Charles Fain Lehman, Ilya Shapiro, Renu Mukherjee, and Daniel Di Martino discuss the attack on two Minneapolis state lawmakers, the rallies against Trump, the military parade in D.C., and the New York City mayoral race.
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Audio Transcript
Daniel Di Martino: No, you know, my problem is that I do think Mamdani is a Marxist who is extremely dangerous, who hates America, who hates the West, who hates the Constitution. And my concern, aside from for New York City, which I think is a very important government that you don’t want to give to a person like that, is that it could become a platform if he wins for more socialists like him to win higher and other offices, and that would be really bad for America in the long run.
Charles Fain Lehman: Welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. I’m your host Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor of City Journal. Joining me on the panel today are Ilya Shapiro, constitutional law guy at the Manhattan Institute, Renu Mukherjee, responsible for all things… political science. I really, I got to give us a more succinct summary for you, Renu. It’s like you do demographics, you do politics, you do education. That’s also true.
Ilya Shapiro: I think she, her specialty is really with Dunkin’ Donuts and coffee in the northeast.
Renu Mukherjee: It is.
Daniel Di Martino: Education…
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, response for all things Dunkin’ Donuts at the Manhattan Institute, and Dan Di Martino, Master of Immigration at the Manhattan Institute.
Daniel Di Martino: Master. I’m a fan of that one now.
Ilya Shapiro: And I think he benches more than anyone else at MI.
Charles Fain Lehman: That’s also true.
Daniel Di Martino: No, no, no, Ralph, Ralph has me on that one.
Charles Fain Lehman: We’re going to do, we’re going to do a special episode that’s only, it’s going to be you, Ralph and Tal, uh, lifting competition for an episode. I’ve been, I’ve been promising this when we hit 10,000 subscribers.
Ilya Shapiro: This’ll date me, but there was a Saturday Night Live skit about, called “How Much Ya Bench” from like 30 years ago.
Charles Fain Lehman: And that will be the theme of an upcoming episode. If people like, subscribe, and do all the other things that I tell them to do at the end of the episodes.
Alright, I want take us right into this weekend’s news. Over the weekend, two Minneapolis state lawmakers and their spouses were attacked. One couple was murdered. The others look likely to recover. I think they’re awake. They’re supposed to give a statement. Maybe by the time this comes out, they will have given the statement. The alleged suspect, Vance Boelter, has been apprehended after a multi-day manhunt. Boelter was reportedly a Trump supporter. His list of targets included Planned Parenthood clinics. We don’t really know the full motivation, but it sure looks like the right-wing instantiation of the political violence we’ve been talking about on this show. So, you know, do we see this as part of that broader trend? And what do we make of this incident over and above the fact that obviously it’s terrible?
Ilya Shapiro: It’s bizarre that he went after these particular lawmakers, because I think they’re the Democrats who crossed over to vote against healthcare for illegal aliens, for example, which is why the initial narrative was the thinking that he was a far-left guy. Could be horseshoe theory. Who knows? Just extremists against centrists? But yeah, it’s not a good development.
Daniel Di Martino: I read that, Ilya, read that it’s only one of the lawmakers that voted against it. One of the others was not actually against the health care for illegals. It’s just very random, you know?
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I mean it seems-
Ilya Shapiro: And also an appointee to some work force commission by two democratic governors, including Tim Walz, the Kamala Harris’ VP nominee. I think it feels like the 70s. We’re just spiraling with this weird political violence in general.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, the guy’s work history is also quite strange. He runs a non-specific NGO. He might have been working in Africa. It seems like he did a bunch of other jobs. He might have worked at the 7-Eleven. He seems like an all-around very strange individual, notwithstanding the fact that he dressed as a police officer and attempted to murder several members of the state legislature.
Yeah, no, I mean, I think the story that I’ve been thinking about is Eric Rudolph, the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bomber who was, I mean, we don’t fully know this guy’s motivations, but Rudolph was motivated by his anti-abortion convictions and by sort of a broader socially conservative criticism of the culture. I mean, I think, you know, this does stand out to me and I’m curious what people think. This does stand out to me as… There have been instances of right-wing political violence in the past five, 10 years. It’s obviously not isolated, but it is not the sort of recent tempo. So what do we make of that shift that we’ve seen a bunch of this sort of like “Free Palestine,” mostly motivated political violence.
