Comedians Agree: Zohran Mamdani Has Great Ideas, But They're Just Not Realistic
Where have I heard that one before?
Comedy’s leading podcaster-pundits, who I keep hearing are vital to the future of Democratic politics, in their infinite wisdom and heterodoxy have coalesced around the talking points that New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is either a woke commie who has to be stopped or a bright guy with good ideas who unfortunately won’t be able to pay for them.
The champion of that former idea is Joe Rogan, who trashed Mamdani in three separate episodes over the last couple weeks. We’ll get to him in due course, but first I’d like to share the more moderate voices of Shane Gillis, Matt McCusker, and guest Joe DeRosa in this week’s Patreon episode of Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast. The following comes in the midst of DeRosa's attempt to describe a 2024 scandal involving current NYC Mayor Eric Adams; he gets basically every detail wrong and claims it led to Adams’ indictment on corruption charges, which it didn't, but that’s neither here nor there:
Gillis: ...His story, Mayor Adams' story, is he was trying to just be like, "Yo, can we please stop taking illegal immigrants?" and the Democratic Party was just like, "Didn't you upgrade to first class on campaign funds?" Like shit like that. That's what it—but yeah, I did hear the church story as well.
DeRosa: It's crazy. But he also—
Gillis: They're probably connected.
DeRosa: He did himself no favors because he came out—he was the guy that made fun of Texas and Florida for complaining about illegal immigrants, and then when they went to New York, he called for a state of emergency.
Gillis: They were getting crushed.
DeRosa: Yeah.
Gillis: New York got crushed.
McCusker: How do you feel about the new leadership of New York?
DeRosa: I don't know enough about it. I just know half the people are excited and half the people hate him.
McCusker: Pumped.
DeRosa: But I don't know—
Gillis: That's kinda every candidate—
DeRosa: Yeah, but I don't even know what they hate—
Gillis: Fifty-one percent like him.
DeRosa: Yeah. What's his deal?
McCusker: I'm curious to see how it works out. He's just trying to make everything free, kind of. It's like free daycare, publicly owned grocery stores, so it'd be a grocery store owned by the government, so that way it's like there'd be private grocery stores and there'd be ones that could, I guess leverage government funds to buy stuff. They don't have to operate at profit.
Gillis: What I don't understand about that is, isn't that what food stamps is?
McCusker: Yeah, well—
Gillis: Just every—
McCusker: Food stamps, you have to just go, but then you have to pay retail price. They're saying, what if the government bought produce for what it costs—
Gillis: Oh, okay.
McCusker: —and just sold it at cost.
Gillis: But either way the taxpayer would be—
McCusker: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DeRosa: There's no way he'll get any of that done.
McCusker: I don't think so either.
DeRosa: None of it'll happen.
McCusker: Free bus. The bus is free.
DeRosa: Well, but here's the thing—
Gillis: Free bus is fine.
McCusker: Free bus is fine, but—
Gillis: I'm good with free bus.
McCusker: I've heard other people have done this, and then the bus becomes—the wait is long as fuck.
Gillis: Free bus. I don't give a shit about that wait.
DeRosa: I don't know if this is—
McCusker: I like experiments, so I'm curious to see what happens. People get very mad. They're like, "What?"
DeRosa: But here's how—this is interesting. I did Rogan yesterday, and Rogan asked me the same question, and I was like—I said the same thing. I go, "I don't know anything, and—"
Gillis: Great minds.
McCusker: True.
DeRosa: Great minds. But one thing he said was, he was like, Rogan said—
Gillis: Jacked as hell.
McCusker: Obviously.
DeRosa: He apparently wants to adopt the same tax structure for businesses that Jersey does, which would make taxes on businesses higher.
McCusker: Yeah.
DeRosa: So that all makes sense. If he wants to do all this goofy shit, it's like that's how he's going to try to pay for it, right?
McCusker: Yeah.
DeRosa: And I said to Joe, I was like, "I can't imagine it being any harder for a small business in New York City." If he does that, it will be—and that might be the way he gets this other shit done, because they are actively trying to run mom-and-pops out of fucking New York. They're trying to run all middle class out of New York. New York will soon be India, where it is dirt poor or you are living in a fucking palace. There will be no in-between.
McCusker: Dang.
DeRosa: It's wild.
McCusker: Well, you'd still free bus to the cheap grocery store every time.
Gillis: Free bus, free food.
McCusker: To take the free bus to a cheap grocery store, would be nice.
DeRosa: Yeah.
