← The Tara Palmeri Show
The Tara Palmeri Show
S-word is back: Zohran Mamdani and the Generation That Stopped Apologizing for Socialism
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A
AI had the time of my life. A I never failed this way before.
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From building timelines to assigning the right people and even spotting risks across dozens of projects, Monday Sidekick knows your business, thinks ahead and takes action. One click on the star and consider it done.
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A
And I owe it all to you.
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B
Try Monday Sidekick AI you'll love to use on Monday.com. welcome to the Red Letter and the Tara Palmerie Show. As you all know, you can read all my exclusive reporting@tara palmery.com and watch the Tara Palmary show when I'm on Substack. I want to welcome Anan to the show. Anan, can you please say your last name for me? Because I'm going to just like I'm going to kill. I'm going to butcher it.
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A
We don't need any butchering. This climate crisis that we're in, it's Anand Girdadas.
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B
Okay. Thank you for doing that for me. I did not want to insult you in, in my poor. I guess, I don't know. It's an early Monday, guys. I can't get it together, but we've got a lot going on. I'm already feeling adrenaline, though, because it is 24 hours until the election. Some of you will listen to this on Monday night, Tuesday morning. And we're here to talk about all of you know, all of what to expect on these special elections, which Democrats are hoping will give them a little bit of mojo after a pretty brutal general election just a year ago. And I'll be at Mamdani's election night party, expected to be a victory party. Zahran Mamdani is running for May.
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A
I will see you there.
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B
Oh, great. Okay. So we'll both be there. I'll be with the Associated Press and you can watch live on my YouTube channel and at the Associated Press. And I think it's going to be an interesting night. I have a feeling it's going to be an early night for Zoran or what do you think?
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A
I, I think that the, the, the, the, the outcome will be known early. But I don't know that it'll be an early night because I think it's going to be a night if it goes as expected where there's a tremendous amount of celebration and a tremendous amount of pent up, pent up feeling unleashed. You know, long before he was running, New York City, I think was beginning to feel to so many people like a place where it was great to live as long as you were like a global superstar or a hedge fund manager or the you know, the descendant of European nobles, but not necessarily a city where it was great to be a regular person. And this, I think this campaign has just invigorated so many people who feel like they should be able to live in New York City and not be driven out or driven to desperation by the cost of living. And particularly I think the idea he centered affordability. But there's this phrase that he uses that I think is the most important phrase of the campaign, which is afford to dream. Right. A city we can afford is probably the central slogan and that's important and it's where a lot of people are. But afford to dream, I think is actually the profoundest phrase of this campaign. Because being able to afford things is like the base layer, like.
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B
Right.
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A
That's survival and that's what people want. But what becomes possible when you can afford things, once that gets put into a column of things, you don't have to worry about existentially every day. What businesses you want to start, what dreams you want to chase, what things do you want to build, what people do you want to have over to your house because you're not stressed about bills? I think on the other side of this victory, if he is able to enact this agenda of affording, it's not just affording that's gonna happen, but there's a lot of dreaming that is gonna be uncorked in New York City. So I think you're gonna see a lot of that emotion tomorrow night.
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B
It's the Maslow's hierarchy. I mean, you can't get to self fulfillment unless you can meet your most basic needs. Right? Security, safety, affordability, food, sustenance. But yeah, I agree. Sometimes I think to myself, where are all the cool people in New York? I mean, they had to leave a lot of them, a lot of the artists, a lot of the writers, a lot of the. A lot of the greats, they just can't get by unless mommy and daddy are paying for it or they're working at a hedge fund. And like, you know, even the West Village, I know there's. It's the place where I don't even know. New York magazine wrote about all the crowd there. And it's just. It's just doesn't seem fun or cool. I mean, my mom used to live on Christopher Street. Very different times. But yeah, it's just a. It's just.
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A
I think it's a fundamental question of like, what are cities for, right. And it's not just, not just in America, not just New York not just in America. I think this is happening in many cities around the world where there's a, there's a question. Are cities springboards or are they like luxury malls? Right. Are cities places where people who have nothing, our cities kind of resources where that people who have nothing can use to remake themselves, to acquire education, to form themselves in the dingy comedy clubs and in the, you know, artist studios in a dodgy part of town? Are cities places where there's no prerequisites, you don't have to know anybody, have any money, but you come and you, or you're already born there and you use the resources of a city, the people who are around you, to become something, to make yourself something. Or in the age of recent few decades, a lot of our cities have become places that are more like luxury malls where it is best to come to them after you have made money elsewhere to enjoy having that money. Yeah, right. And you can, you land in any city in the world and you can tell which, which kind it is. And I, and, and I think the, you know, I don't know that, that, you know, there's no moment where like people choose this affirmatively, but New York, like many other cities, has drifted in this direction of, of the luxury mall instead of the springboard. And I, my biggest hope for the Mamdani era is that it, it puts New York City back on that path to being a springboard, a place where you don't have to have anything to make yourself into something great.