Ilya Shapiro: Well, the Omni-Cause, right?
Charles Fain Lehman: Well, in a sense, right, but like that’s, you know, that doesn’t seem like the story here, from what we know. Yeah.
Ilya Shapiro: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Daniel Di Martino: Well, my concern with what’s happening is that there’s clearly a gradual increase in the number of incidents, the intensity of the incidents. It’s happening with several political issues. It’s not now concentrated on only one. And I think that the consequence of this, if we don’t address it somehow, and I’m not sure how, because maybe it’s related to just how online culture is shaping up and brainwashing, essentially self-brainwashing online.
What the consequence is going to be is that there’s going to be a lot more security, a lot more surveillance, a lot more, you know, you won’t be able to access your state representative perhaps as much as you could anymore. Maybe Congress, entering Congress like we can now, is going to be restricted. Maybe entering the state legislature is going to be restricted. And that’s just going to result in lower quality of life, less freedom, less representative democracy and living more in a security state. You know, it’s kind of like the consequence of living in a low-trust society, right? And it’s just a shame.
Ilya Shapiro: That reminds me of the Pennsylvania Avenue that goes by the White House. I’m old enough to have been there when it was open to traffic. And then, I think it was after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that it was temporarily, “temporarily” closed and of course never reopened and now it’s a completely solid protected thing with bollocks and all these other things and eventually a second or even a third fence around the White House.
Charles Fain Lehman: “Bollards,” not “bollocks,” which means a very different thing.
Renu Mukherjee: I think…
Ilya Shapiro: Very good, very good. That was a very good malapropism.
Daniel Di Martino: You’re right, it’s very sad. It’s very sad. And I fear that we are constantly progressing towards that type of society.
Renu Mukherjee: I was just going to add that this is someone, know, Ilya mentioned the “Omni-Cause.” This seems to be someone that had “omni-cause,” that sort of mentality on both sides. And I wonder how much of it is also just someone who had grown quite dissatisfied with life, with politics, both personally, both in terms of what’s going on in the country with Democrats and Republicans. His roommate, his personal story is quite interesting also in that his roommate was interviewed in Minneapolis by police officers and had said that over the last few weeks, days he had noticed that this individual had sort of devolved into a despair spiral.
Apparently he was living in this unit with this friend of his for the last, you know, several decades because of convenience with respect to his job in Minneapolis as a funeral worker. At the same time though, he did have a family, a wife, children in a house in the suburb of Minneapolis. So, you know, perhaps it is because of convenience with respect to his job, we don’t know. But that also doesn’t change the fact that, you know, this is a husband, a father, you know, living by himself with this roommate in this small apartment. Roommate says he’s sort of been toward a downward trajectory. And so, you know, this is, he could have motivation.
Ilya Shapiro: Yeah, if you have roommates when you’re in your 50s, that’s a red flag. And then weren’t the flyers for the No Kings protest found in his car as well? I mean, this is just all over the place.
Renu Mukherjee: Yes.
Charles Fain Lehman: I think the theory there is that he was intending to target the protests and that’s why he had collected the flyers rather than that he was endorsing the sentiment of the protest.
Daniel Di Martino: Well, but what I mean is, I thought the roommate was like a college roommate, and like who knows him since high school. No, no, it’s more recent?
Renu Mukherjee: No, well, he had known the roommate for decades and the roommate was obviously very distraught and talking to the police, but they currently live together and in fact he had sent a text message to this individual.
Daniel Di Martino: Well, of course, but I thought he was married?
Charles Fain Lehman: Yes, it seems it’s—
Renu Mukherjee:
That’s the red flag.
Daniel Di Martino: So he’s married and then they also have somebody else living in the house?
Charles Fain Lehman: Right.
Renu Mukherjee: No, no, no, the route so he was living this—
Charles Fain Lehman: No, so it seems like he kept a separate apartment in order to make his commute easier during the week.
