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Eli Lake
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Eli Lake
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Eli Lake
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Eli Lake
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Eli Lake
start writing your own chapter in modern military history. Welcome back Breaking History listeners. This is kind of an emergency podcast because we had to cover something about the great leap forward in New York City where we see now the success of really more than I mean it's three congressional candidates in a primary, but also for the Democratic Socialists of America, but also what looks to be, at least in New York, to be the takeover of the Democratic Party by what used to be a fringe left wing organization called the dsa. My guest is an old friend who I worked with many years ago at the New York Sun, Harry Siegel. He was a longtime columnist for the Daily News. He is a co founder of the New York Editorial Board which is hoping to kind of bring back journalistic accountability in New York local politics, which I think is a great thing and just overall seen as one of the deans of New York City politics.
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Background/Unclear Voice 1
The bag is wet, you rub the park, you like the dance those Valeries and Taylor sand. Your hacky stack is hard to handle but SPX falling well in the world's a mess but now it's there for three nobody knows. Now we are here and we are all this new.
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Background/Unclear Voice 2
Now we teach the PhD and we run the NYC. I want to make the New York Times and all the times they took my side our compass. New visa.
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Eli Lake
Harry, thanks so much for coming on Breaking History.
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Harry Siegel
You are always great to see you. Thank you for having me on.
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Eli Lake
So before we get into the entree, let's do an amuse bouche. Tell me a little bit about the New York Editorial Board because it's a fascinating kind of idea. It's like a collective of just journalists who are kind of doing the job the New York Times used to do
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Sponsor/Ad Voice
when it came to local politics.
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Eli Lake
Is that right?
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Harry Siegel
That is. I'm going to go deep into that. I got to just mention I'm also a senior editor at the City Reporter, which is a nonprofit newsroom just covering New York. And I do the faq. I'm one of the hosts of the FAQ NYC podcast there. I'm always, as you know, Eli, juggling a whole bunch of things. And one of those now is this New York editorial board. And the backstory here which leads us right into this election is that the God almighty New York Times, whose national endorsements have become sort of a running joke, decided to stop doing local endorsements sort of out of the blue. And the backstory there, as I understand it, is that what happened is the owner of the paper was very upset at some of the coverage he got in the Intercept. If I recall, they were paired up with one other outlet after the paper endorsed Dan Goldman when he was running for the then open, then open congressional seat that he won. And so he quietly said, let's not do local endorsements anymore. I don't like this. And that reporting was sort of oppo research. And it was really in the vein of, as I saw it, like, look at these two rich Jewish guys, look at the schools they went to. Of course they did this thing and it's gross. But his response was also pretty gross. And they stopped doing local endorsements, by the way. They didn't announce this or tell anyone. Other reporters at the Times to their credit, got a tip that this was happening, passed it to other reporters at the Times, and the paper eventually reported out its own secret, I believe with a, with eventually a comment, you know, from the paper itself. But it was absurd. And months and months after this had happened, that's really gross in an abdication. And the local endorsements are where the Times actually had some real juice and was one of the last remaining pillars of an increasingly rickety establishment. So in the absence of that, a group of journalists, our friend Ben Smith helped came up with the idea and sort of helped convene this, got together. We're not endorsing anyone. We work for different outlets. I work for a, you know, a non profit investigative newsroom. So it doesn't do partisan politics. But we're meeting with candidates, electeds, power brokers, and sitting them down for hour long interviews that are serious and in depth. And I do think those have some importance. The one we did that made the most New Zealand was actually not involving Lander or Goldman. It was dac Darieliza Villier Chevalier, now one of the growing socialist contingent in Congress as she was running.
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Eli Lake
I call Darieliza Meinhof.
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Harry Siegel
She came in, she did an interview there. I was not present at that one. My colleagues who were there sort of pressed her on a bunch of the things she's said and argued for. She tried to put forth a substantial explanation of why, you know, she is fundamentally against police, suspicious of borders, those things. And there were big holes in her answers from many people's perspective that were widely circulated. What I'll note is, you know, the Fox thing, we report, you decide like, you know, the job of this editorial board is not to endorse and say you ought, we should, we must. It's just to put this information out. And with that information in front of them. This woman who notably was at this October 8th rally, right, that no electeds or potential politicians at the time attended, that would have been totally unacceptable for a Democratic candidate a couple years ago. Asked about that, she said, well, well, I was anticipating Israel's response. And we've reached a point where because of, in part, Israel's response, the war in Iran, connections with Trump, in part because of a much longer term push to reshape the Democratic Party and, you know, tensions with its establishment and with Jews there, we reach this sort of breaking point where, you know, a very nice, very popular mayor like Zoran Mamdani, who's very guarded with his language, who doesn't often misstep, was comfortable putting his seal behind her. So he's not going to show up at that sort of rally, but he's going to make it clear that somebody who does is completely acceptable to his movement. And that was enough against a sort of unpopular incumbent. I won't get into the stuff with Tao Espayat.
