WTH Do Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists Really Believe? James Kirchick Explains.
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 30 October 2025
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With just one week until Election Day in New York City, we’re reflecting on the past and future of the Democratic Party, Gracie Mansion, and the political home of mayoral hopeful, Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani is a Democratic Socialist, having campaigned alongside and accepted donations from members of the Democratic Socialists of America, a group with a clear, parasitic strategy towards the Democratic establishment and post-colonial West. What does this mean for our political parties? If successful, what does it mean for New York? And for our country?
James Kirchick is a journalist and the New York Times-bestselling author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington and The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. A contributing opinion writer to the New York Times, a writer at large for Air Mail, and a contributor to the Axel Springer Global Reporters Project, he has reported from over 40 countries and his writing has appeared in many publications including the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:03.1 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. |
| 0:07.1 | Thanks for listening. Here's our show. |
| 0:08.7 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:10.5 | What's really going on? |
| 0:12.0 | We said, what the hell happened? |
| 0:13.5 | You don't have to know what the hell is on it. |
| 0:15.6 | They see what's going on. |
| 0:16.7 | I don't know what's going on. |
| 0:18.0 | What is going on? |
| 0:20.0 | We must find out what's going on. What is going on? We must find out what is going on. |
| 0:29.4 | Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka. |
| 0:31.0 | I'm Mark Tiesin. |
| 0:32.1 | Welcome to our podcast. |
| 0:33.6 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:35.5 | New York edition. |
| 0:36.7 | Mark? |
| 0:37.7 | What the hell is going on is we're a week out from the New York election, and Zoramandani looks like he's headed to Gracie Mansion, and he is a Democratic socialist. |
| 0:49.3 | He's running on the Democratic Party ticket, but he is a Democratic Socialist, which is the radical left-wing party of AOC and Bernie Sanders and all the, and many other fellow travelers of global communism. |
| 1:05.0 | And so we have on today, Jamie Kirchick, who's a great writer who's done a deep dive into what democratic socialism |
| 1:12.2 | actually is. What is this party to which Zora Mandani is attached mean? What does it mean for the |
| 1:19.2 | Democratic Party in the future? Was it mean for New York? What does it mean for our country? |
... |
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