💪 Mamdani, Mayor of the Manosphere
Peter Rothpletz on the final New York mayoral debate, Mamdani's viral podcast appearance, Trump's 'cheat code' for military rule, and the rise of the Hamburger Helper.
👨🏾⚖️ On this day in 1991, Justice Clarence Thomas was sworn in as a member of the Supreme Court, filling the seat of civil rights champion Justice Thurgood Marshall. Has there ever been a greater downgrade in US history?
Good morning! Peter here with the most important political analysis you’ll get today. The Bulwark’s Cam Kasky and I linked up to watch last night’s New York City mayoral debate. My chief takeaway? I wish Curtis Sliwa were my incorrigible, charming drunk uncle. Cam’s take? Sliwa is as attractive with the red beret on as he is with it off. Stay tuned for even more sharp, sober takes.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ Zohran Mamdani charms both New Yorkers and ‘brocasters,’ Donald Trump’s allies hint to Zeteo that he’s inching ever closer to invoking the Insurrection Act, family healthcare premiums are skyrocketing, and Graham Platner continues to reckon with the fallout from his Nazi tattoo scandal.
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🍎 Mamdani the Manosphere Whisperer
To channel SNL’s Stefon, last night’s Big Apple debate had everything: cocktail napkins, TikTok dances, bottles of Red Bull, and Islamophobic accusations of global jihad.
Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani and former New York Governor and independent candidate Andrew Cuomo argued quite viciously over the course of their 95-minute tête-à-tête. Republican Curtis Sliwa was also there (and he was so funny).
All in all, it was an intense but extremely absurd affair.
If you happened to tune in, I regret to inform you that the debate was an utter sideshow.
You wasted your time.
The main event, the conversation that anyone and everyone who genuinely cares about the future of the progressive left, occurred hours earlier on the “manosphere” Flagrant podcast.
Stay with me… Hear me out…
Future Mayor Mamdani sat down with MAGA-friendly comedian Andrew Schulz, and he killed it. He was charming. He was clever. He was humble. He was fundamentally human. Most importantly, he was persuasive. Just watch:
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Given all this, here’s the million-dollar question? Why isn’t the Democratic establishment backing Mamdani?
Yes, yes, I’m aware of the Bill Ackman of it all. But I said “million dollar,” not “billion dollar” question.
Why haven’t House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and a broad swath of Democratic voices endorsed one of the single most talented messengers the Dems have stumbled upon since Barack Obama?
It boggles the mind!
The man is everything they claim they want. He’s young. He’s charismatic. He’s masculine. And, as we learned yesterday, he can communicate with and charm even the most non-PC manosphere personalities. Mamdani is, by the establishment’s own accounting, MAGA kryptonite.
The Democratic Party, for the sake of its own survival, must learn how to take yes as an answer.
To date, it refuses. It’s baffling. It’s as if the establishment is deadly allergic to any manner of novelty, to any sort of risk, to even the most everyday person who just wants to make a difference. In entertaining this aversion, the establishment whistles past the graveyard.
Jeffries, Schumer, and company must ask themselves this: what, exactly, are they so afraid of? That someone might actually feel inspired? That a Democrat might appear to be real and earnest and unscripted for once? Mamdani represents the thing the Democratic machine constantly pretends to seek out but can never quite stomach: raw authenticity.
Couple that with economic populism and anti-fascism, and WOWZA.
Don’t y’all ever want to win?
🗞️ What You Need to Know
So much for law & order: The US conducted yet another strike against a boat allegedly carrying drugs, this time on the Pacific side of South America, killing the two people aboard. I guess executing folks willy-nilly is the norm now.
Broken bromance: The Treasury Department imposed new sanctions on Russia’s two largest oil companies after talks of a Trump-Putin summit dissolved. The department said the move was a direct response to Russia’s “lack of serious commitment to a peace process to end the war in Ukraine.” Color me shocked.
Merkley’s record-breaking speech: Oregon Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley broke the record for the fourth-longest Senate floor speech in modern history, speaking out against the Trump administration for over 22 hours. Love the energy… what did it accomplish?
UVA capitulates to Trump: The University of Virginia became the first public university to reach a deal with the White House in Trump’s war on DEI in higher education. Thomas Jefferson would be ashamed.
The right’s debt hypocrisy: The US exceeded a gross national debt of $38 trillion yesterday, marking the fastest accumulation of a trillion-dollar debt, excluding the COVID-19 pandemic. Seems bad!