Gillis: Shit, I might go back. Free bus? Free groceries?
DeRosa: That's wild, but you—
McCusker: You just walk round New York with one of those personal shopping carts.
DeRosa: It's crazy though, but it's like, who would need a system like this? Oh, poor people.
McCusker: Yeah.
DeRosa: Who wouldn't need it? Really rich people.
Gillis: Wait till you find out—wait till you find out who controls voting.
McCusker: Yeah. I'm curious. Whenever I hear experiments like that, I'm always like, "Yeah, let it rip. Let's see what happens." Although I don't live there, so, you know.
Just a few things I’d like to dwell on here. First, note Gillis’ bizarre rendering of the Adams prosecution, which he casts as the Democratic Party’s retaliation against Adams for his efforts to be tough on immigration. In reality it’s quite the opposite: Trump famously ended Adams' prosecution in return for his cooperation with ICE's immigration crackdowns.
Second, all three of these guys are from Pennsylvania. If they’re curious how government-owned grocery stores might work, they need look no further than their home’s hundreds of state-owned liquor stores.
Third, note DeRosa’s concern about mom-and-pop businesses. He’s implicitly including himself in that group: he owns and runs a small sandwich shop, Joey Roses, in the Lower East Side. It’s not quite a mom-and-pop—he co-owns it with Paul Italia, co-owner of comedy club The Stand—but it’s safe to say the business is struggling: his landlord recently filed a lawsuit against him alleging that he’s $35,000 behind on rent.
The irony here is that Mamdani is very explicitly running on a promise to make New York City easier and more affordable for small businesses like DeRosa’s. But because DeRosa has not bothered to educate himself, and because he exists in an extremely conservative media environment, he has no clue. Hence these guys arrive at the same posture towards Mamdani that they take towards pretty much every liberal or left-wing policy: “I don’t know anything about it, and it seems pretty reasonable, but I’m going to be demeaning and racist about it anyway.”
“You can't convince a culture to eat different food.”
Okay, let’s move on to our friends over at Flagrant. This week they dispensed with their usual racist jokes about Mamdani and got into his policies with two guests, conservative pundit Saagar Enjeti and liberal pundit Ezra Klein.
Seth Simons
In both cases they concluded that his policies are good, but they’re just not terribly feasible (and he really ought to come discuss them personally). Here’s a bit of their discussion with Enjeti, which comes during a longer conversation about income inequality and the rising cost of living:
Andrew Schulz: … And to go back to what you're saying about, like, [if] you make $100,000 a year, but you have $300,000 worth of debt. I think that's why the rent freeze is so enticing to people, because if you're spending $1,700 a month, let's say, on your student loans, and that's just the interest. You're not even chipping away at them. That's your savings. So, if you again take your rent from $5,000 a month and you take it down to $3,300, now you have your savings again. And I think in a way the program is kind of punishing landlords for universities charging exorbitant prices.
Enjeti: Yeah, that’s right.
Schulz: So you're just passing the buck to someone else. And it's like, landlord is a bad person, of course, ‘cause they own this property, and there are shitty landlords, I get it. But like I think the core of the issue is the fact that these kids are saddled with this debt with these degrees that offer them nothing in a city like New York and they’re paralyzed with this fear that there is no opportunity for upper mobility. […] I think that contributes to the support from Mamdani and specifically the demographic that seems to be really excited about what he's going to bring.
But to me, there's a little bit of this passing the buck. It's like, okay, we have this thing we can't move, which are these loans, so we got to move it to another area to free up some economic mobility for these people and get. And if you're one of those people that's saddled with that debt, you don't give a fuck who got to pay for it as long as it's not you. I get that. They're offering a solution that maybe in the long term will hurt people. And I want to talk to him about it because I want to see how we grapple with that.
Enjeti: He's gotta come on the show. We'll work on that.
Schulz: No, I've been talking. No, I've been talking with them. I've been talking to, so it looks like that's going to happen. I genuinely want to ask earnestly, what are the downstream effects of some of these policies and how does that work? But there is no question that they're enticing and it's not to the poor. People think that, oh, the poor love the socialists. No, no, no, no, no. It's the middle class that are entitled in their brains to a better life that they're not having that this is so enticing. They're like, wait, why am I in the same economic bracket as my parents? I was supposed to be richer than them.
Enjeti: Lower than, yeah.
Schulz: Or lower. Yeah.
