Zorhan Mamdani, the new mayor of New York, Abigail Spanberger, the governor-elect of Virginia, and Mikey Sherrill, the Governor-elect in New Jersey, we'll go through all the results, what it means for the country, and that shocking socialist speech from Zorhan Mamdanani last night.
00:00:02.000Zorhan Mamdani, the new mayor of New York, Abigail Spanberger, the governor-elect of Virginia, Mikey Sherrill, the governor-elect in New Jersey.
00:00:09.000We'll go through all the results, what it means for the country, and that shocking socialist speech from Zorhan Mamdani last night.
00:00:17.000First, you may know here at the Daily Wire, we don't always agree, actually.
00:00:20.000Friendly Fire is the show where Matt Walsh, Michael Moles, Andrew Clavin, and I get together to disagree live for the entire internet to see and comment on what could possibly go wrong.
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00:00:51.000Well, I mean, the Statue of Liberty, we're in New York, and the Statue of Liberty is half buried in sand now, and Charlton Heston is just yelling at it because of what New York City just decided to do, which was by an overwhelming margin, actually, hand over the financial center of planet Earth to a Marxist pro-jihadist named Zorhan Mamdani, who has never held a real job.
00:01:14.000And, you know, it's a bold move, Cotton.
00:01:19.000According to the New York Times, Momdani, riding a historic surge of enthusiasm as the nation's largest city, embraced a generational and ideological change.
00:01:29.000Well done, New York Times, was elected in New York's 111th mayor.
00:01:34.000The results were evident very early on in the night.
00:01:36.000It's about 35 minutes for the AP to call the race.
00:01:39.000Momdani received 1.1 million people, I believe, voting for him.
00:01:45.000The turnout yesterday was extraordinarily high.
00:01:50.000His nearest competitor, Andrew Cuomo, who ran, at best, a somnambulant race, sleepwalking his way through the race, it seems to be a sense of entitlement for Andrew Cuomo, running in the primaries, then running in the general.
00:02:00.000He was unable to win the race because of enthusiasm for Momdani, yes, but also because of wild lack of enthusiasm for Andrew Cuomo, which was quite real.
00:02:09.000The anti-Momdani vote was not enough to overcome the pro-Momdani vote, given the shortcomings of the other candidates ranging from Eric Adams to Curtis Saliwa.
00:02:18.000Momdani's coalition, which we'll get to in a little bit here, was an unusual coalition, to say the least.
00:02:27.000He intends on major change in America's financial center and indeed the financial center of planet Earth.
00:02:32.000He intends a new system that is going to destroy capitalism.
00:02:37.000Now, will he actually be able to accomplish that?
00:02:39.000You know, there are some checks on him.
00:02:40.000He's got a 51-member city council that he has to run things by.
00:02:44.000And many of the promises that he has made are third grade running for school president promises.
00:02:48.000Free ice cream for everybody and no homework was basically his campaign.
00:02:52.000That if he said affordability over and over and over, and then if he just threw out a bunch of random things that he will never be able to do, then he would be elected mayor.
00:03:02.000We now live in a political era characterized on both sides by people accurately diagnosing problems and then not accurately diagnosing any solutions and saying, if you give me ultimate power, I will solve it for you.
00:03:14.000And then we swivel to the other side and then we swivel back to the first side.
00:03:17.000And that seems to be the cycle that we are in currently.
00:03:20.000I'm going to get more into Momdani in a moment, but I first want to explain to you the rest of the news that happened last night.
00:03:26.000Abigail Spanberger also won in Virginia.
00:03:29.000She won by a large margin in this race over the current lieutenant governor of Virginia, Winsom Earl Sears.
00:03:38.000She ended up winning by over 10 percentage points.
00:03:41.000Because that race was not particularly close, she was also able to drag Jay Jones over the line.
00:03:45.000There's sort of a fascinating contrast between Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, who is considered what would have been called the Blue Dog Democrat.
00:03:52.000She's not particularly conservative, but she is certainly more moderate than, say, Zorin Momdani.
00:03:57.000Her pitch yesterday after she won was that pragmatism was the order of the day.
00:04:01.000Here's what Abigail Spanberger, the governor of the elect of Virginia, had to say.
00:04:06.000We sent a message to the whole world that in 2025, Virginia chose pragmatism over partisanship.
00:04:28.000Okay, so she is also a candidate who in the past has called out Democratic focus on issues like, for example, the trans issue or on racial issues saying like this sort of stuff does not win elections.
00:04:38.000And so it'll be fascinating to see the internecine warfare in the Democratic Party between a moderate victor like Abigail Spanberger, comparatively moderate, versus the Zorhan Mamdani where all the enthusiasm and media coverage is going to go.