🧠 Pop Quiz!
In Zohran Mamdani’s rap era, he became the music supervisor for one major movie, featuring Lupita Nyong’o and David Oyelowo. What was the film?
Keep your eyes out for the answer below!
🌏 Anywhere But America
🇵🇸🇮🇱 The International Court of Justice told Israel in an advisory opinion that it must allow aid into Gaza and support the UN’s relief efforts.
🇪🇺🇷🇺🇺🇦 The EU joined the US in imposing additional sanctions on Russia. “We waited for this. God bless, it will work. And this is very important,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in Brussels today.
🇰🇵 Ahead of Trump’s visit to South Korea, North Korea launched its first ballistic missile tests in five months.
🇵🇰 The Pakistani Navy seized roughly $972 million worth of narcotics in the Arabian Sea, working with the Saudi-led Combined Maritime Forces
🌍 About 40 migrants from sub-Saharan Africa died when their boat sank off the coast of Tunisia. It’s one of the deadliest tragedies at sea in the region since the beginning of the year.
💬 Quote Unquote
“I hate Nazis, and I think far-right extremism is a cancer that needs to be excised from our politics… I have the politics of anti-Nazism.”
In the wake of the controversy over his Nazi tattoo, Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner spoke to Zeteo’s Andrew Perez in an exclusive interview in Maine last night, which will hit your inboxes later today.
🚨 Don’t Miss It!
Mehdi sits down with veteran British conservative journalist and author Peter Oborne to discuss the Maccabi football controversy, the “cross-party cartel” of UK lawmakers who continue to support Israel and Netanyahu, and the “underlying racism at the heart” of British society that considers Palestinians not as humans, but as “objects.”
The full video interview will also hit your inbox later today!
🍨 The Scoop
Trump’s Insurrection Act ‘Cheat Code’
Zeteo’s Swin Suebsaeng is here with the latest on King Donald…
Trump will tell anyone who will listen that if he doesn’t get his way in court - and if he can’t invade Chicago to his liking – he’s prepared to invoke the Insurrection Act. Doing so now would be a staggeringly authoritarian escalation, but one that Trump is convinced will mean, as he claimed to reporters, “no more court cases.”
However, administration officials tell me, even when Trump officials and government attorneys have gamed out scenarios for this, they have preemptively prepared for aggressive court challenges, as elected Democrats stress there is no emergency that would justify Trump’s power grab.
When I asked a senior Trump appointee if this president sees invoking the act as some kind of cheat-code for getting around the courts and the Posse Comitatus Act, this source replied: “Yeah, a cheat code or a trump card,” (No Pun Intended?) adding: “The president may say that it stops all legal challenges, but it is not going to be as simple as that.”
Legal challenges aren’t enough. The Democrats need to be ready for an across-the-board plan of political and civil resistance to Trump’s budding military dictatorship. But do you have faith in Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries?
🧠 Trivia answer: Queen of Katwe
📊 Chart of the Day
Health policy nonprofit KFF is out with its annual benchmark health benefits survey, detailing just how high healthcare premiums are for families on employer-sponsored insurance plans... and it’s staggering. Go ‘Murica!!!!!!
🍔 Hamburger HELP US!
And as if the rising cost of healthcare isn’t enough to sound the alarm on the affordability crisis, we at Zeteo present to you the Hamburger Helper Recession Indicator™️.
Yes, Eagle Foods, the company behind Hamburger Helper, told Fox its year-over-year sales rose 14.5% in August.
The struggle (meal) is real.
ICYMI From Zeteo
Zeteo’s Melanie Riehl and Akshay Gokul contributed to this newsletter.
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Mamdani is a breath of fresh air. He can communicate, he’s personable and he’s talking about issues people care about. Schumer, Jeffries and the rest of the old ineffective Dems should just retire and let the young generation lead.
"Mamdani represents the thing the Democratic machine constantly pretends to seek out..." But that's just it. They PRETEND to seek it out because the machine pretends to be leftist. It hasn't been leftist since President Bill Clinton dragged it to the right with his dismantling of the social safety net and his trashing of AFDC. This is why Hilary - with her full support of her husband's policies - couldn't win against Trump; the left wouldn't vote for her. The machine is threatened by people who want to return the Democrats to the left. In some respects, Bill Clinton birthed the modern-day far-right Republicans by moving the Democrat establishment rightward.