It’s not a secret that I find the politics of the left, especially the politics of groups like Democratic Socialists of America, to be delusional and often counterproductive, and it’s not a secret that I think the moment they’re having right now, where they are occasionally winning Democratic primaries and general elections in big cities, is not going to last long.

I’ve been asked why I think the left’s recent successes would be short-lived, both by people who hope I’m wrong and those who hope I’m right. My reason is simple:

Despite the left’s recent rejection of “Woke 1,” the time period around the turn of the decade when the left’s temporary success in Trump’s first term came crashing down due to their support for broadly unpopular policies like defunding the police and open borders, they still, at times, dabble in these insanely radical and unpopular ideas.

Sure, New York City’s democratic socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani has had a hands-off approach to policing, while staying focused – most of the time – on economic issues, but his allies in the movement are doing no such thing, and his recent slip-up, where he expressed sympathy for an accused murderer and career criminal who died on Rikers Island, shows it’s only a matter of time before the left’s damaging Woke 1 takes make a comeback.

Case in point: Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher, a state legislator from Greenpoint and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, who is also a member of DSA and a key ally of Mamdani’s in Albany. Earlier this month, Gallagher held a press conference where she defended her past calls to not incarcerate people for retail theft – an ongoing problem in New York City that has led to often-swiped items in stores being put behind glass in locked cabinets, causing inconvenience to customers and lost revenue to stores. She said:

“I stand by what I said—no one should be jailed for stealing toothpaste. But not bc I believe in lawlessness. I care just as deeply about compassionate justice as I do about using our resources effectively. Criminalizing poverty accomplishes neither.”

Gallagher went on to say that she believes anyone who steals something does so because “you need them.”

This idea was a big part of Woke 1: people steal because they’re desperate, and instead of putting them in jail, you should just give them what they need. It does not take a genius to understand why this would be met with a Bronx cheer from the general public.

Thanks in part to Woke 1, people who steal one tube of toothpaste rarely go to jail in New York. People who steal a lot of toothpaste to sell on the black market do, sometimes, though far less than they used to thanks to policies like bail reform. If they did, the products wouldn’t be behind plexiglass at the pharmacy.

Which of these are DSA electeds like Gallagher actually protecting?

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When I was 13, I told my mother that when I turned 18, I wanted to be driving a red convertible, a 2000 model, since it would only be a year after: I wanted us to buy a summer house in Pennsylvania, and I imagined myself driving there on summer weekends in my convertible, top down, riding across the George Washington Bridge.

She laughed at me.

“That’s not going to happen,” she said, rolling her eyes.

My reaction was a very defiant teenager version of “fuck you.” I didn’t understand *why* it couldn’t happen. I insisted it could, and I could get a job, save money, and make it happen. I had a “where there’s a will, there’s a way” attitude about it. Her response is best described as that “yeah ok” Jennifer Lawrence GIF meme you see all the time.

Spoiler Alert: She was right. It didn’t happen.

My family wasn’t super wealthy, and nobody had the money to buy me a new red convertible in the year 2000, which, and get this, turns out were quite expensive – too expensive for a teenager working part-time sorting and restocking the Hallmark card display at Barnes & Noble for $10 an hour. Instead, when I turned 18, I drove a 1992 white Toyota Camry with over 100,000 miles on it that I bought by cashing in savings bonds my grandparents got me when I was a baby, and you know what? It was fine. That was more than what most 18-year-olds in 2001 had. It got me to and from school and work, and it shuttled my friends to hangouts in Queens and on Long Island.

Having unrealistic expectations and getting angry and defiant when others point them out is part of being young. When my professors told me I’d probably never be The New York Times’ London bureau chief, I had a “watch me” attitude.

Spoiler Alert: I’ve never been nor will I probably ever be The New York Times’ London bureau chief. Honestly, even if that position still exists, I don’t know if I’d even want to be now. In 2015, I did achieve a less ambitious dream when I became Editor-in-Chief of the Queens Tribune. Maybe the worst job I ever had. I yearned for the days of restocking greeting cards for $10 an hour.

Along the way, though, I also met people who did entertain my unrealistic dreams. Happy to find someone to coddle my delusions, I listened to them and trusted them, until I realized in most of these cases, they were just looking to take advantage of me. Some were looking to grift money out of me – something that turned my anger and frustration into bitter disappointment.

By my mid-30s, I had learned a valuable lesson. Older, wiser people with more life experience have a better grasp on what is realistic versus what is a pipe dream, and realistic goals are possible and often satisfy our needs just fine versus radical ones. Anyone who tells you otherwise is likely a grifter trying to take advantage of your youthful idealism.

Where am I going with this? You’ve probably already guessed this is another article about the left – specifically the young left who have ambitious dreams of a collectivist utopia where healthcare and housing are free, there are no wars, and everyone is equal.

It’s a nice dream; it’s also completely unrealistic, especially in the current political and social climate in the United States. Unforunately, it’s not only something no one wants to hear, but it’s also something that only causes leftists and young voters to double down on voting for candidates and empowering influencers who are often grifters and pick-mes, and will never deliver on these promises.

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The Divisive, Toxic Michigan Democratic Primary is finally over.

Progressive candidate Abdul El-Sayed, backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, narrowly won the primary for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat against moderate Rep. Haley Stevens on Tuesday, scoring a key win for the Democratic Party’s left flank.

If you followed me during this race, you know that I’m not the biggest fan of El-Sayed, or the left flank in general, but El-Sayed’s win isn’t surprising if you had followed the trajectory of the campaign recently. However, what was surprising to many – not me, frankly – was El-Sayed’s winning margin. His victory was underwhelming when compared to expectations. Polls late in the race indicated he would beat Stevens by double digits, but final unofficial results show El-Sayed winning by less than one point and with under 50 percent of the vote. State Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who dropped out of the race on July 5, won about 4 percent of the vote.

The primary was considered a big test of whether democratic socialism – or the adjacent style of progressivism – can win a Rust Belt swing state with a large traditional “working class” population. Progressives claim El-Sayed’s win proved their theory right – that economic populism wins working-class voters, many of whom embraced Trump1. Unfortunately, that’s where their analysis and conclusion end. The answer to that is a slightly complicated “no.”

Leftists point out that Sen. Bernie Sanders also narrowly won Michigan in 2016 against Hillary Clinton, but Sanders lost every county in the state to Joe Biden four years later. They forget that both times Bernie’s worst-performing parts of the state were the ones dominated by blue-collar, working-class voters, like Detroit, Macomb County north of Detroit, the working-class suburban Obama-Trump area where the term “Reagan Democrats” was coined, and the areas around Flint and Saginaw, where Hillary won.

Digging deeper into Tuesday’s result – and results of other races across the country – shows a similar pattern. Abdul El-Sayed may have won his race, but it’s abundantly clear that economic populism isn’t winning working-class voters who left the Democratic Party in the last 10-15 years, and to the extent that the far left is winning races, it’s in constituencies with young, college-educated populations that working-class voters see as the “elite.”

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In September 1998, when I was 15, I saw this cherry-red Tommy Hilfiger fleece pullover hanging in the store at Macy’s Herald Square. It was expensive, and my mother told me if it were ever on sale, she’d buy it. A few months later, I forced her to keep the promise. I saw it on sale at the Macy’s store in Long Island’s Roosevelt Field Mall. They only had an XXL size, which was too big for me, but it was 50% off. I’d grow into it, I figured.

I wore it to school the next week on a chilly day because I loved it so much. When I got there, I noticed my classmate Frank - one of the “popular” kids - had the same pullover. Apparently, it was a popular article of clothing and status symbol among the “cool kids.” Since it was only early autumn and we had school dress codes, I had never seen how often these kids wore theirs. My classmates thought I had bought the fleece because I wanted to be part of their “clique.” They mocked me for it, even demanding I return it.

I went home, put the fleece in my closet, and didn’t wear it again for years1. It wasn’t that kids mistakenly thought I had purchased it to “be like Frank.” It was that the fleece was meaningless to me now.

Individuality has always been important to me – often to my social detriment. I was more often an “outcast” than I was “in style.” Sometimes, as with the Tommy Hilfiger fleece or that Nas song, I found myself accidentally culturally aligned with what was popular in the moment. More often than not, though, I didn’t, and I was fine with that. In fact, I usually valued it. Other kids, and even some adults who should’ve known better – such as relatives and teachers - would criticize me for not trying harder to fit in, even blaming me for bringing on my own bullying and isolation. Trying to “fit in,” though, just felt like self-betrayal. Also, I witnessed firsthand how other marginalized and unpopular kids would try to “fit in” with the “cool kids,” and it always ended up blowing up in their faces. They were the ones who took the fall for the group’s misdeeds, whether it was an act of vandalism or possession of drugs. Some even failed out of school because they were too focused on getting validation from their new friends. They had downfalls akin to Cady Heron's in Mean Girls. In the end, they’d look like losers anyway. I did not want to be that person. If I was going to be popular, it would be on my own terms.

In many ways, that’s what attracted me to liberalism and the Democratic Party a quarter century ago. The Republicans of that era – not that they’ve changed at all since – valued conformity, even if forced through extensive social pressure and ostracization. You love country, God and family, even if it doesn’t appear to love you back. Conservative culture in that era felt as if you were treated not as a human with individual needs, but as a cog in the wheel or one of a bundle of identical sticks. On the left, I can be who I want and believe what I genuinely believe, even if it wasn’t popular.

Increasingly, though, it feels like leftism, and the Democrats as a whole, are becoming more and more like what the right was 25 years ago – and still is. A clique one must conform to be welcomed into. Increasingly, it’s clear Democrats are having a “pick me” problem.