00:04:50.000As said, she dragged Jay Jones over the finish line.
00:04:54.000He ended up winning by about seven percentage points over Jason Mieres in that attorney general race in Virginia, despite the fact that Jay Jones, of course, had this very extraordinary texting scandal in which he had apparently texted a Republican that he wanted to kill the Speaker of the House of Delegates in Virginia and then labeled that speaker's children little fascists.
00:05:14.000That apparently did not inhibit his election.
00:05:44.000I think it would have been kind of a shocker if Republicans had won or even been competitive, seriously competitive in any of these states, which brings us to the third state that was up for election last night.
00:06:01.000I'll get into all that in just a moment.
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00:08:18.000Unfortunately, Jack Chitterelli lost to Mikey Sherrill.
00:08:23.000Chitterelli had come close in his last election cycle, but that was more of a surprise.
00:08:27.000I think people saw him coming this time if they're Democrats.
00:08:30.000And so she ended up winning by, again, a fairly significant margin in New Jersey.
00:08:36.000Not a gigantic shock because there are almost 900,000 more registered Democrats in New Jersey than registered Republicans.
00:08:43.000Chitterelli ran a sort of traditionally conservative campaign.
00:08:46.000And because he almost surprised Phil Murphy in the last election cycle, I think that Democrats showed up en masse to stop that this time.
00:08:55.000She, of course, is not particularly moderate.
00:08:57.000She tries to make up that she is moderate.
00:09:00.000But it's, again, fascinating to see the sort of ideological diversity inside the Democratic Party.
00:09:04.000So long as you're anti-Trump, then you can have Abigail Spanberger and Mikey Sherrill, and of course, Zorhan Mamdani, which brings us to Zorhan Mamdani.
00:09:11.000And it'll be fascinating, as I say, to see whether the Democratic Party decides to engage in the glossing of Zorhan Mamdani as sort of the future of the party.
00:09:33.000And it'll be fascinating, again, to see how the Democratic Party treats him.
00:09:38.000Do they treat him as a sort of outsider?
00:09:40.000Do they say that he's sort of quirky the way they treated Bill de Blasio?
00:09:44.000Or do they embrace him and try to draft off of the energy that he obviously captured in the middle of this campaign?
00:09:51.000Now, if you look at the polling results, the sort of exit polls from NBC, for example, his coalition is really interesting.
00:09:58.000So one of the lies that is constantly told about socialist candidates like Zorhan Mamdani is that they are the people who get blue-collar voters.
00:10:08.000One of the things that is different between America and Europe is that historically speaking, European blue-collar workers tend towards socialism very often.
00:10:17.000In America, blue-collar workers have always been fond of capitalism because it is what provides their jobs.
00:10:23.000Even in the early union days of the United States, the unions were actually quite actively anti-communist in the United States in a way that they simply were not.
00:10:31.000They were sort of the vanguard of the proletariat, actually, in much of Europe.
00:10:36.000That was not the case in the United States, and that remains true today.
00:10:40.000In fact, Zorhan Mamdani's base here was immigrant, extremely progressive, college-educated, and female.
00:10:48.000Those were the things that drove Zorhan Mamdani to victory here.
00:10:51.000The exit poll, 81% of women under 30 voted for Mamdani.
00:10:55.00081% of women under the age of 30 voted for Zorhan Mamdani.
00:11:00.000Now, again, some of that has to do with the fact that Zorn Mamdani, on a personal level, because of the smarmy grin and the inability to bench press 135 pounds, seems particularly non-threatening, as opposed to Andrew Cuomo, of course, was ousted from office over his inability to keep his hands off the asses of others.
00:11:17.000And so I can't imagine that that really helped Andrew Cuomo in this race, particularly among women.
00:11:23.000Young men voted 64% for Zorhan Mamdani.
00:11:28.000Older men above the age of 65 voted 48% for Cuomo.
00:11:33.000Men between the ages of 45 and 64 voted for Mamtani by 1%, which is basically a dead heat.
00:11:40.000Women overwhelmingly voted for Mamdani, but as you got older, it trended toward Cuomo.
00:11:47.000When you look at sort of the racial polarization, there wasn't tons of racial polarization here, actually.
00:11:53.000The white voters in New York City voted basically dead even between Momdani and Cuomo according to these exit polls.
00:11:59.000Black voters voted 55 to 40 in favor of Momdani.
00:12:02.000Hispanic voters voted 49 to 42 in favor of Mamdani.
00:12:06.000Asian voters, which would largely be South Asian, meaning Muslim voters, voted overwhelmingly for Mamdani.
