Because I have spent most of my adult life in the entertainment industry, I have long histories with both Los Angeles and New York City. I lived in L.A. for almost 25 years, but was always better connected for stand-up in New York. I began my career out west, but my first real manager was New York-based, and by the time I started playing the East Coast, I was already a headliner. That meant I spent a lot of time traversing the continent for work.
These two once-glorious cities are now progressive continental bookends and tragic testaments to just how much damage the Left can do in a generation. (Side note: please don't get pedantic about "progressive" there. I use that, socialist, and commie interchangeably.) For me, that damage is both heartbreaking and infuriating. If it is reversible, it is going to take a very long time.
After terrorist sympathizing commie Zohran Mamdani emerged as the victor in New York City's Tijuana donkey show ranked-choice Democratic mayoral primary, Americans who aren't permanently drunk or clinically insane found themselves shaking their heads at the fact that this could happen in the city that suffered the most from the 9/11 attacks less than 24 years ago.
It is widely assumed that Mamdani will unseat Eric Adams, the incumbent mayor who fell out of favor with his fellow Democrats because he wanted illegal aliens out of his city. Adams is now running as an independent. There is no real semblance of a two-party political system anymore in the Big Apple, so Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa is largely viewed as a sacrificial lamb.
Personally, I think that things in NYC are a little more complex in this race. Mamdani may have greatly benefited from Cuomo fatigue in the electorate. Having a full-throated Intifada supporter as its standard-bearer could backfire on the Democratic Party in this one, especially if Eric Adams runs a smart campaign (not a guarantee). In fact, Mamdani is such a wild card that Sliwa might be able to pull off the Mother of All Upsets if Mamdani and Adams fracture the Dems.
The best hope for keeping Mamdani out of office is probably to have NYC's Republicans go full "politics makes strange bedfellows" and throw their support behind Adams for this one. Yeah, it's like choosing between two types of cancer, but at least one of them is survivable.
Should Mamdani prevail and become New York's next mayor, it will be like a board game where the Dems landed on a space that says "Skip Ahead 10 Spaces," and those 10 spaces will bring it closer to wandering in the political desert for a while. That's the optimistic view, anyway.
Almost all of the Democrats' post-mortem polling in the wake of the 2024 election indicated that the party had gone too far to the left on too many issues. The party has yet to internalize any of the lessons that need to be learned from that.
The hacks in the mainstream media love to blather on about divisions in the Republican Party, but the GOP is one big Kumbaya singalong compared to the Dems these days. There are essentially two Democratic parties now: the Coastal/Illinois Dems, and legacy Dem voters in the rest of the country who haven't lost their freakin' minds.
If Democratic candidates keep pushing all of their chips into the left, the Republican Party could very well scoop up some more votes from disaffected flyover country Dems. A worst-case scenario for the party would see even big blue city Democrats finally getting sick of being looted, murdered, and taxed into oblivion. There were rightward shifts in almost every blue state last November, even California. The Democrats could be sitting on top of an electoral ticking time bomb.
The worst case scenario for American patriots would be the triumph of the public education indoctrination mills and Academia, which would cause the insanity to begin spreading inward from the coasts. After all, "free everything" sounds pretty appealing until you have to start paying for it. If that happens, the red states should start building walls.
All bets are off in 21st-century American politics. If, just 15 years ago, anyone had predicted that Donald Trump would a two-term president or that New York City would be on the verge of electing a vocal supporter of Islamic terrorism to be its mayor, he or she would have immediately been referred to a mental health professional or sent to an emergency room to be examined for a concussion.
I tend to lean towards this all being bad news for the Democrats. If they end up with Zohran Mamdani and Karen Bass as the leaders of the two most populous cities in the United States, Republican candidates won't have to expend much energy creating campaign ads in 2026 or 2028.
Back to my long history with both of these cities.
When I first began doing gigs in and around New York City, and then when I moved to Los Angeles, both cities had Republican mayors. Heck, California had a Republican governor back then. While each city may have been trending blue, they were both still purple at the time. This was in the mid-1990s.
After His High Commie Holiness the Lightbringer Barack Obama got into the Oval Office, the Red/Blue divide in America began deepening at a greatly accelerated — and almost irreversible — pace. The division we see in this country now is not, as the leftists insist, the fault of President Trump. No, responsibility for that can be laid at the feet of Obama, who almost gleefully fomented acrimony. LA and Manhattan never had a chance after that.
Again, I have no idea how this will all play out. I'll just keep doing what I can to point the Dems towards the desert.
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