Renu Mukherjee: He did. He had said that, you know, he has.
Daniel Di Martino: Well, that’s strange.
Renu Mukherjee: Yes, well he had said, as someone who worked for a funeral home, that he often got calls at all hours of the night. I don’t know how true that is, in my experience with family, if that happens you make the call, but that doesn’t mean that, you know, all arrangements are made immediately. So I’m not quite sure about that. But yeah, for that reason he kept this apartment, and he had sent a text message to this roommate and another individual just saying, “You don’t know what I’m about to do, but I just want to apologize and you’re not going to see me for a while.” And then he went and committed this horrific act.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I mean, think there’s, you know, to take the ideological angle of it, there is this sort of when I draw a connection to the Eric Rudolph bombing, for example, or there are a couple of high profile killings of abortion doctors in the 1990s. You see this sort of like, there is this coherent ideological strain that could explain this. But then, you know, there are on and off right-wing ideological strains that produce domestic terror through the last 50, 60 years. You think about the response to killings at Waco and Ruby Ridge that help trigger the Oklahoma City bombing is the most, you know, obvious one, the militia movement in the 1990s, and you know, I think what’s interesting there is not that it’s just, like I mean it’s interesting that there’s right-wing political violence, but that we’re seeing this at the same time as left-wing political violence. All of this is sort of disconnected from its historical context. It’s like, just like these guys who are attacking people over Israel-Palestine or firebombing Tesla’s, are instances reaching back to the 70s to recover those radical ideas, so too, theoretically, and again, we don’t really know, but theoretically it’s this guy reaching back to the 1990s. And it’s just like, there were these ideas that have floated around in the memeplex for decades and decades and sort of rose and fell with issue salience, and now they’re just always available to everybody all the time. Like you can go read Timothy McVeigh’s manifesto. You can go read the Unabomber’s manifesto. You can go like consume anti-Israel propaganda from the 1970s. You know, in some senses that should produce this like, it’s not a surprise that it produces this, like, general uptick in political violence because political violence has never been easier. And more importantly, it’s never been easier to auto-radicalize, right? So just like expose yourself to radicalizing material and have your brain shaped by it.
Ilya Shapiro: And apparently in popular surveys, whether we’re talking about on campus when they ask students about whether it’s okay to physically stop certain speakers from speaking and things like that, to more broad public surveys, whether it’s ever appropriate to use violence for political purposes, all those things are in unfortunate directions.
Daniel Di Martino: Perhaps the question we should be asking is not why is there more political violence now, but given that this is really the norm throughout U.S. history and just global history, even in fact, we’re still probably below the norm of most of the 20th century. The real question is why did we live in such a peaceful period of a couple decades so recently? And I’m not sure we know the answer.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I mean, you do see, well, it’s interesting, there’s sort of the spike in the 1970s, and then it retreats. And I think a lot of it has to do with the availability and accessibility of information, which is to say, part of how the large increase in domestic terror in 1970s is mostly attributed to a relatively small number of groups. And what happens is, better or worse, the FBI rolls a lot of those groups up, and then they don’t have influence anymore.
It was then relatively expensive to obtain information on how to commit terroristic acts, knowing how to mix explosives, knowing the best ways.
Daniel Di Martino: We had so much domestic terrorism even before the 70s. How many political assassinations were there in America? The Ku Klux Klan, like so many things that were domestic terror still happened when there was no technology, no information.
Charles Fain Lehman: Well, OK, so that’s about state capacity, right? Like, you go, if you roll the clock back to the late 19th, early 20th century, if you’re talking to the Klan, like, what’s happening there is that the state was variously incapable or unwilling to control it. And when I say incapable, I mean the federal government lacked the power projection and unwilling in the sense that many of southern governments tacitly condoned that behavior. But like, you know, the advent of modern federal policing, the FBI, the modern DOJ, that is in part about, you know, realizing that they didn’t have the manpower to enforce things like the anti-Klan acts that they needed to do in the mid-20th century.