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B
But let's lay out some of the realities. President Trump is already talking about cutting funding to New York as retribution for Imam Donnie win. They are certainly going to clash over immigration. I would expect they're going to clash over funding because he's got a big agenda, you know, making these free buses. I do think he's pretty close to free childcare. Is that what it's called? Right. It's. I think he's close because de Blasio already had 3K, so like 2K, you know, it's not that far away. He's sort of coming off the foundation that de Blasio built and the state run grocery stores or the city run grocery stores. I mean, I think that'll, that could work. I don't know. But I think that with the busing, I mean, you need the budget, right, to be able to do that. Although apparently only half of people actually pay for busing right now. So I don't, I don't know.
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A
I, I, I think this city is able to find budget for all kinds of things.
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B
Right.
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A
This city is able to find resources for all kinds of things that rich people need when, when, when, you know, when, when big companies need a tax break, when movies can be made here, they need. They want a tax break.
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B
Elon Musk got some pretty big stuff, right?
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A
When, when you want to build, you know, giant, giant apartment buildings, there's all kinds of tax abatements and deferments. So the city seems to be actually able to come up with money for all kinds of things, you know, it's able to come up with. I forget what percentage. You probably know better than me. What percentage of police officers make huge overtime money. And overtime, you know, almost being the sort of the point of the nypd. So money's around. I think the question is, like, what do you spend it on? You know, this is not Somalia. Where.
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Right.
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It's like, it's like, how do we find a million dollars?
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Right.
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This is a question of like, there's billions of dollars.
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B
Yeah.
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Right now it's going to like NYPD overtime if, if people in this city would prefer it to fund buses instead of NYPD overtime. That is a totally reasonable democratic choice that I'm not going to stand in the way of their making.
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B
Yeah. I do think, though, having covered City hall for the New York Post for about a year, I was in room nine between the Bloomberg administration, the end of Bloomberg, early de Blasio, it's really hard to go up against the real estate lobby in New York. And he is calling for a rent freeze on rent stabilized apartments. And I just think that he is going to be up for a fight. I wonder what he'll be able to get done. Clearly, you know, he's going to have an antagonist in the biggest tabloid in town, the New York Post, but we'll see. You know, who knows? Again, I think a lot of the groundwork has already been laid for him through the de Blasio administration, and he seems to be trying to make allies. But I, you know, he said something on New Yorker radio and he was like, why can't we dream that the city can be better? Why can't we. Why, why should we not be allowed to put forward these ideas? And maybe they'll come, maybe they won't, but why should we not have ambitious agendas? And it's, it's kind of a fair point, right?
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A
Yeah, it's interesting. You know, when Trump proposes big and outlandish things, we center the big and outlandish proposals, not the resistance to them. When people on the left often propose much more humane things that would just try to make people's lives better, we center the fights that they're going to be up against instead of first the thing they're trying to do. I have had the privilege in my job of traveling to so many different countries and reporting from so many different countries. I'm just here to tell you, if you haven't gone to the same places, there are things in other countries that we could just totally have. These countries are almost to a nation less wealthy than us. Right. I think the median per capita income in France is like 40% less than ours. Right. But there's just social housing. It's not just for very, very poor people. Like, Paris has housing for all kinds of people who would find it hard in a fully marketized economy. So Paris has decided that it's a city that wants artists there in big numbers. Now you can behave the way we do in America, which is like ancient people praying for rain. Let's hope some artists kind of find a way to have some housing here, or as New York has done at certain moments in the past, you can say, let's create a policy that would allow artists to live here. So there is social housing not just for poor people in Paris, which there is, but there's social housing specifically for artists who make some money and can pay some rent, but can't compete, can't bid, you know, get in a bidding war with a hedge fund manager. Paris wants to have artists there, so they've made a social choice to do that. You know, all these countries in Europe that have free healthcare, every single one of them is less wealthy than us. Every single one of them, Yeah.
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B
I lived in Belgium for two years because I have dual citizenship. And I had state, you know, state healthcare, and I lived in that situation. The only thing is, Belgium is a really small country compared to the US and so is France. And so it's a lot easier to create programs that insure people when it's like. It's like when states have their own, you know, healthcare, public Healthcare, it's harder and it's not always easier.
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A
Or is it just more threatening to very wealthy people?