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Last October, while I was in Maine for my annual trip to our family compound, the first scandal around former Maine Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner hit the presses.

It was concerning Reddit posts he made in the past that appeared to blame women for rape. The reaction on the ground in Maine was pretty swift – even if a bit overwrought for what I thought was a banal scandal. His campaign manager, Genevieve McDonald, had resigned, and there were calls for him to drop out. A house in Southwest Harbor on Mount Desert Island, with a Platner yard sign I had been passing every day that entire week, had removed the sign.

Inquiring as to why some people were getting off the Platner train, I was basically told, “Where there is smoke, there is fire.” Friends of mine in the Pine Tree State who were involved in Democratic politics informed me that there was a rumor going around – one of several rumors about Platner – backed up by convincing evidence, that Platner had raped an ex-girlfriend. My sources never named his victim, who we now know is Jenny Racicot, but the story I heard in October was similar to the one we found out this week:

His girlfriend asked him to come over because she had gotten injured because he gave good massages, but she changed her mind. He, already expecting sex, got frustrated, let himself into her home, and raped her. It is very similar to the Racicot story we now know about. It was the first of many other sordid stories I’ve heard about him – some of which, such as the story of him getting violent with another ex-girlfriend, turned out to also be valid.

I made it abundantly clear then, to much scorn online, that I could not support his candidacy. Leftists online, who had fallen for Platner thanks largely to his Pro-Palestine views – Palestine being the current omnicause for the left – started a vigorous campaign of harassing, doxxing, and outright bullying critics of Platner, including myself, and the left in general. Even as randos online threatened to get me blacklisted from job opportunities and social groups, I frustratingly held to myself knowledge of credible rape allegations against Platner that I knew would eventually come out, and hoped it would happen early enough that another Democrat would be able to run against incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November.

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On the Wednesday morning after New York’s June 23rd primary, I woke up to a text from a lifelong friend of mine, a moderate Democrat who once worked for a Democratic State Senator and with whom I sometimes talk politics. It just read one word:

“Yikes”

After living in the five boroughs all her life, she recently bought a house on Long Island and is closing probably at the end of July. I asked her who she voted for in the primary – she lives in Ridgewood in Congressional District 7, where there was a heated race between Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso and Assemblywoman Claire Valdez, backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Democratic Socialists of America.

Nobody. She said she and her husband didn’t bother to vote since they wouldn’t be living there in November.

“It wouldn’t have mattered,” she said. “And we’re moving anyway.”

Another friend of mine in Glendale said the same thing. She also didn’t vote, despite being in the 7th District, as she’s planning to move to South Carolina “as soon as I can.”

I heard that same sentiment echoed by a colleague who lives in Upper Manhattan and was mortified that her congressman, Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, was ousted by activist Darializa Avila Chevalier. A lifelong resident of Washington Heights, whose Dominican-immigrant parents worked multiple jobs to send her to the now-shuttered Mother Cabrini High School, she confessed to me that, while she voted, she wasn’t very enthusiastic about it as she increasingly spends time at her family’s new home in Pennsylvania.

“I’m eventually just going to move there anyway,” she said to me, before adding that she was considering switching her voter registration to Pennsylvania1.

Diego Montalvo, a former neighbor of mine who lives in the Bronx, made a similar sentiment. Although his representative, Rep. Ritchie Torres, won reelection, Montalvo was appalled at the other results.

“I thought [New York City Mayor Zohran] Mamdani was a one-shot thing,” he said. “Guess not.”

He and his wife, both Puerto Ricans born and raised in the South Bronx, are moving to Norwalk, Connecticut, in September anyway.

Last year, ahead of the Democratic primary that vaulted Mamdani to power, I published a piece explaining why, up to that point, New Yorkers elected bland politicians. My theory was simple:

Voters don’t care enough about the city or state to be concerned about its long-term stability.

The lack of organization and motivation among New York moderates, and their ceding the political establishment to the left, has a lot to do with that dynamic – New Yorkers who are genuinely unhappy with the city, but plan on leaving rather than fixing it – and it’s manifesting itself in Democratic primaries in the Second Trump Era.

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Earlier this month, while the New York Knicks were on their fairy tale run to their first NBA Championship in 53 years, a client of mine who recently relocated to New York asked me where the team’s name came from.

I explained that “Knicks” was short for “Knickerbockers,” which is an old-time phrase for a native New Yorker that dates back to the city’s colonial days. It was the Dutch who initially founded New York as New Amsterdam in 1624. Forty years later, the English took control of the town in the Second Anglo-Dutch War and renamed it New York. The English gave the original Dutch settlers in the city a nickname, related to the type of pants they wore - knickers. The name was “knickerbocker.”

Two centuries later, during the Gilded Age, the name was used to describe native New Yorkers whose connections to the city predate the arrival of waves of immigrants and domestic transplants who came to New York in search of a better life1. New York-author Washington Irving used the name for a character in his first novel and the name became associated with a popular hotel and gentlemen’s club in Manhattan.

“Knickerbocker” isn’t a phrase used to describe natives that much anymore, and its only widely known use besides the basketball team is for an important commercial hub and subway station in Bushwick, Brooklyn. However, I think it’s fitting that the city’s only “New York” branded basketball team, whose name refers to natives, united the city in a glorious championship win at the same time a divisive debate is bubbling over who is a “real New Yorker.”

The Knicks’ win comes in the midst of a heated Democratic primary campaign season, where multiple Congressional seats are up for grabs. Tuesday’s primaries for state and federal legislative seats includes three high-profile Congressional races in parts of the city that are heavily gentrified, pitting longtime New Yorkers and the political establishment against recent transplants who became politically active in the last year thanks to Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The political environment has highlighted an ongoing point of division in the city, over how much it has changed, not just politically, but culturally as well, and where native New Yorkers, who lived through many of the city’s darkest days, stand?

Since 2024, there has been a pronounced shift in the political environment of New York City, where recent transplants, especially younger voters, are outvoting and outmaneuvering longtime New Yorkers in neighborhoods where transplants make up the majority of the electorate. Much of this happened because there was a large exodus of New Yorkers, especially natives, during and immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic, and they were replaced by younger people moving to New York, often left-leaning Zoomers escaping conservative states and taking advantage of lower rents and New York’s progressive culture in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic and Donald Trump’s return to the presidency.

These younger voters are now facing a post-COVID inflation and housing crisis, coupled with anger over Kamala Harris’ loss to Donald Trump in 2024 and American support for Israel. Mamdani was able to activate them as New York voters last year, completely upending the electorate.

Exit polls from last year’s mayoral election showed that native New Yorkers, those born in the city, voted for Andrew Cuomo over Mamdani by 10 points. It is transplants who largely make up Mamdani’s political machine and are hitting the streets for Mamdani’s endorsed candidates; Daraliza Avila Chevalier, who is challenging Rep. Adriano Espaillat in the Harlem and Upper Manhattan-based 13th Congressional District, former City Comptroller Brad Lander, who is challenging Rep. Dan Goldman in a district that includes most of Lower Manhattan and Western Brooklyn communities like Park Slope and Sunset Park, and Assemblywoman Claire Valdez, who is challening Brooklyn Borough President, and longtime progressive champion Antonio Reynoso, in the 7th District to replace Rep. Nydia Velazquez. The 7th District is one of the most left-wing districts in the nation and includes major leftist bastions like Bushwick and Greenpoint in Brooklyn.

Mamdani did well in all these districts last year. Owing to that, he has decided to take on the two incumbents and a longtime ally2.

Espaillat, who is the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and has been in office since 2017, is an institution in Washington Heights, longtime home to one of the largest Dominican communities outside Hispanola. The descedant of powerful Dominican politicians, Espaillat has represented Upper Manhattan in either Albany or Washington since 1997. Chevalier, who is also Dominican-American, is challenging him in part due to Espaillat past support of Israel. Her political base, however, is largely transplants who have increasingly been moving into Upper Manhattan due to lower rents comparable to gentrified parts of Brooklyn and Queens. His base are the longtime Dominican residents of the community, who have had roots there for decades.

Goldman, who represents a district that includes Wall Street, is being challenged by Lander for similar reasons - past support for Israel – which was once a less divisive issue in the district. Goldman won his seat in a multi-candidate race in 2022, emphazing his role in Trump’s first impeachment. At the time, Trump was a defeated, disgraced ex-president and Goldman was able to champion his role in taking him down. Now, however, Trump is back in office and Goldman’s anti-Trump credentials look less impressive.

The 7th District is the nucleus of gentrified Brooklyn, where formerly Puerto Rican enclaves of Williamsburg and Bushwick, that first helped propel Velazquez to Congress in 1992 – the first Puerto Rican woman elected – are increasingly whiter, younger and wealthier. Neighborhods like Greenpoint, Sunnyside and Ridgewood, once dominated by working class, moderate Irish-, Italian- and Polish-American residents, are now also home to more young professionals. These are some of the most left-wing communities in the country and a major hub of socialist and social justice politics.

All three races highlight the shifts in demographics and culture in the city, not only in recent decades, but in this decade alone. Gone are the days when it possible to be both a progressive upstart and a Zionist, as former Mayor Bill de Blasio and Attorney General Letitia James were when they challenged the establishment. Espaillat, who famously challenged former U.S. Rep., and Harlem institution, Charles Rangel a decade ago, nearly toppling him and Reynoso, who two decades ago founded the progressive group that help dethrone Brooklyn Democratic boss Vito Lopez, are now both classified as a tool of the establishment.