Ilya Shapiro: So are we just talking, I mean, are we talking just the 80s, apart from the attempted assassination of Reagan, which was, know, Hinckley was crazy and the, you know, his motivation to try to impress a Hollywood starlet. But apart from that, it was, you know, “greed is good” and “those heady days,” because then you get into the 90s with what you were talking about with Ruby Ridge and Waco.
Charles Fain Lehman: If you think about, so there are a couple of high salience incidents, right? There’s the militia movement, and then there’s also the first stirrings of Islamic domestic terror, most obviously the World Trade Center bombing. But if you look at the absolute number of domestic terror incidents in that period, you do see a steady decline and then a bottoming out. And it’s only in the 2010s that it starts to pick back up. And there again, it’s right-wing and left-wing.
Those measures are a little suspect because A) they’re always retrospective, and so they’re highly reliant on what was being reported at the time. And then B) the people who put together those measures are ideologically compromised, in my opinion. But I do think it’s coherent to say that there was a relatively peaceful period in the 80s, 90s, 00s, at least domestically speaking. But then I think it has become much, much easier to engage in radical activity, conditional on being radicalized. And I suspect it’s become easier to be radicalized too.
Renu Mukherjee: You’ll want… The conservatives and liberals, though, will want to realize that there’s a long history. And of course, know, our listeners are not the type of people that for either side are going out and you know, engaging in violent protests because of course City Journal listeners and readers would never do that. So this isn’t really any sort of advice to our listeners, but there’s a long history of political science showing that just violent tactics are not only less effective than peaceful protests, genuine peaceful protests, and having your desires met and actually affecting change both within local, state, national government, but it’s ineffective. So if you bring up, Charles, you had mentioned burning Teslas, that’s going to be viewed as ineffective simply because you’re imposing a cost on a consumer and that’s to be viewed as a nuisance, a headache. So anytime you block traffic, these aren’t as… Blocking traffic is a nuisance and it’s a disruptive tactic. It’s not the same as setting a Waymo on fire, but even that is going to be ineffective because you’re making the lives of the people you want to appeal to much harder. And so I think both Republicans, Democrats, and kind of trying to bring their coalitions together and sort of say, you know, you don’t want to engage in disruptive tactics, there’s a long history of political science showing that, in fact, you’re going to have the opposite effect.
Charles Fain Lehman: Let me take that as the opportunity to take us out because I want to move us onto our next topic. So I want to ask before we go, do we expect to see increasing right-wing violence to complement the rise that we’ve seen on the left? Do we think that this is a one-off or do we expect to see more of this in the next—you know, we’ve talked a lot about the “long hot summer”—do we expect to see a complementary increase in right-wing violence to correspond to left-wing violence? Ilya, what do you think?
Ilya Shapiro: Well, horseshoe theory suggests, and just as you were talking about the rise of this age of violence from ten years ago or so, that seems to parallel our populist moment and the extremes of both the left and the right, which would suggest that you will have certain things like this. It just depends on what the right targets might be or what the issues are that inflame people.
Charles Fain Lehman: Renu, what’s your take?
Renu Mukherjee: I think that the long hot summer of violence unfortunately is going to continue. I just think, you know, we’re only in the middle of June and I think that there are a vast number of copycats out there, both on the left and, you know, if this guy is on the right, then I guess, you know, some will find what he did unfortunately appealing.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yep, Daniel?
Daniel Di Martino: Yeah, I think especially the fact that it does have some consequences. It does raise salience. There are network effects, social contagion. I think it’s the most likely outcome is that it will increase of all types. It’s not just right-wing, it’s left-wing. It’s like there will be a lot of senseless political, like, “we don’t really know what’s the politics of this person” violence.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I mean, I think that that is plausible. My bet is still on sort of the lion’s share of current violence being left-wing, not because I have sort of like any preference for right-wing political violence. I think it’s extremely bad, obviously, but rather because I think there happens to be more organizing energy around it on the left at this point, and so more deliberate opportunities being made for it to be enacted, which is different from what’s happening on the right thus far.
All right, going to take us on to the events of the past weekend. We saw two big—one was a protest, one was not a protest—but simultaneously we had these 50 state protests, the “No Kings” protests against Donald Trump or if you were in Canada, the “No Tyrants” protests.
