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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: No Trump Edition (well, almost!) [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-06-26
We begin today with Jonathan Lemire of The Atlantic and his commentary on Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York City’s Democratic primary for mayor.
Few looked to New York City for hope. The mayor’s race at first seemed destined to be defined by Adams’s scandals. When Cuomo made his entry into the race, many expected that his name recognition and his support from wealthy backers would give him an easy win over a series of well-meaning but uninspiring challengers. Cuomo positioned himself as someone who would stand up to Trump and urged voters to look past his own scandals—he resigned in 2021 after a series of sexual-harassment allegations, which he denied—and to recall instead his level-headed COVID briefings. Of all the candidates, he argued, only he had the management skills to revive a city that has just seemed off since the pandemic. But Cuomo ran a desultory campaign, limiting his exposure to reporters and, more important, to voters. His long-held ambivalence toward the city was evident, as were the rumors that he viewed Gracie Mansion merely as a stepping stone to higher office. He couldn’t shake his humiliating exit as governor. A late endorsement from former President Bill Clinton only reinforced the notion that Cuomo represented an aging, tarnished generation of Democrats. “Cuomo relied on older establishment endorsements that no longer hold weight in the city,” Christina Greer, an associate political-science professor at Fordham University, told me. “Cuomo also underestimated the extent to which New York voters are tired of disgraced politicians using public office as their contingency plan for life.” (Bill de Blasio, the former New York City mayor who has feuded with Cuomo for years, told me that he ran a “grim, fear-based campaign with no authentic big ideas.”) [...] Mamdani revealed himself to be remarkably adept at communicating his message, mastering social-media memes and delivering powerful speeches that evoked far more of Barack Obama’s loft than Biden’s whisper. He said yes to seemingly every interview and every podcast, tossing aside the caution traditionally preached by the focus-group-wielding political-consultant class. He tapped into liberal New Yorkers’ anger over Gaza. He resonated with young people, including young men, who not only turned out for him but also volunteered for his campaign, creating an enthusiastic army of believers that created a noticeable contrast with Cuomo’s support from donors, unions, and establishment figures. In the race’s final days, a cheerful Mamdani walked the length of Manhattan, a metaphor for the tirelessness he brought to the race.
Lauren Egan of The Bulwark interviewed moderate Democratic operatives who were quite impressed with the Mamdani campaign.
Fewer people have a better understanding of the circumstances that led to Mamdani’s win over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo last night than Crowley. Seven years ago, he was defeated in his primary campaign by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a race that was similarly heralded as a changing of the political guard. “For Andrew, much like me when I was running, it is hard to motivate folks unless you have a cause,” Crowley reflected. Among those centrist and establishment Democrats who were left concerned by Mamdani’s win, there was near-universal admission that he ran a tactically impressive campaign. His relentless focus on the cost of living and affordability resonated with voters. His energy and conviction came across online and in person. He took risks, put himself in front of voters, and made sure those moments were captured for social media. As the Democratic party struggles to figure out its identity in the second Trump administration, even the centrists seem to agree that Mamdani’s victory is a sign that the old playbook for campaigning no longer works. “It wasn’t what he was selling that the Democrats should emulate—it’s how he was doing it,” said Matt Bennett, a vice president at the center-left group Third Way. “We’ve got to be careful to nominate people that are bold. But bold is not a synonym for liberal. Bold means willing to engage.”