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Probably partially that, but I do think that it was like the, the taxes are way higher than they are here. But I do think that when you think about how much you pay for health insurance, it's probably all washes out. And it's probably the same when you think about the deductions from your paycheck that go towards health insurance, right? Like it's probably about the same as you would pay in taxes if you live.
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A
And then here's another cost, right, which, which is never factored into this thing. You're absolutely right. If you add, if you add that. But here's another cost, right? Go on the street in any place in America, okay, I, I have literally done this as an actual reporting experiment and go ask people, do you have any like business ideas that, you know, everybody's, this is a country of hustle, right? Like yeah, you and I are both entrepreneurs in a, in a media kind of environment. Like I feel like this is a country where people, everybody's got like an envelope in the back of the envelope idea, a back of the napkin idea. Okay. So I feel like. And this is a country where people have these things maybe more than many places. And then you ask them what is the number one reason you are not pursuing this idea? And almost to a person it is they can't afford to get off their employer based healthcare. It is not, it is not just that they can't afford to lose their paycheck because I think people could have sometimes enough savings that they could afford to lose their paycheck for a few months and try their idea. But it is the thought of losing their employer based healthcare, their children going some months not being insured, someone gets cancer, they're, you know, going to die. That is the reason. So now what is the social cost of that? That goes well beyond premium. How many businesses are we not seeing founded in this country every year? How many people are not doing their dream job not creating their idea, not writing that book, not making that movie, not starting that startup? How many more tech startups, how many more plays, how many more works of literature, works of music albums would we have if people were not tethered to employer based healthcare? What is the cost of that? I would bet it's a lot less than whatever we're saving by depriving people of healthcare.
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B
Yeah, no, I agree with you. You know what I found really interesting though when I was living in Europe and I used to talk about this a lot. They don't have the same entrepreneurial, like, attitude that we have. They like. They like the safety nets of their jobs. A lot of them get into large corporations, they take jobs there, and they stay there for the rest of their lives. They're kind of like our parents generation, you know what I mean? Um, and they're not that entrepreneurial. They don't really love the small business. It's harder for them to get capital. It. It is in Europe. Um, and so there are, like, you know, there's some benefits to the system that we have right now. Um, I think it's harder to get loans, too. They don't have credit scores like we do, which is a good thing and a bad thing. You know, there are two sides to that. But, yeah, I think, like, there's a lot to be learned. And I think for. I think what's so interesting is that, like, socialism was such a dirty word for so long. Right. Because of this, because of the Cold War. But, you know, if you live in a European country, it's socialist country. And I think our generation is less afraid of the word socialism. And that's what we're seeing with Mamdani and the election. And I think, you know, even Mikey Sherrill would never say this, but like, Mikey Sherrill, Abigail Spamberger, you know, Zo Run Momdani, they're all running through the funnel of affordability. Right. And. And Mikey Sheryl says, I'm gonna. I'm gonna deal with energy prices. Right. Electricity prices. You know, Abigail Spanberger has her own messaging. And so I feel like they're trying to attack the affordability crisis the way that they would, but in the way they would. But he is doing it in the most, like, blaring way by being what he calls a democratic socialist. But, yeah, I think there's. We're. We're just an entire country. A generation is not afraid of that word anymore than what it represents.
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A
No. And that's exactly right. And I think, you know, I've always felt that what part of what happened in the previous generation, you had, And I'm sympathetic to this, you had older folks, people who are now older, who lived through the Cold War and were told that Russia could bomb you at any moment. Maybe they had drills and they went underground into bunkers to do nuclear drills in the 60s and 70s, practice going.
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B
Underneath their desks at school waiting for bombs to come out.
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A
Yeah. As we all know, being under your desk protects you from nuclear radiation. Yeah. And if you live through that trauma, I totally understand if you have a trauma, traumatic kind of subrational attitude to kind of any politics of redistribution, because you're. You're not acting from a thoughtful place necessarily. You're acting from a trauma place. You were told that there was this menacing Soviet Union system that was gonna, like, ruin your life. You know, it was a lie. It was not gonna ruin your life. It didn't ruin your life. You're fine. But I understand some people are just, like, acting out of that old fear. I think a lot of those people are dying out and aging out. And, you know, a lot of people who are a generation or two younger than that just don't have that trauma and fear. They understand that in any society, I mean, just to, like, get over this. This bullshit, like, there are socialized and privatized elements in every society in the world. In North Korea, there's definitely a black market for some shit, right? There's no perfectly socialized society, and there's also no perfectly privatized society, as far as I know. So the question is, what do you socialize and what do you privatize? Right? All these politicians who deplore socialism, why are they running to draw government salaries? Like, working for the government is socialism, right? Socialism is. We all put money collectively into something that we own together, like the government. So Republicans who run for office to fight socialism, they are beneficiaries of socialism. If we had zero socialized elements in our society, this was just a private market, free for all, an anarchy of just buying and selling. There would be no collective government paid for by taxpayers, which then paid them out of their paychecks. So government paychecks, senators and congressmen's paychecks are socialism. Roads are socialism. Air traffic controllers are socialism.