00:12:12.000And as I say, on an educational level, this idea that it was like blue-collar voters who put Mamdani over the top, that's not true.
00:12:18.000Actually, 20% of the electorate never attended college, apparently.
00:12:39.000If you have an advanced degree, 57 to 37.
00:12:42.000So these are elite belief systems, elite belief systems, and his sort of appeal to foreign populations or foreign-born populations was sort of the Zorin-Mamdani model.
00:13:26.000And again, that is largely driven by the Orthodox Jewish population.
00:13:29.000Even some conservative Jews were very, very not pro-Mamdani.
00:13:33.000The 33% of Jews who voted for Zorhan Mamdani, I would guarantee you that these are people who do not regularly attend synagogue, keep kosher in any way, or have any relationship truly with their religion in a very serious way.
00:13:46.000Other, there was no Muslim category here, other, which I assume means Muslim, voted 70 to 25 in favor of Mamdani.
00:13:53.000Straight people in this election voted 4646.
00:13:57.000LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign voted 82 to 15 in favor of Zorhan Mamdani.
00:14:04.000So, again, a fascinating breakdown there.
00:14:07.000But one of the things that it shows is that Zorhan Mamdani pretending to be a sort of person of the people, against the rich, against the college education, against the elite.
00:14:17.000There is an elite class in New York City who work for government or nonprofits, who make a good living, who graduated from college, have college degrees, or are people who he explicitly appealed to as quote-unquote outsiders to the system, suggesting that basically it was immigrant populations versus everybody else.
00:14:39.000So last night, Mamdani wins, and then he delivers what is an extraordinary victory speech, truly extraordinary, because he just says all the quiet parts out loud.
00:14:47.000If this is the future of the Democratic Party, you know, go for it, guys, that it's playing with fire.
00:14:51.000I mean, New York City, by the way, New York City is playing with fire.
00:14:55.000If he implements any of them, they are in serious trouble.
00:14:57.000The best thing that can happen to Zorhan Mamdani is he can do this communist happy talk.
00:15:03.000He can do his sort of pro-jihadist happy talk, and nothing that he says actually gets done.
00:15:09.000That is the best thing that can happen to him because, again, there are systemic checks and balances that prevent Mamdani from sort of single-handedly destroying the city.
00:15:17.000And so he should not get credit for not destroying the city because of things he was not allowed to do.
00:15:23.000It turns out that if he wants to raise taxes, he has to go to the state level, and the state legislature is very unlikely to want to increase taxes again.
00:15:31.000He says that he wants to make all the buses free.
00:15:34.000How's he going to do any of this stuff?
00:15:36.000Mostly, he won't be able to get any of that stuff done.
00:15:38.000And then he will rail against the system, presumably.
00:15:41.000And that's if he wants to win re-election, how he will win re-election.
00:15:44.000Nothing will change, but he'll rail against the system that didn't allow him to do all of the worst things.
00:15:49.000I can say that the number of people from whom I have received texts who run businesses in New York openly talking about moving their businesses is extraordinary.
00:15:59.000I'm happy on a personal level to help facilitate the move of anyone who wants to get out of New York City to Nashville or to Florida to a zero tax state that is friendly to business.
00:16:10.000I think we're going to set up some sort of portal for people who want to do that because Mamdani will make the business climate here disastrous.
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00:18:58.000In this speech, he does not quote any of the American founders.
00:19:02.000Typically, when you win, you tend to quote the founding ideals of the country.
00:19:05.000He doesn't pay lip service to the founding ideals of the country.
00:19:08.000In fact, his entire speech is about how America historically is trash and how all of the fundamental principles of America are trash and how he's here to change things on a radical, fundamental level.
00:19:20.000The people that he quoted in this speech are Eugene V. Debs, a socialist candidate from the 1910s, and Nehru, the socialist leader of the non-aligned India in the post-partition era.
00:19:41.000The only other person he quoted mainly because he really hates Andrew Cuomo and wanted to stab him is at one point he quoted Mario Cuomo, Andrew's father.
00:19:52.000So I'm going to go through this speech in a little bit of detail because it shows you where the vanguard of the Democratic Party, the progressive wing of the Democrats, where they think we are, and how much they truly, truly despise the status quo of America and America historically.
00:20:06.000So here he was, leading off with a quote from, again, a socialist, Eugene B. Debs.
00:21:07.000Humanity does not fundamentally change.
00:21:09.000You can change yourself if you take on certain actions or if you accept certain things into your life, but humanity itself is not changing.
00:21:18.000The Marxist idea is that all the evils of humanity are created by the economic system.
00:21:22.000And so if you change your systems, then there will be a better day for humanity.