It’s the political representation of how things have changed in the city and for many of us “knickerbockers” who were born and raised in The Big Apple, very little of the city we grew up in remains. It’s something I explored last summer.

I am not necessarily anti-transplant. This month, owing to my fascination with cities, I’ve been reading a book about the history of Alexandria, Egypt. The book, Alexandria: The City That Changed The World by Islam Issa, explores the city’s history from it’s founding by Alexander The Great in 331 BC to the modern day. One of the constants in the story is how one dominant group tried to keep foreigners and transplants out of Alexandria to protect it’s culture. First, the Ptolmeies tried to keep out the Romans, then the Christiains tried to keep out the Muslims, then the Arabs tried to keep out Europeans, all to the city’s determint. Ultimately the changes were inevitable, and, especially after wars and natural disasters, economically necessary. They were what has kept the city alive for nearly two and a half millennia. However, the trade offs were that the Alexandria of one generation looked completely different than the Alexandria of the next.

That same thing is true in New York, and many native New Yorkers like myself have had to learn to accept it, and at times, even embrace it. Transplants are what keeps New York alive, and at one point, our ancestors were all transplants. A century ago, it was my 22-year old great-grandmother walking off a boat at Ellis Island with all her belongings in the same way a 22-year-old recent college graduate rolls her luggage with all her belongings off a plane at LaGuardia Airport today.

It was only a matter of time, though, before “knickerbockers,” increasingly losing the city they knew and loved, while trying to be good sports about it, would feel a line had been crossed. The Knicks’ quest for a championship is one of those struggles that native New Yorkers feel is theirs. It was our hearts that were broken in 19943. It was we who sighed every time we put on a Knicks jersey during the decade-long playoff drought. It was we who got caught up in Linsanity in 2012, and the next year, when Amar’e Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony brought the team to the playoffs and past the previous year’s Atlantic Division champs, the Boston Celtics, in the first round.

Just like it was us, not the transplants, who watched the Twin Towers fall in 2001, or watched Breezy Point burn and Staten Island flood during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, or watched paramedics take out neighbors away on stretchers during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Fair or not, it’s difficult for a true “knickerbocker” to share, or even hand over, a golden moment like the Knicks win to people who didn’t share in those struggles – especially those who have showed indifferent to disdain toward sports and joyous moments of entertainment in the past.

Much of the pro-Mamdani left were the same people who glued themselves to Avenue of the Americans during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade just two years ago, hoping to shut it down in protest over Gaza, or screamed “Joy is Cancelled” at the Rockefeller Center Tree Lighting. They are the same people who have mocked people’s love of sports by using phrases like “sportsball” and criticized Americans for spending an entire Sunday watching football.

Many native New Yorkers feel like they have endured decades of waiting and hoping for a Knicks championship, and the “transplant class,” many of whom have only been New Yorkers, or at least active New Yorkers, in the last couple of years, and have never shown an interest in professional sports before, jumped on the bandwagon in the last six months, seizing a rare joyous New York moment for themselves.

It is representative of that larger dynamic where transplants are seen as transients who treat New York City as an extension of their college campus – someplace temporary to sow their oats – and while they’re here claim it all as their own. They bring with them thier naive and not-well-thought-out ideas, implement them politically and culturally and then leave when things go sideways, disappearing off to some red state where they spend their rest of their lives telling their friends at their megachurch or in their hunting club how they can’t believe they ever lived in that “shithole,” and claiming it was New York to blame for the left-wing turn in their youth. All while the “knickerbockers” clean up the messes they left behind.

This dynamic is as old as the city itself, and dates back to the era that birthed the name of our basketball team. The way natives feel about transplants today is not much different than how knickerbockers felt about the English in the late 17th Century, or the “old money” felt about the “new money” in the Gilded Age, or the WASPS felt about the immigrants in the early 20th Century, or how the white working class felt about blacks moving in to communities like Bedford-Stuyvesant, Flatbush and Rosedale during the Great Migration and White Flight era.

Overall, I don’t think this division did much to add to the divisions in the city already and I write this largely as an observation, rather than an attempt to present it as something worse than it is. Most of this grumbling happened behind closed doors and off line, and it obviously didn’t show itself on the Canyon Of Heroes last Thursday. Mamdani’s speech, in which he harkened to many of New York’s dark days, was well-received, but then again, he has lived in New York City since he was seven and attended high school here.

I do think, however, it is a chasm that will become more apparent in the future, especially in the political realm and something to keep an eye on over the next few years, especially if - and don’t laugh when I say this – the New York Jets4 win the Super Bowl.

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Growing up an American kid in an American classroom, you learn a very patriotic, often jingoistic, view of our history. While the bad stuff – the Trail of Tears, slavery, Jim Crow – is not hidden away, you are taught that, on balance, America has been a force for good in the world.

National pride was instilled in us at a young age. I remember my seventh-grade teacher scolding us for not standing for the Pledge of Allegiance, reminding us of the laundry list of things Americans accomplished, from steam engines to air travel to putting a man on the moon. Schoolhouse Rock, a popular educational cartoon series from the 1970s that was a big part of my childhood, had an entire season on American history, including an episode called “Mother Necessity” about major inventions and innovations developed by Americans. The series celebrated America as a pioneer in liberty, exploration, innovation, and the embrace of diversity, which together made America uniquely great and made you proud to have been born under the stars and stripes.

It always felt as though being an American meant presenting the best image of ourselves, one of being the smartest, fastest, toughest, and most innovative people on the planet. The type of greatness everyone else aspires to be, and most can never achieve. That greatness is our birthright.

That image is nothing like what we saw at the White House last weekend at Donald Trump’s birthday UFC fight on the South Lawn. Instead, what we got was a trashy, cringefest of drugged-out fighters vomiting on themselves and grappling like roosters in a cock fight, making played-out, insulting jokes about Trump’s political rivals. As someone who used to watch UFC, back when it was more about the martial arts and less about paying homage to Donald Trump, I thought I could, in the weeks leading up to Sunday’s fights, offer my opinion on why I believe UFC, especially in its modern form, is not an acceptable venue to show off what’s great about America as we celebrate it’s 250th birthday1.

Yet when I did, I was repeatedly told that doing so made me “elitist” or “snobby” and that it was clear I would never understand what “real America thinks” and why men love Trump so much and hate liberals.

Maybe that’s true. Maybe I don’t get it. Maybe most American men prefer the image of stoned vomiting fighters with terribly poor hygiene calling Michelle Obama a man, to innovators and war heroes. Perhaps “trash culture” is what half the country wants the world to see when they think of the United States, and I’m the one who is out of touch. I can’t possibly understand why.

What has happened to us that so many Americans have such low standards and opinions of themselves and their fellow countrymen that they embrace this type of degenerate, trashy, cringey aesthetic as a representation of American culture? Where does it fit within the larger narrative of America as a global industrial and military powerhouse that became the world's envy?

I think it’s fitting that the UFC cage match happened the same day the United States faced a humiliating defeat by Iran. MAGA is a movement desperate to reclaim the image of America as a global power that no one can match – and attracted the support of tens of millions of Americans humiliated by the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan and angry that it led to the presidency of Barack Obama, whose foreign policy emphasized an America that was a partner in a global world, rather than the dominant power.

They failed.

Now, MAGA must contend with another humiliation, that of an embarrassing loss entirely of their own making to a longtime adversary. Trump, who ripped up Obama’s deal with Iran in 2017, with the promise of doing something Obama refused to – using the threat of America’s military force to bring Iran to heel – failed spectacularly at doing so and is now sending his cucked vice president out into the world to defend a peace deal that makes Obama’s look like the Treaty of Versailles in comparison.

What we saw this weekend was the equivalent of a Roman Emperor staging a desperate gladiator show in the Coliseum as Visigoths approached the gates of Rome. We are no longer a respected military power or global economic partner, and no amount of fighter jet flyovers, saluting Marines, and bloody men in a cage will make up for how the world sees us now. Trump and his MAGA deadenders are desperately trying to cover up a failing administration presiding over the decline of a once-powerful and revered nation with a veneer of a warrior ethos that they believe harkens back to the mid- to late-20th-century peak of American global power. After Iran, the world knows now that America will back down from a fight – that warrior, gladiator, tough guy nonsense Trump and MAGA are trying to portray is laughable. No one is buying it.

I’m going to get called elitist and snobbish for saying this, and I don’t care:

I demand a better representation of my country than what was offered last weekend at the White House. I want the world to see America as a nation that celebrates and encourages intelligence, sophistication, innovation, and bravery. If that makes me “out of touch,” then that’s a shame, but so be it.

Trump and his movement are truly the worst of us. We are better than filthy-looking, tatted-up drug addicts vomiting on themselves and making insulting remarks about a former First Lady, but I no longer believe that a significant number of Americans want to be better than that. They are fine with the world thinking that’s who we are, either because they have completely lost all personal dignity and respect for themselves, or because they naively think that image of America commands respect.

It doesn’t, though, and I’m not sure they believe it either. America under Trump is neither respected nor feared. I’m not even sure it’s hated anymore, either. Trump’s America is pitied. It’s a pity to see a country that gave the world steam engines, airplanes, and humans on the moon being reduced to cage fights and insulting remarks as its president easily surrenders from a fight he foolishly started.

I don’t know if the next Democratic president – because it’s going to have to be a Democrat who does it – can salvage our image. The most pressing problem is that, having elected Trump twice, Americans can no longer be trusted. The world does not want the global order to depend on the fleeting whims of rural wives in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Even if our next president tries to re-engage and rebuild respect and admiration, the world knows they can be replaced in four years by someone who is the polar opposite, and Republicans and their allies in the media will work double time to gaslight Americans into thinking the humiliating Trump years were all a fever dream.