Ilya Shapiro: In Canada, they had to make it “No Tyrants,” but apparently in Europe, they still kept it to “No Kings,” even though most of those countries still have kings of some sort.
Daniel Di Martino: But some of them, do want to abolish the monarchy, to be fair.
Charles Fain Lehman: Sometimes.
Ilya Shapiro: Yeah, what did Australia do? Did the Republican movement get involved? You know, here in Falls Church, in Falls Church, Virginia, down Broad Street, there were apparently lots of people. I was not, I didn’t go by to sightsee or otherwise, because I was enjoying my Father’s Day and just hanging out by the pool and grilling some burgers and watching my toddlers play in the rain.
Charles Fain Lehman: I want to make sure that we also talk about the…
Daniel Di Martino: You know, it’s generally not a good idea to call for a protest on Father’s Day. It sounds like these people didn’t get the timing right.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yes, I mean, did people watch any of the coverage? What was your, you know, I’ll be honest, my impression of the protest is that they were both more peaceful than I expected and also much more geriatric than I expected. It kind of seemed like it was a lot of Boomers who were protesting, which was interesting as a demographic phenomenon.
Renu Mukherjee: Another interesting demographic.
Daniel Di Martino: Yeah, because if you think about it, the 2020 protests and like everything before, it was young people, right? And now it’s almost as if the democratic base is the Boomers or at least the most engaged people of the base.
Ilya Shapiro: Well, the thing is, the professional protesters, to do it on weekends, you have to pay overtime. And there have been some cutbacks in that sector.
Renu Mukherjee: I was just going to add that another interesting demographic aspect of this is that at least here in DC watching the coverage of these protests, both on social media and on the news, and even, you know, bits I saw in New York, not only is there are the protesters much older, but it’s overwhelmingly white. And it just, you know, it just reflects the fact that if you are a working class, black, Latino, Asian individual, you know, you don’t have an interest necessarily, or frankly, the time to go out in the middle of the day and protest. These are sort of an interesting, I think you could also say, you know, add a socioeconomic element to this. If you’re from Massachusetts like me, there’s an interesting phenomenon called the L.L. Bean Boat Tote, where you will have, you know, a monogram on like a little like canvas tote bag. A lot of women really enjoy this, men as well. There’s a popular Instagram account with funny slogans and what this Instagram account tracked, normally boat totes, over the past Saturday were the presence of these purses at these at the No King rallies and you know with all these statements and I’m just thinking this is such an elite sort of New England preppy New York item you would purchase that it just really conveys, you know what the socioeconomics racial demographics are of these of these protesters.
Ilya Shapiro: Not too many quilted Lily Pulitzer purses, I take it. That’s more of a Southern thing.
Renu Mukherjee: Definitely not.
Daniel Di Martino: Well, but what I’m thinking is, you know, older people represent an ever-increasing share of the electorate. If it is true that the Democrats have kind of like switched bases to the older age, they’re going to be much more engaged, especially in the midterms. The low propensity voters that the Republicans persuaded in 2024 are low propensity voters, are minorities that show up less outside of presidential election years. And, you know, there will be a reversion to the mean probably in the next election and or even in the next presidential. And that’s probably good news for Democrats and bad news for Republicans. Unless, you know, maybe there’s some really great news like, you know, the Ayatollah of Iran and the regime falls, and then it’s thanks to Trump and then that’s amazing. outside of a really positive news shock, it’s probably good for the Democrats and bad for the Republicans.
Charles Fain Lehman: Part of what I think is interesting there is the, often we identify an age gradient in political views. Young people are liberal and old people are conservative. And that still basically shows up in the data. But it’s sort of attenuated by this cohort effect where Boomers are liberal and Zoomers are not exactly…they are more conservative than their age predicts they ought to be. And so there’s a larger fraction of Zoomers who are conservative than you would expect.
Ilya Shapiro: Especially men.