00:21:28.000Not just for New York, but humans will change.
00:21:31.000Okay, he then continues by posing a false dichotomy in which he suggests that the wealthy and powerful in New York have been controlling.
00:22:19.000So Zor Mamdani is saying something deeply ahistorical and also untrue.
00:22:23.000And it is all about this idea that there is some sort of perverse, manipulative class that is interested in stealing money from the pockets of the working folks.
00:22:31.000Again, he wasn't hiding the ball here.
00:22:36.000For as long as we can remember, the working people of New York have been told by the wealthy and the well-connected that power does not belong in their hands.
00:22:48.000Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery by candlebars, knuckles scarred with kitchen burns.
00:23:01.000These are not hands that have been allowed to hold power.
00:23:05.000And yet, over the last 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater.
00:23:15.000Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it.
00:25:07.000But then when he says that there's a mandate for a new kind of politics, a mandate for a city we can afford, a mandate for a government that delivers exactly that.
00:25:13.000This is the thing that drives me absolutely up a wall about the way that we do politics in this country again.
00:25:28.000When there's a party change, when there's a person who changes, it's a mandate for change.
00:25:31.000But the question is a mandate for what?
00:25:34.000If the idea is there's a mandate in New York City for him to hem in the police in favor of social workers or for free buses, as I said on CNN's live stream last night, I'm very much looking forward to never having to pay for a hotel again in New York City.
00:25:49.000I'm just going to ride the buses around.
00:25:54.000As long as I don't get stabbed in the face, which may very well happen in a city of New York governed by Zorhan Mamdani, who thinks that the police are inhibitors of human freedom.
00:26:06.000Okay, he continued by talking about the people he thinks were forgotten.
00:26:10.000And you'll notice the coalition again.
00:26:11.000Zorhan Mamdani believes that his coalition is immigrants, new immigrants, to New York City who have been culturally dispossessed in some way by, I suppose, the great white superstructure.
00:26:26.000You showed that when politics speaks to you without condescension, we can usher in a new era of leadership.
00:26:36.000We will fight for you because we are you.
00:26:41.000Or as we say on Steinway, anaminkum wa'ileikum.
00:26:45.000Those so often forgotten by the politics of our city who made this movement their own.
00:27:00.000I speak of Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas, Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses, Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties.
00:27:23.000And yes, Auntie's line was a nod to the fact that he said that his auntie, who is not in fact his aunt, was victimized by 9-11 because people gave her nasty looks on the subway, supposedly in a completely non-confirmable story.
00:28:06.000Now I know that I have asked for much from you over this last year.
00:28:13.000Time and again, you have answered my calls.
00:28:18.000But I have one final request: New York City, breathe this moment in.
00:28:29.000We have held our breath for longer than we know.
00:28:34.000Again, that's a reference, I assume, to BLM and the idea that we can't breathe and all the rest of this kind of stuff.
00:28:39.000Again, the idea is that there is a perennial underclass in America, and now he has liberated them.
00:28:44.000We have liberated them to take over the city.
00:28:47.000If you're a business owner, man, you should be running for the hills.
00:28:50.000If you're a person who pays taxes in the city, you should be scared out of your mind, truly.
00:28:54.000In fact, I asked our friends and sponsors at Comet, which is a project of perplexity, please provide me a chart of percentage of total taxes in New York City paid by tax bracket.
00:29:04.000And here is the answer: here's an up-to-date chart showing the percentage of total personal income tax paid in New York City by tax bracket for the 2021 tax year.
00:29:12.000They did it illustrate how the highest earners pay a disproportionately large share of total city taxes, with the top 1% contributing nearly half, and the top 0.1% alone contributing about a quarter of the total.
00:29:25.000The lowest 50% of earners, less than $50,000 AGI, paid about 4% of total New York City personal income taxes.
00:29:34.000Households in the 50 to 90% bracket, which is 50,000 to 250,000, paid about 20%.
00:29:39.000The 90 to 99% group, which is up to a million bucks, contributed approximately 27%.
00:29:45.000Those in the top 0.9%, 99 to 99.9% paid 24%.
00:29:52.000And the top 0.1% of filers, over $25 million AGI, which is annual gross income, contributed one quarter of New York City's total personal income tax receipt.
00:30:06.000And Zora Mamdani's idea is: what if we squeeze them even harder?
00:30:11.000I mean, after all, they don't have the money.
00:30:14.000And they certainly don't have the assets to actually just, you know, take, well, good luck, my dude, because he is a full-scale demagogic communist.
00:31:59.000So here he was talking about his magical agenda.
00:32:02.000And New Yorkers, you can only hope none of this happens.
