In this episode of Highly Regained, I sit down with writer and podcaster Scott Greer to discuss Zoran Mamdani's victory in the Democratic primary, why he's a third-worldist, and what his victory means for the left.
00:02:21.880We had to wrangle you because I had read your piece where you were sort of breaking down Zoran's victory, what this means for the left.
00:02:28.460I know recently you had said that you were kind of, as the left sort of has to look inward and determine, okay, how do we sort of rebrand for the next chapter, that they would kind of take on a bit of chauvinism.
00:02:39.920Maybe that would be kind of the technique.
00:02:42.640While Zoran, yeah, like you said, okay, maybe he incorporated a little bit of that.
00:02:49.420And in that article, you also pointed out that it's not entirely accurate to call him a third-worldist.
00:02:55.220Now, that's a line that me and a few others in the space have been taking, but maybe you can define kind of that chauvinism aspect and then maybe why the third-worldist isn't the most accurate sort of title for him or adjective for him.
00:03:08.400A few years ago, I read an article saying that the left may embrace what we could call American Chavezism.
00:03:14.700And that's named after Hugo Chavez, the left-wing dictator of Venezuela who was succeeded by Maduro, which now Trump is not very happy with Maduro.
00:03:23.080And they had a very left-wing socialist regime that was very hostile towards the West, very hostile towards capitalism, obviously, and had a certain bravura and a very machismo aspect to it.
00:03:37.880Now, this isn't really the case with Zoran.
00:03:41.020Like Maduro and Chavez are kind of like swaggering alpha males.
00:03:45.020They're like, we're going to take away your stuff.
00:03:46.920Meanwhile, I would never use the term swaggering for Zoran, you know, maybe prancing around or something, but it's definitely not swaggering.
00:03:55.700And I offer this idea is that what we would see in American Chavezism is a combination of anti-white sentiment with economic socialism, as that these people would be denouncing the white man and saying, we need to take all their stuff.
00:04:12.260We need this massive wealth redistribution from whites to the other people in order to have the socialist utopia or whatever.
00:04:22.780Now, you sort of have that with Zoran.
00:04:25.580Zoran and his campaign ran woke or it had a woke agenda, even though if he didn't highlight it as much.
00:04:33.500In fact, if you compare him to, say, the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, you know, he was almost anti-woke compared to them.
00:04:42.080But his agenda was still very woke because he's talking about taxing whites at a higher rate than other people.
00:04:47.420He's talking about ending gifted programs because they don't have a sufficient level of racial diversity.
00:04:52.660And even a lot of the other things he's talking about has that similar woke focus.
00:04:57.680So he still had that anti-white sentiment, even if he's not driving at that.
00:05:02.040And we even saw that in his victory speech where he highlighted, like, every single immigrant group that backed him and said, this is your country, too.
00:05:08.820You know, I didn't mention white New Yorkers in that coalition, curiously enough, even though, of course, a lot of these wealthy are not very much wealthy, but middle class young people who voted for them, which I use the term yuckies, young urban creative.
00:05:23.600It's better to call them that than yuckies. Different demographic, different type of people.
00:05:30.320You know, they were not being included in.
00:05:33.240Patrick Bateman wasn't doing resin art, like, you know.
00:05:36.680Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not like thanking all the great HR professionals who helped him win.
00:08:10.400Yeah, yeah, we still have we want the State Department's flying pride flags, not the embassies wiped out.
00:08:16.640Yeah, well, Zoran seems like kind of an interesting synthesis because I agree with you.
00:08:20.440Like, OK, he's clearly not, you know, your classical, you know, well-read third worldist who's like, oh, we need to get revenge on these colonists and whatever.
00:08:29.180I mean, he flipped off the Columbus statue.
00:08:31.560To me, he kind of represents the synthesis between woke and kind of this third world mindset, because to me, it seems it looks a little bit more like potentially South Africa, where it's like, OK, yes, maybe the South Africans, they were cozy with the Cubans or the Soviets, that sort of thing.
00:08:48.360But when they took over power, they kept the free market to a large degree.
00:08:55.640So maybe third worldist isn't the best description.
00:08:58.200But I guess what I'm getting at is it drives me crazy when people when they're describing what could like what could be the outcome of a Zoran New York City.
00:09:05.760They start saying like Sharia law and like social like actual socialism.
00:09:10.700And I'm just like, that's not really what I'm worried about.
00:09:13.560I'm just worried about the fact that he openly admits that he wants to tax white neighborhoods at a higher rate.
00:09:17.840Like he's partying at gay clubs at like two in the morning.
00:09:19.980That's not really like jihadist behavior.
00:09:55.840They're going to try to convert everyone to Islam in New York City, which is like if you look at his whole campaign, this is like the, you know, lamest thing ever.
00:10:05.040The complete opposite of like a devout Muslim.
00:10:08.300I mean, he did go and try to appeal to devout Muslims, but it's just part of this rainbow coalition he's formed.