Two things to dwell on. One is Schulz’s insane defense of landlords, which, well, what can I even say. Another is that he shares with Tim Dillon the belief that Mamdani is chiefly supported by a constituency of downwardly mobile young people who are frustrated, as Dillon put it after the primary, “that their education is not reflected in their income.” I note this because it seems implicit in that belief that young college-urbanites with, let's be real here, humanities degrees are to blame for their own poor financial decisions, and I note that to stress that when it comes to Mamdani, these guys are just bog-standard Republicans harping about personal responsibility and claiming to speak for real poor people. See, for instance, the Flagrant crew’s take on city-owned grocery stores in a Patreon episode released earlier this month:
Mark Gagnon: That's what I wonder about Zohran's, like the grocery stores. If you put that in the hood, I'm curious if people in the hood are like, "Yes, I'd want to go get carrots."
Alexx Media: It will be an experiment, sometimes that's all you need.
Schulz: So this is the other thing, it's like you can't convince a culture to eat different food. For example, if you go to a Jamaican neighborhood, you put a Japanese grocery store and it's cheaper, but it's only Japanese food. The Jamaicans are gonna be like, "This is not what we eat." Like, "Maybe we'll dabble or whatever." So the fear is if you have decades and decades of these food deserts and people eating these shitty sugary foods that tastes absolutely amazing, and then you put fresh produce there, it's not like Tuesday gonna go, "You know what? I'm only eating salad."
Media: Yeah.
Schulz: I started eating salad yesterday. I'm miserable. So it's like, you also need a—
Media: But there are people there that, you know, will try.
Schulz: Yes. And they should.
Gagnon: And they gotta do something.
Schulz: They should have the ability.
Ha! Ha! Okay, let’s move on to their episode with Ezra Klein:
Klein: He's got two problems. And I'm not on the anti-Mamdani side of this, but he's taken a couple of risks and the big risk is that he can't deliver what he promises. Everything he is talking about and most of the big ticket things he's talking about, not freezing the rent actually, requires a lot of money. Free daycare is very expensive [...] He does not have control over taxes as mayor of New York City. So tax increases would have to go through Albany, through Governor Kathy Hochul. She is running for her re-election on a no-new-taxes pledge.
Schulz: And she literally came out and she's like, I'm not going to do it.
Klein: She's not going to do it. It's bad politics for her. She doesn't just have to win a democratic primary New York City. Other parts of New York are not as blue as New York City is and not as rich as New York City is.
Schulz: I think that's something people don't understand about New York.
Klein: Yes.
Schulz: You get out of New York City, it gets red quick.
Klein: It gets red quick.
[...]
Media: And I'd just like to point out that it is doable. Mayors can change it.
Klein: Free daycare will be bigger and more expensive than pre-K at a time when the finances are going to be pretty tough. The other thing that I think it's totally obvious Mamdani will be dealing with if he wins the election is the Trump administration is going to look at New York City and be like Harvard. And they're gonna try to break it.
Schulz: They're gonna try to put immense pressure—
Klein: They're gonna take all the money from him they can. They're going to use New York City as a site for ICE confrontations. It is going to be very, very, very tough. And New York City, I almost assure you, is going to be dealing with very reduced federal money coming in.
Schulz: And with reduced federal money, you have no chance of doing these programs that are going to require—
Klein: So he's got that set of problems. Doesn't mean it's impossible and doesn't mean something couldn't be done and something like free buses are not that expensive. You could do free buses. That's not that bad.
Singh: So that's—sorry. I was going to say, with Trump in 2016 too, he ran on all these things and people are like, "Oh, how'd you guys not know he lied?" He ran on overturning Roe v Wade. He got that done. If you get one of the big things done, your base will be, I think, satisfied and be like, "Oh yeah, this guy got it done." If he gets free buses, if he can freeze the rent, I don't see him being viewed as a failure because he didn't know all the other things.
Klein: I think how he'll be viewed will have to do with a lot of things that we can't even predict right now depending on what happens. But so freeze the rent, here's the other one. Freezing the rent is, I think, just really tricky. I've spent a lot of time talking to affordable housing developers. And if you freeze the rent for a year, fine. Freeze it for two years, fine. If you do a long extended rent freeze, you will make the construction of new affordable housing fall sharply.
Schulz: Why is that?
Klein: Because, what you've basically done is you've taken... It's already not an incredibly great business to be in. It's a complicated business. There's regulation, whatever. […] Even if you listen to Mamdani, he'll say, "I believe we need a lot more housing so long as it accords with our environmental, our union, our affordability goals." And that's great. I want housing that does that. But what we need first is a lot of new housing and the more things you layer onto it, the more expensive it becomes and you don't have money.