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I’m going to have a couple of posts coming up regarding the series “Subway Takes,” which has quickly become my go-to series to hate-watch.

The online program in which comedian Kareem Rahma interviews people while riding on the subway, using the new-defunct MetroCard as a stand-in for a microphone, has brought us some incredibly hot and stupid takes. Last month, one such take by Pakistani-born singer Arooj Aftab sparked a commotion.

“White people should not be allowed to sit on stoops in Bed-Stuy,” Aftab suggested.

She added:

“It looks bad. It’s not as aesthetically pleasing, especially for Bed-Stuy as a neighborhood. As more and more white people are moving into Bed-Stuy and messing up the vibes, and having our favorite bars and our favorite places close down, they should not be inviting all their friends and sitting on the stoop. I think it’s rude to the history of the place.”

“OUR” vibes?

Aftab, who was born in Saudi Arabia, raised in Pakistan, and moved to New York in 2010, triggered a wide range of responses with her comments. She was referencing the gentrification of Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Brooklyn neighborhood that was once a center of black culture but has rapidly gentrified over the last 20 years, to the point where some areas, especially closer to the borders with Clinton Hill and Bushwick, are now majority white for the first time since the 1960s1.

The interaction was brought to the attention of Bed-Stuy’s City Councilman, leftist favorite Chi Osse, who responded with what can only be described as a showman’s version of “no comment.” The take was stupid, he admitted.

Osse, however, rose to the City Council as an activist in Central Brooklyn, often opposing gentrification, which, in this part of Brooklyn, is a code word for “white people moving in.” One reply to Osse’s non-comment on the Subway Takes video called out his past “woke” takes, including one in 2021 where he said a cisgender white man shouldn’t be Speaker of the minority-majority New York City Council. Osse’s response?

“Woke 1 was crazzzyyy.”

In other words, I can’t believe I used to believe that. Which left me wondering, did he ever actually believe it? Or did he realize his political future no longer relies on the votes of longtime black Bed-Stuy residents concerned about gentrification, but rather the gentrifiers themselves? What other beliefs will leftists look back on in regret in five years when they no longer serve them?

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Class, Corruption, and Immigrant Struggle In Late 18th-Century Gotham

Ellis Island today is one of New York City’s most-visited attractions. For decades, however, it was the first piece of dry land that the waves of immigrants touched in the United States. For many of them, New York was their final, permanent – at least long-term destination. The Big Apple is where these immigrants started their lives, and unfortunately, where many ended prematurely.

Set in New York in 1896, The Alienist is a turn-of-the-century Criminal Minds-like crime drama that places the reader in the heart of a distinct period in New York City history – the waning days of the 19th Century. The story follows an investigation into the gruesome, sexualized murders of young immigrant children and the work of Dr. Lazlo Kreizler, the psychologist – or alienist, as they were called at the time – hired by the police to figure out who the suspect might be, mentally. The novel explores the early use of fingerprinting and criminal psychology in police work, and the dangerous reality that poor, recent immigrants faced in New York City at that time, alongside the late-Gilded Age wealth that profited off their labor.

Carr sets different scenes of the story at notable New York City locations, including the then-under-construction Williamsburg Bridge, Castle Clinton, and the former Croton Reservoir, where the New York Public Library’s main branch is now. While the main characters are all fiction, J.P. Morgan and future President Teddy Roosevelt, then New York’s Police Commissioner, make an appearance.

The Alienist was made into a TV series on TNT in 2015, starring Daniel Bruhl, Luke Evans, and Dakota Fanning.

Harriet The Spy - Louise Fitzhugh

A Child Grows In Manhattan

This one’s for the kiddies.

Louise Fitzhugh gives a good insight into both the unique aspects of a New York childhood, as well as the ways it’s just like anyone else’s, in the story of the precocious Harriet Welch.

An aspiring journalist who writes down what she sees in her notebook, Harriet’s young life gets thrown into chaos when the things she relied on begin slipping away, forcing her to begin the “growing up” process. Harriet’s close confidant and nanny, Ole Golly, leaves to marry and start her own family, and the secrets that were supposed to be hidden in her journal end up on public display.

Fitzhugh wrote the book in the early 1960s and set it on the Upper East Side, with places like Carl Shultz Park as settings. Though Harriet obviously comes from a privileged, wealthy, Upper East Side family, her story is not unfamiliar to children of other classes. It’s a great book for any young adult growing up in the city.

The book was made into a popular Nickelodeon movie in the 1990s, starring the late Michelle Trachtenberg as Harriet and Rosie O’Donnell as Ole Golly.

Ladies And Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning - Jonathan Mahler

A Non-Fiction Look At New York’s Urban Decay Era

The 1970s were a tough time to be a New Yorker. One Queens native, who was a teenager in the borough’s Jackson Heights neighborhood in the 1970s, regularly describes that decade to me as “the war.” The city was suffering from civic bankruptcy, population loss, rising crime, and rampant poverty due to stagflation nationally – a situation in which there is both inflation and a sputtering economy – a bit like what we’re experiencing today.

In this non-fiction book, Mahler takes the reader through one of New York City’s worst years: 1977. Mahler walks us though the chaos of the year through the intertwining stories of the serial killer Son of Sam terrifying New Yorkers; a blackout on a hot summer night that led to riots and looting in poverty-stricken neighborhoods like Bushwick; a clown car of ambitious politicians who created a pile up in that year’s Democratic primary for Mayor – which then-Congressman Ed Koch ultimately won; and baseball star Reggie Jackson adjusting to his new life as a New York Yankee, and his conflict with team manager Billy Martin, culminating in the Yankees’ victory in the World Series that year.

The title of the book is a reference to an incident during Game 2 of the 1977 World Series, played on October 12th, where a helicopter hovering over the game at Yankee Stadium spotted a large fire burning in an abandoned building nearby. Announcers Keith Jackson and Howard Cosell gave updates on the fire during pauses in the game, and the incident became emblematic of the city’s decline and struggles in the 1970s.

Jazz- Toni Morrison

Harlem’s Evolution Into The Center Of Black American Culture

Harlem may be one of New York City’s most historically important neighborhoods. Named after the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands, it was given its name during Dutch colonization because it is roughly the same distance from the tip of Manhattan (New Amsterdam) as Haarlem is from Amsterdam – about 10 miles.

Harlem today, though, is perhaps best known as the epicenter of black culture in the United States and the birthplace of the Harlem Renaissance.

The second of the three novels in Toni Morrison’s trilogy about African-American history (with Beloved and Paradise), Jazz explores the migration of African-Americans to Harlem in the early 20th Century to escape the violence and oppression of Jim Crow, and their role in the Harlem Renaissance. It gives us the story of the rise of Black Harlem in a way only Morrison can, through an uncomfortable story about flawed humans.

The narrative tells the tale of a middle-aged black couple who settled in Harlem in the 1920s, and other characters who try to find peace, prosperity, and identity in the community, away from the horrors of the former Confederacy and other parts of the country where black Americans were suffering oppression. Though the story weaves back and forth between Harlem and life in places like St. Louis and the South earlier in time, it is a great look into how Harlem became the center of African-American culture – a place where black Americans came to thrive, both in the arts and in commerce – and how the trauma of Jim Crow America they fled played into the creation of that culture.

When I Ran Away - Ilona Bannister

New Yorkers’ Complicated Relationship With 9/11 Grief And Trauma

New Yorkers who lived in the city on September 11, 2001 - as I did - tend to have a very complicated relationship with that day and the trauma stemming from it. In this novel, Ilona Bannister explores this in the character of Gigi, a survivor of the attacks who flees the Financial District that day on the Staten Island Ferry and loses her brother in the tragedy. She also meets a man, Harry, whom she sees as her escape from the trauma, and they experience “that day” together, watching news of the attacks from Gigi’s home in Staten Island.

Ten years later, still struggling with her 9/11 grief, Gigi runs into Harry again, and they leave New York for London, where Gigi hopes to finally escape the shadow of 9/11. It doesn’t work, and she finds herself in an even worse place after another decade.

The tragedy of 9/11 cast a pall over the lives and experiences of New Yorkers in the years that followed. For years, the giant gaping hole in Lower Manhattan was a constant reminder of that terrible day, and many grieved by making the attacks and their aftermath a major part of their identity, regularly referring to it and its victims and chastising anyone who felt ready to “move on.”

Gigi represents a very real feeling among New Yorkers, especially younger New Yorkers, in the decade or so after 9/11 - the only way to escape the horrors was to leave it behind. I’ve personally seen others who followed a similar path struggle with. Bannister published the book a year after the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, so it felt relevant as many were still struggling with the trauma related to that tragedy.

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On the same day that Donald Trump was first inaugurated as president, I decided to make a career change. Having experienced firsthand the result of criticizing Trump in the press and not willing to spend my life receiving death and rape threats for a measly $40,000 a year, I left journalism and decided to go into real estate. I enjoyed the beat as a reporter and liked the idea of making my own schedule, being my own boss, and having a pretty much unlimited earnings potential.

In the first year, I regularly ran into longtime industry veterans in New York City who had a lot to say about Trump from his days as a real estate mogul in the 1980s and 1990s – very little of it good.

“The biggest con game he ever played was convincing people he’s a good dealmaker,” one broker who had worked with him early in his career told me. “He’s always been a terrible dealmaker who couldn’t negotiate for shit. Somehow, the American people bought the phony image he sold of himself.”