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Eli Lake
He showed up like a week later at another rally. But yes, you're right. Like, I mean, this was in a different. This was also a young councilman, I think. I mean, he wasn't yet, you know, Zoran. And we, let's just stop it here. We should play a little bit of the rally because that rally was not anticipating Israel's response. It was reveling in the bloodlust of Hamas. And there is a difference.
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Background/Unclear Voice 2
Early morning on Saturday, October 7, our resistance stormed illegal settlements and paraglided across colonial borders. Into the largest military base around Gaza. Khalim Abu Salem in this operation and OXA flood, the resistance fires more than 5,000 rockets.
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Harry Siegel
Look, Madani is not a guy who is going to tear down hostage posters, but he's the leader of a movement and is running an administration full of people who are totally comfortable doing that. And I think there's something very disturbing and gross about that. He spent the election pretending in some sense, you know, this was about 67. And then as mayor, he put out a nabka statement, right. The first ever by a mayor on Israeli Independence Day and made it clear that this is about 1948. He couches this in very universal language about how any state that doesn't have full treatment for all its citizens, and the suggestion is that's always been Israel. We don't need to go deep into that. But, you know, like, this has changed recently and under Netanyahu, but is absolutely not part of the founding of Israel, that there's two classes of citizens. But there's a lot there that is creepy and off putting to me. And with world events, with Israel's alignment with Trump is increasingly popular in both parties. And both parties, I think, have establishments that are not where their voters are. And I think Mamdani is there. I don't like his convictions, but I think he has the courage of them that they're politically successful and popular right now. And lots of people that don't think deeply about this just sort of have a sense of being fed up. And here is someone who's speaking honestly. Here are the candidates he's endorsing, and all of them breaking through. And against Nydia Velazquez, this Puerto Rican trailblazer, her chosen successor against sitting Congressman Adriano Espia, right, against incumbent Dan Goldman, which is its own sort of complicated thing. He was never the right guy for the district. The progressives were split. Maani cleared the field for Lander in a one on one race. That one was given from Trump. But that's a sweep. All the socialist candidates, not all endorsed by Mamdani, except one, maybe, except one who ran for state legislature positions, won. This was a big shift. New York City is not New York State, is not America. But it's a real sign of where the party is going and how detached its quote unquote leaders, including tribal leaders, black ones, Puerto Rican ones, Dominican ones, Jewish ones, are from where popular sentiment is at the moment.
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Eli Lake
So that's what happened. So let's go back a little bit. The first question I have is, who is the dsa? That's the Democratic Socialists of America. Now, I did an episode of my podcast nine months ago that looked at the founding of this party by Michael Harrington, and it was a very different thing. Michael Harrington, lifelong Zionist and his whole thing was, I want socialism, but I want the socialism of the possible. He believed, for example, his formative experience, you might say, is coming up through Dorothy Day. And then he becomes one of the advisors to Lyndon Johnson's war on Poverty.
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Sponsor/Ad Voice
He.
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Eli Lake
He believes in the idea that the socialists can push the Democrats and we can govern more progressively, but he's not. You couldn't imagine a Michael Harrington leading a movement promising to next election take out Tip o', Neill, who was the Democratic longtime Speaker of the House. We saw a chance in some of these election parties that your next Hakeem Jeffries, who would be the first black speaker of the House, if the Democrats, as we expect, will win a majority in the midterms. So what happened to the Democratic Socialists of America? That was my first question. Who are they and what's their secret sauce? Because they seem to have the momentum at this point.
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Harry Siegel
So without getting too deep into the New York weeds, and there's a whole lot of different groups and acronyms and show games that go into this, but acorns involved, but I'll leave them out, the Working Families Party basically took over that role of we're nominally a separate party, but we're really there generally to drag Democrats further to the left. A bunch of stuff happened, some of it involving Andrew Cuomo and him going to war with that party and hilariously starting a Women's Equality Party, not coincidentally coming just before WFP in your acronym Alphabet, to kneecap them, to force organized labor to separate themselves from the wfp, which had always been a balance between left wing activism and labor. So with labor split off, the WFP nonetheless sort of held to that role of pulling Democrats a little further to the left, but really within the confines of the Democratic Party politics. The dsa, I'm skipping decades of history here, but it's modern history. Starts off with people who in the first Trump term are disgusted with Democratic politics, who have that whoever wins, we're all going to burn perspective, starting to meet each other, organize, feel active, want to participate, knock on doors. This is happening as the Democratic Party in New York. I think this applies more generally. But I know New York is a shell or a husk that isn't really doing that work, that doesn't bother knocking on doors, that has no interest in turning out new voters, that wants to benefit from this closed system. And the voters they have, hoping they