Charles Fain Lehman: Especially men. And I think what’s interesting is like the idea that we should have 50 state protests, which is the biggest protest ever, is like such a Boomer thing to do. It’s just like what we, how should we oppose Donald Trump? Well, we’ll go out and we’ll sing about how there should be no kings and we’ll march out. Like, Zoomers don’t do that. That’s not how they think about political engagement at all. They’re on TikTok all day. And so it’s not a surprise to me in some sense that this is a very Boomer activity and that like, you know, the dialect of the modern democratic party is so Boomers. So in some sense that’s, you know, to Daniel’s point that rebounds to their benefit because old people vote. But also it’s like, you know, the Boomers talk, the Democrats talk about having this like, you know, this young people problem, this men problem. And sometimes it’s just like a coolness problem. Like the problem is that—
Daniel Di Martino: Wait, but did you see the response of Trump over the weekend to the No Kings protest? He posted a truth social and said, “Thank you so much to all the no Kings protest. Your goal has been achieved. America has no King. I am still your president.” You got to, I mean, I love the trolling. I really love it.
Ilya Shapiro: While the military parade was going on, and I must say I was curious about this, so I briefly considered going into the district to watch but of course, was, ultimately didn’t because I didn’t want to have to deal with parking, which ultimately because not that many people attended could have been, you know, maybe it would have been doable, but it was interesting. And I watched little video clips of what was going on. You know, France has one of these military parades every year. Nobody accuses it of being some authoritarian, you know, takeover place. A curiosity. And maybe in retrospect, we’ll see this as kind of the launch of the celebration of the 250th maybe.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, so I do want to talk about the parade as well. That was the other competing event this weekend. Daniel, Renu, what did you guys make of the, did you watch it? What was your impression of it?
Renu Mukherjee: I think that, so Ilya’s point about how this is sort of kicking off the 250th celebration, I think that’s sort of how it’s being portrayed, that this is the first in a series of events. And I would say that in looking at the coverage of, I live in D.C., but I did not make it to the parade. But I, you know, in reading all of the coverage about this, it seems as though there is some degree of Trump Derangement Syndrome at play. I think, you know, there are other instances in which you either have air shows with the military, there’s other demonstrations that are done that celebrate the history of the Army, the U.S. Navy, the Air Force, et cetera, and it’s not met with the sort of resentment and vitriol that we saw over the weekend. So I think combined with the fact that this is Trump and also a lot of, you know, other events happening at the same time, Israel, Iran, the No Kings protests.
Ilya Shapiro: On his birthday.
Daniel Di Martino: Yeah, the optics didn’t help Trump. Yeah, the optics didn’t help him because of the birthday thing. You know, perhaps that’s actually why he wanted it. Like, we don’t really know. I didn’t really care much about the parade. I did go to the one that he held in 2019 in D.C., I don’t know if you remember, for the Fourth of July. And it was really amazing, that one, I will admit. It was very widely attended because it was Fourth of July, I think that, you know not Father’s Day weekend. That also didn’t help Trump’s attendance for that parade. It’s also the Army’s birthday, not like the country’s birthday. It’s a smaller audience. I do think that there should be a really big military and just national parade next year for the 250th anniversary of America on July 4th. Yes, absolutely. That I am fully supportive. I think it should be big.
Ilya Shapiro: On the 4th of July
Charles Fain Lehman: I mean, I will say, I will say the like the number one reason to vote for Trump in the last election is that of the two choices for candidates, he was clearly going to do the superior job like going completely nuts for the 250th. Like, you know, Kamala Harris doesn’t really have the 250 vibe, right? They were they were all sort of at the DNC, they were all sort of uncomfortable with the flag. They’re like, there ought to be flags here too.
Daniel Di Martino: That’s true. Ugh. It would have been horrible, Charles. Thank God that it’s not going to be horrible during the 250th.
Charles Fain Lehman: Right, whereas Donald Trump was born on Flag Day, so like, you know, the man is well equipped. Yeah, so I want to, want to, I’ll take this out. This may provoke some dissension because I’m curious, what do people make of military parades generally? And I will provoke some conflict by saying, I’m not a big fan. Like, I don’t love military parade. Like, I think there’s something very like, almost third world about it. It’s like, let me demonstrate my might by like showing off how big my weapons are. And it’s like the way that America does that is through power projection. Like nobody doubts that we’re number one. And so it all it just sort of seems like a little tin pot to me. I’m not a fan.
