“We Are Terrorists Now,” Andrew Schulz Declares After Hosting Zohran Mamdani

Fresh off hosting Zohran Mamdani for a conversation where the candidate ably kept the focus on his proposals to make New York City more affordable, Andrew Schulz and his cohosts released a Patreon-exclusive episode in which they joked that they’re all Muslim terrorists now and Sharia law is coming to NYC. See for yourself, and then keep reading for Shane Gillis's latest effort to defend Trump against the Epstein allegations:

Mark Gagnon: [Ed. note: I have no idea what this is referring to:] Bro, I really wish we did the towel, fucking stool stroke when we were in Saudi Arabia.

Schulz: Oh, that was a great idea. That was a great idea.

Gagnon: That would’ve been all time. That would’ve been all time.

Alexx Media: Stop.

Schulz: What?

Media: Stop.

Schulz: [Using a derogatory term for women who wear the hijab:] Have four of the ninjas come onstage, flip the stool upside down, feel some wood. Feel that wood.

Akaash Singh: Yo, ninjas don’t need to stroke it. 

Schulz: Say what? No, they gonna sit on that. Sit on that wood. Sit on that wood. 

Media: No, we had fire shit there.

Schulz: You're a Muslim now, dude.

Gagnon: Yeah, true.

Schulz: We're Muslims now. America will be eventually, but New York is gonna be the beginning of it.

Gagnon: Yes.

Singh: Sharia law, baby.

Schulz: We're bringing in that Sharia court.

Singh: Yep.

"We're Muslims now. America will be eventually, but New York is gonna be the beginning of it."

Schulz: We need some Sharia courts. Need that shit in my house. Need that shit in your house too. He couldn't even get off the phone with his Sharia.

Singh: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We delivered a couch that won't fit.

Schulz: And then she's like, "Yo, I need your help." And it's like, Sharia.

Singh: What do you want me to do? It's work.

Schulz: Sharia.

Gagnon: That's what you were talking about? I thought you were trying to get my Kindle back.

Schulz: No, no. That's already done.

Singh: We ordered a couch and they said, "If this doesn't fit, you're still getting charged."

[...] 

Schulz: Yo, we are terrorists now.

Singh: That's true. That's true.

Schulz: I feel like I was radicalized. I'm radicalized. I'm radicalized.

Media: Yeah, but the good kind.

Schulz: What does that mean?

Media: Socialist, radical socialist.

Schulz: Can I be honest with y'all—

Media: Yeah.

Schulz: —About this shit? I feel like he made me gay a little bit, too.

Media: Welcome, bro.

Schulz: Honestly, I don't even think motherfuckers care about socialism. I literally think whatever candidate was like, "We're going to make the rent cheaper," they would pick—if the most conservative guy came up and was like, "Listen, I believe in all conservative politics, but we gotta put a stop to this rent shit until we figure it out." I think that wins. I don't think there's this, "New York wants to be socialist now." They're like, "This is the problem. Who's going to solve it?"

Media: Yeah.

Singh: Yeah. I think it's rent. I think it's—

Schulz: Same shit with Trump.

Singh: Yeah. I think it's all that shit. It's like, it's hard to survive and then y'all are offering a status quo on this side. I don't want status quo. Fuck that. Even if it risks making things worse, they're already bad. At least let's try to make things better.

Schulz: Exactly.

Media: I don't get why he makes it harder on himself, calling himself a democratic socialist. Just say you're a progressive.

Schulz: He's like—

Singh: Well, when you're a communist, you gotta dumb it down.

Schulz: That is the softening.

Singh: You gotta water it down.

Schulz: That is the softening.

Media: Yeah, but he can just lie and just be like, "I'm progressive."

Singh: You can't be honest and say you wanna globalize the Intifada. You gotta water it down.

Schulz: So I looked into the Intifada.

Media: What's up with that?

Schulz: Not great. Not great, according to what I Googled. You know what I mean?

Media: I remember in the chat, I thought it was the same thing as the Irish, I mean the Arab Spring and I was like, "The Intifada's not that bad."

Schulz: Arab Spring is the worst soap. You smell like a Turkish ice cream man.

From here the crew goes on to do some light phrenology and then argue that maps should be redrawn by racial stereotypes rather than nation-states, with Schulz describing Dagestani people as monkeys: 

Schulz: They're not Arabs, we get it. You're Europeans. You're Europeans, Turkish.

Gagnon: Yeah, they think they are. The Persians too. Persians really try and pretend they're not Arabs.

Schulz: Yeah, so you see their fucking eyebrow. Arab is an eyebrow. Arab's an eyebrow. Can we just say like, Asian is the eyes, Arab's an eyebrow. What else?

Media: And the complexion.

Schulz: What?

Media: You gotta put the complexion in there.

Schulz: I don't know if you do. I don't know if you do.

Gagnon: It might just be eyebrow.

Schulz: It's an eyebrow.

"Asian is the eyes, Arab's an eyebrow."

Singh: [Referring to the voiced uvular fricative:] The second—"ch"—you're Arab.

Schulz: You're Arab. But also like, Egyptians are African, but they're not.

Singh: Right.

