Thursday, June 26, 2025

IN NEW YORK, I'M ENJOYING THIS BILLIONAIRE FREAKOUT

Rupert Murdoch's New York Post reported yesterday that hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman had settled on a strategy for dealing with the (to him) intolerable victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York Democratic mayoral primary:
Bill Ackman is preparing to back Eric Adams’ bid for reelection as New York City mayor — and is hoping that rival candidates will drop out to bolster the current mayor’s chances against Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, The Post has learned.

... Ackman is hoping that [Andrew] Cuomo and Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa will bow out of the November election to allow Adams a clearer run against the 33-year-old hard-left firebrand Mamdani, who is backed by AOC and Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The Post also reported that Cuomo was ready to step aside:
Andrew Cuomo will drop out of the mayor’s race after his humiliating defeat against socialist Zohran Mamdani, sources told The Post — as the ex-governor’s donors and backers desert him and weigh whether to boost Eric Adams.
But did the Post's souces actually talk to Ackman? Apparently not:


It appears that Murdoch was trying to rally the Masters of the Universe class around Adams and was attempting to drag Ackman into the pro-Adams camp kicking and screaming. (As I noted in the update yesterday, Adams appeared on Fox & Friends yesterday morning, and there were kind words about him in a Post editorial. Further evidence of Murdoch's commitment to Adams can be seen in a Kirsten Fleming column published in the Post last night under the headline "Mayor Eric Adams Is Ready to Apologize for Past Hires as He Vows to Rebuild Trust with New Yorkers.")

So what is Ackman's plan? He explained it after midnight last night in a tweet that was nearly 1,500 words long (switch to decaf, Bill!). I'll just give you the summary:


The fat-cat class discussed a different plan, but apparently it won't work, according to The New York Times.
At 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon, the Partnership for New York City, a big business group, held a meeting for a subset of its members to discuss the new political landscape.

In separate discussions, some business leaders even consulted election lawyers to see if there was a way to replace Andrew Cuomo on the ballot, should he not run in the general election as an independent, three people familiar with the conversations said....

But Jerry H. Goldfeder, a state election law expert, said that was unlikely to be a legal possibility.
Ackman alludes to that in his tweet, which is quoted below.


Well, it's not as bad as this idea:
On Wednesday ... the New York Young Republican Club, or NYYRC, took to X, begging Trump immigration advisers Stephen Miller and Tom Homan to revoke Mamdani’s U.S. citizenship and deport him.

“The radical Zohran Mamdani cannot be allowed to destroy our beloved city of New York,” the NYYRC’s post states. “The Communist Control Act lets President Trump revoke @ZohranKMamdani’s citizenship and promptly deport him. The time for action is now—@StephenM and @RealTomHoman, New York is counting on you.”

In the replies, the X account for the Republicans for National Renewal tweeted, “We fully support this initiative. Communist radical Zohran Mamdani should be remigrated as soon as possible,” and the John Birch Society approvingly posted a “100” emoji.

The message was reposted by the accounts of numerous conservative figures, including Gavin Wax, who was formerly the NYYRC president as well as the chief of staff for recently departed Federal Communications Commissioner Nathan Simington, who has recommended Wax as his successor.
I wouldn't completely rule out the possibility that the Trump administration will try to do this using the Communist Control Act, which is real. (It was signed into law by President Eisenhower in 1954.) But it's more likely that Ackman, Murdoch, and the rest of the billionaire class will persuade Cuomo not to run on the independent ballot line he's secured, and possibly persuade Sliwa to drop out and endorse Adams.

Meanwhile, the attacks on Mamdani will only escalate. The Post published this attack a few days before the primary and it didn't land, but I suspect it will go national now:
Socialist NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani once voiced his “love” for the five leaders of a notorious nonprofit convicted of funneling more than $12 million to the terror group Hamas.

The former C-list rapper-turned-far-left-pol praised the heads of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development – known as the “Holy Land Five”– in a shocking 2017 rap track uncovered by the antisemitism-fighting group Canary Mission....

“My love to the Holy Land Five. You better look ’em up,” Mamdani – who performed under the stage name Mr. Cardamom – says in a song called “Salaam” which the Queens assemblyman has said is about growing up Muslim in New York.
Canary Mission, which specializes in doxxing pro-Gaza activists, posted this:


There are, to put it mildly, differences of opinion about the Holy Land Five. Human Rights Watch says:
The Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development was shut down by the Bush administration and designated as a terrorist organization in the wake of 9/11, even though it donated money to Palestinian charities that the U.S. government itself supported. Its leaders are serving sentences of up to 65 years in federal prison.

The defendants in the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) case were never accused of directly funding terrorist organizations or terrorist attacks, nor were the Palestinian charities they funded accused of doing so. Nonetheless, they were prosecuted under US “material support” legislation on the notion that the social programs they financed help win the “hearts and minds” of Palestinian people for Hamas.
Expect a lot more of this between now and November. I wish I could tell you for certain that it won't work.

Meanwhile, if you're puzzling over what appears to be Mamdani wearing an apron but no shirt in what appears to be a halal cart in the Canary Mission video above, here's the source of the imagery: the video for a different Mamdani hip-hop song, called "Nani." In it, the acclaimed actress and cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey plays a foul-mouthed grandmother who's also a crime boss (with a doctorate). Enjoy.