Trump regularly made bad deals and either found ways to get out of them or leveraged the losses he incurred. It’s how he managed to bankrupt his own casino, and why he overleveraged his real estate assets – which ultimately led to a successful civil suit against him by New York Attorney General Letitia James. He got away with it because he inherited a fortune, had almost unlimited money to burn, and leveraged it into real estate at a good time to invest in New York City. At the time, he was losing millions per year and nearly went bankrupt in the early 1990s – something we later discovered when his tax returns were leaked.

Trump’s real estate empire, originally built by his grandmother and father, benefited from low real estate prices in New York following white flight and the urban decay of the 1970s and 1980s. During that time, real estate in most of the city could be bought dirt cheap, and the city was so desperate for a revitalization that it was easy for developers like Trump to get the approvals to build. By the 1990s, as real estate boomed again in New York, he could no longer benefit from that. That’s when he shifted his focus from real estate to his personal brand. He made his name his business. Trump cultivated an image of himself as a brilliant businessman, dealmaker, and entrepreneur who knew how to make money and amass power and respect, so much so that he created an entire reality show where desperate people competed for the right to work alongside him and be his…apprentice. His name became more powerful and more financially lucrative than his real estate assets.

None of this alone led to him becoming president, though. By the 2010s, when Trump became the nucleus of a conspiracy theory that suggested President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and thus not eligible to be president, he was one of the most unpopular, reviled figures in society.

How, then, did people fall for the con that Trump was some sort of expert dealmaker who would thrive as President? They fell for it because he made them want to.

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I don’t really consider myself a moderate. I know that to many people who read my takes and hear my opinions, I can give off moderate, even slightly conservative, vibes. However, if I did label myself, it would be as a pragmatic progressive.

The reason is simple. I can’t for the life of me think of any issue or policy item that I agree with the national Republican Party on. Not that they’re a party with principled policy items anyway, but to me, the national Republican Party is a dumpster fire that is completely antagonistic to my worldview.

It is very unlikely that I would ever vote Republican for federal office. Local Republicans in New York City are, for the most part, to the left of national Republicans, so sometimes I could be persuaded to vote for them, but that hasn’t happened in a while. The last time I voted Republican at all was over a decade ago, for a hyper-local office, and only because I was personally friends with the candidate, who himself was on the liberal end of the Republican Party. One has to go back to Harry Wilson, the 2020 Republican candidate for New York Comptroller, to find a time I filled out the bubble for a Republican candidate – and even then, it was for a Republican who was an advisor to President Barack Obama, a Democrat.

Despite my reputation in leftist circles, I am politically well to the left of most moderates I interact with regularly. The moderates, centrists, independents, and “normies” I converse with and live around are not ideological, and their priorities shift depending on the environment.

In 2024, one of the major factors that convinced many Trump-voting moderates I spoke with to overlook his disqualifying flaws and either vote for him or not vote at all was their belief that they would benefit somewhat from another Trump presidency. They may have thought him to be a criminal who deserved to be in prison. Still, they had just endured years of record inflation, “wokeness,” and “cancel culture.” They felt that President Joe Biden had lost control of the immigration situation, and, for some, the concern that LGBTQ activists were brainwashing children to question their gender identity had become too great to ignore. They pined for the pre-pandemic economy and society and were convinced that Democrats, who had embraced the “new normal” of the COVID-19 pandemic, were the ones holding us back from returning to 2019 life. Trump promised to tackle all these things. With Trump and the GOP, moderates saw an opportunity to get policy changes they wanted to address the problems they were concerned with, and Democrats and leftists either ignored, denied, or were too focused on the situation in Gaza to care.

That will always be why progressives will have a hard time convincing moderates to abandon Republicans and vote for them without concessions, and why moderates will always consider returning to the GOP tent even after the party and its worldview appear to be discredited. Moderates can get some of what they want from Republicans when they win. They have no real reason to oppose them being in power over Democrats.

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ELECTION SEASON SPECIAL: NOW THROUGH JUNE 1, 25% ALL ANNUAL PAID SUBSCRIPTIONS. CLICK HERE TO REDEEM.

This week, I was leaving my office in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, when I was hit with a putrid smell that I’ve grown all too used to in New York City these days:

Marijuana.

Sitting in a crevice on the side of my office building, a disheveled woman was smoking a freshly lit blunt, blowing the smoke out onto the sidewalk with no consideration for who was passing by, nor any consideration to what was going on just 10 feet away – People enjoying the 70-degree May day and eating lunch at a table set up outside a cafe.

I watched as the two disgusted women picked up their food and walked into the cafe, where their disappointed waitress asked what was wrong.

“Some fucking prick is smoking weed,” one woman told the waitress.

“That’s Mamdani’s New York,” I heard the waitress reply as I walked away, crossing the threshold of being out of earshot.

It’s not Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s fault that an antisocial moron has no consideration for other people who choose to smoke marijuana steps away from others enjoying lunch. This type of behavior is common and predates Mamdani’s residency at Gracie Mansion. For years, my neighbor has smoked marijuana several times a day in his backyard, about 15 feet from my bedroom window, causing the smell to waft through my air conditioning in the summer, and making it impossible to keep my window open in other seasons. It happens in other places as well. It happened to me outside an ice cream parlor in Jupiter, Florida, just a few years ago.

Antisocial behavior is a reality of humanity. It doesn’t just exist in the United States. I once watched someone take a dump on a sidewalk in Vancouver, Canada, and saw someone shoot up heroin in a park in Amsterdam. However, I did notice a much lower tolerance for it elsewhere. The homeless man who squatted on the sidewalk in Vancouver was quickly escorted away by law enforcement, and the sidewalk was quickly cleaned up. In Amsterdam, police swept the park where those people with an addiction gathered. When a mother sent her children to distract riders on the subway in Rome, probably so she could pickpocket tourists, cops dragged her and the kids off the train in front of everyone. No one protested, and some riders even applauded. In Zadar, Croatia, I watched a cafe owner chase a beggar away with a broomstick after the beggar had asked diners for money. In Aruba, I saw a bar owner dismantle the tents of vagrants camping on the beach outside his establishment and throw them in a dumpster.

I sometimes tell these stories to progressives in New York, and they usually respond with a disgusted, “Is that what you think we should do here?”

My answer is that those countries have many economic and social policies they desire – universal healthcare, robust public transit, and well-funded social services. Despite their protests otherwise, it is not unrelated to how these societies police antisocial behavior.

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When Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed Lindsay Boylan’s underdog campaign for the open City Council seat on Manhattan’s West Side earlier this month, even some of his biggest supporters were surprised and concerned that he was taking too bold a step. Boylan was one of four candidates running in the special election to replace now-State Sen. Erik Bottcher in the 3rd Council District, which includes the West Village, Chelsea, and Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan.

The frontrunner for the seat was Carl Wilson, Bottcher’s chief of staff and a longtime Democratic operative in the district. He faced Boylan, an activist best known for being one of the women who accused former Gov. Andrew Cuomo of assault in 2021, leading to his resignation and ultimate political fall. Also in the race were Layla Law-Gisiko and Leslie Boghosian Murphy.

The election seemed like one of those standard open-and-shut special election contests in New York City, in which the long-anointed heir apparent with significant local ties slides right into an open seat in a low-turnout special election. It wasn’t obvious that the race was close. Wilson had long built support over the years, positioning himself as Bottcher’s obvious successor. It would be difficult for anyone to overcome that, especially a candidate like Boylan, who had tangible ties to the district.

That was apparent in the results Tuesday night. Wilson outpolled Boyland and his other opponents by nearly 20 points, getting 43 percent to Boylan’s 25 percent of the vote. Law-Gisiko, who was running a campaign focused on opposing further big developments in the district, received 20 percent and Boghosian Murphy finished with just under 11 percent. Since no one received 50 percent of the vote, the election will go to ranked-choice voting until someone reaches a majority. Those results will be released next week. Still, Boylan conceded Tuesday night, effectively making it clear that once the losing candidates’ votes are reallocated, Wilson will come out the winner.

Mamdani backed Boylan in part because the district was friendly to him last year. Mamdani won the district by 15 points in November and by 19 points in last June’s Democratic primary. It is one of 18 Council districts across the city that Mamdani won in both elections last year, districts where Mamdani should be most politically influential. Facing a hostile City Council led by Speaker Julie Menin, who is notably more moderate than he, Mamdani needs all the support in the body he can get, and he needs an ally in this seat. Boylan, a longtime supporter, would be a key vote for his agenda. Wilson, who is a more mainstream liberal, will be an ally of Menin.

The district, which stretches from Canal Street to West 57th Street, west of Fifth Avenue and Broadway along the Hudson River, includes the notorious Hudson Yards development and the Elliot-Chelsea public housing complex, which has been eyed for demolition and redevelopment. Law-Gisiko focused her campaign on opposing the redevelopment and won the precincts that included the housing complex. Wilson was the only candidate in the race running on a YIMBY - or pro-development – platform, and an area in which he would likely be an ally to Mamdani.

Even though Mamdani had won the district last year, even those who believe his influence is significant were not convinced he would have enough juice to push Boylan over the line. Mamdani putting his reputation and name on the line for a flawed candidate like Boylan was a high-risk, low-reward move. The mayor has been shy about using his influence in recent political fights. For example, he did not show up to lend his name and face at rallies organized by his most loyal supporters calling for Gov. Kathy Hochul to support giving the city the authority to raise taxes on the rich – one of Mamdani’s major campaign promises. Why he thought it was worth it to intervene on Boylan’s behalf here was weird.