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B
Social Security is socialism.
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A
Food safety. The people who inspect your meat, inspect your medicine. If you really don't want to live with all those elements, that's fine. Now, a reasonable debate to have is like, what should be socialized and what should be privatized? That is a completely reasonable debate to have. But I think what a lot of people just miss in these discussions, including on the left, is like, it's not about zero of one or zero of the other. It's just about what is the healthy balance of these elements. Right? How much should housing, which is an area of complexity, how much should housing be socialized versus privatized? Right. There are some areas where we would all agree it should be just privatized. I don't want the government inventing my phone.
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B
Yeah, right.
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A
There's, I don't think there's a single person in America who thinks that should be in the socialized column. That's the privatization.
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B
Yet they can listen to our phone calls.
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A
Exactly, exactly. Right. But there's other things where, you know, like, I don't know, I mean these days it's hard to think of something that is purely uncontroversial. But you know, I would say like roads, generally people agree to the public.
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B
Although they're not very good at keeping them up. That's the problem. It's like when you rely on government and it's not great at its job, like doing the most basic things, like.
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A
Well, it's, I mean, that's true, but it's also, you know, the right has this incredible game where they starve the public by fighting for budget cuts and you know, tax cuts that force budget cuts. And then government becomes less good at functioning because it has less resources. And then the right is able to point to that as evidence of the fact that government shouldn't be given more responsibility. But they're the ones who, you know, cause that dynamic, that doesn't explain every government failure. But look, you know, boring ass problems like programs like Social Security keep millions of people from dying and out of poverty every year. Every year. Right. And I, you know, when, I just.
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B
Hope it doesn't run out.
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A
When I wrote my book Winners Take All, I would often talk about, you know, this idea that whenever government solves a problem, like a real big problem like Social Security, solving the problem of old age and surviving and having resources in old age, big kind of societal problem. Whenever government solves a problem like that, it goes into a basket of things no one is ever grateful for ever again.
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B
Well, it's expected. We pay a lot in taxes. Like we expect the government to work when it doesn't work. It's like when people say to me like, why don't you write positive news? I'm like, you only write about things that don't work. You don't write about when the plane lands, you write when it doesn't land completely.
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A
But it's worth remembering that when we're hearing stories about government not working, it is in the context of so much that is working that separates us. And again, having had the ability to travel to lots of other places, like I know what it's like to go to places where no contract could ever be enforced by a court of law. That's, that applies. That's many, many, many countries in the world. Right. Including many, you know, big, I mean you got to take India right to advanced economy in many ways and it's, you know, it's a lot of growth and it's got a lot of big companies. Like no one getting into a business contract in India would ever be able to totally reliably assume that should shit go down between these two companies over this contract, that an Indian court of law would be accessible to them, would be timely and would rule in a fair minded way. Imagine like, imagine what that does to an entire society where no one. Right. So the idea that the courts in this country will enforce your business contract is so taken. Yeah, we had this problem with the Roberts court, this and that but like that's an example of something that like no one has to think about anymore. Generally speaking, unless it's some big celebrated case that's a political issue generally speaking in the like millions of contracts that are just flying all around this country, everybody signing those contracts can comfortably assume that they will be enforced properly by courts.
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B
Yeah, eventually, but yes, eventually, sure. Yeah. I do want to get into it. President Obama obviously seen as the standard bearer of the Democratic Party and you know we're, he was seen as very useful campaigning this weekend for Mikey Sherrill, Abigail Spanberger. Obviously New Jersey and Virginia are very different than New York, but he has not endorsed mom Donna yet. He did call him after his primary win and you know, he. What do you make of this? It's a day to go. He sells endorsements. Neither his Schumer, although Mamdani was protesting outside of Schumer's house, I believe at one point over the war in Israel and in Gaza and, and I don't know. What do you think about this? The Obama snub?