00:32:06.000This will be an age where New Yorkers expect from their leaders a bold vision of what we will achieve rather than a list of excuses for what we are too timid to attempt.
00:32:21.000Central to that vision will be the most ambitious agenda to tackle the cost of living crisis that this city has seen since the days of fear of an agenda that will freeze the rents for more than two million rent stabilized tenants.
00:32:58.000And if you believe this, then I guess I have a radical jihadi supporter, Marxist, for you for mayor.
00:33:05.000I mean, I guess that's what you guys wanted.
00:33:07.000Okay, then he talked, of course, about Donald Trump, because undergirding a lot of this is the idea that he is a backlash to Donald Trump.
00:33:14.000And so Donald Trump was made the bugaboo here.
00:33:17.000Here he went after President Trump, again, listing off all of the supposed victims of President Trump, the multi-ethnic, multi-sexual coalition against President Trump.
00:33:26.000In this moment of political darkness, New York will be the light.
00:33:35.000Here, we believe in standing up for those we love.
00:33:40.000Whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone else with their back against the wall.
00:34:08.000Well, I mean, again, he is not hiding the ball.
00:34:11.000He did try to pay lip service to fighting anti-Semitism.
00:34:14.000Even there, he could not stop, but paid much more attention to supposed Islamophobia in New York, a city where they just elected a man to the mayoralty who posed alongside an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and refused to say Hamas should be disarmed.
00:34:31.000That guy was just elected mayor of New York, and he's talking about the scourge of Islamophobia.
00:34:35.000If you are a Jew in New York City, prepare for some pretty hard times.
00:34:40.000Because if you believe Zor Mamdani is going to fight anti-Semitism while simultaneously celebrating globalized Intifada and saying that the Prime Minister of Israel ought to be arrested, and also he has no thoughts on Hamas disarming, prepare to be surprised.
00:34:52.000That is not going to go the way that I think some of you think it's going to go.
00:34:57.000And we will build a city hall that stands steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers and does not waver in the fight against the scourge of anti-Semitism.
00:35:10.000Where the more than one million Muslims know that they belong.
00:35:18.000Not just in the five boroughs of this city, but in the halls of power.
00:35:26.000No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election.
00:35:34.000Meanwhile, he did sum up by saying, basically, government is great for everything.
00:35:38.000There are zero things government can't do.
00:36:26.000And yet somehow he is the person who is going to unite the people earning $20 an hour with the people earning $30 an hour.
00:36:32.000One of the sort of gigantic lies of Marxism is that the way capitalism works is pitting people who are poor against one another so that they don't eat the rich.
00:36:57.000But again, it's all class warfare for Zorhan Mamdani.
00:37:01.000And then, of course, he goes back to Trump.
00:37:04.000And he says that President Trump has betrayed the nation.
00:37:07.000He's going to usher in a generation of change.
00:37:10.000Guys, if you don't find this frightening and this is actually kind of like a sexy pitch to you, well, I really, really hope that you get used to breadlines.
00:37:20.000Together, we will usher in a generation of change.
00:37:24.000And if we embrace this brave new course, rather than fleeing from it, we can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves.
00:37:42.000After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him.
00:37:56.000And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.
00:38:08.000This is not only how we stop Trump, it's how we stop the next one.
00:38:17.000So Donald Trump, since I know you're watching, I have four words for you.
00:39:49.000H.L. Mencken, the famous columnist from the early 20th century, once said that democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
00:39:58.000Really, New Yorkers, and I'm glad that I have some Florida real estate that is available at a fetching price for those of you who wish to escape a city that is likely to go down the tubes over the course of the next several years, if, in fact, Zara Mamdani gets his way.
00:40:13.000Already coming up, Hassan Piker has some interesting comments about the victory of Zarin Mamdani, mask off moment for Hassan Piker, but the mask is usually off with Hassan and a bizarre theory about why Democrats did well yesterday.
00:40:25.000Apparently, Republicans must embrace interviews that gloss Nick Fuentes if they want to defeat Zarin Mamdani or something.
00:40:34.000And we'll try to make our way through whatever that is.
00:40:36.000First, look, I'm on the road constantly, like right now, covering news stories, political events, you name it, between flights and hotel rooms.
00:40:42.000Sometimes getting a proper nutritional meal is the first thing that goes out the window.
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00:41:01.000Nothing added that shouldn't be there.
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00:41:06.000Sometimes I'll even open the capsules and mix the powder into my smoothies.
00:41:08.000However, the day is going, they go with me.
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00:42:25.000Go to helixleep.com slash Ben for 27% off-site-wide.
00:42:28.000That's helixleep.com slash Ben for 27% off-site-wide.