don't die soon enough because they tend to be older. And the DSA starts putting in this work along with lots of other reform efforts and A bunch of its minding ele like the Omni cause, which for a long time was global warming and climate change starts to shift to Israel. There have always been true believers in that perspective. It is very much not mine. I have nonetheless some respect for that. Do we have respect for anyone who actually wants to see their argument through, who isn't just sort of bluffing or playing a hand and like, okay, those are your words. Let's engage. So this movement is also fundamentally decarceral, deeply suspicious of borders, like really suspicious of the idea of nationhood or state. And you have downwardly mobile class. A bunch of stuff happening. We're going to jump forward to 2019. This socialist Tiffany Caban runs for district attorney in Queens. She's written out by the smart money. You know, you got all these black homeowners in Jamaica, all these different parts of this very big borough. There's no way they're going to elect someone like that for this role. They run hard and through the wall. And I don't think Caban, frankly, is brilliant to the best candidate. But there's people who care. They're out knocking on doors. They sense they're building something. They sense this establishment is weak. On election day, she wins. There is a, there's a recount, and she loses by a few dozen ballots to this woman, Melinda Katz, who's a protege of the former state controller and then disgraced guy Alan Hevesy. It's a long story. Also used to be involved with Curtis Slua, the Republican who just ran for mayor. It's all, everything in New York's a long story. But the point is Caban loses and the establishment goes back to sleep. You know, they're like, oh, that was really close. A brick fell. Maybe I should think about what I'm doing with my wife. Oh, well, that brick landed right by my foot and not on my head. Onward. And then you jump ahead seven years and a second Trump term, which flips history on its head. Bringing us back to Dan Goldman, who runs the first time. I'm an MSNBC at the time hero. You know, I helped run a Trump impeachment. Who cares if you ran a Trump impeachment, sir? This guy's president again. And so you have a dedicated group of people knocking on doors and trying to convince them with a very appealing avatar in Zoran Mamdani and a whole swath of people, including some of the, you know, the no kings resistance world, such as it is, who aren't on board with all this but are exhausted with Austerity politics, as the socialists would put it. You know, this is the best we can do with resistant politics and say, why not give this kid a chance? And he ran very hard and through the tape and got there and then notably, a lot of people said, well, he had the lucky who he was running against in that circumstance and this is obviously a high watermark and an anomalous result. And this guy who trusted his theory of the case, ran very hard on it, kept trusting it, and invested in challenging Democratic incumbents in a way a new mayor very rarely does. And he said, I think I'm stronger than you. I think I brought these new participants into democracy to the table. And he has and kept running through and now it's like further demonstrated his power. So that's a huge win, not just for him, but for this DSA movement. One of the co chairs of the New York DSA was talking about how they could have taken out Hakeem this year, which is probably true. And Mamdani actually personally intervened to stop this young council member and new DSA member Chiase from running against Mamdani. And weirdly, unlike in mainstream democratic politics, and there's always what gets decided in public and what's decided by closed doors is tricky. But he asked him not to run. She said, I'm still running. Mamdani had to show up at the DSA vote about whether or not to back him and personally plead with members not to support the guy. And then actually, as with Caban, he barely won that vote, but he won it. DSA wasn't going to support him and I'll say dropped out because he also, anyone who can read a poll sort of understands this is where momentum is. This is bringing new people and young people in. And again, they're organizing, knocking on doors, finding each other, binding each other to this in ways I just don't see the mainstream people doing. It really feels like a set of melting icebergs and the people still have places. What's up? Gregory Meeks in Queensland. I could keep going. Just want to hold on Hakeem for as long as they can, see if this tips, see if they get lucky with Trump as a foil again and how much worse could we be? But I think patience with that is running out. And this DSA movement really organized around a fundamental hostility toward both nationhood in general, but fixated on Israel in particular. I think in very unhealthy ways, is booming. And Israel's actions in recent years, both in terms of wars, it's been involved in and alignment with Trump, I think have really helped that break through. And last thing, this DSA co chair, you flatly said in an interview with my friend Ben Max before the election, I thought was remarkably transparent in a way. I wish Democratic leaders were. It's like, look, these are small races. We're worried about how they're going to end up. They ended up doing very well. But we're doing this thinking about 2020 and what the Democratic Party is going to be and who we nominate to run against whomever the Republican is at that point in what's become Trump's party. And I think they had remarkable success in getting there. Assuming Democrats retake the House, I think the vote to make Hakeem speaker is going to be an interesting one. I'm sure he'll get there, but I'm sure there's going to be real promises extracted in the course of it.
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Eli Lake
Okay, so I want to, before we move further, can you just give me, Harry, a garden variety, who's a DSA volunteer? I have my own stereotype in my head. But you're in New York. Who's joined the movement? Are they, you know, the working poor, you know, minorities, or are they baristas with sociology master's degrees?
