- Right-wing panic and hypocrisy over the election of Zohran Mamdani;
- While the right-wing increasingly embraces the racist views of Nick Fuentes;
- How the election clapped back at Trump; Robert Reich on how Trump has put America into reverse;
- Brief items about the actual Trump economy; Trump “news”; how Republicans are obsessed with issues that don’t matter to most Americans; and how the fossil fuel industry continues to spread climate change denial.
The right is hysterical about the newly elected mayor of New York City, because he’s not an old, white, Christian dude.
Slate, Molly Olmstead, 5 Nov 2025: Let’s Check In on How the Right Is Handling Mamdani’s Big Win
Tuesday night was, by any reasonable metric, a disastrous night for Republicans. Democrats were elected to the governors’ mansions of Virginia and New Jersey. Pennsylvania kept their liberal Supreme Court justices. Californians backed redistricting to counter Republican efforts. Even Georgia elected two Democrats to statewide offices.
But the greatest cultural shock to the class of Republican pundits and politicians who dominate social media conversations came from the night’s biggest news: A democratic socialist was elected mayor of the country’s largest city.
Zohran Mamdani’s election was not as surprising as his primary win in June, and since then, Republicans have had time to adjust to the idea of a young, charismatic idol espousing a new and exciting message for the Democratic Party. On Tuesday and Wednesday, though, instead of responding with new policy ideas to excite their own base, they mostly responded by returning to old territory: bald, ugly Islamophobia.
It’s hypocrisy, of course, to be worried about Sharia Law, when MAGA would happily impose Biblical rules on the nation if they could.
The Republican Party, which is currently roiled by debates over whether it should embrace the neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, has in recent months increasingly tolerated and even espoused forms of bigotry that had previously seemed to be in cultural retreat. The identity-focused response to Mamdani’s historic campaign, fixated on his race and religion, is further proof that open racism has been normalized, and rhetoric that would have once pushed you to the margins of politics is now a route to advancement inside the MAGA movement.
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On a similar note,
NY Times, 6 Nov 2025: Nick Fuentes’s Rise Puts MAGA Movement in a ‘Time of Choosing’, subtitled “After Mr. Fuentes’s interview with Tucker Carlson, Republicans are considering just how far his views are from the nationalism embraced by President Trump’s followers.”
For much of President Trump’s second term, the political heirs of his “America First” agenda have tried to form an intellectual framework for their movement that embraces nationalism while keeping overt bigotry out of the coalition.
With the rise of Nick Fuentes, a 27-year-old white nationalist, and his young, racist and antisemitic “Groyper” movement, some fear the exercise has failed.
The struggle and its stakes for the nation burst into view after the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson last week offered a friendly interview to Mr. Fuentes, an avowedly racist antisemite. The interview triggered rounds of acrimony and recriminations on the American right.
And,
NY Times, opinion by Michelle Goldberg, 3 Nov 2025: Nick Fuentes Was Charlie Kirk’s Bitter Enemy. Now He’s Becoming His Successor.
Charlie Kirk, the conservative influencer who was assassinated in September, and Nick Fuentes, the young Hitler-loving white nationalist at the center of a growing schism on the right, were bitter enemies.
Fuentes despised Kirk for his support of Israel, and, more broadly, for his efforts to marginalize Fuentes’s gleefully racist and fascist brand of politics. In 2019, seeking to expose Kirk as “anti-white” and a “fake patriot,” Fuentes organized his army of young fans — known as Groypers, after a variant on the alt-right Pepe the Frog meme — to flood events held by Kirk’s organization, Turning Point, and ask hostile questions. At one, they drove Donald Trump Jr. off the stage.
…
If you’re not familiar with Fuentes’s ideology, he helpfully distilled it on his streaming show, “America First,” in March. “Jews are running society, women need to shut up,” he said, using an obscenity. “Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part.” His sneering, proudly transgressive attitude has made him a hero to legions of mostly young men who resent all forms of political gatekeeping.
I think I’ll start calling this “cave man morality” — base human nature in its least enlightened form, modulated not even by religion.
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Despite which…
The New Yorker, Susan B. Glasser, 6 Nov 2025: America Begins Clapping Back at Donald Trump, subtitled “In a week of political exits, a reminder that Trump’s time is coming soon, too.”
Was this the week that America finally started clapping back at Donald Trump? Actions trigger reactions; we all know that. Yet, remarkably, Trump has spent the first nine months back in the White House plowing forward as if, channelling Lenin, there was all mush and no steel to meet his advance. Only a man who truly feared no political consequences could have chosen to hold a Great Gatsby-themed Halloween party at his Mar-a-Lago estate on the weekend before important off-year elections and amid a federal-government shutdown that is causing millions of poor Americans to wait indefinitely for monthly food assistance. In the face of such evident political malpractice, many wondered whether a video of the event, which showed a scantily clad woman gyrating in an oversized Martini glass, was an A.I.-generated stunt to make Trump look bad. But, no, it was real. He is actually that brazen.
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Robert Reich, 5 Nov 2025: The True Test of our Progress, subtitled “Trump has put America into reverse”
The Democrats had a great day yesterday. It’s crucial that they hone their economic message for next year’s midterms on affordability, based in fairness.
Trump is doing the opposite. Although a federal court ordered Trump to continue to provide food stamps to about 42 million low-income Americans who depend on them, Trump yesterday threatened to deny them anyway until the end of the government shutdown.
In a post on social media, he said benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly referred to as food stamps, “will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up the government, which they can easily do, and not before!”
How low Trump has sunk.
Eighty-eight years ago, in his Second Inaugural Address, Franklin D. Roosevelt told America that “the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
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Items briefly noted.
- LA Times, Michael Hiltzik, business columnist, 6 Nov 2025: How bad is Trump’s economy? Election results say it’s very bad, and getting worse, subtitled “The economy was robust and growing under President Biden. President Trump has reversed the trend.” — — Widely acknowledged, except by Trump and his acolytes, who don’t do evidence. (via)
- Robert Reich, 6 Nov 2025: What’s “news” under Trump? — — Just because Trump says “whatever happens to be in his brain at the moment” doesn’t make it news.
- Paul Krugman, 5 Nov 2025: Which Party Is in Trouble, Again?, subtitled “Thoughts after a very blue night” — — Noted for comments about how Republicans are obsessed about issues that don’t actually matter much to most Americans: “Republicans may be obsessed with trans athletes, but most people aren’t.” The actual number of trans athletes is very small.
- The Guardian, 3 Nov 2025: Exxon funded thinktanks to spread climate denial in Latin America, documents reveal, subtitled “Texas-based fossil fuel company financed Atlas Network in attempt to derail UN-led climate treaty process” — — The same story, for decades now. Whose interests do they represent? Only their own. And this is the flaw of unmediated capitalism.