00:42:31.000Make sure you enter our show name into the post-purchase survey so they know we sent you, helixleep.com/slash Ben.
00:42:36.000Well, as if it weren't clear enough what Zora Mamdani is saying, one of the people he hosted at his election night party was one Hassan Piker, with whom he had posed, you know, a person who said that America deserved 9-11.
00:42:45.000And just in case he wasn't saying it loud enough, last night, about a couple minutes after hugging AOC, Hassan Piker then declared it a tragedy that the United States defeated the Soviet Union.
00:42:56.000What do you think it means that this guy right as a socialist and anti-communism did it work to stop him?
00:43:03.000Yeah, I think we are in the heart of the Imperial Corps.
00:43:08.000This is the country that defeated the USSR, unfortunately.
00:43:12.000And the reality of the matter is, there's a lot of antagonism.
00:43:16.000There's no class consciousness in the United States of America.
00:43:19.000One of the things I try to address every day with my commentary.
00:43:22.000And I will say this: the conditions have deteriorated so much that everyday Americans, in spite of their lack of class consciousness, are finally arriving at the conclusion that perhaps there is an alternative out there.
00:43:37.000There is an alternative that focuses on them as opposed to the interests of the billionaires and the millionaires, as opposed to the interests of the capital owners.
00:43:45.000And I mean, you can't help but notice that.
00:43:48.000You can't help but feel at least a little bit of excitement around that.
00:43:53.000I mean, anybody who thinks that it was unfortunate that the Soviet Union, which is responsible for the murder of legitimately tens of millions of human beings, and then given their involvement with the establishment of the Chinese autocracy, more tens of millions of human beings, you know, at least they're saying the quiet part out loud now before they shock their dog in their $3 million mansion.
00:44:12.000Well, meanwhile, the dumb takes come hot and heavy these days, truly stupid takes.
00:44:17.000The dumb take from the right is that the reason that Zorhan Mamdani is now mayor of New York, or that Mikey Sherrill won in New Jersey, or that Abigail Spanberger won in Virginia, is because people were critical of Tucker Carlson's interview with a neo-Nazi last week.
00:44:35.000Well, one Jack Pesobiak tweeted, thank goodness so many conservative pundits spent the last few weeks focusing on e-drama and cancellation efforts instead of working to get out the vote.
00:44:43.000That was very helpful to the movement.
00:44:46.000And I will point out at this point that Tucker Carlson, who has come under absolutely deserved fire for glossing Nick Fuentes last week, the infighting did not begin with people critical of Tucker Carlson.
00:45:02.000It began with Tucker Carlson, who has spent precisely zero time, zero effective time attacking Zaran Mamdani.
00:45:11.000I have before me a list of the times that Tucker Carlson mentioned Zorhan Mamdani.
00:45:18.000And the answer is he mentioned Zor Mamdani on episodes three times in the last two years.
00:45:57.000And like, if I want to meet Jewish constituents, I'd go to their synagogues, their homes, or whatever, but I'd be here in New York because that's what I'm doing.
00:46:20.000By the way, just by way of comparison, I had my staff count up how many times I have covered Zorhan Mamdani at length on this program since just June.
00:46:32.000Since October 5th, the answer is 17 times since October 5th.
00:46:37.000In the last week, I did four separate episodes, four separate episodes about Zarin Mamdani.
00:46:44.000By the way, we also cut a get out the vote ad basically for Jack Chitterelli in New Jersey.
00:46:50.000And you may have noticed where we got, we're in New York.
00:46:52.000Like my entire team came to New York to cover this particular story.
00:46:57.000So if we're talking about who is directing fire against the left, which seems to be the question, I think it is pretty obvious who is not directing fire against the left.
00:47:06.000In fact, in fact, that Marjorie Taylor Greene, beloved of Tucker Carlson's program, and a person who is earning strange new respect from the left, she had the opportunity yesterday to appear on The View.
00:47:18.000Now, that's kind of an unusual opportunity for people on the right.
00:47:20.000Typically, you're not given an opportunity to appear on The View, specifically because they don't want anybody right-wing on.
00:47:25.000But the good news is that The View, which used to consider Marjorie Taylor Greene a low IQ Republican worried about Jewish space lasers, now they consider her a low IQ Republican concerned about Jewish space leaders, but also who agrees with them.
00:47:48.000She focused in, you know, really where it mattered on Zarin Mamdani by blaming the Republicans for the government shutdown.
00:47:54.000Just slow clap for these no fighting inside the.
00:47:59.000Here's Marjorie Taylor Greene, you know, doing the hard work of fighting the left by, you know, never fighting the left.