Schulz: They're Arabs. They're not from Arabia, but they are.  That's what we gotta redo the map. We have to do, we have to make a global map. We have, what is it called, a globe?

Gagnon: You get to globalize—

Schulz: We have to globalize the maps, but do it how we actually talk about people.

Gagnon: Yes.

Schulz: You know, like English people is everybody in Europe that's white in the north.

Gagnon: Yep.

Schulz: Except if you're a redhead, then you are—

Gagnon: Irish.

Schulz: That's Irish.

"The monkey ones are from Dagestan… they're a little bit more monkey."

Gagnon: Yep.

Schulz: But if you're a redhead, you live in England, you're Irish.

Gagnon: Yes.

Singh: Got it.

Schulz: Norway, Scandinavia, whatever, they're English. No one cares. Then there's Russians.

Gagnon: Yep.

Schulz: Then there's the—

Media: How do you separate them, though?

Schulz: What, the Russians?

Media: Yeah, like—

Schulz: The monkey ones are from Dagestan.

Media: Yeah.

Gagnon: Tracks.

Schulz: They are a little bit more, and they're white, so I can make that statement, right?

Gagnon: Yeah.

Schulz: But they're a little bit more monkey. Like if we're starving and there was a bushel of bananas at the top of a tree, I'm not gonna send you.

As I said a few days ago, I am agnostic on the question of whether it’s useful for politicians like Mamdani to court right-wing influencers like Schulz, but I believe that if they do, it’s incumbent on them to challenge their hosts’ right-wing beliefs. It may well be to Mamdani’s benefit that Schulz & Co. are otherwise enthusiastic about his campaign—I personally doubt that the Flagrant podcast’s audience composes a meaningful portion of the NYC electorate—but I struggle to what is gained in the long term from buddying up to comedians as gleefully racist as these. Mamdani himself has spent the last several days rightfully assailing Andrew Cuomo’s Islamophobia; while it’s true that Cuomo is a politician rather than an entertainer, one big reason it’s bad for politicians to be racist is that they implicitly give permission to millions of ordinary people to be racist as well. Perhaps this same logic might extend to podcasters who also, by the way, helped elect and continue to support Donald Trump. 

So long as we're here, here’s Shane Gillis and Matt McCusker on their latest Patreon episode, asking investigative journalist Nick Bryant if the Democrats and/or the intelligence community might be trying to unfairly tar Trump as an Epstein associate:

Bryant: …And I don't have Trump derangement syndrome, but we do have a president that's committed to not making sure that there's an investigation into a bunch of child molesters.

Gillis: Would you say there's a chance that Trump is trying to hide that investigation because he knows the people that would release it would use him as, they would maybe insert him more than he was into it? You know what I mean? Like they might weaponize it against him if you let the Democrats lead the investigation. Now I'm just playing—

Bryant: No, that's entirely possible. I think what Trump is hiding—Trump might be involved. I mean, with Epstein, people pretty much knew what—John McCain's widow was being interviewed about Epstein and she said that everyone knew what Epstein was about. So it's not like a secret what Epstein was about. And Trump hung out with him for a long time.

Gillis: Now the thing I've always been told is he stopped hanging out with him after the first time Epstein got caught in Florida. 

Bryant: No, it was before—so there's two stories about that…

[...]

Bryant: I mean, this whole thing could be taken care of really quickly if the Department of Justice had the will. If Pamela Bondi and Kash Patel weren't lying their asses off, this could be taken care of. 

"Some parts of the intelligence community have been trying to get him for a while."

McCusker: Yeah, that was the one thing that kind of sunk them, when they were asked directly like, "Were you told to warn Trump if anything came up indicting him or alleging that he was involved?" And they were like, "Why are you even asking me this?"  Which is like, dude, it's a yes or no, man. Just say yes. 

Gillis: But that's also the thing where it's like, I am not defending Trump again, but it's like there's an idea where he could be, the intelligence communities have been trying to get him. Some parts of the intelligence community have been trying to get him for a while. It's like, who knows, under the last—if they slid some fucking names in there of like, "Well, Trump did this also. You just add it to the fucking file." And then when he's like, "I'm going to release it," and he opens it and it's like, "Oh, shit, they said I did a bunch of shit."

McCusker: "They got me." The letter, what do you think about the letter? No, true. That letter—

Gillis: He was obviously, he was boys with him.

McCusker: Yeah, exactly. But say the letter's not real, that would've scared me. If I was a president and they came up with a thing like, "Yo, this guy wrote this." I'd be like, "Fuck this."

Bryant: You guys think the letter is real?

McCusker: I don't know. I honestly don't know.

Bryant: I have a hard time believing that Rupert Murdoch would've published it without vetting it. And if you look at the birthday book and the other entries, it's consistent with what's in the birthday book.

Gillis: So you believe the letter's real?

Bryant: Yeah, I do.

McCusker: Can he draw like that? That was kind of fucking impressive, honestly, taken out of the context.

Gillis: I mean, he probably had a kid do it.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Shane Gillis is fully in the tank for Donald Trump, so much so that he’s in denial of the massive amounts of evidence pointing to Trump’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein.