Zohran is MAGA, homey!

The times are a-changin’ !

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One of the dozen or so contenders for the most recent do-or-die election bucked the entire dais of gutless stock characters around him on policy, was thoroughly ridiculed and counted out for doing so, then proceeded to kick all of their asses over a long election year despite their big bankrolls, endorsements, experience, and name recognition.

Where have we seen this movie before??

And the parallels only start there. When asked which foreign country each candidate would visit first as mayor (why in the world would anyone ask this to mayoral candidates?), each and every bought-and-paid-for boot-licking NPC on the stage -minus one- said they’d go to “The Holy Land”!. The dude with the funny name who eats with his hands essentially said “ I don’t know about ya’all but I’m New York First. I’ll be staying here.”…

MTG with a beard.

Speaking of MTG, she’s been modeling what it means to be actually MAGA lately, in the Deep South no less, and the swamp creatures are threatening to eat her for it. Her main position is that the government should spend money on her constituents who have a hard time paying for groceries and health insurance rather than on bombs to be given to a foreign country that bought off most of her colleagues in Washington. Her voters really like her position by all indications, but the powers that be want us to know that this means she’s basically Stalin.

Where is Steve Bannon, the high priest and godfather of MAGA, on these new developments? Like Zohran, Steve Bannon was once called a “communist”- by Elon on his way out.

And for good reason.

Bannon, against all odds, somehow convinced a government with the party of Reagan controlling all three branches to intervene in the free market in a big way with tariffs and restrictions on the travel of cheap labor, in order to forcibly lift the plight of the working class. In fact, he essentially redefined the party of “government is the problem” to be the party of “let’s use the government to make America great again”, through the aforementioned mechanisms. Basically Stalin. Everyone I don’t like is literally Stalin.

Steve Bannon has had plenty of nice things to say about AOC, Mamdani’s Sister-in-Arms, over the years.

“They did an amazing job in ’18. I keep saying I admire AOC,” he said. “I think her ideology’s all f — -d up, but I want her. I want to recruit bartenders. I don’t want to recruit any more lawyers. I want bartenders.”-Steve Bannon

In contrast, consistent with his single-minded desire to make America great, Bannon has focused his fire instead on the replaceable puppet types that Mamdani and Trump eviscerated, many of whom are nominally in his own party. Bannon has said numerous times that his arch enemies are Mitt Romney and Mitch McConnell and Liz Cheney and the other craven gimps-on-leashes doing everything they can to sell themselves and America to the highest bidder.

Bannon’s not exactly heaping praise on Zohran these days, but I sense that he senses a kindred spirit in the newly elected populist nationalist mayor of New York. Like Bannon, I’m not a huge fan of government grocery stores and I have a bit of a problem with 34 year olds who haven’t yet had a job that wasn’t working for their parents, but there was only one dude in the NYC mayoral election who could smell which way the wind was blowing and had the huevos to say what he believed despite raging headwinds, and for that I give him a pile of respect, as did the voters.

Zohran’s unequivocal, resounding defeat of all comers including the scion of perhaps the most powerful New York political family laid bare, if for some reason we hadn’t seen them before, a few no-longer-deniable truths:

• Government intervention in the economy is no longer a poison pill. Most of the voting age populous lived through the stock market collapse and the subsequent raping of the common man by the elite through real estate hoarding, through forcing everyone to buy a vaccine that didn’t work, through keeping wars going indefinitely to reap the profits ….we don’t really believe in Reaganomics any more, for good reason. Governments are necessary for us to thrive. Everything the Boomers thought about free markets and free love and related utopianisms was bullshit. Put some tariffs in place. Close the borders. Fund buses for people who need them in cities where people don’t have cars. If your countrymen can’t afford groceries, recognize this is a problem and do your best to do something about it. Taxes exist to strengthen the nation.
• Being everything to everyone gets you nowhere. We’re in a fucking crisis. Take a fucking position on something you coward Boomer phonies. Jeb Bush and Andrew Cuomo, etc. are as fake and gay as they come, and we’re finally calling them on it. Eat with your hands if you’re into that. Grab supermodels by the pussy. Say “fuck”. Often. Don’t be so fucking serious. Make fun of your hecklers. Troll them. Go to Alaska to meet with Putin and watch the professionally-oh-so-serious crowds’ heads explode. Got to a mosque in a city dominated by Jewish Americans in response to everyone calling you a terrorist.
• If you want to get elected, quickly dispense with your luxury beliefs. Virtue signaling about Israel or climate change or Jesus or how much you love every sexual aberration out there is so 2010’s. We care about economics now.
• Realize the times have a-changed. The uniparty hegemony and unquestioning, unquestionable consensus on neocon foreign policy and no taxes for rich people is the stuff of a bygone era, call it the Third Turning. There will be a few stragglers who refuse to get the message despite the entire universe screaming it (see Lindsay Graham, Hillary Clinton, Nikki Haley), but the die is cast and we ain’t going back.

The Democrats, at least in one city, have finally learned the lessons that the Republican base learned a decade ago, and it seems like they are willing to take up the banner that Bannon created around 2015 if the Republicans are no longer up for the task.