Ilya Shapiro: But the thing is, wasn’t… I think I agree with you at least in part, but this wasn’t just like rolling down our biggest ICBMs down the street and things like that. It was historical because they had soldiers in period dress from the Revolutionary War through the modern day. I mean, you had Gulf War, you had all these other things, which was interesting. That makes it a kind of a living history display as well. It wasn’t simply kind of the prototypical Cold War, Brezhnev-era, standing at the Red Square, watching these kind of robots goose step through and the missiles and all that. So was definitely an American version of that. There was a curiosity. If we standardize this and do it every year, every five years, I don’t know what eventually it’ll be, it would have to be an American spirit to it. You know, we have on Memorial Day, we have Fife and Drum parades all the time, so incorporate some of that. So there’s an American way of doing it. You know, the French have horseback with those crazy helmets with the feathers on them and all that. You know, that’s very French.
Charles Fain Lehman: Nobody cares about the French, they’re not a real country.
Ilya Shapiro: Well, the joke was, you know, Macron was concerned, quote unquote “concerned” about the Israeli attack on Iran and the response online was, well, maybe you can help teach Iran how to surrender.
Daniel Di Martino: Well, I’ll say my take is I was exposed since an early age to military parades of the Venezuelan regime. They always did that very often and I always dreaded seeing that on TV. You know, it was always very militaristic, very dictatorial. Everybody dressed in red or military attire, red because it’s the color of the revolution. And, you know, it was Maduro or Chavez surrounded by a bunch of military generals or commanders. And I really disliked it. I don’t think it’s the same here, but I, you know, always cringe at that. I do think it’s appropriate for the 4th of July. I do, but like outside of that, it’s probably excessive. It costs money. I mean, this costs money and this country is in debt. Okay. Like it’s probably not the best use of taxpayer dollars when you can do other things. So, I mean, that’s my perception.
Ilya Shapiro: What if it’s privately funded? We can get sponsors. Apparently this one was. There was Coinbase among other sponsorship logos.
Charles Fain Lehman: Coinbase.
Daniel Di Martino: Yeah, yeah, and I don’t know how I feel about the government promoting a crypto exchange either, you know? Like, there’s a lot of considerations here. Whereas if they had just thrown fireworks, perhaps the considerations wouldn’t have been there.
Ilya Shapiro: Our producer Isabella notes that it was also part of the military’s recruitment budget. Might not be bad for that actually.
Daniel Di Martino: Okay, well then, that’s true. Then I guess is if it does help with recruitment, then they should continue doing it. I’m very pragmatic on this. But perhaps it’s more useful to do like a better ad, like the one they released that is not woke. I don’t know.
Charles Fain Lehman: Renu, where are you on military parades? We have one yes, one no, one maybe.
Ilya Shapiro: Sponsored by Dunkin’.
Renu Mukherjee: I think I probably… Sponsored, I can’t even say that. I don’t want them to sue me in case they don’t like my answer. I’d say that I’m probably a maybe. I do think it’s all about the optics and how it’s done. If it’s emphasizing the history, you have flags, you have actors, it’s focused much more on, I guess, the country as a whole and what the country promises, which in the case of the U.S. are, you know, our wonderful founding principles. It’s fine. I think if it’s used optically to sort of intimidate the citizenry, then obviously that’s negative. So I think it largely depends on how it’s executed. And I don’t think that it was executed poorly this Saturday. I think this parade in particular was probably fine.
Charles Fain Lehman: Fair, okay. All right, all right. On that, before we go, we, it’s, gosh, what is it? Eight days before the Democratic Mayoral Primary in New York City. Just before we started recording, the New York Times released, the Times isn’t endorsing in local races anymore, so they didn’t endorse, they sort of anti-endorsed Zohran Mamdani, friend of the pod. They were like, “Don’t rank Mamdani, and we don’t like Cuomo. We aren’t going to say you should rank him, but we’re not going to not say you shouldn’t rank him.”