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C
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B
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C
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A
I don't think it's snub at all. I think it's actually the opposite. I think, you know, Obama has not, I think very much endorsed in city races and the New York Times story was clearly like from the Obama camp partly as far as I could read between those lines. There was another similar story in the New York Times some weeks or a couple months earlier where they talked about how Obama world has embraced Mamdani and helped him. And it talked about Patrick Gaspard and all these people like, you know, as well as the, the Pod Save America guys and whatever. I, I actually think the Obama world, to the extent that, that, that's a kind of whole now world of people and, and people have gone into various parts of life, has actually been one of the, the, the places to kind of embrace Mamdani early on. And it's actually much more shocking that Schumer has taken so long and not endorsed or Jeffries took so long and then finally did. I think there's this fear, which I actually think Democrats are getting over with Mamdani, but there's this fear of contamination by association with, you know, a Democratic socialist or whatever. And the right doesn't have this anxiety. Like, the right, you know, a, A Republican in upstate New York will just go endorse some like, cowboy immigration hawk in Arizona who is much more racist and much more, you know, like extreme and whatever and putting guns in all their ads. And the upstate New York Republican, like, doesn't need to be that person, but also kind of doesn't, doesn't feel afraid of being contaminated by association. So it's just like, yeah, like, I'm from my place, but. But I'm going to support this person.
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B
Oh, see, I think that like, Trump's not really involved in any of these races in Virginia or, or New Jersey. And I think that's for a reason. Like he's doing tele fundraising, but he's, he didn't go to Jersey. Like, he didn't go to.
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A
Well, he doesn't care about anybody but himself. The point I'm making is Democrats have often.
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B
He knows he's reflect him. He would go. He, he would go if he thought it was helpful, but he knows it's not.
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A
Sorry, but the point I'm making is that Democrats often feel like if a more moderate person embraces a progressive or even Democratic socialist with a lot of energy, that they're somehow saying that they too endorse. And it's not, it's not an endorsement of everything someone believes. And so I think there's certain maturity in Obama sending these signals of support from Mamdani that are basically like, you're running in your local race. You, you have energy that's admirable. Like, that is not an endorsement of everything you've ever said like, that's a mature attitude in politics. If you agree with everything anybody says and does, every single thing, you're in a cult. And so it's okay, I think, for whether it's a Schumer, whether it's a Jeffries, whether it's other Democratic leaders, whether it's Barack Obama, whether it's the Clintons, you know, not that anybody cares to, you know, to say, this is someone who is connecting with people and channeling and creating power and building power through organizing 90,000 volunteers. Volunteers. And that's admirable and someone who can make people feel things in the Democratic Party again. Wow. I mean, this is a party that, you know, it's like in the hospital where you keep hearing that heartbeat, you know, everything's okay. Like, this is a party where, like, you keep listening to that machine to make sure. And this guy has made people feel things. And God, like, you gotta have. You gotta have respect for that. And I actually love it. My sense is Obama actually has respect for it.
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B
You know what? I was listening to an old interview with Mamdani this morning and he mentioned that he was actually in high school when he started organizing for Obama. And I was like, wow, he's really, really impressive, especially for his age. Like, you know what I mean? He's 34 and he. Even the way he answers questions. Like, I don't know if you ever listened to his interviews, but he's got the skill of the pivot unlike any other I've ever heard. But it's not. But it's pretty. Like he's thoughtful at the same time.
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A
You know, he's thoughtful, he's very smart. And also like, I mean, 30. He's 34. Like until pretty recently in human history, that was like closer to the age people died. Like, we, like, we've had a great century where we started living like a lot longer because of penicillin and all these other things. Right? 34. Like for the founders. What were the ages of the founders? What was Jefferson's age when he drafted, like, I don't know if you're old enough to fucking draft a declaration of Independence and he's either 27 or 30, something like that. If you're old enough to write a letter to England being like, fuck off, we're making our own country. I don't know, maybe you're old enough.
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B
To run a.33.33.33, right.
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A
Are you going to say, Thomas, we should have assigned that to an 80 year old. Were there any 80 year olds around back then? Right. You know, there's sort of this age inflation that happens, like just because modern medicine allows people to live longer, which is great. I don't think it means that we should think things that people were capable of in the 18th century at 33, we should now. It doesn't follow that because we have invented penicillin, what a 33 year old could do in 1776, we now think they're incapable of, of doing in 2025. That's totally backwards. It's wonderful if we've extended life through medicine and surgery and ambulances and all these things. But it really does not follow to me that if you could draft a constitution in your 30s, in the 1770s and 1780s, if you could write federalist papers, if you could, a Constitutional convention, if you could fast forward some decades, you know, be part of deciding the fate of slavery in this, like people were not living till 90 all the time back then. Right. Which is like the, you know, age in Congress. Why do we believe that the extension of life through modern medicine means that things that 30 year olds like, always handled throughout history they can't handle anymore? That just makes no sense to me. Was Jefferson too inexperienced to several extend.