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Harry Siegel
Definitely both. And look, the people who got involved early on were downwardly mobile baristas with sociology degrees who were often white, not from New York City, who like to run, often like Hispanic Latina candidates, if they can also claim to be Jewish. What's up? Julie Salazar, like, so much the better. And the thing is that the issues they were pushing the Democrats were not addressing in satisfactory ways. And I'm not putting that just on the party. The whole world is struggling with this, with massive population shifts, with affordability issues, with AI, with tech. But the simple question, do you feel like you're going to do better than your parents? Are things better than they were 20 years ago? Is this system working at stop and, and so you have this group that's starting off with your baristas that's actively pushing this, that's doing cool posters, that's trying to get people involved, that's putting them around each other, that ends up being less just young, white and random then I think a lot of the right is describing it at now. It still definitely has that core. It's still looking for avatars who suggest it's more broadly representative than it is, you know, But I don't think that's quite right. Dariel Aza won the black vote from all the exit polling. I'm seeing all these candidates did badly in NYCHA projects in particular and then that's getting the reasons for that. And they're serious but I think they're getting pretty significantly over indexed and the idea that this is just the kids of the great awokening is just pretty obviously not true at this point. And I think that second tier of give the kid a chance people who look at Mamdani's endorsement and his nicks ads and say how much worse could things be and these solutions aren't working is really significant here. This is not my political movement, but I sincerely respect the hustle, the organizing, the bringing new people into politics again with real objections to the way Israel and Jews have served as the Omni cause with that or Jews who don't think Zionist is a slur if we need to make that distinction which, which is a significant majority of Jews. But, but, but I think it is a large and growing movement. I think it's very related to Bernie Sanders 2016 run in a whole number of ways and that you have local people who'd felt totally iced out including by the way a lot of people who found out in 2016 and 2020 they thought they were going to vote for Bernie and they showed up on primary day and it's like, oh, you're not a registered Democrat. You had to be that months ago you can't vote. You said what the. You know, and we're upset and instead of just withdrawing, which is something many people are doing different spheres these days, got angry about it and then found each other and have a level of activity and engagement that of itself I think is very healthy. And I can't fault them for overperforming if other groups are not doing their part to make credible positive cases for what they can deliver and how. And it just seems to me that's always the next thing that's going to happen, but we're not quite there. And I'm deeply, deeply frustrated as a boring, moderate establishment person who wants small T tolerance and things to be normal to see how little energy there is in that direction. Still, you know, the people didn't get serious about that after Mamdani won the primary. After Mamdani won the election, it's always the next thing that's going to happen. And it's a ton of like where can we pour $10 million in tons of that money is getting judoed. The money is actually more complicated because look, the progressives cheap money too. We have matching funds in New York. The it's like basically $8 in public money for every dollar someone contributes all these other and ranked choice elections. So the result is when it's clear Mamdani is going to win, you have all these other Democrats spending their eight to one public dollars, you know, amplifying Mamdani and largely trying to drag Cuomo down. And this is up against the tens of millions of dollars that are being spent often in some really ugly ads by Cuomo and outside spending. So this is always a little complicated. But the short version is people who'd felt iced and priced out of our politics who feel like their lives are more like a video game and are unaffordable, which I understand and sympathize with. They have this one movement that's offering them some appeal, often with the tremendous intensity around Israel in particular. Again, and you saw that in that San Francisco footage. It's wild. You can't be at this march if you're not like there's an over intensity to that part and that gathering thing. But there's also legitimately people putting in energy.
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Eli Lake
Yeah, we should say that. This politician in San Francisco, Scott Wiener, very hard left guy, especially on gender ideology, but he said the magic words on Israel. He said it was a genocide. And that still wasn't good enough. Which is the point is that. And you know, you can go back. It's not like Dan Goldman was out there stumping for more arms to Israel. Dan Goldman was pretty much with the party. This is something I want to ask you about, which is that it's not. The Democrats themselves have already kind of talked themselves into becoming an anti at least foreign aid to Israel party. I mean, I think set, what is it, seven out of the eight or eight out of the nine Jewish Democrats voted for the Sanders amendment. Sanders himself, by the way, an independent, former member of the Democratic Socialists of America, no longer a member. I want to get into that in a second about who exactly is DSA now. But the point being that it was, I mean, was there much of a distinction between, I don't know, Darielizes, her primary opponent, this guy Espionda, on Israel. I mean, it seems like every Democrat running in New York was against what Israel was doing and called it a genocide. Right? I mean, what, what, what was the issue?