As a result, Mamdani is facing his first big question: whether his big win last year actually translates into an equally large sphere of influence over voters. Mamdani’s detractors will emphasize that his inability to deliver a district he won by double digits to an ally proves his influence is much weaker than his supporters’ image of him suggests. I think there’s some truth to that, but this is just one race, and while this district voted for him, it isn’t a hardcore base of support. Mamdani will have much better luck in the ‘Commie Corridor” in Brooklyn and Queens in the upcoming June primaries for Congress and the state legislature.

Nevertheless, Boylan’s loss is problematic for Mamdani in terms of advancing his agenda through a hostile Council and a skeptical Albany. Much of Mamdani’s support is soft. It came from his superior campaign over his opponent, a washed-up former governor. His margin of victory, like most elected officials’, did not come solely from his loyal followers, but from converts and persuadable who aren’t necessarily married to Mamdani’s brand or agenda. He doesn’t have enough loyal support in City Hall or Albany to push his agenda through the legislative process, and Boylan’s loss gives legislators, even in districts that he won, some signal that Mamdani is not an immediate political threat to them. Their ties to the district matter more. It isn’t clear he can expand his base of support, either, which he will need to do.

A few weeks ago, I pointed out that Mamdani’s election victory did not have a broad geographic reach. He actually won fewer Council districts than Cuomo in the primary, and despite his win, his left-wing allies did not score substantial wins on the Council level. Support for democratic socialist candidates who were not incumbents was largely confined to Mamdani alone. This is problematic for him in trying to get an agenda through the City Council or the state legislature, where members represent districts with geographic boundaries. The mayor has the same problem national Democrats have with the U.S. Senate – Mamdani’s support is so concentrated in a small number of geographic areas that it doesn’t translate into influence outside those select few areas. Winning 90 percent of the vote in Bushwick can make you mayor, but it can’t win you a majority on the City Council or in Albany.

The deep loyalty voters in the Commie Corridor have for him will help Mamdani in June across the East River. However, if he was hoping to build on his win, and increase his influence enough to pressure Speaker Menin or Gov. Hochul to give significant concessions to his, and the democratic socialist agenda, then Mamdani has to show that his influence is as big as his victory suggests – and that showing that he can help candidates ideologically aligned with him win districts, like the 3rd Council District, and areas, like Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen, that he did outside the “Commie Corridor.” Those are the areas that made him mayor.

That didn’t happen on Tuesday.

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Virginia fought back.

Commonwealth voters on Tuesday narrowly approved a controversial plan to redraw the state’s congressional district lines this year to allow Democrats, who have had full control of the commonwealth since last year’s election, to be favored in 10 of Virginia’s 11 House districts, up from six currently. The redraw is the latest battlefield in the ongoing mid-decade redistricting war; an effort to cancel out Republican efforts to redraw maps in states like Texas, North Carolina, and Missouri, which Republicans drew, hoping to give them an advantage in this year’s midterm elections, where they expected to get routed nationwide.

This war started last summer in Texas, where Donald Trump pushed the state’s GOP-controlled government to draw out five Democratic seats to give Republicans an advantage. The plan was based on a similar mid-decade redistricting that Texas underwent in 2003 under former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Then, Republicans were also facing a closely divided House, and Texas Republicans redrew the state’s map to end the careers of several conservative Democrats who consistently won districts that otherwise voted Republican.

Presumably, Trump and the GOP thought Democrats wouldn’t, or couldn’t, fight back, just as they did not in 2003.1 It certainly seemed that way. In a good-faith effort to provide leadership on the issue in the 2010s, Democrats worked to eliminate partisan gerrymandering in states like California and New York. In Virginia, as well, where Republicans drew a brutal pro-GOP gerrymander in 2011, Democrats sought to prevent it from happening again when they took full control in Richmond in 2019 by making the process nonpartisan. This resulted in the current map, where Democrats and Republicans are each considered “safe” in four seats apiece, and three other seats are considered “competitive.” Republicans thought Democrats wouldn’t renege on that – and figured doing so would require voter approval anyway, and they wouldn’t dare risk looking like hypocrites.

But they did, and it paid off – with a catch. While Democrats won in Virginia, voters didn’t give Democratic retaliation tactics a full-throated seal of approval, and in their post-referendum victory celebrations, Democrats should keep that in mind, even if they loathe to.

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Everyone by now knows the story of Henry VIII and his six wives. It has been a cultural fascination for nearly half a millennium. In fact, next year, 2027, will be 500 years since England’s most infamous king started the process to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and triggered a massive turning point in world history.

The backstory is familiar to most. Catherine, the daughter of the famous Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, who drove the last Muslims out of Spain in 1492, and that same year financed Christopher Columbus’ trip to the New World, had originally come to England to marry Henry’s elder brother, Prince Arthur. After Arthur died, and Henry became king, Catherine married him. It was an effort to keep England’s unstable Tudor Dynasty in power after a century of civil war by gaining an alliance with Spain, quickly becoming Europe’s most powerful country.

However, after nearly 20 years of marriage, Catherine had failed to give Henry a surviving son, leaving only a daughter, Princess Mary, as his heir. Henry was convinced God had punished him for marrying his brother’s widow, which is frowned upon in the Bible, and sought to annul the marriage and try again with a new wife. We all know what happened next.

Although Catherine was from Spain, thanks to her genealogy and the inbreeding of Europe’s royal families, she actually may have had a better claim to the English throne than Henry did. There were caveats, of course. Her claim was through a female line, always considered less legitimate than a male-line descendant, and English law prohibited foreign-born claimants from taking the throne.

To understand this, we have to go back over a century before either Henry or Catherine was born, to 1377. That year, King Edward III died and left the throne to his young grandson Richard II. Richard’s father and Edward’s son, also named Edward, had predeceased his father. The dead king had three other living sons, the eldest being John of Gaunt.

John governed England as regent for his nephew during his minority, but after John died in 1399, his son Henry dethroned his cousin and took the throne as Henry IV, the first king of the Lancaster Dynasty. For the next 86 years, England became quagmired in a civil war called the Wars of the Roses, which were fought between John’s descendants, the Lancasters, and the descendants of John’s younger brother, Edmund, Duke of York – the Yorks. The war only ended when Henry Tudor, Henry VIII’s father, defeated the York king, Richard III, at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 14851.

As was common in European royal families, Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII were related. They were both direct descendants of John of Gaunt.2 However, Catherine was a direct descendant of one of John’s legitimate children, while Henry’s ancestry was more ambiguous – he descended from one of John’s illegitimate children who were later. controversially, made legitimate.

John had three wives. His first, Blanche of Lancaster, was the mother of Henry IV. She died young, at age 26. John’s second wife, Constance, also died young, around her 40th birthday. John and Constance had one child, Catherine of Lancaster, who became queen of Castile in 1390. Catherine of Aragon was Catherine of Lancaster’s great-granddaughter and was named for her.

John’s third wife was his former mistress, Katherine Swynford, with whom he had an adulterous relationship while married to Constance. The two married after Constance’s death, but they already had several children, including a son, John Beaufort. John of Gaunt convinced Pope Boniface IX, who was locked in an ongoing scuffle with France and needed all the friends he could get, to solemnize his marriage to Swynford and legitimize their children, including John Beaufort. The pope agreed, hoping to retain English support. That meant that John Beaufort, who was born a bastard of the mistress Katherine Swynford while John of Gaunt’s legal wife, Constance, was still alive, was now considered legitimate and had a claim to the English throne. Interestingly, both John Beaufort and his half-sister, Catherine of Lancaster, were born in the same year.

It is John Beaufort from whom Henry VIII descends. John Beaufort’s granddaughter, Margaret Beaufort, was the mother of Henry VII, who won the English crown at Bosworth Field, and Henry VIII’s grandmother3. At the time, the only legitimate heirs to John of Gaunt were the reigning King of Portugal, as a descendant of John of Gaunt and Blanche’s eldest daughter, Philippa, and John of Gaunt’s great-granddaughter, and Catherine of Aragon’s mother, Isabella of Castile. Since. Neither the king of Portugal nor the queen of Spain could contest the crown; the legitimate claim would have passed on to their children, including Catherine of Aragon.

If one doesn’t recognize John Beaufort as legitimate, as many in England did not at the start of the Tudor Dynasty, then the legitimate claim through John of Gaunt goes directly through Isabella I and her daughter, Catherine of Aragon. That makes Catherine a more legitimate heir to the English throne than the husband who tossed her aside, altering the history of Christianity.

This did not go unnoticed, even then. After winning the crown, Henry VII became obsessed with securing it. He married Elizabeth of York, Richard III’s niece, to allow their children to claim the throne through both John of Gaunt’s line and Edmund, Duke of York’s, ending the Wars of the Roses. Henry still feared uprisings against his rule, and often faced them, due to his claim being passed through a former bastard, so it made sense to marry his son to one of the last legitimate descendants of John of Gaunt – Catherine of Aragon. Any child of Henry’s sons and Catherine would have been confirmed as legitimate. Since this was vital for the survival of the Tudor Dynasty, Henry was willing to break Biblical rules about marrying brothers’ widows to make it happen.

Interestingly, this lineage story played a role in English history decades later.