- [33:18]
B
Their like Peter Pan phase as well? I think now, because think about it, a lot of women would have already given birth by like 14, 15, 16. They started families earlier. They knew they were gonna die at like 60, so they had to really get on with life earlier. And so with that comes a certain level of maturity. Right? People often.
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A
Yeah, I think things people were coerced to do, they should have the choice not to do.
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B
Yeah, exactly.
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A
But like Zoran is not being coerced to run for mayor, and Maxwell Frost was not coerced to run for Congress, and AOC was not coerced to run for Congress. All I am saying is like, it's actually very weird to think these ages are even young.
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B
Yeah, yeah. Depends on it. Depends on the maturity of a person.
- [34:01]
A
Young for what? Like, I don't know, like I, I wrote my first book at, I published it when I was 30. I wrote it between, you know, when I was 26 to 30, let's say. Right. Um, like that's a, it's a hard, demanding thing to do. Um, I probably couldn't have done it when I was 14, but I don't know that I would have needed to wait another decade or two decades to do it either. Like, I don't know. You can mo in most professions. Like, you can do pretty serious things by your late 20s. And early 30s, I think in medicine, like, you know, I don't want a 14 year old doing surgery on me. But are there some extraordinary surgeons who are 27, 28, 29, 30? Yeah, probably are. Are there some incredible political talents, movement talents, like, I, I think you are. You know, there are some things where you want someone to have done something like 8,000 times before. They're, you know, but I actually don't think political leadership is one of those things. That's my personal opinion. I think, you know, the mayor you were talking about sitting in City hall, like, the New York City government is full of lots of people who have.
- [35:16]
B
That kind of too long, who have.
- [35:18]
A
That kind of batting practice experience, right. If, if you, if you have an idea on homelessness policy, right. And you want to know, like, will that actually work? Will that backfire? Will that create unintended consequences? You got a lot of people who've been in the trenches working for you as mayor who can totally give you the answer to that question. I don't think you need to be.
- [35:39]
B
The person staff upright and know people that know how to pull the levers of power, because power is policy. Like, that is just how it works. And being a great communicator is amazing. It's great for your party, it's great for your message. It's a great way to sell your policies, make sure you get credit for them, make sure that you get reelected, make sure that you have a mandate. But ultimately, there are a lot of blockages. Although he's a Democratic counsel, I think he'll be okay, except for dealing with the real estate lobby, I think will be tough. And I assume, and based on my reporting, that he'll probably hire a lot of de Blasio staffers who have already done this already. So that'll be interesting. I do have some positive news to wrap this up with. I'm hearing from a lot of my Democratic sources that they are saying that the shutdown will probably end this week. So once they get through the elections, Hakeem will likely call people back on Thursday. And, you know, we may be at the end of the road, which I'm.
- [36:44]
A
And how. What's the. What's the.
- [36:47]
B
They just vote.
- [36:48]
A
What's the deal?
- [36:50]
B
They vote to reopen. And that's probably what's going to happen.
- [36:53]
A
With the healthcare thing. Saved or not saved.
- [36:57]
B
I think ultimately the Republicans will work on something for the Obamacare subsidies because it will impact their voters probably even more so than Democratic voters. Trump has already said he wants to do it, he just won't open the government. He won't, he won't negotiate on it until the government is open. Excuse me. And he's gonna do it. He knows he has to. They're like, they have polling from back in July when they were building. They're doing their build back better passage or not build back better. What am I saying? That's, that's a big beautiful bill. So many Bs that showed. This is Trump's pollster that showed that they were gonna be hit in the mid, in the midterms by like, I think it was as much as four points down by four points. So they're fully aware that this is a liability for them and they're going to deal with it and they just need to, you know, get through the, they have to get through the elections and we will see the government reopen. We're getting way too close to November. The air traffic controllers, huge problems snap obviously even bigger than that. And listen, if it doesn't happen this week, it's happening soon is what I'm, the indications that I'm getting from my sources. So I think that's a good thing for everyone to, to end on. Sadly we have to get through an election first. But so it goes, right? This is politics.
- [38:25]
A
Yeah.
- [38:28]
B
Yeah. Any last words ahead of election night? What are you looking for?
- [38:35]
A
I think what's going to happen probably is I think Zoran's going to win big is my guess, in New York. And I think what's going to happen is a lot of these fear mongering thing. A million people will leave New York City if he wins, et cetera. Suddenly you're going to see this whole blob of fearful, fearful people, rich elites who, who, you know, who don't like the idea of a city that, you know, is more affordable to more people suddenly realizing like this is now the way of the world and like pretending they were for this all along and like trying to, you know, get in there and influence him. And that's going to be the, that's going to be the new challenge. Right? These people always do this. Like, what, they're first against it and then they' oh no, no. Like we were always for him. Like we just want, you know, we just want to shape it. So I think that's going to be a very interesting thing. He's going to have to, you know, first he was fending off critics, now he's going to have to fend off like the wrong kind of help. And you know, while, while Also building coalition. And I think he's been really, really, really dynamic about that. So we're going to see how he. How he handles that.