Gagnon: And you're capping what the money could be.
I don’t want to get into debates about abundance or YIMBYism here. Rather I’d just like to repeat what I’ve been saying about these guys for a while. Although they present themselves as braver, more honest, and more in touch with the common man than mainstream media, here they're completely indistinguishable from mainstream media. In response to enthusiasm about a young left-wing candidate, they’re throwing cold water on his proposals under the guise of objective process concerns. Boring! Over the years I've been following them, these guys have eagerly staked out positions they believed in on various hot-button issues and advocated for them on their own merits, even in the face of popular backlash. Now that they're finally being treated as serious, legitimate players in political discourse, they're suddenly no different than the New York Times editorial board.
Okay, let’s move on to Joe Rogan.
“How do you say his name?”
The most influential comedian in the world learned how to pronounce Zohran Mamdani’s name in a conversation with Joe DeRosa (he's doing the rounds to promote a special) released on July 23rd:
Rogan: What do you think is going to happen if this—how do you say his name? Mandani? Guy?
DeRosa: I don't know how to say his name, but I know who you're talking about.
Rogan: Is that how you say his name, Jamie?
Jamie: Zohran Mamdani.
Rogan: Say it again?
Jamie: Zohran. Almost like the movie, I think?
Rogan: Say the whole name.
Jamie: Mamdani.
Rogan: I'm going to use that as my ringtone from now on.
DeRosa: Mamdani.
Jamie: You saying that.
DeRosa: Mamdani. I admittedly know very little about this guy. All I really know is is half the people seem excited and half the people seem like it's the worst thing ever. So, par for the course, I guess, in politics.
Rogan: Well, young people are very excited.
DeRosa: Yeah.
Rogan: Young people think we're going to give communism a try. Yay. Let's see what happens.
DeRosa: Yeah.
Rogan: I know he wants to jack up a lot of taxes for businesses. I don't understand business enough to comment on that. I don't know whether that would be beneficial overall for the good of everybody or not. But I'm always skeptical when they want more money.
DeRosa: Does he want to jack up taxes on all businesses or just—
Rogan: I don't know.
DeRosa: —certain level businesses?
Rogan: I don't know. I think he wants to change the tax code in New York to be the same for businesses as it is for New Jersey, which is a little higher. Believe it or not, New Jersey is a little higher than New York.
DeRosa: That city is making it, in my opinion, absolutely impossible for mom-and-pop businesses to continue to function. And it's starting to happen more and more everywhere.
More than a week before he learned how to pronounce Mamdani’s name, however, Rogan rendered his judgment that Mamdani is a loony leftist. Here he is in an episode with podcaster Danny Jones:
Rogan: People can be manipulated very easily, shockingly easily. Not all of us, right? You and me are probably pretty skeptical. There's a lot of skeptical people out there, but there's a bunch of people that are not skeptical at all. They're super gullible, and when an ideology forms, they step in line and they follow that ideology verbatim to the line. They'll repeat the things that they're supposed to say to the line because they think that's what they're supposed to do in order to be in the good graces of this community that they find themselves in. It's a fucking cult. And there's a shit ton of cults. It's not just the Moonies, it's not just whatever, fill in the blank. It's all sorts of political ideologies. It's MAGA, it's the far left. It's the people that are cheering for this guy in New York City that's a communist.
Jones: Yeah, didn't he just promise a bunch of money for a transition surgeries? Yay, hooray.
Rogan: Yeah, it's nuts.
Jones: Government-run grocery stores and all that stuff. He didn't win yet, he's just won the primary.
Rogan: He's gonna win, dude.
Jones: You think?
Rogan: Yes, 100%. Because the other guy is the fucking guardian angels guy. The other guy is Curtis Sliwa, the guy who wears the goofy beret.
Jones: Oh, really?
Rogan: Yeah. That's the guy who won the Republican side. Nobody wants to be a Republican mayor of New York City because they know they can't win. So they're not—
Jones: This guy is to the left of Bill de Blasio.
Rogan: Oh, he's way to the left. Yeah. And he's young and he's energetic, and he's saying all the right things for all these kids that are in the streets that are protesting. They think they want to make the world a better place, which hey, I would've been doing it with you if I was 20. It's all the same thing, man. It's all the same thing. You can get indoctrinated into a particular way of thinking without being objective about what's actually going on.
