State of Thursday: THE PIED PIPER OF BUSHWICK
There are a couple of fires right now for conservatives.
Greetings, Dear Reader,
As usual, they’re all wrong and I’m right.
How can we interpret the two conflagrations in our midst?
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THE PIED PIPER OF BUSHWICK
There are a couple of fires right now for conservatives. To our front, the Heritage Foundation is in the midst of a generational struggle session over allegiance to Israel.
While I think the reckoning is worthwhile and ultimately inevitable – especially considering future American conservatives are not apt to carry Jerusalem’s burden – the one to our rear is much more immediate and consequential.
The story we’re hearing from the left (and the right) about Mamdani’s win in New York City is pure mythology. It’s a stunning rebuke of Trumpism, the left tells us, a populist peasant uprising. Trump’s personal take: Well, the shutdown is bad.
None of that is remotely close to true.
Mamdani won overwhelmingly because of three distinct cohorts: “educated” women, “educated” men, and non-native New Yorkers (both domestic transplants and immigrants).
The working-class, non-degree-holding, and native NY-born populations voted overwhelmingly for Cuomo by a margin of 2:1.
Self-described “left-wing MAGA” political analyst Batya Ungar saw this data and dubbed Mamdani the “Pied Piper of Bushwick.”
“Mamdani’s base is the over-credentialed, downwardly mobile 20, 30-something hipster who thinks they are working class because they have student loans,” she said. “Mamdani is the patron saint of the nepo baby socialists, the Pied Piper of Bushwick.”
Bingooooo, she hit the nail on the head.
So what do we do about it?
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With regard to the shutdown, Donald Trump is currently lobbying the Senate to nuke the filibuster. The filibuster allows Senate minorities to “debate” a bill forever. The only thing that can stop this debate is if 60 senators vote to end it.
Conservative onlookers, rightly in my opinion, are skeptical that Trump should lobby so hard for an end to the filibuster.
“Imagine what Biden would have done if Democrats nuked the filibuster,” goes the thinking.
I saw another commentator point out that the only reason you’d nuke the Senate rule would be if you had a slate of legislation that would leave Democrats “in the wilderness for a very long time.”
Well … about that.
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The conflagration to our rear isn’t actually Mamdani. In fact, I’m skeptical that he’ll do much, if any, permanent damage to New York City as long as he has Albany to his rear controlling stuff like “free” transportation.
The actual problem is what gave rise to him in the first place, and that is an issue we can fix in one presidential term.
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Have you seen this style of short-form video? They start off with some kid in college graduation garb. Usually it’s an expensive school, NYU, Columbia, Harvard or something. The kid will say, “I majored in the decolonization of early Roman history,” or some neo-Marxist mumbo jumbo.
Right then, the video will cut to a conservative saying something to the effect of, “That’s great, I’ll have a large espresso latte, please.”
I’ve seen dozens of these. The joke is that these pricey educations are worthless, and they are. Most of those kids will either end up competing for shrinking job prospects in academia or …
They’ll end up working at a coffee shop in New York City’s Bushwick, forever in debt, the American dream forever out of reach amid skyrocketing home prices and grocery prices. Eventually, given a choice, these folks will vote for socialism.
Here’s the rub, though: Instead of mocking them, we can actually prevent this from happening.
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“When 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why,” reads an email Peter Thiel wrote to a host of Big Tech bigwigs in 2020.
“From the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate.”
“If one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.”
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Instead of simply trying to end the shutdown by nuking the filibuster, Trump should instead be thinking about nuking the burgeoning Marxist pipeline entirely.
First: Stop “educating” these “hipsters.”
As I see it, you can help future generations immensely and sap serious strength from the Democrat Party for generations in one stroke: Nuke the filibuster, then nuke federal financial aid.
Then put colleges and private loan companies on notice. If a student defaults then declares bankruptcy, half the debt is paid by the university and the other half simply vanishes forever.
Overnight, you’d see a radical shift in financial priorities for both lenders and the universities gobbling these easy funds.
No more “intersectional” mumbo jumbo. No more people majoring in feminist retellings of the Star Wars franchise. No more worthless “educations.” Educations and individuals will suddenly be rated like potential homebuyers.
Is your academic pursuit likely to generate enough capital to pay off the debt? No? No soup for you.
We need more STEM. We need more health care. We need more agriculture. We need more energy. We need more construction management. We need more builders. We don’t need more Bushwick hipsters.
Divert financial aid to those pursuits and into common trades, and Democrats flirting with Marxism will have a generational struggle re-forming a constituency. Can you imagine AOC trying to convince armies of engineers, plumbers and construction workers to vote for her?
You’d increase the number of debt-free Americans. You’d increase the number of homes and the abundance of food and energy. This is what we need.
You’d also obliterate the intellectual pipeline that’s been feeding party apparatchiks to the left for decades.
Will the universities suffer? Of course. Probably thousands of out-of-work professors and administrators.
In the new American regime, they can find work in the fields.
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The second thing to button up would, of course, be immigration, legal and illegal. Simply shut it off and burn the bridge behind you.
Poof!
There goes Mamdani’s constituency.
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I guess at this point one could simply say, “Well, Democrats would regain power and simply turn the spigot back on.”
They could be that insane, but do we really think once it’s off, Americans will be all for turning it back on?
We loved it when student debt prevented family formation and homeownership! Two trillion dollars in student loan debt? Let’s make it three!
Or
We loved it when armies of unmoored, unemployed prime-age foreign males who speak zero English loitered around suburban America! Bring them back!
Color me skeptical that Democrats would be so bold. America certainly wouldn’t stand for it, no matter how much Dems wielded the cudgel of “empathy.”
Not everyone deserves to live here, just as not everyone has a right to spend other people’s money reading Russian poetry.
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Well, that’s my prognosis. I’ve been shouting it from the rooftops for years now.
I hope they’re listening, because something’s got to give.
Israel is tertiary as far as I’m concerned. Washington itself won’t last if the constituency that gave us Mayor Mamdani goes national.
WHAT I’M READING
They did it to themselves.
The Worst Politics Site On Earth Just Died
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Welcome to governing, Zohran!
‘Angry Mamdani’: Socialist Mayor-To-Be Braces For Harsh Reality Check, Analysts Say
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Scott Jennings on point as usual.
Scott Jennings Says What We’re All Thinking (Or Should Be) About Democrats’ Victories
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It’s amazing how dedicated some people are to losing.
EXCLUSIVE: John Thune Is Defying Trump On The Filibuster. Here’s His Explanation.
WHAT I’M WATCHING
Mamdani Is The One That Made This About Race.
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