- [39:54]
B
Yep, we will see. And also, how does he handle the New York Post?
- [40:00]
A
I don't think he's worried about the New York Post. Rupert Murdoch is, you know, an Australian immigrant who should have been more grateful for all that America gave him, but he's chosen to come to this country and use publications like the Post to undermine this society. You know, my parents are immigrants, and I always think about the fact that my parents are so grateful, and they would never. My parents would never do anything to toxify and divide this country in particular, because they feel so grateful. And Rupert Murdoch is such a profoundly ungrateful immigrant who uses organs like the New York Post to just make this country worse. And I don't know. Most immigrants I know are not like.
- [40:42]
B
Yeah. The thing about the Post is, though, it is how you channel to the. The unions, a lot of them, the police union, for example, which is something. I actually found that Mamdani was smart to go on Fox and apologize to the cops. So my friend said that made him look like a squish. But I thought that was actually a smart move because I don't know if you remember from de Blasio's term in the beginning. I mean, he literally had such problems with the police where they were turning their backs to him when he showed up. And you need the police force when you're leading a city. So I don't know.
- [41:13]
A
I think the police force needs to, you know, check their behavior. I don't know that, you know, it's on anybody else. Look, the, the, the. The criticism of police in general has been that they, you know, kill people for no reason. The seed of the Black Lives Matter movement that a lot of police hated was people saying, you know what? Killing unarmed people for existing is wrong. And a lot of police people did not like that message, thought that was a dangerous message, thought that was offensive, and developed their own flag. I just believe in the normal American flag. But a lot of police people thought it was important to develop their own flag with a blue line. I grew up just revering the regular American flag. Call me Normie. But a lot of the police wanted this kind of more fasci. Flag, fascist, kind of adjacent flag to signal their hostility to that movement rooted in the idea that unarmed people shouldn't be killed. So I'm less concerned with who the police turn their back on than, you know, whether the police are the police are here for us. They exist at our pleasure. I don't live in the NYPD city. The NYPD has jobs in my city. We employ the nypd, and we are free as citizens who vote to shape a different direction. Right. If we feel like the way they're doing their job makes us safer and gives us the kind of city we want, great. If we vote democratically to shift philosophically in a different direction, we're not getting rid of police, but we're saying, you know what? Police exist with a kind of impunity that doesn't make a lot of people feel safe. And we want them to shift direction. If they don't want to work for the police, they're welcome to. You know, there's so many. Oh, I can't say there's so many other jobs in the age of AI, but there are other jobs.
- [43:12]
B
Did you grow up near New York, or where did you grow up?
- [43:15]
A
I grew up in Ohio and D.C. okay.
- [43:18]
B
So I. I grew up very close to New York, and, like, my mom's from there. I was born in New York. I'm also the daughter of an immigrant. And it wasn't like it. We've come a really long way in the city from what it was like when I was a kid. Like, I was genuinely afraid to go into the city Midtown. It was like a dangerous place to live. A really dangerous place to live. You wouldn't even want to live. Like, you wouldn't want to live downtown. You wouldn't want to live where we live. I mean, not necessarily where you live. You know what I'm saying? Like, the city has become a much better city and place. And I don't know. I think that there is something to be thinking about in terms of security. And even though, you know, Mamdani didn't lean into that in this campaign, even though he was advised to, which I thought was interesting, he went with the affordability route. But I don't think you can take away from how necessary it is to have a relationship as the mayor with.
- [44:13]
A
But I think in what you just said, it was so interesting. The assumption behind what you just said is that it is police. It is police and the work of police that make a city safer. And I would argue if you look at a lot of social science research, there is a lot of things that make cities safer, and police may not even be the most important one. And probably the most important one is the condition of most people's lives. Right. What do you think? What do you think the level of Stealing is in Norway.
- [44:49]
B
I've been to Norway, but I don't know. It's probably low. It's a pretty homogeneous.
- [44:53]
A
Like, why? Because their pops are very fierce.
- [44:56]
B
It's a small country. It's really small.
- [44:58]
A
It's not the size of Norway that. There's a lot of social science on that. I can tell you. It is not the size of Norway that makes stealing lower. What is, is less desperation.
- [45:12]
B
Yeah, I would agree. Yeah, I would say that it's. It's.