Rogan went even further in an episode released Friday with his friend and frequent guest Mike Baker, a former CIA officer and current podcaster:
Baker: [...] Mamdani is doing, again, what a lot of slick socialists or communists in the past have done. He's speaking to the masses and he's using all these platitudes and there will be an element that buys into it because they haven't seen how it can be.
Rogan: Well, it seems like a huge element bought into it. He won the primary.
Baker: He won the primary. Yeah. No, I—
Rogan: So what happens now? So Eric Adams is the current mayor. So if this guy wins the primary, is Adams even—is it possible for him to run? How does it work now?
Baker: Well, I guess mean he could run as a independent, which maybe is his intention.
Rogan: Because he apparently is still running, right?
Baker: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Rogan: He plans on running?
Baker: Isn't Cuomo also planning on running? Or did he drop out again?
Rogan: I believe he's still trying to run as well. So he lost the primary and I think people think that people are so horrified that Mamdani's in that they think that maybe it's possible.
[...]
Baker: And the Democrats nationwide seem to have some real concern over Mamdani because that's not the message they want to send at a time when they see sort of this cultural shift in America where we think, "Okay, we might be done with this whole woke issue." And then they see Mamdani out there slinging the bullshit.
Rogan: Doubling down.
Baker: Doubling down. And you got Bernie Sanders backing him. You got Jerry Nadler in New York backing him. You got obviously AOC backing him. So they—rightly so, because what do they want to do? They want to reclaim the White House and they want to reclaim the Senate. They're not going to do it riding the backs of a avowed socialist who wants to reclaim the—
Rogan: More than a socialist. Essentially a communist.
Baker: Yeah, yeah. And he's, again, God bless the ideology of the youth, but people should do a little bit more research into his ideas and how they've worked elsewhere and maybe they might change their vote.
Rogan: There's only one way to enforce those ideas, and that's with guns.
Baker: Yeah, that's right.
Rogan: That's how you force—
Baker: "It's a government grocery store. Get the hell over there."
Rogan: Yeah, government grocery stores and taking money away from the rich people. How are you going to enforce that? You need force.
You need guns to run city-owned grocery stores! If only Rogan’s comedy were so funny.
What strikes me as I put these all in one place is that not only do these guys know nothing, they keep announcing they know nothing even as they treat each other as ipso facto authorities on whatever they’re talking about. I’m not totally closed off to the idea that liberals and leftists should try to reach these podcasters’ audiences—I’m just 75% closed to it—but I think a fundamental obstacle is that they're all essentially rigid in 1) their ideological priors (right-wing), 2) their susceptibility to messaging that flatters their ideological priors (extremely), and 3) their interest in learning new things about the world (negligible). Which leads me to believe that no matter what this or that individual guest might persuade them, over time they’ll revert back to the mean (stupid and conservative), as will the fans who stick with them.
Is it still worth trying to reach persuadable folks on the margins? Sure, maybe, that’s above my pay grade. Even if it is, though, the structural problem remains that these guys move in right-wing information ecosystems, and so long as they have influence they’ll inevitably use it to spread right-wing thought.
Anyway. I’ll leave you with some of Tim Dillon’s comments about Mamdani a few days after his primary win:
Dillon: I think that restoring the balance will be good. If he can make the city more affordable, it can be good. If he turns it into a crime-ridden hellscape, not great. Not great. If he's blaming Whitey and the Jews for everything, not great. I don't love that. I don't love making it a sanctuary for third world illegal labor that billionaires can use instead of native-born people. And I don't want to talk about Jews and Muslims for the rest of my life. There are Christians who live in America that should hold some political office too. Sorry. No offense. No offense. I know that all the signers of the Declaration of Independence were Jewish and Muslim, right? I mean, google that. Maybe they weren’t.
But the point is this. I think the conversation is too dominant. I love Jewish people. I have great Jew and Muslim friends. I love the whole desert, all of the desert people, the desert tribes, actually. All of the desert tribes, I like. I like their food. I bought a shawarma, a lamb shawarma from my friend before we came here. That's why I'm late. I love all the desert tribal peoples. Yes, they're fighting religious wars all the time. Is it tiring? For me, it is. But I do think, how about just a few Christian people who've lived in America for a few generations? Just throwing it out there as a bit, as a full bit. But again, might be interesting.
That's all, because it's too much. I even think the Jews and the Muzzies are sick of being discussed as much as we talk about. It's too much already. It's too much. America shouldn't just be a place where these groups of people are just warring all the time and fighting all the time. It's like, we have to return to a little bit of concern for the United States as a country, as a nation, as something that should be functional. Society has to return to being functional.
Society has to return to being functional.