Catherine had an older sister, Joanna, who inherited their mother’s throne and would have been higher up in the line of succession to the English crown than Catherine. Joanna’s son, Charles, was King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, and it was his troops’ sacking Rome in 1527 that helped convince the Pope to deny Henry VIII his divorce from Charles’ aunt. Charles’ son was Philip II of Spain, who married Catherine and Henry’s daughter, Mary, and later sent the Spanish Armada to dethrone Mary’s half-sister, Elizabeth I, in 1588. Therefore, Philip himself, who was controversially King of England for a short time when married to Mary, may also have had a more legitimate claim to the English throne than the woman he married and her half-sister, whom he tried to knock off the throne.

Philip knew this. He had planned to put his own daughter, Isabella Clara, on the English throne had the Spanish Armada succeeded, declaring the Tudors ineligible due to their claim stemming from John of Gaunt’s adultery. Philip would have claimed the English crown for his daughter through his ancestor, John of Gaunt’s legitimate daughter, Catherine of Lancaster – a claim that, at the time, was 200 years old.

Ok, you win.

I’ve finally surrendered and decided to write about Hasan Piker. I know a lot of you are likely bored of this topic by now – and I don’t blame you – but this will probably, hopefully, be my one and only post about this topic. I’m hoping this will make everything I have to say about it clear.

Ezra Klein’s editorial over the weekend just offered proof that the discourse has completely veered away from what it was initially about into a discussion about a Hasan Piker problem that doesn’t exist, so here I am, trying to steer it back.

I’ve never personally liked Piker, because he strikes me as a creepy, arrogant, cocksure dude who wants nothing more than to be influential and powerful – and if he ever achieves that, he’s liable to utilize that power in negative ways. He’s a shock jock with a socialist veneer, who enjoys saying things that will outrage people into sharing his posts, knowing he’s too rich, male, connected, and good-looking to ever be held accountable for them, and then the more clicks mean more money. The only reason he’s ever come to my attention is because of other gay men who watch him simply to see if he takes his shirt off. Maybe he is better looking than most of the other trolls who spend hours livestreaming their every thought on the internet, but honestly, I’ve engaged in meaningful conversation with better-looking people throwing axes at a bar. My response to the men and women who defend watching his streams because of his looks is: “Go outside.” You don’t need to subject yourself to the King of the Tankies verbally vomiting his love for terrorists just because you want to look at a hot guy. Get an OnlyFans account.

Two weeks is a long time, and there’s a war going on, so, understandably, we all have forgotten how this Piker discourse started. It began not because a candidate for office decided to engage him on his Twitch stream, as Klein seems to think. It began because a candidate for office - Abdul El-Sayed, the Bernie-Sanders endorsed underdog in the Democratic primary for Michigan’s open Senate seat - decided to bring him on the campaign trail in hopes Piker has enough pull with young voters in Michigan to save his faltering campaign against State Sen. Mallory McMorrow and Rep. Haley Stevens. The decision by El-Sayed to platform someone who trafficks in anti-semitism so soon after a Jewish school was attacked in Michigan, in order to focus on college students as a voting bloc in an election being held in the middle of the summer, is problematic enough. The bigger issue is that by campaigning with Piker, El-Sayed isn’t only platforming him – he is embracing his worldview, and bringing the Democratic brand along. El-Sayed will probably lose the primary anyway, but he opened the door for other Democrats to further platform Piker, not as a moderator of political debate, but as a Democratic Party powerbroker and leader of the progressive movement. This would, frankly, be devastating proof that people on the left fundamentally do not understand or care to understand why they’ve struggled to gain and hold power for generations.

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The second season finale of the hit HBO Max show The Pitt will air next Thursday night, and it has sparked much more controversy than the first. From a storyline involving ICE agents to accusations of misogyny and racism, this season, which started in January, has triggered a lot of hot takes.

The hit series burst onto the scene last winter. The first season was critically acclaimed, and several of the actors, including the creator and star, Noah Wyle, have won numerous awards, including Emmys. The Pitt was renewed for a third season even before the first episode of its second season aired.

Set over the course of one day in a Pittsburgh emergency department, with each episode shot in real time over the course of one hour, similar to 24, The Pitt has gotten rave reviews not only from critics, but also the medical community, for its realistic portrayal of the stress and chaos of emergency rooms and issues related to healthcare in the United States. At the center of the story is Dr. Michael Robinavitch, known as “Robby,” the senior attending at the emergency room called “the pitt1.” While the series features quite an ensemble, Robby is the show's nucleus, and his character arc this season has been central to the controversial reactions.

Watching the latest episode, it dawned on me that the show’s title, The Pitt, may not just be a reference to the nickname of the medical facility in which the show is set. It may be a little too on-the-nose, but perhaps The Pitt is also a reference to where Robby is, emotionally, mentally, and physically. Robby is stuck in “the pitt” – not just the facility, but in the figurative ditch he has been in for some time.

Fans of The Pitt know Robby’s backstory from Season One. He is still struggling with PTSD stemming from his experiences during the COVID-19 Pandemic, including and especially related to the loss of his mentor and friend during it. In the first season, he suffered a panic attack, and his mental health problems were left unresolved. In the second season, it feels like they worsen. He’s planning a sabbatical. After his shift, he will take his motorcycle for a three-month ride across the country. While he sells the sabbatical as a temporary reprieve from the stresses of working in the emergency department, the hints over the course of the season tell a different story – the trip is a cover for his plans to take his own life, as the stresses and trauma of his job have finally caught up to him. It’s not lost on me this season, during which Robby is doing one last shift before “declaring independence” from “the pitt”, takes place on the Fourth of July, Independence Day. He all but confirms his suicidal feelings in the most recent episode, where he tells his friend, and motorcycle repairman, Duke (Jeff Kober), that he “doesn’t want to be anywhere anymore.” As someone who has gone through these mental battles when I was younger, I can understand what he’s thinking. He feels trapped and suffocated, facing brick walls closing in on all sides. The only place he exists that gives him any meaning is a place that is also killing him. Robby and his job are in a toxic relationship. I don’t think he’s necessarily planning on taking his own life, though it’s definitely on his mind. I think he hopes the three-month sabbatical and ride across country will convince him that there’s someplace else he’s at least as needed, if not more so, than “the Pitt.”

Robby, this season, is giving a master class on one of the many reasons the “man problem” manifests itself in destructive ways in society today, MAGA being one example.

The Pitt is set in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the heart of America’s Rust Belt. Robby is a white man born and raised in the Rust Belt, probably in a working-class background. He was no doubt raised to believe that the emotions he is feeling now are a character flaw. It’s proof of weakness; a failure.

Robby is tormented by that, and he is doing what he was brought up to do to fight that – not seek help, but try to bury it deep down in “the pitt.” He is battling it, and like many men – especially white men – who grew up in the type of culture he likely did, he is losing the battle.

The abusive, bullying behavior he is often accused of this season against other doctors, including most notably Dr. Samira Mohan (Supriya Ganesh), who herself is struggling with emotional issues while on the job, is part of that battle. This is trying to project strength out of fear that others are discovering your “weakness.”

Throughout the entire season, Robby hints that he might not go on his sabbatical after all, trying to make himself into a “martyr.” He shows up to his last shift looking for a reason not to go. In the most recent episode, he blows up at Charge Nurse Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa) after she assures him that the emergency department will survive without him – something he doesn’t want to hear. In teasers for the season finale airing this Thursday, he tells his presumptive replacement, Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), that he doesn’t believe she can take on his duties after discovering she has a condition stemming from a childhood illness that triggers seizures. The frosty relationship between Robby and Al-Hashimi, who brings extensive experience in high-stress environments, is a major plot point in the season. The teaser clip, in which Robby scolds Al-Hashimi and tells her he has doubts about her abilities, triggered backlash online and accusations of misogyny. However, I think it’s about him looking for a way out of his “escape.” We saw all season that Robby was desperately trying to cling to anything that would convince him to cancel his sabbatical and stay.

What is the core reason for his martyr complex? Well, he needs a reason to stay alive, and “the pitt” is his reason. Having no family of his own, he struggles with his purpose and legacy. He doesn’t know who or what he is without the Pitt, and fears finding out that maybe he isn’t anyone outside of it all – something that can be a catalyst to suicide. Finding out Al-Hashimi has a compromising medical condition may just be what he needs to justify staying and being “the martyr” he is accused of being, and remaining in the safe, familiar embrace of “the Pitt.”

His fraught relationship with Dr. Frank Langdon (Patrick Ball) is also a major plot point in the second season, after Langdon is caught stealing Libirum from the emergency department in Season One and is temporarily fired and sent to rehab. Robby hoped to leave on sabbatical before seeing Langdon again, but the latter returns to work early, and Robby seeks to keep his distance from him. It’s easy to dismiss this dynamic as Robby still being unforgiving of Langdon, his protege, for betraying him, but I think there’s something else at play there. He’s mad at Langdon because Langdon wasn’t afraid to own his failures and show his face at the place he failed and be vulnerable. He’s showing Robby up in that regard.

It’s understandable that a lot of people see Robby as a villain, and his treatment of Mohan – and the young and idealistic Dr. Victoria Javadi (Shabana Azeez) can come across as misogyny. However, he saves his worst animosity for Langdon, the other major white male character in the show. I don’t get that he’s mad at Langdon merely for betraying him by stealing drugs, but he’s also mad at betraying him as a “man” in dealing with his faults.

There have been quite a few brilliantly written white male characters - Saxon on The White Lotus, for example. I got some criticism for analyzing his character a year ago, but as Saxon’s storyline played out, I recognized something familiar that I also see with Robby.

As a society, we have been trying to, or told to, look into what is happening to men in our society that makes them feel forgotten, targeted, or socially isolated, and leads many to find solace in carnival barkers, conspiracy theorists, and dangerous social and political movements. Robby’s story, while maybe not inspiring empathy from many of us, could provide some insight into social dynamics we’ve been missing for a long time.