- [45:16]
A
You think. You think people. You think people prefer selling drugs and making, I don't know, 15 grand a year from it to having a job with benefits and whatever, where they make 80 grand a year, 100 grand a year?
- [45:31]
B
I think there are a lot of different things. I think there are a lot of things.
- [45:33]
A
So when you talk about a Mandani agenda, their own.
- [45:36]
B
I think people also want their own neighborhoods to be police.
- [45:40]
A
Sure. But I'm saying the assumption that you were just making was that police are important because the city used to be unsafe and now it's more safe. And what I'm suggesting to you is that based on reporting I've done around the world, not just in the city or just in this country, the things that make us safe are the conditions of other people around us. Right. It would be very hard for me to imagine you committing a whole bunch of crimes that I might be able to think of. And I think the reason you're not going to commit those crimes, if I'm making an assumption, is not because you're afraid of the police. I think you have needs met in your life that make it much less likely that you would commit robbery, that you would attempt to sell and deal drugs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I would bet my confidence that you are not going to commit a bunch of crimes. Has to do. Not with a sense that the police have cowed you. It has to do with the sense that you don't need.
- [46:49]
B
Well, yeah, and that's the other thing. Like petty crime in Europe is really high. Actually, it's higher than in the US People steal wallets, they steal bags, steal that kind of stuff from people all the time. I actually was like the victim of crimes when I lived in Europe, which I have.
- [47:06]
A
There's crime everywhere. And by the way, there's inequality everywhere, there's housing, housing prices are rising everywhere. These issues are everywhere. But I think it's a mistake to think that the Mamdani, what you were setting up is people value safety, but Mamdani is pushing for a new thing with the cops. What I'm suggesting to you is if you read the social science on what leads to safety and what leads to danger, an agenda of making life less desperate for millions of people would result. Would in, in my view be likely to result in much less crime. Well, I, like I. Most people who. The idea you think about, think about the least governed places in this planet, right? Think about true anarchies or places after civil war, whatever, right. Where almost everybody is kind of engaged in crime or illegal activity or whatever, right. They're doing that for the same reason you and I are doing our jobs. To like feed their families and take care. Like most people are not serial killers. Right?
- [48:18]
B
But then like, how do you, how do you make sense of the crime that is in Europe?
- [48:24]
A
Like the type of crime it's much, it's. It is less than in this country. And every, like every indicator if the.
- [48:29]
B
Petty crime, it's higher for sure.
- [48:31]
A
Petty crime, yes. People are, People are also struggling to live in every European country. Things are very expensive around the world. Real estate in particular has been commodified around the world. No one is saying otherwise. All I am suggesting to you is police play a role in making society safer. But you can't police your way to a safe society if people around you are desperate. Because people will take care of their kids. People will. I will commit whatever crime I would need to to put food on the table for my kids. There is no crime I wouldn't commit if that was the only way to put food on the table for my kids. So I have to assume that other people make that calculation too. The difference between you and I and people who might have to make that calculation is you and I don't have to make that calculation.
- [49:20]
B
I don't know that they're always doing it to feed themselves, but I didn't say always.
- [49:24]
A
I'm talking about an agenda of having people be able to afford life and be less desperate is an agenda that would be likely to reduce crime. And there's a whole bunch of social science to prove it.
- [49:40]
B
Well, we shall see if the affordability. Fixing the affordability crisis will result in less crime. And we'll see what Mamdani can do, what he's capable of achieving as a mayor. And I mean this will chart a new path forward for the Democratic Party and we'll see if they embrace him too. I want to thank everybody for joining. I think this was really interesting. And I'll see you at the party tomorrow night.
- [50:10]
A
Yeah. Sounds great.
- [50:12]
B
Yeah. Okay. Well, I appreciate everyone and sign up for both of our newsletters and we will hopefully do this again soon. I think we can maybe in a few months look back on it and see what seems to have worked, what hasn't, you know, what is, what's on the place. So thank you so much, everybody.
- [50:34]
A
Thank you.
- [50:35]
B
Cheers. Bye. That was another episode of the Tara Palmieri Show. If you want to support that type of investigative independent journalism, Please go to tarapaumarie.com and sign up for the Red Letter. It's a way to support independent investigative journalism to find the stories that you won't hear or read elsewhere. It is amazing that there has been such little coverage of this story, and that is why I had to have Ken on my show to tell you all about it. But if you want to keep this kind of journalism alive, please go to my website and consider becoming a paid subscriber to the Red Letter. If you like this show, please rate it, subscribe, share it with all of your friends. I want to thank my producer, Eric Abenate. I want to thank my researcher, Abby Baker. She also handles my socials. And Adam Stewart, who does my graphics. I'll be back again this week.