00:10:14.920And but they're not going to be, you know, implementing Sharia law.
00:10:18.640I don't think that I think that would have some negative effects on the gay clubs he was campaigning at.
00:10:23.700And a lot of his audience would not be supportive of that.
00:10:26.640But I mean, it's still, you know, it's one of those things that in middle America, you know, that's still there's still a lot of understandable anti-Islamic sentiment.
00:10:37.100And that's an easy way to and I'm not using this pejorative because I think there is a need to present Sauron as a threat and to fear monger about him.
00:10:47.920Now, I think that's good that we want to portray him as a threat, but it comes across as very stupid.
00:10:53.280And if you look at some of the campaigning, this probably did help Mom Donnie in the at the end of the day, you know, with like Andy Ockels, you know, a Tennessee congressman showing off as like, have you forgotten New York?
00:11:04.860And it's about like 9-11 and it's like, we're going to have this again.
00:11:08.720You know, Zoron's going to fly the plane straight into the Empire State Building this time.
00:11:13.680I don't I don't think he's going to be a suicide bomber, but it's just a way to present the threat.
00:11:19.140And I guess that's more threatening than, you know, rent control that destroys the city.
00:11:24.980I mean, it'd be like, you know, it's the same by the same logic, be like worried about Joe Biden establishing like a Catholic integralist, you know, like it's just like that's not really once you kind of adopt leftism, you leave a lot of the devout religiousness at the door.
00:11:40.380But yeah, I kind of get it, though, because, I mean, I think one line that did seem to resonate, at least with a lot of people, is maybe not that Zoron would sort of perpetrate another 9-11 himself, but that it is shocking that a city that literally in my lifetime, I'm 24, in my lifetime witnessed, you know, Islamic terror attack knocking down, you know, these two massive skyscrapers.
00:12:02.24020 years, 20 something odd years later, they can elect a Muslim.
00:12:06.180I think that's actually a very salient point is saying, like, OK, maybe not what changed liberals minds.
00:12:11.700It's like, look how look how fast it took to replace New Yorkers, because all those New Yorkers that remembered that they voted for Cuomo.
00:13:19.300And I think you would have seen even there a lot of concern over electing a Muslim, you know, in the late 2010s when ISIS was still fresh in people's minds.
00:13:27.780But right now, people have forgotten radicalism.
00:13:30.140We haven't really had a major Islamic terror attack in the United States in a while.
00:13:36.240Even the Palestinian issue, it feels separated from radical Islam, even if Hamas is, you know, a very Islamist organization, clearly.
00:13:45.280But there it's separated from that issue.
00:13:47.620So we don't feel the threat of radical Islam, especially when we're presented these people like Ilhan Omar, even though she wears a hijab.
00:13:55.320You know, she divorced her husband and married a Jewish man, her second husband, and she broke up that marriage, if I'm not mistaken.
00:14:03.480So that's not like very much Sharia behavior.
00:14:06.760I don't think that would be allowed under Sharia law.
00:14:09.360Then you have Mom Donnie, who's this theater kid, and on and on.
00:14:12.940You know, it's now that they, all these Muslims come here and they become assimilated libtards rather than jihadists, which that's not, you know, maybe that's a slight improvement.
00:14:34.820So it actually is worse because now they're able to join into this rainbow coalition and push against traditional America and push for these radical policies that run against America's interests.
00:14:47.160So I, but it's harder to create a threat around the theater kid versus, you know, Osama bin Laden.
00:15:04.460Al Qaeda is not really doing much of anything.
00:15:06.220I mean, Europe still struggles a lot with radical Islam.
00:15:08.960Like there's this week they've broken up like multiple potential terror attacks on Christmas markets and other things like there's even in Germany that there's some, you know, Christmas markets they can't run because they can't afford the security costs.
00:15:22.620So they still have a major Islamic terror problem in Europe, but Americans aren't as aware of that and it doesn't seem to affect us.
00:15:29.660So we don't have as much of an intense hostility towards Islam that we would have had even in the first Trump term.
00:15:37.080You know, you got to remember the Muslim ban that Trump opposed in the primary helped him win the primary.
00:15:43.240Now it's, you know, he was still running on that, but people didn't really even pay attention because it's just not as much of a salient issue as it once was.
00:18:11.620But I mean, it's funny with even with like conservatives, like a year ago, you know,
00:18:15.640Trump was campaigning towards the Muslims and highlighting, you know, the not only just Biden's Israel policy, but also wokeness in schools.
00:18:24.300And you saw this in like Dearborn and other places where all these people in full Muslim gear are out there protesting trans stuff in their kids' school.
00:18:32.500And then conservatives like based Muslims.
00:18:35.260And you're like, well, I don't know about that.
00:18:38.100But then conservatives have the sympathy for them when they're opposing wokeness in schools.
00:18:42.820And that's also an issue that doesn't seem to be as fresh in people's minds right now.
