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Celerity

(50,618 posts) Sat Jun 28, 2025, 12:35 PM Saturday

Elie Mystal for The Nation: The mainstream media doesn't want anything to change, ever.

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Who needs the NYT editorial board?

When Eric Adams, a corrupt, dirtbag centrist cop, won the New York mayoral primary four years ago, mainstream media forces hailed him as the new face of the Democratic Party. Nate Silver said he could be the next Democratic presidential nominee. People were falling over themselves to praise his Trump-like “straight talk,” and his platform of being “tough” on crime and immigration while not quite as openly racist as Republicans usually are about the matter. His brand of Black MAGA was promoted as the way forward for the Democratic Party.

Adams was never as popular as this year’s New York mayoral primary winner (and Nation mayoral pick), Zohran Mamdani. Not for a day. His victory over Maya Wiley and Kathryn Garcia was “wafer-thin.” By comparison, Mamdani cruised to victory on Tuesday night over former New York governor Andrew Cuomo.

But Mamdani, only 33, is not being hailed by mainstream media types as “the future” of the Democratic Party, because his future leads the party to places they don’t want it to go. Instead of running a campaign based on shunning our neighbors and bewailing our problems (as Adams and Cuomo did), Mamdani’s campaign embraced our differences while offering new solutions to old problems. Instead of suckling at the teat of Wall Street titans (as Adams and Cuomo did), Mamdani ran on addressing the unaffordability of New York.

The mainstream media doesn’t want anything to change, ever. They want to keep people in fear, and in thrall to corporate interests. The Democratic Party that can unlock the vast potential of this country, and defeat the forces of racism and MAGA, is not the Democratic Party that can win the endorsement of the New York Times editorial board. Zohran Mamdani just proved future Democrats don’t have to.