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Harry Siegel
The argument the DSA candidates are making now is they're running against good progressives in good standing like Dan Goldman or like Antonio Reynosa, who basically toe the party line on all these things is these people don't have enough anger and energy about it. And that's and we don't just need a polite opposition to Trump to aipac, which anyone who can read a poll and we'll talk more about AIPAC another term shortly understands is a totally sensible political play. It's distressing to me to see a self identified Mamdani aligned Zionist Jew like Brad Lander, you know, his opening ad and running against Goldman, you know, brings up AIPAC very early on. This guy loves aipac. I'm paraphrasing, I won't have anything to do with them. I think AIPAC has not done itself any service by aligning itself in more directly partisan ways. I think Israel has done a lot of this. If we go to the I brought up the Mamdani Nabka announcement before. He said from the campaign early on and he held he had the courage of his conviction he wasn't going to march in the Israel Day parade, which should have been a real indicator. This is about 48 in the existence of this state at all, any Jewish state. But when this happens and then the Israeli consulate sends without informing any local Democrats that were bringing in one of the more extreme members of Netanyahu's cabinet to march, somebody who a lot of these people don't have any truck with or have anything to do with, it makes it very hard. So the same way I found it appalling when Donald Trump was like, any good Jew has to vote for me. If not, you're a traitor to your people. Again paraphrasing because I'm doing this from memory. But he pushed that line very hard at several points around 2016. You know, there's now this mirrored in some senses pull from the DSA and attempting to turn the idea of Zionism into a slur that that's in essence apartheid and in essence Nazism. Again, this has a very long history that well precedes the war in Gaza or anything else and goes through many peace efforts and attempts to find a political solution. But as Israeli society and its politics have moved away from that, it's caused a real strain for diaspora Jews in explaining these positions and for anyone who doesn't have the patience for all that is just watching footage of this is upset. The gas prices are really high and wait a minute, the no more forever wars guy who's president again is launching a war with Iran and then good luck explaining, no, it's different with Lebanon and the south isn't really a state and that's a proxy group. And here's how Hezbollah work. You know, like people of good faith, no pun Intended are just not all that interested. And there's obviously a dedicated core with fierce ideology, and I think a lot of anti Semitism tied in. That's done a wonderful job of extinguishing, with the help of allies like Cuomo, the last value of the term anti Semitism, any of those lines. And then a candidate like Dariel, you can see all this moving even further, that somebody who shows up the day after Israel is attacked, terrible atrocities are happening, and the country is in mourning, you know, essentially to rally. Not with the Palestinian people, such as they are, but with the mosque. It's like, that's fine, because look at what's happened since. And just as somebody who can read a poll and who takes election results seriously, Mamdani was correct about that bet. And this is always. This is, you know, left on left action in an attempt to shape the party, not the country initially. Like, where are the borders? Where can we push farther? What can and can't be politely said? And testing that and testing it in part through other actors, you know, you have a little more space from. And you can feel all of that shifting in really disheartening ways, for me, at least.
- [32:16]
Eli Lake
But we were told by the smartest political analysts that Mamdani won on affordability, that he was, you know, these were, you know, bread and butter issues for everyday New Yorkers and the rent was too damn high. And he's trying to address all of that. And yet it seems like the most important thing to this new kind of wave in. In progressive politics is how much do you hate Israel? And, I mean, it seems like there's a little bit of a disconnect there, which is like, well, I mean, at a. Why wouldn't a candidate say, what does this have to do with the price of gasoline? Or whatever?
- [32:55]
Harry Siegel
But voters are just seeing this as a test of who's honest and sincere in their approaches. You have people with, I think, serious sympathy with Israel and understanding of that relationship, the challenges in that region, what it means to have a post Holocaust Jewish state, and that's a shrinking and aging and also totally defined group. And then you have all of this new energy. People are learning about all this history through very recent events, through footage that's circulating and so on. We're open to that. And I think Mandani, who's very smart, very energetic, reads a lot, at least appears responsive. Like, who's actually responsive is something that actually takes a long time to test out in politics, like, recognize that as a sincerity and authenticity test. And is this a party that is bound by its institutions and its history, or is it one that's sort of deciding from its members and its movement? The DSA is the latter. And it has been successfully orchestrating in New York what amounts to a semi hostile takeover of the Democratic Party and the WFP to some extent with. With some willing hostages, if you will. No grim pun intended. Like Brad Lander, like along for that ride. And you can see it with Brad. I had a private conversation with him I won't get into. But, you know, he talked to the Times about how he felt guilty about some of the stuff he was saying and he thinks this is important. And he really doesn't like the Netanyahu government, but he knows that this veers into dangerous symbolism and the. It's harder and harder for quote, unquote leaders who are to some extent smart followers who understand popular opinion and are trying to shape it, but also are responsive to it, to hold the line right now. And in fact, presenting anti Israel bona fides has become a way of being like, I'm really going to fight for this affordability agenda. And then the guy Mandanis, energetic, is actually trying to do this other stuff at the same time is trying to balance all this out. And I think at this point it's working. He's very popular in not just New York City, but like surprisingly popular in New York State and nationally. And I think this movement still has more room to grow. And I'm trying to express it and I think you can hear, like some of my concerns and reservations about this. And the people are going to be welcome in this tent. Dariel, as again was at the Columbia protest. And I can't tell you how many people I had tremendous issues with those protests and I thought they were very different from the parallel ones. For instance, like Brooklyn College with New York kids, first generation and college kids. People aren't kids who are coming to classes with their kids, right? Getting treated the same way. I did not like the Columbia protests. I did break the story about the NYPD gun going off during the raid there after they said this was a brilliant tactical operation. But people get radicalized by these things. And if they're starting off it's like a farce or Wikipedia read of history. You're there and there's cops screaming in your face, and it's scary. And I know some of these people are doing bad and radicalizing things to other people there and to Jews or anyone who has any sympathy with Israel. And I'm not dismissing that. But people are like, I don't like the footage I'm seeing on tv. I think what's happening to babies is bad and are just thinking of it that way. And then I want to show up and you show up and there's people screaming at you, yelling at you, pushing you back like armed authorities, avatars of the state, like this is how movements built. And there's been a lot of that happening sort of in the absence of can we win the argument? And I'm worried about that.