00:18:48.480So there are some people will remember that there's bad Muslims.
00:18:51.840And Mom Donnie reminds some at least conservatives about that.
00:18:55.940Well, there is this there is this theorizing on the right and conservative circles.
00:19:00.700But they would always see moments like that where, you know, Muslims be protesting some sort of woke book or something.
00:19:06.560And they would be like, see, the intersectional coalition is breaking down.
00:19:09.980But Zoran seemed to just completely shatter that because like his coalition was literally like everyone that's basically just not like a normal American patriot.
00:19:19.020And he stitched it together pretty seamlessly.
00:19:22.000And so maybe you can outline that why that's probably not entirely accurate to say like the intersexual coalition is like on the verge of collapse.
00:20:25.500And Momdani's coalition was a combination of these.
00:20:30.460I don't know if the we'll just say downwardly mobile or, you know, economically threatened, middle class, young white people are young people, college educated.
00:20:42.100A lot of them are Asian and other things.
00:21:14.600And we probably would have voted for Eric Adams if he stayed in.
00:21:17.580But and then it was like the working class whites and probably the more affluent middle class whites, the yuppies who really fear getting their, you know, their taxes going up and, you know, the crazy stuff that's going to happen to the city.
00:21:32.680But the more economic or the middle class people who feel more economically precarious and the young college educated people without kids and stuff, they were more likely to vote for Mom Donnie.
00:21:42.680So it was that combination of yuckies and immigrants that proved the winning formula for Mom Donnie.
00:21:49.860And I think that's what we're really going to see for a lot of these far left candidates is a combination of college educated Americans who feel that they're not having the same economic prospects as their parents.
00:22:02.620And then they're won over to a left wing populist message along with immigrants who, you know, they didn't they turned against Democrats when they felt that they were pushing a bunch of crazy stuff in their school and their kids schools.
00:22:15.060And they were letting criminals run rampant. Now they may shift back to the left if they if they are told that, you know, Mom Donnie in this campaign is like, I don't want to defund police anymore.
00:22:24.900And maybe they were won over that. And he didn't really highlight, you know, how they're going to push like gender indoctrination in schools.
00:22:31.600He just simply was like, we're ending gifted programs. So your kids can go to better schools or whatever. Yeah.
00:22:37.660And then they didn't quality in schools. So it's a different message. And I think that can very well win back those two demographics.
00:22:46.120I mean, you know, Trump did pretty well among young people, particularly young men, but Mom Donnie won 68 percent of young men.
00:22:52.760Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is what Bannon was talking about. He's talking to Politico about this.
00:22:56.760He was saying, look, as I've seen, he keeps reemphasizing this and it's true. And a lot of Republicans don't quite understand this yet.
00:23:03.760It's like populism is a viable tool to turn out low propensity voters, whether you like it or not.
00:23:10.020And Zoran was tapping into that. He tapped into low propensity voters. And that's just the secret sauce.
00:23:16.440So my question is, what aspects of this Zoran thing are viable, maybe not nationwide, but in other cities?
00:23:23.840How much of it do you think is more exclusive to New York City? As in, why should people be concerned about Zoran?
00:23:30.500Because a lot of people are just saying, oh, it's New York, you know, let them, you know, screw themselves over.
00:23:35.900What specifically about Zoran is it that makes them a little bit of a evolution and I guess wokeism to be precise?
00:23:42.200I mean, it can apply nationwide. I mean, New York is not that far left of a city compared to others.
00:23:47.180This is not Seattle or Portland, you know, and they generally tend to vote, go with a cent of, I don't want to use term centrist, but a moderate seeming Democrat.
00:23:56.220Bill de Blasio is an exception, but I mean, they went with Bloomberg, multiple terms, Giuliani.
00:24:02.500And then they had Eric Adams was presented as a moderate candidate.
00:24:06.580So they generally go for the moderate. This isn't, you know, like basing your assumptions on, or even someplace like Minneapolis where they're generally far left.
00:24:14.840This is like a major American city that has a lot of normal people.
00:24:18.400If they went with this crazy guy, that's, that's a concerning factor.
00:24:22.200And I think the economic populism of a left-wing variety is something that Democrats can sell nationwide.
00:24:28.600Yeah. It looks like my cam, I don't know. I think my camera went.
00:24:31.660Yeah. Your camera went black. So I was like, I'm about to talk more, but I was worried that we lost you.
00:24:35.700I think it's a Zoran attack. I don't know what's going on.
00:24:38.060Yeah. Mom Donnie has attacked. This is, uh, this is Sharia law coming down on us.
00:24:42.580This is what every woman in New York city is going to see after mandated burghets are rolled out.
00:25:53.580So that's my closing thoughts on the topic.
00:25:55.480And if you would like to follow my work, you can follow me on Twitter at Scott M. Greer and subscribe to my subset highly dash respected.com.
00:26:03.060And also find my work on YouTube under highly respected.