00:48:06.000When I ran for Congress in 2020, I ran criticizing Republicans and Democrats equally because I come from a working class family, ran a construction company for over 20 years, and I feel like the government has failed all of us.
00:48:25.000And I represent a district that is rural manufacturing district, blue-collar workers, and people have been crushed by decades of failure in Washington, D.C.
00:48:36.000And so I have no problem pointing fingers at everyone.
00:48:41.000And just to be clear, she also ripped on MAGA explicitly as well as the Republican leadership.
00:48:48.000But really, the reason that Zor Mamdani won is because some of us were critical of people glossing white supremacists.
00:48:56.000In fact, what we probably should do is unite with white supremacists to defeat Zarin Mamdani while the white supremacists try to drag down the entire conservative movement.
00:49:03.000That's probably the way we ought to do it.
00:49:05.000You know, here was MTG again, you know, doing the hard work of fighting Zarin Mamdani by ripping on MAGA and Republican leadership.
00:49:12.000You know, I think there's a lot of paid social media influencers.
00:49:17.000And I found it very interesting that they were the MAGA accounts, but they're all paid.
00:49:22.000And they all attacked me when I announced I was coming to join you ladies on the view.
00:49:27.000And I think that's very weak and pathetic.
00:49:29.000But when I talk about weak Republican men, I'm pretty much talking oftentimes about the leadership in the House and the Senate.
00:49:37.000And they're just not getting our agenda done.
00:49:43.000Again, with this kind of cogent defense of conservative principles there from Marjorie Taylor Greene or from Tucker Carlson, who has spent the last several years demoralizing conservatives by siding with and glossing some of the worst people on planet Earth.
00:49:59.000And then we're told that unless there's unit, like I need an explainer.
00:50:05.000Truly, I need an explainer, like a statistical explainer on how unifying with people who are actively anti-conservative is going to somehow grow the conservative coalition against the left.
00:50:20.000I want an explainer because it doesn't add up logically or mathematically.
00:50:25.000And if you want Zarin Mamdani, not just to be mayor of New York, but governor of New York and people like Zorhan Mamdani to be president of the United States, then Republicans could definitely do the thing that some seem to want to do, which is fringe out their own party by unifying with a wing that is fundamentally anti-conservative that disagrees with Donald Trump on many of the key issues of Donald Trump's actual platform.
00:50:55.000It's not a well-thought-out logical idea.
00:50:57.000It is an act of ideological pusillanimity.
00:51:03.000Well, on a more positive note, after all that terrible political news, I'm joined on the line by Leland Vitert.
00:51:08.000He's host of On Balance with Leland Vittert.
00:51:10.000He serves as News Nation's chief Washington anchor.
00:51:13.000He's also the author of a brand new book, a really tremendously inspiring book titled Born Lucky, A Dedicated Father, a Grateful Son, and My Journey with Autism.
00:51:21.000Leland Vitter, thanks so much for taking the time.
00:51:30.000So, why don't you sort of spell out what the book is about and why you wrote it?
00:51:37.000Yeah, so born lucky is hope for every parent of a kid who's having a hard time, not just with autism like I did, but ADHD, anxiety, bullying, the difficulties growing up.
00:51:48.000It's to give parents the hope that my parents didn't have.
00:51:51.000When I was about six years old, they were told I needed to be evaluated.
00:52:51.000And my dad, with that, said that he felt as though that I, in my current form at that point, would not really have an opportunity for a happy or productive normal life.
00:53:02.000And he said, so at that point, he decided I am going to adapt Lucky, which was my nickname, to the world rather than the world to Lucky.
00:53:12.000And Born Lucky is the story of him adapting me up for the world and teaching me the social and emotional fabric that comes so naturally to most people, trying to find a way to give a kid who wasn't going to be good at school and wasn't going to have friends self-esteem.
00:53:32.000I mean, that's an amazing thing because the medicalization of a lot of these problems has led parents to believe that if there is not a drug that sort of fixes it, that if the medical community doesn't have an answer, that basically you despair or you have to, as you say in reverse, sort of change the world to fit the kid.
00:53:49.000And so the idea is that the world has to make adjustments.
00:53:52.000And instead, it sounds like your father recognized the reality, which is that if you were going to be successful in the world, then it was going to have to be a very hard road to train you to be ready for that world.
00:54:01.000So what are the kinds of things that your dad would have you do given all of those challenges?
00:54:07.000Yeah, look, starting when I was about five or six years old, he figured he needed to teach me self-esteem.
00:54:12.000Self-esteem to him is earned, not given.
00:54:14.000So it started with push-ups, 200 push-ups a day, five days a week for three or four months, and then you got some kind of reward.