- [36:47]
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- [39:04]
Eli Lake
of on I want to shift to the dsl. The Democratic Socials of America leadership in New York in particular are Marxist Leninists. They are out there, politically speaking. And I just. Before we go though, I just want to point something out. Brad Lander was a member of DSA, and he quit along with a number of the OGs of the DSA after October 7th because DSA had pretty much endorsed the Hamas shooting spree and kidnapping. And he was among those who said, no, I can't really be part of it. And there was a moment when we saw the initial October 8th and those initial rallies right after where people were cheering on the hang gliders and everything like that. I remember having a conversation with a member of New York's congressional delegation who said that that was it for them. They've stained their reputation for a generation now. It didn't end up working out that way. So tell me a little bit about. Is the. It's like the leadership of this organization itself is really radical, right? I mean, or am I wrong on that?
- [40:29]
Harry Siegel
They're radical. Like quite radical, certainly. So the two co chairs of the New York City DSA are Gustavo Cordillo and Grace Mauser. Right. And they. The thing is, they're both smart, they're both quite radical. They're both, again, admirably transparent about their views. And they are also, they are not exactly leaders like they are speaking for a group collective that's making decisions and bringing new people into this group in a reasonably organized way. And that group keeps being willing to stretch how radical it can be as it is accumulating political and popular power. I think, Eli, that there's been tremendous narrative warfare and a lot of it is really ugly. And the people who were endorsing Hamas and that barbarism were generally also denying sexual assaults and intent. And how much of this was aimed at civilians. Obviously, a ton of this narrative warfare goes in different directions. And it's been distressing to me to see ways in which I just keep flashing back to 1980s Comic books in sort of dystopian ways. The. You have a president who keeps expanding the definition of what's terror, what's an existential threat, what other states are allowed to do and how power works. And people who are repulsed by that find themselves weirdly open to morally obscene acts like hostage taking. And then when you're doing this symbolically and at a distance, as I was saying, like pulling down hostage posters, I just thought that was such a terrible and clear social marker and one that I think would have played out very differently. If not for how foreign policy has proceeded over the last two and a half years, that should have been. That's the end of those people. That is a bridge too far. That's not how decent people think about anyone else's suffering. I think putting up your own posters and here is a city that's been ravaged, here's a child in a hospital is totally fair game. I think anyone marking up someone else's poster, ripping them down, you're not allowed to have that. And this all comes from an ideological conviction that people are using this real human suffering as a wedge to inflict brutal and systemic stuff on other people. Like that's sort of the left version but, but that's everyone's version is I don't have to credit that suffering and I'm not trying to be, you know, just, just a total hyper and you know, the, the Russians have children too or whatever. But I just think it crosses a real moral line for like individual souls when, when, when you do something like that. And it worries me with the rising popularity of Mamdani's movement, not him, but how many people in it were, were, you know, actively doing things like that. Some of them now in positions of authority in his administration. This new member of Congress who we've been talking about, it's very disturbing to me and smacks of your pain matters, yours doesn't. You get in line in ways I don't think will end well. But I really encourage other people share that view to consider why so many convincible people are not convinced or sympathetic at all right now. I've been having complicated conversations. I don't want to really get into her on air, but like with my daughter about this, you know, dad, I really like Israel, you know, she knows some history now, you know, teenager. But I don't know what to say. How do you explain this thing and that thing? Different things I'm trying to explain as best I understand it. And here's what someone else would say. Where's these politics and someone else with those. But that's a lot of effort to ask people intellectually and emotionally and spiritually to put in all the time in an era of narrative warfare and by the way, an era where there is no down ballot voting. So in some weird ways these local races that are going to go upstream, maybe all the way to the presidential are part of this new era where everyone thinks the same way up and down the ticket and entirely. And there's almost no effort put into convincing convincible people the issue is it is sort of a waste of time. Most of these elections are, in fact, decided in primaries. The fights are within the parties as much as they're between them. But I think for the sake of any national cohesion, for the sake of my personal mental and moral cohesion, standing by your own arguments as opposed to hate, reading those of people you don't like is really, really important. And I promise you, when I go on other podcasts and talk with people with other points of view, you know, we're very excited about Mamdani. You know, I'm pushing other parts of this very hard. Like, like, can you think about this? Can you think about what you're excluding here? Because it's benefiting you right now. I just, I'm very sad and scared about where we're going. And I know many people are full of excitement and optimism, enthusiasm about Mamdani, about a new spirit of participation, about, like, a politics that can offer, like, more to people they think. And I don't want to demean all that, even as I'm very worried about the. Some of the nasty forces I think are really intimately entangled with it.