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Back in 2023, after the Democratic Socialists of America punted on trying to expand their small City Council caucus, which had been decimated when half the members of the Council Progressive Caucus resigned earlier that year, I warned that it would come back to haunt them if one of their own succeeded Eric Adams as mayor.

Three months into the term of that mayor, that prediction has manifested.

Spring means budget negotiation season at City Hall. The city budget is due by the end of June, and every year the mayor and the City Council release their proposed budgets, then hash them out in negotiations over the course of the Spring to reach an agreement, usually in the 11th hour in late June. The big-budget “dances” of the Bloomberg era, where the mayor would propose drastic cuts to services, only for the City Council to push back and everyone to declare themselves heroes when an agreement was reached not to close firehouses or shutter after-school programs, are so far in the past that I’m unsure anyone in power currently remembers them. This year, however, those “dances” might be making a renaissance. New York City hasn’t had a situation where the Council and the mayor were this ideologically dissimilar since at least the first Bloomberg term, where he regularly battled with Democratic Speaker Gifford Miller – possibly even farther back than that.

Both Mamdani and the City Council released competing budgets last week. Mamdani’s proposed budget raises property taxes by 9.5 percent to make up for the city’s estimated $6 billion shortfall. Calling it a “last resort,” Mamdani hopes the threat of a property tax hike will push the state legislature in Albany to agree to let him raise taxes on the rich instead, something the legislature and Gov. Kathy Hochul have given a firm “no” to. However, the City Council, led by moderate Speaker Julie Menin, who opposes Mamdani’s proposed tax hikes, stepped on his message by releasing a budget that closes the shortfall through revenue reevaluations and cost-saving measures.

Mamdani called the budget proposal “unrealistic,” and his supporters have targeted Menin and other Council members, claiming their budget is meant to protect the rich and avoid putting the governor and the legislature on the spot on the issue of raising taxes on the rich, ahead of their June primaries.

Mamdani supporters are convinced that his stellar communication skills – which I always felt were overrated – will harness public opinion and push the Council or the state legislature to approve whatever he wants. The problem with that is that public opinion is a weapon that can be used most effectively only at election time. While the governor and state legislature are up for reelection this year, Gov. Hochul is not facing a primary challenge from the left and is more focused on her Republican opponent, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman. The state legislative primary slate is already set, and only a couple of the Democrats resisting Mamdani’s call to authorize tax hikes on the rich are in any danger of losing primaries.1

As several state legislators reminded me this week, even if Albany allows Mamdani to raise taxes, the City Council may not agree, and they’re not facing voters again in 2029, and nearly two-thirds of the body is term-limited. Progressives’ inability or disinterest in building a large Council caucus after their 2021 failures, and Mamdani’s inability, despite his win, to build a larger coalition beyond his core neighborhoods, are coming back to bite them.

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Arthur Miller, alongside Tennessee Williams and John Patrick Shanley, has always been one of my favorite playwrights. For me, Miller’s plays are the most timeless in terms of American culture. You can drop any of his works in any era of American history, and they fit.

One of them, Death Of A Salesman, is returning to Broadway this month. I got a chance to see it in previews last month at the Winter Garden Theater. The last time I saw the play was over 25 years ago, so I had forgotten much of it, and after seeing the new production last week, I thought they had added to it or changed it to make it feel more relevant to our current social climate. They didn’t; it was just that relevant, these many decades later.

Miller wrote the play shortly after the end of World War II, when the United States was firmly established as the economic and military superpower, leading the fight against Communism in favor of Capitalism and free enterprise. The story is widely known. Aging salesman Willy Loman watches his career and legacy collapse in front of him, leaving him humiliated in the face of his wife, two sons, successful neighbors, and the ghost of his dead, rich brother. It’s perhaps the closest thing an American story gets to a Greek tragedy.

The cast in the new revival, which opens April 6 at the Winter Garden Theater, is phenomenal. Laurie Metcalf (Roseanne) is Willy’s loyal wife, Linda, while Ben Ahlers (The Gilded Age)1 and Christopher Abbott (Wolf Man) take on the roles of sons Happy and Biff2. Jonathan Cake (…And Just Like This) is cast as Willy’s brother, Uncle Ben. However, the true star of the show is the surprise choice to play Willy - Nathan Lane.

Having a gay actor known for playing iconic effeminate roles star as the epitome of post-war maleness felt like a weird “woke” choice, but it was a role that he seemed to fit easily into. There were moments where Lane was almost frightening. In one scene, where he is especially angry, his face turns beet red, and you can hear the huffs of his anger reaching a boiling point. You expect him to throw a chair or something. He disappears into the role, embracing the degradation and humiliation Willy is forced to bear. Willy is infamous for being delusional, but Lane’s performance seems to suggest that his delusions are a security blanket or a shield, meant to protect and/or absorb the blows he takes. You almost don’t want to wake up from his delusional state at times.

There were a lot of very uncomfortable moments in the play, more uncomfortable than in other versions I’ve watched. The scene where Willy is fired after asking Howard, the son of his former boss, who now runs the company, for a non-traveling job, and several of the family conflicts between the Lomans, make you feel like you should leave the theater. Are we supposed to be witnessing these intimate moments this way?

Death Of A Salesman always felt like a critique of American Capitalism, and certainly this version came across that way. Willy, hardworking and loyal, works himself to the verge of collapse, and all he gets from the company he had been loyal to for decades is a “so long, get some rest.” Despite all the hard work, he is unable to pay his bills, leaving his family struggling. Willy is treated no differently than a piece of machinery – tossed in the trash when it can no longer adequately serve its purpose. This is not what the American Dream was supposed to be, right?

Connecting it to modern culture and politics – because that is what I do here – I thought about how that conclusion may convince male leftists to believe economic populism - eat the rich - will work. In the play, Miller makes Howard look like a sociopathic weasel who was handed everything and is more concerned with his new toy than with his dedicated worker's well-being. What if, politically, we turned the entire Capitalist system nto Howards? Certainly, then, the downtrodden men of America who fawn over people like Donald Trump would support that, right? They would realize the rich oligarchs and business owners who employ them don’t actually care for them, and all their hard work may one day be for naught.

No, and Miller explores that.

Despite Willy’s anger at Howard and jealousy of his more successful neighbors, he never shows any real disrespect toward either of them and is apologetic if he feels he has crossed a line. Instead, he lashes out at his struggling son, who is just as much a “victim” of the system as he is. Willy Loman has such ironclad trust in a system that progressives even today believe men like Loman can be convinced to turn against, that he chose to die before turning on it. It can’t be ignored that Willy took his own life only after taking a “handout” from his more successful neighbor. Most men don’t want to be taken care of, not by their loved ones, nor by their community, nor by the state. They want to be the ones caring for others. That is the essence of manhood, not just power, but self-reliance. Has anything changed in the last 80 years to think men are more likely to turn against this system than they were then? No. In fact, I would argue it got worse because many men like Willy Loman today have found a way to work that unfair system to their own advantage, and society’s disadvantage. We created a society where men can monetize the type of frustration Loman feels, where he takes out his frustrations not on the rich and powerful who scorn and dismiss him, but instead on those below him. That, to be brief, is what the “manosphere” has become. I can’t help but wonder if Willy Loman, or more likely one of his sons, would find a second act as an anti-intellectual grifter on the Manosphere, screaming about immigrants or feminism, hoping that perching themselves higher than other groups of people will make up for their failures. There were moments where I wondered if Willy was less delusional and more angry; he could actually make a successful run for political office.

Much of the play focuses on Willy’s belief in the importance of being liked, and on how reputation and camaraderie go a long way in business. I couldn’t help but think of the connection to “likes” on social media, or Donald Trump, or Manosphere podcasters, constantly talking about how “liked” they are, as if nothing else they do or say matters. Being liked is, in itself, a success, and now we monetize it. The era of social media has turned likeability into a commodity, but it has also altered its definition. People don’t necessarily have to think positively of you; they just have to consume your content, even if they dislike it - what we call “hate watching” or “hate clicking.”

Which got me thinking: is that how we got here? Sure, Willy commits suicide at the end of the play, but what about the Willys who didn’t? Or the Biffs and Happys who grew up having seen how the system chews up and spits out men like themselves and their father? How do decades and multiple generations of the type of dynamic Miller wrote about nearly 80 years ago influence the type of social backlash that led to people like Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate, Myron Gains, or even Hasan Piker? Willy wasn’t a bad guy - even if he did cheat on his wife. He was a simple man, a workhorse, who valued building and leveraging relationships. Did decades of watching this type of good-natured person get taken advantage of lead future generations - or those men themselves - to come to the conclusion that there’s no point in being good, hardworking, and friendly? Social media took it further, making men realize not only that being a good person doesn’t pay off, but actually being a bad person may be the ticket to power, success, and financial freedom.

There’s a lot about Death Of A Salesman that feels relevant today, but it’s also a reminder that the “man problem” is nothing new. The generations before us didn’t always have it easy, or even necessarily better. Men have always been forced to battle forces that make them feel emasculated. Willy deserved better, but so did millions of other men who, like him, took failure personally. We can do our best to try to build a better world for them through the type of social welfare that could’ve helped Willy and his family keep the lights on and the bills paid, but ultimately, what men like Willy - and those who are attracted to “Manosphere” types today - want is, for better or worse, power, independence, and a legacy. Is it any wonder they gravitated politically toward a billionaire with his name on skyscrapers?

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