A word of caution: I’ve seen the current Chicago mayor and the previous Chicago mayor campaign like poetry. (For that matter, so did former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.) None of those three governed like even moderately good prose (pun not intended!). I don’t think that the scandal-ridden Eric Adams (who will say anything) or the Republican nominee for NYC mayor (who’s a joke) will win. But MAGA will be ready to undercut Mamdani at a moment’s notice. Robert McCoy/The New Republic MAGA Republican groups are calling for the deportation of New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani. On Wednesday, the day after the 33-year-old democratic socialist handily secured his party’s nomination, the New York Young Republican Club, or NYYRC, took to X, begging Trump immigration advisers Stephen Miller and Tom Homan to revoke Mamdani’s U.S. citizenship and deport him. [...] The message was reposted by the accounts of numerous conservative figures, including Gavin Wax, who was formerly the NYYRC president as well as the chief of staff for recently departed Federal Communications Commissioner Nathan Simington, who has recommended Wax as his successor. [...] Mamdani has been on the receiving end of such odious and absurd attacks before. Earlier this month, Republican New York City Councilwoman Vickie Paladino called for Mamdani to be deported during a tirade in which she cited an NYYRC post that said he “shouldn’t have been allowed into the United States in the first place” and called to “remigrate him.” In light of DOGE’s attempts to create a huge database containing highly sensitive information for most Americans, Stephanie K. Pell, Josie Stewart, and Brooke Tanner of the Brookings Institution reminds me why my dislike for the 43rd president continues to burn with the fire of one hundred suns.
This is not the first time the federal government has pursued a system capable of integrating and searching vast and multiple types of transactions, records, and data across different sources and databases. In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) proposed a program called “Total Information Awareness” (TIA), later renamed the Terrorism Information Awareness program. TIA was “a research and development program intended to counter terrorism through prevention.” As one of us described in a book chapter about U.S. collection of data, 1 back in 2002, John Poindexter, retired admiral and director of DARPA’s Information Awareness Office, identified the “transaction space” as one “significant new data sourc[e] that need[ed] to be mined to discover and track terrorists.” This space included data encompassing communications, financial, education, travel, medical, veterinary, country entry, place/event entry, transportation, housing, critical resources, and government records. Part of the plan was for “Red Teams” to develop model attack scenarios, then determine the types of transactions necessary to carry out such attacks. These transactions would form patterns discernable in databases to which the government would have lawful access. Having developed targetable patterns of attack precursor behavior, the government could then search across databases, some of which would involve access to data held by the private sector, to detect the presence of those patterns. At the time, the American Civil Liberties Union called TIA “the closest thing to a true ‘Big Brother’ program that has ever been seriously contemplated” by the U.S. government. The government, for its part, appeared to believe new legislation amending the Privacy Act would have been needed to allow for at least some of the data sharing and integration envisioned by the program. In response to “intense public controversy,” Congress terminated funding for the program in 2003, although some research aspects were transferred to another group working with the National Security Agency.
Finally today, AI researcher and university professor Colin W.P. Lewis writes an absolutely chilling essay on his The One Percent Rule Substack where he looks at two books written about “good Germans” (I excerpt from portions of the essay written by an actual “good German”)
If you want to know how democracy dies, don’t watch the tyrant. Watch your neighbor. Or better yet, watch yourself the moment you stop asking questions and start nodding along. In Defying Hitler, Sebastian Haffner wrote as an ordinary man caught in the slow erosion of everything that mattered. His memoir, despite its title, begins not with Hitler, not with a rousing speech or a climactic battle, but with a duel: one private individual, face-to-face with a state demanding his thoughts, his gestures, his time, his soul. It is not a battle of equals. The outcome seems inevitable. Yet Haffner offers us a disturbing truth: the erosion of freedom does not come by force alone. It comes by consent, by inertia, by a quiet willingness to go along. [...] What appears to be an innocent rite of passage is, in hindsight, a national grooming. This is the first warning: propaganda is not merely the lies told by the powerful. It is also the games children play, the songs they sing, the silences adults maintain. The insidiousness lies in its pleasure. The boys of 1914 found the war exciting before they found it appalling. By the time they saw the latter, they had already lost the ability to dissent. [...] Haffner, ever the reluctant protagonist, never pretends to be a hero. His memoir is less a celebration of resistance than a chronicle of weariness. He does not join the Nazis. But nor does he change history. What he preserves is much bigger: his mind, his sense of judgment, the quiet core of selfhood that refuses to mouth what it does not believe. “He was not born a hero,” Haffner writes of himself, “still less a martyr.” And yet he resisted. Not by attacking the regime, but by refusing its vocabulary.
Read the whole thing, though.
On that note, try to have the best possible day that you can!
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