- [46:27]
Eli Lake
Okay, so with a little bit of time we have left, we got maybe 10 minutes. I just want to ask, because not every dog barked. Richie Torres, who has bucked the trend and has been very pro Israel as his party has abandoned Israel, he trounced his opponent. And there was a moment on election night last week where the Bolshevik cosplayer streamer, Hassan Piker screamed in a sort of tirade of obscenities that he was going to next. You've got two years left, Torres, and I'm coming for you. And I thought to myself, are you sure? Because the one thing that Richie Torres seems to have going for him is that he has one of the poorest districts in the country. They. And it seems like the secret sauce for the DSA is you got to have enough downwardly mobile and over educated types to kind of make a dent. What do you. What is there anything we can learn from the fact that Torres managed to clear his primary in this very tough year for establishment Democrats?
- [47:42]
Harry Siegel
Yes, but not too much. Okay, so first off, his main opponent there was Michael Blake, who's now lost roughly 172elections in a row. It is cartoonish.
- [47:52]
Eli Lake
Okay.
- [47:55]
Harry Siegel
Secondly, Mamdani very carefully and intelligently chose the races he wanted to get involved in, and he did sweep those races. At the outer edges of that radar scan. Richie Torres and Grace Mang are probably right at the top. He Said I don't need to pick those fights. Torres district has a lot of NYCHA housing and as I said, the Mamdani slate and socialists generally severely underperformed in NYCHA housing even as they did better with black and Latino voters than a lot of the commentary I'm seeing has indicated. Also, the post, which has been sort of crusading on that keeps being like, this was a closed and low turnout election. It was closed. The people who are pushing for open primaries, which I'm a huge believer in, are the worst, most discredited people. It's insane and exhausting. It's the Eric Adamses and the Andrew Yangs. It's not helping. And turnout in this election was actually a little up from comparable previous elections in this closed system. So that's not great civic participation, but it's more than we've had and there's a real sour grapes ness to that that concerns me again because I'd like to see actual moderates and common sense people. I think that term has also become very charged and sometimes reactionary, you know, work out, not just right now. I think so much common sense is sniping at the the left and the left sometimes does things to beg to be sniped at. I'd like to see a common sense that's based on voters. Here's what we can do for you. Here's how this works. Here's why I want this to work. And I don't think there's nearly enough of that. Torres is actually an exception on that rule too. He's a very substantial, interesting, self made guy who is actually an impressive city council member. I could count on one hand the impressive city council members of my 25 years closely watching New York politics, maybe two. And I do think it's a little more solid in this district, but fundamentally a question of how high this wave goes. And it's clearly not just Mamdani. It's not a personalized thing in the ways people wanted to say just six months ago and six months before that he was hardly even a guy. He was at 2% in the polls.
- [50:17]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Right.
- [50:17]
Harry Siegel
You know, or a year before that. Excuse me. And if this wave is high enough, lots of very decent, competent leaders who did not get on board quickly enough, who did not accept like what the new terms of engagement are, to be in good standing with this group are obviously going to be washed away. And I think that'll be dangerous and gross. But again, I cannot blame this group for maximizing its political position. And after many years of Feeling sometimes correctly, like they have been shunted away in conversation and in political circles and not acknowledged. Like when you suddenly get there, of course people are going to grasp for everything they can and keep pushing as they should. And other people need to push back harder. Like if they break all orbit and containment, that says at least as much about the countervailing forces as it does about them right now.
- [51:11]
Eli Lake
One more thing. We got a little bit of time left. I just want to throw out. It seemed like not that long ago there was a reaction to the progressive prosecutors and the rather left wing notions that there were crimes that shouldn't be enforced and that we had. It was, you know, Democrats themselves said we can't, we can't campaign on defund the police. It's like they memory hold that Chesupodine in San Francisco was recalled. There was, I remember in 2024, it's not like Trump had a chance of like turning New York City red, but he managed to have a pretty high turnout rally. And then I think it was the Bronx, you know, people came out for him. There was frustration about quality of life issues and it was largely being put blamed on progressives. Is there an opportunity maybe, you know, Mamdani's been on a bit of a honeymoon. It's probably too soon to say. The one thing on note is that he has kept Tish on as the police commissioner and you know, he's freezing the rent, he's celebrating Nakba Day, he's marching on Pakistan Day. He's doing a lot of very democratic, socialist of America things, but he's not yet doing anything that I can tell to mess with the crime stuff or to implement some of the progressive crime stuff. Maybe talk a little bit about that. Is there an opportunity maybe that maybe things look a little differently if Mamdani can't deliver and quality of life goes down?