00:54:20.000And the idea was to teach me that hard work would yield results.
00:54:26.000He said there's two things you can control, your character and your hard work.
00:54:30.000And then he would start taking me out with his friends.
00:54:33.000He said that he knew I wasn't going to have any friends.
00:54:35.000You know, he never told anybody about my diagnosis or anything.
00:54:39.000No teachers, no counselors, none of his friends.
00:54:40.000He and my mom suffered silently as it was.
00:54:43.000But he would take me out to a lunch with his friends.
00:54:46.000And when I would start talking too much or interrupt or ask a question that was off-rhythm, he would tap his watch.
00:54:51.000And that was my signal to stop talking.
00:54:54.000And then to sort of bookmark that moment.
00:54:57.000And later we would post-game it, right?
00:54:59.000We would go through, okay, so when Mr. Shapiro was talking about his kids, why'd you interrupt and ask him about how he gets sponsors at the Daily Wire?
00:55:09.000Okay, what could you have asked Mr. Shapiro about?
00:55:12.000And then we would role play that conversation.
00:55:16.000And then the flip side was, you know, I was severely bullied, ended up being taken out of three or four different schools.
00:55:22.000One scene in Born Lucky, my dad comes to find me in fifth grade at, I think, my third elementary school.
00:55:28.000And for the past month, they had put me with the girls.
00:55:32.000So you can imagine a father looking out at PE fields, asking the PE teacher, how's his kid doing, and realize that they put me with the girls to protect me from the bullying.
00:55:41.000It was also the flip side of that was he became sort of my only person and my only protector and friend.
00:55:48.000So every night he and I'd spend a couple of hours together and he was sort of putting me back together from the emotional torture and isolation and bullying that happened every day.
00:56:00.000So now obviously you're grown, you're a successful person, which is an unbelievable story.
00:56:05.000Do you still struggle with some of those same issues that you did when you were a kid?
00:56:09.000How much of this were you able to sort of train out of?
00:57:06.000I found his phone number and just wrote a note.
00:57:07.000I said, I just want to apologize for being so rude to you.
00:57:10.000He eventually just walked away from me because I wouldn't talk to him.
00:57:14.000And in that note, I never once said, oh, by the way, I have autism.
00:57:19.000And that's sort of the message that my dad taught me, which is that you can never use your diagnosis either as an excuse or allow it to define you.
00:57:29.000And that's why he didn't tell me or anybody else until I was in my 20s.
00:57:35.000Now, Leland, one of the most amazing things about what you're saying right here is that all of these lessons are broadly applicable to kids who don't have autism.
00:57:42.000I have four kids, thank God, all healthy as far as we know.
00:57:45.000And everything that you're saying, these are just good parenting tactics, period.
00:57:50.000And yet parents will treat kids who don't even have autism, don't have some sort of condition.
00:57:54.000They will treat them as though the world ought to adapt to their needs, as though the world is somehow wronging them.
00:58:00.000I feel like we've trained an entire generation of people to be unable to cope, despite the fact that they don't even have the challenges that you grew up with.
00:58:09.000Well, I think that's why Born Lucky has resonated in the way it has been.
00:58:12.000You know, you're a best-selling author.
00:58:14.000And oftentimes when people say, how's the book doing?
00:58:17.000People want to know how the sales are for us.
00:58:20.000In Born Lucky, what I've been most sort of unbelievably humbled by is the hundreds, if not thousands of emails I've gotten from parents of kids who aren't on the spectrum saying this has changed my perspective on parenting because born lucky is the proof of the power and agency every parent has to help their kids be more.
00:58:40.000And you point out rightly, and I've always been inspired watching your show and listening to you how dedicated you are to your kids.
00:58:46.000This is proof of what really involved parents can do.
00:58:57.000I just wrote it to sort of say thank you to my dad.
00:59:00.000But I think you're right that it's hit this nerve that it's telling parents something that they're not being told.
00:59:07.000And they're not being told really how much they can do to help their kids and to prepare their kids.
00:59:14.000And again, I think the book is radically inspiring because you're an inspiring person.
00:59:18.000You've become successful despite all of this, and maybe because of the parenting that you received, because you had this in the first place.
00:59:25.000And that should be a hope for a lot of parents who have kids who are suffering from this sort of stuff or who have kids who they just need to change and they need to figure out how to do that.
00:59:34.000The book is Born Lucky, a Dedicated Father, a Grateful Son, and My Journey with Autism.
00:59:43.000All righty, folks, the show continues for our members right now.
00:59:46.000Interestingly, there are some members of the Hollywood contingent who are beginning to realize that maybe only aiming at the far left is a bad business strategy.