The biggest loser besides Cuomo in the NY mayoral race was The New York Times

The biggest loser besides Cuomo in the NY mayoral race was The New York Times. The newspaper reversed its own policy against endorsements and threw its weight behind Brad Lander in the primary and said, we’re not for Andrew Cuomo but he would—wink wink– be “better for New York’s future” than Zohran Mamdani, who doesn’t “deserve… a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots.” I.e., he’s not even in the top five. Ezra Klein also did a piece endorsing Lander and treating Mamdani as a showman. 

When Mamdani walloped Cuomo (56-44 at the final count), it was a huge embarrassment to the Times. How out of step is the newspaper with the new, diverse New York? How much does the Times despise the social media that allowed the Queens assemblyman, a Democratic socialist, to break the ancient law that big money will triumph? ($30 million was spent against Mamdani). 

The Times also tried to marginalize Shahana Hanif, a city council member in central Brooklyn who wouldn’t shut up about Gaza. She was primaried by a professional at the Brennan Center who said she shouldn’t talk about foreign policy. Hanif won in a landslide, by 44 points. 

I have no doubt that the Times newsroom is in turmoil today. Young staffers feel disenfranchised. The old guard is hanging on, out of touch and defensive — Fragile Elitists. 

Mamdani described Israel’s Gaza policy as “genocide,” a word the Times disavows, and the newspaper’s dismissal of Mamdani and Hanif exposes the paper’s rigid attachment to Israel. At best, Times columnists are like Ezra Klein, devoted to a delusory two-state solution even as generation after generation of Palestinians are born into apartheid– another verboten word at the Times. More typically, Times columnists defend Israel when it murders Gaza civilians, and its editorial board misrepresents and maligns anti-Zionism. While a news story prints the idiotic claim that Mamdani’s victory is like “Kristallnacht.” 

Today, the paper blinds itself to Gaza. When Greta Thunberg calls on anyone with prominence to risk their career for the sake of the children in the rubble…  when Clarissa Ward explains on Colbert that Gaza has destroyed “any notion” that the U.S. is a beacon of human rights. When Juliet  Stevenson writes in the Guardian that “I do not want to find myself at the end of my life looking back at this time regretting that I… was too frightened to speak out, or to act” against the “sadism” and “depravity” of the Israeli bombing of Gaza– these are human beings responding honestly to the great moral question of our time. Gaza is like Guernica over and over again, and it will scar this age as Guernica scarred the 20^th century.  

Tragically, our greatest newspaper (and believe me, I depend on the Times) has been unable to reflect that “apocalypse,” to use CAIR’s term. 

Listen to Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes on a podcast trying to catch up with the Mamdani victory – they’d rather talk about TikTok “attentionality” and “the mimetic tip of the spear” – till Klein leaks out a sad truth at the end – mainstream Dems “will not speak on Gaza and how horrifying that has been.” 

This is the majesty of the Mamdani victory. It has broken through the mainstream’s suppression of the rage over Gaza that is surging through the Democratic base. In this respect, it is revolutionary. Consider that Andrew Cuomo built his career (in part) on being against BDS. Signing proclamation after proclamation against BDS, he helped establish that red line across the Democratic Party (and raised a ton of money in the bargain). Liberal Zionists were just as bad. J Street endorsed legislation saying that the nonviolent tool of boycott—deployed by Rosa Parks and Nelson Mandela– was antisemitic.

But Mamdani is for BDS, and has suggested that he will refuse to travel to Israel – and he has been rewarded, not canceled. His courage (and Brad Lander’s generosity) has transformed the discourse. Liberal Jewish opponents of BDS shut their mouths or said, I have some disagreements with Mamdani, but I’m behind him. 

So, overnight, a red line became a mere disagreement. This is a huge victory for Palestinian human rights. 

The establishment is shocked by Mamdani. It laments the loss of faith in institutions and deplores the rise of social media. When I was young we always used to quote the Yeats poem on political dissolution– “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; … The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.”

I never really understood those lines til now. We live in a radical age in which formerly marginalized ideas on both left and right are getting a hearing. As an aging former elitist, I have my own apprehensions about the cultural revolution. 

But there is good reason for it. Leading institutions failed Americans again and again, on income disparity most obviously, but also in foreign policy. 

The best and brightest institutions brought us the Iraq War. They brought us the Gaza genocide. It is important to say that word. Today, anyone with eyes can see that Israel makes no distinction in its slaughters between civilians and combatants, and that it acts day after day to deprive an entire society of the means of life. Historians of violence have told us this is a genocide, including Omer Bartov, the Holocaust historian, and Francesca Albanese of the U.N.. 

But Ezra Klein puts genocide in quotes. And so does liberal talk show host Brian Lehrer. 

That red line – the refusal to see the moral horror for what it is – will also crumble in the Mamdani era.