Ilya Shapiro: He’s a friend of the pod? Okay.
Charles Fain Lehman:
It’s a joke. It’s a joke.
Daniel Di Martino: Charles, you keep saying it sarcastically as a joke and I think people are going to take you literally.
Charles Fain Lehman: I think they can figure out where we fall on Zohran. Alright, so here’s-
Ilya Shapiro: Several, I think several candidates visited the MI offices at some point, right?
Charles Fain Lehman: I believe that. I’m sure that’s true.
Daniel Di Martino: Yes, a couple.
Ilya Shapiro: Well, does anyone care about the New York Times endorsement? Like, would that actually matter in the, really, in the Manhattan Democratic primary? Hmm. Well, not those voting in like Queens or whatever. I mean, maybe the Brooklyn elitists, but…
Charles Fain Lehman: Yes, I think it’ll be good. I think it’ll be…
Daniel Di Martino: The question is, do democratic primary voters care, you know?
Renu Mukherjee: This, it’s good because…
Daniel Di Martino: But those are the people who are voting for Mamdani. So those are the ones that they need to persuade.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, Manhattan voters. Right.
Renu Mukherjee: Exactly, and that’s why this editorial is so, so excellent because it, you know, paints Mamdani in the worst possible light. I tweeted out that it paints him as sort of a spoiled nepo baby theater kid cosplaying as an ineffective Bernie Sanders. And in fact, I imagine much of the New York Times editorial board’s readership, if not supports, views Mamdani favorably. So, you know, these are, these are the types of readers and people that probably do need to have some sort of awakening, realize that you know this individual that they hold so highly is actually ridiculous.
Ilya Shapiro: Did you call him a less effective Bill de Blasio as well?
Renu Mukherjee: No, but that is that it is something else that the editorial board suggested, that he is a less effective sort of pie-in-the-sky Bill de Blasio, if that would even be possible.
Ilya Shapiro: And he doesn’t even go to the gym. I mean, you know, I’m sure Daniel only needs one arm to out-bench Mamdani.
Daniel Di Martino: Bill DeBlasio did, I mean…
No, you know, my problem is that I do think Mamdani is a Marxist who is extremely dangerous, who hates America, who hates the West, who hates the Constitution. And my concern, aside from for New York City, which I think is a very important government that you don’t want to give to a person like that, is that it could become a platform if he wins for more socialists like him to win higher and other offices, and that would be really bad for America in the long run.
Charles Fain Lehman: So I want ask, like I said, we’re eight days out, something like that. So what are people handicapping? Very briefly before we go, on primary election day, who do think is going to come in first? What are people’s bets? Daniel, where are you betting?
Daniel Di Martino: I really fear it’s going to be Cuomo first, but really closely behind him, Mamdani for the first round of votes. And you know, I can only pray that Mamdani doesn’t win at the end of their ranked choice voting tally.
Charles Fain Lehman: Renu, what are your predictions?
Renu Mukherjee: I think that Cuomo is going to eke out the win. I mean, I really hope he does, but that’s probably where I stand.
Ilya Shapiro: I think what’s going to happen is, yeah, probably Cuomo wins, there’s ranked choice voting shenanigans, confusion, what have you, and all the Mamdani leftists are going to say that it was stolen and it was rigged, and they’re going to have massive “stop the steal” actions, and it’s, we’re going to have some fun with it.
Daniel Di Martino: It was the CIA who rigged the election, like in Latin America they’re going to say.
Ilya Shapiro: The 1 percent billionaires and…
Daniel Di Martino: If only the CIA was so based.
Charles Fain Lehman: On that note, that’s about all the time that we have. Thank you to our panelists. Thank you, always, to our producer, Isabella Redjai. Listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, or even if you didn’t, don’t forget to like, subscribe, comment, ring the bell, do all the other things you have to do, and all the platforms you listen to us on, on YouTube or elsewhere. Leave us comments, questions, concerns, diatribes below. We might even respond to some of them. Until next time, you’ve been listening to the City Journal Podcast. We hope you’ll join us again soon.
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