Hello and welcome back to the Jackpin Show. I'm Jen Han, here of course with Paul Prescott. Paul, what's new?

How much? I'm enjoying my teacher's summer break, you know, so that's right. Yeah, you're your YouTube propaganda full time now, as we established last show.

But I'm really excited for this week's show to be honest. I mean, we have been trying to get Cedric Jackson on the show like for ages. I'm sure lots of viewers are familiar with him already from his great work in Jacobin, Catalyst, Nonsight, and elsewhere.

But Paul, what else is going on today? Well, there was a big election in New York City. Other things to talk about. Yes, it's funny because neither of us are New York City residents. I don't live there anymore. But of course, you know, we have mentioned the mayoral race on the show before. New York went to the polls yesterday to vote in the primary on the Democratic nominee for mayor.

And, you know, as I think all of you know, a new thing that was happening in New York this year was ranked choice voting, right? So you can totally not confusing. Everyone got it. No one can plan about it. Exactly. Everybody got it. Nobody was trying to game the system at all. It worked like a charm.

So what happened yesterday? Well, Eric Adams, who has been the front runner, basically this entire time, has emerged basically as the winner. We don't have the ranked choice vote tallies yet. They will not be expected until around June 29. So we won't know for a few more weeks who the official winner is. But as we can see, Eric Adams right now is leading the pack with over 30% of the vote.

And, you know, I think that this isn't a huge surprise. Like I said, Eric Adams has been the front runner for months. Yang was kind of percolating for a while. But he's since conceded and from the from the numbers so far, it looks like he didn't do that well at all.

But I think so Eric Adams is a really interesting figure, right? Because I think, you know, there's a lot to say about Eric Adams. And we've sort of gone into Eric Adams on the show before.

But in the last couple weeks of his campaign, I noticed that he was sort of deploying what I think was a very kind of old school type of political class identity politics.

So Ross Barkin, who is a columnist at Jacobin and of course has a great newsletter about New York City politics.

He pointed out that among other things, Eric Adams argued at one point that red control would destroy black wealth.

So this is a very kind of classic like like I said, like 1990s sort of deployment of identity politics to mask a very sort of reactionary politics, right?

And I want to read this quote from Ross. This is from his newsletter. So he writes or this is a quote from Eric Adams. So Ross Barkin asked all the candidates what they thought about a rent freeze or even a rent rollback.

And Eric Adams said, the greatest wealth of black and brown people in this city is in their property. So when we start making any decisions on small property owners, we need to factor that.

Then he goes on to say, because if we're not going to freeze mortgage payments for small property owners, if we're not going to roll back their mortgage payments, then we need to be careful.

And you know, Ross goes on to point out that actually most of the property owners in New York, most of the landlords are not these like hypothetical black and brown like small mortgage payers.

They're larger landlords that own multiple properties. So this is really, you know, pretty disingenuous dissection from the problem of rent, you know, which of course in New York is sky high as it is in many other large cities.

And then closer to the election, there was an even more incredible use of this type of identity politics from Eric Adams. And in this instance, he actually compared Andrew Yang and Catherine Garcia, who campaigned together to Jim Crow.

So let's take a look. This is a really amazing quote from the New York from New York magazine from Eric Levitz. He writes, Adams argued that by campaigning together, Yang and Garcia were effectively quote saying we can't trust a person of color to be the mayor of the city of New York when the city is overwhelmingly people of color.

It is unclear whether Adams is aware that Andrew Yang is of Asian descent. Then it goes on to write, in any case, after Yang confirmed that he is not white, Adams refined his indictment of the Yang Garcia alliance, saying that their decision to campaign together on juteenth was an insult to quote black and brown people in the city as well as all New Yorkers.

Then, let's see, finally, on Monday, Adams, like a Yang's decision to share his second choice with the public to Jim Crow era poll taxes.

I love how he had like a few prepared, so I was like, all right, if they knock that one down, I'm coming with the poll taxes.

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