- [52:52]
Harry Siegel
Definitely. At the moment though, he's maintaining it. And it's opening up space for people like Chevalier, who's fundamentally skeptical of policing as an institution and incarceration as a thing, and opening some of that space up. And of course there's more space for that if crime stays down. I think there was a really complicated post pandemic moment defined by some rises in crime and a real spike in fear and uncertainty that moderate Democrats and Republicans tried to capitalize on. And I think that moment has passed, at least for now. And so the real pressures on Mamdani and on Tish and on Tish through Mamdani to ease up on policing, to give people more Breathing space. And that's always great right up until it leads to some terrible thing and then it's leading the 5 o' clock news in the Post. If it bleeds, it leads. And if there's enough of that, there's so many convincible people, the same people who not so long ago elected Eric Adams mayor, things could shift. But I think there's been so much chicken whittling of how terrible everything's about to come, it's vastly helped Mamdani. I'll point to the snowball fight a few months ago in Washington Square Park. That's what Mamdani called it afterward. And there was, you know, it was like an Instagram thing and all the kids came and some of the kids were 30 years old and it was rowdy and police were there and like trying to keep this from getting too rowdy. And then, and then these kids came and we're wishing police, not kids. 30 year old influencer. I saw this other video of him pretending to mug people, all people of color who were like terrified and unhappy about it. And he gets arrested in the middle of the video. This came out afterward. You know, this wasn't a kid. You know, he's a robbery. So I'm not a robber, I'm a social media influencer. I don't know which is worse on like a certain level. Like real, real asshole. Let me be clear. Right, but, but the, the, the Post went so nuts about this. Tish, you know, has to answer to the unions went wild about this. And Madani saying a snowball fight sounded reasonable in comparison to them saying this is a huge public safety issue. And I know that if you have, you know, it's real vaporian stuff like the, the armed authority of the state is a serious thing. And people can't just be running up throwing snowballs and giggling at you and that's totally fine, or you're leaving people to police themselves. And that can be very problematic. But there's obviously some gift space. We're past that post pandemic era. Things are not out of control or feeling that way. And it means he does have some breathing space there to figure this out. And again, he's had wonderful success in this so far. Opponents over swinging rather than steadying their own feet continue to work greatly to his benefit.
- [55:54]
Eli Lake
Do you think that he, in his heart of hearts, he would like to pursue or revive this kind of progressive approach to policing?
- [56:06]
Harry Siegel
Oh, of course. I think he sees policing as the best, like a necessary evil. And you don't need that. And look, me personally, I don't want the public streets to be waiting rooms for the morally suffering, the mentally ill, the drug addicted and the deeply dysfunctional. Right in a really nice city and one that works for the most part and functions around all that. I don't think anyone, right or left does. And then there's all these debates that are older than us about what the solutions are that have not moved all that much. And you know, in his heart of hearts, this is like more kindness and less cops. And I have no objection to that. If he can safely and steadily get there, I can't imagine who would. I just think it's immensely challenging to do so. So I am hardened that he's kept tish on that he's sort of separated policing from a lot of what he's doing and against increasing pressure from the left and is not casually tampering with that part of the equation, at least so far.
- [57:11]
Eli Lake
Well, that's smart, right?
- [57:12]
Harry Siegel
It is. I think he's very smart. And you know, I mean, do you
- [57:18]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
think, and I just.
- [57:18]
Eli Lake
The last question here is the Israel stuff a little bit of a shiny object to sort of say, you know, here's something that the mayor of New York City can't do anything about, but I'll say the right words and I'll create space for this new anti Zionism and meanwhile, get off my back about the cops.
- [57:44]
Harry Siegel
I really don't think so.
- [57:45]
Eli Lake
It's a little bit the same way like, you know, like George H.W. bush made a big deal about the flag burning amendment.
- [57:49]
Harry Siegel
No.
- [57:50]
Eli Lake
Which was ridiculous, but it was a way of keeping his own kind of like, you know, his own base in line, which, you know, gave him so he didn't have to like, you know, eventually George H.W. bush. But you can see what I'm saying.
- [58:05]
Harry Siegel
I know exactly what you're saying, and I don't think so. I think he's Mahmoud Mamdani's son. I think he was raised in these politics. I think he's very serious and sincere about them. He also, obviously he's using them for political benefit and is aware of those equations. But everyone wants to give a little, what is it, a bubble food to the base or whatever. I'm botching it. But no, I think he's pretty sincere, is making the argument well, at a moment when political events in history are flowing into it and that will keep pushing there. I think this is part of what brought him into politics in the first place. And I think especially in the aftermath of this wave of protests. We've had and only talked a very little bit about that. There's space to channel those people and grow this into something, and he's very cognizant of doing so. I think this is a serious political power and world building exercise and it is dangerous at this point not to take it as such. And if you don't like it, you know not to consider what your own world building exercise is.
- [59:17]
Eli Lake
All right, well, we gotta have you back, Harry. Thank you so much. This is a very important insight into what's happening in New York. Watch what's happening in New York if you want to understand what's going to go on later down the stream for the rest of the Democratic Party. Because this is very significant what has just happened.
- [59:35]
Harry Siegel
It really is. Thanks a lot for having me, Eli. It's always great to be on with you.
- [59:59]
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