Month: June 2026

---

Zohran Mamdani, mayor of New York. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The lead story in the New York Times and elsewhere this morning is about how candidates backed by Zohran Mamdani, the New York mayor, won their primaries for New York City congressional seats. This, the Times writes, “sent shock waves through the Democratic Party.”

Horse wash.

There are 535 members of the U.S. Congress, and we are talking only about voters in New York City, who are some of the most liberal voters in the country. I don’t see what is so shocking about the idea that members of Congress should represent their districts.

But the New York Times’ spin is much worse than that. The Times’ story reveals how hard the mainstream media work to marginalize common-sense liberal values as though they are radical. The Times felt obliged to include a quote like this one:

“Republicans will very quickly seek to elevate, as they always do, the most radical voices in the Democratic Party,” said Howard Wolfson, a former head of the House Democrats’ campaign arm and a top adviser to Michael R. Bloomberg. “And after tonight, they will have more radical Democrats to choose from.”

Radical, my foot. There is nothing radical about the political values of these supposedly far-left candidates. The media always write about political conflict and rarely about what “far left” Democrats actually want. If they did, they wouldn’t be able to pass it off as radical and far left. Even worse, if the media told people what these “far left” candidates actually want, then more people might vote for them. Here’s a list:

• Higher taxes on high incomes

• Higher taxes on corporations

• Expansion of federal funding for housing, health care, and child care

• Higher minimum wage

• Large-scale investment in renewable energy

• Opposition to fossil fuel expansion

• Stonger emphasis on human rights in foreign policy

• Restrictions on federal surveillance

• Stronger ethics rules in Congress

• Diplomatic rather than military-first foreign policy

Why is it so shocking that people in New York would vote for these things? Our political and media ecosystems regard these ideas as radical. These are the same political and media ecosystems that laundered, sane-washed, and normalized right-wing political values right up to the edge of overt fascism. Why is it radical to start undoing what right-wing government for and by the oligarchy has done to this country?

If we really have a national government, including Democrats, that regards values like those in the list above as dangerously radical, then Mamdani is right. Only the Guardian was brave enough to quote Mamdani:

“The old politics that got us into this crisis is not the politics that’s going to get us out of this crisis.”

---

Source: Wikimedia Commons

---

Ezra Klein triggered my snake-in-the-grass detector long ago. It was clear that he’d sold out to someone, but previously I thought that it was only New York Times management that he’d sold out to, because the New York Times requires both-sidesism in its progressive commentary, and of course Klein wants to keep his job and his elite perch.

But now we know that it’s much darker than that. Yesterday, Wired magazine came out with a horrifying piece about Peter Thiel’s secret “Dialog” society, in which the names of its secret members were leaked. Ezra Klein is on the list, along with other elite snakes such as Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker, Jared Kushner, Elon Musk, and even some old snakes like Grover Norquist. The Wikipedia article includes some of the names.

The Wired piece is Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel’s Secretive ‘Dialog’ Society. It is an invitation-only group. They are all snake aristocracy, and they all know each other.

There is much about Ezra Klein that is irksome, starting with his attitude. Certainly he is smart, but his narcissistic belief that he is ever-so-much smarter than everyone else oozes like pus into everything he writes. His lofty insights, he thinks, are eminently elevated above anything the rest of us common folk can see. So he condescends to point it all out for us, rub our silly noses in it, and then reframe the dialogue.

His grand discovery of the “abundance” theme was one of the things he tried to sell us — Reagan-style supply-side economics warmed over. Too many people fell for it. His brand of liberalism is to save liberals by berating them and bamboozling them. Just think of the gall it takes to repackage anti-regulatory business agendas and right-wing abundance theology as just the thing to save the Democratic Party.

The next Dialog retreat, by the way, is scheduled for August in Ireland.

It will be interesting to see whether the New York Times will be bothered to be embarrassed by this. We stand to learn something about how New York Times management thinks these days.

According to Wired, it was a Swiss hacktivist, who, acting on a tip, found the data and leaked it. This emphasizes how important it is to use every means possible to surveil the global elite to try to track, and expose, what they are up to and how they coordinate their strategy. It’s no surprise that people like Peter Thiel, Jared Kushner, Rick Warren, Ted Cruz, and Tulsi Gabbard are on the list. That we now know that the likes of Ezra Klein and Jonathan Haidt are on the list is a huge breakthrough in open-source intelligence. Some of us saw through Klein’s and Haidt’s disguised agendas long ago. Now, it is to be hoped, nobody (other than Republicans) will ever again take seriously anything they say.

---

Graphic by ChatGPT 5.5. Click here for high-resolution version.

---

Hillary Clinton called it “the vast right-wing conspiracy.” That’s exactly what it is. I should hasten to add that it is not a conspiracy theory, though, because it’s all out in the open now where we can see it. Still, the right-wing elite are as secretive and covert as possible, so it’s a constant challenge to uncover as much as we can of what they’re up to and bring it out into the open.

Once upon a time, so-called conservatives could lie to us about what they really want, mouthing noble-sounding lies about limited government, fiscal responsibility, and personal liberty. But only a tiny handful of them were actually serious about that. (Liz Cheney, please take a bow.)

Now they have revealed what they really want and have wanted all along — a cruel and Stalinist chief executive, a legal system that does not apply to elites but which can be brutally enforced against the little people by militarized police, extreme (and untaxed) wealth, the destruction of institutions that support democracy and expertise, and elite right-wing rule that cannot be challenged by the little people, whether through law, protest, or elections.

What a bunch of nasty people! Part of the work that must be done is helping those who have been deceived by them to see what they really are and what they really want. That’s much easier to see now than it used to be.

I was impressed at Simon Schama’s putdown of J.D. Vance’s outrageous remarks at a D-day ceremony in France. Schama called Vance’s speech “a special kind of loathsomeness: a blend of historical deafness, grotesque stupidity and comically ludicrous self‑importance.” He called Vance “a comic book nobody.”

I’m also thinking of the DNC’s response to Stephen Miller’s vile insult of James Talarico: “Shut up you ugly fuck.”

We don’t have to choose between the high road and the low road. There are no noble terms with which to describe the lowest of the low — the comic book nobodies and ugly fucks who want to own the world and treat the rest of us like cattle.