Category: New York City
I’ll Have What He’s Having
If you’ve never heard of Drew Nieporent, it’s okay, even if you’re something of a foodie. Stick with me to the end of this review, and there’s an excellent chance you’ll want to read this delicious memoir from a pioneering figure of the New York restaurant scene. Once you’ve read the book, it’s all but certain you’ll wish you could have dinner with him.
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Socialism didn’t win New York. Marketing did.
I oppose Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic Socialist agenda. But if Republicans are serious about winning elections next year and in 2028, they need to take a hard, unsentimental look at how he just won one of the most consequential mayoral races in the country.
This was not an ideological earthquake. New York did not suddenly “discover” socialism. What happened was a marketing and mobilization breakthrough. Mamdani’s campaign understood attention, simplicity, participation, and distribution better than anyone else in the race.
Republicans often confuse seriousness with stiffness. Mamdani showed that message discipline does not require lifelessness.
Joe Perello, the city of New York’s first chief marketing officer, noted in PRWeek after Mamdani’s victory that the campaign did more than communicate a message. It built an engine that converted online engagement into real-world turnout.
“For marketers and strategists alike, the implications are clear,” Perello wrote. “Growth hacking, iterative testing, and data-driven amplification can convert digital sentiment into real-world behavior. In Mamdani’s case, that meant converting hearts, clicks, and hashtags into ballots.”
Here is the part many on the right do not want to hear: Mamdani did not spend his time lecturing working-class voters about the virtues of socialism or defending failed economic theory. He focused on immediate, kitchen-table concerns and paired them with simple, slogan-ready answers.
Is halal food expensive? Make it cheaper. Struggling to get to work? Free buses. Grocery bills too high? Government-run grocery stores.
He took Bernie Sanders’ 2016-era talking points and filtered them through a polished, Obama-style optimism that voting-age New Yorkers were willing to engage with.
Most voters do not have the time — or patience — to think through how these promises would actually work. They just want to hear that someone intends to make their lives easier.
As Citizens Alliance CEO Cliff Maloney observed during Mamdani’s surge in the polls, the public’s lack of understanding about how government operates — and how socialism consistently fails — created the political environment Mamdani exploited. He did not create that environment. He mastered it.
Republicans’ digital blind spot
For years, Republican campaigns have treated digital media as messaging rather than infrastructure. Social platforms are used as megaphones for press releases, fundraising tools, or dumping grounds for cable-news clips. The underlying assumption is that persuasion happens elsewhere — on TV, at rallies, through mailers — and that digital simply amplifies those efforts.
Mamdani reversed that logic. Social media was not an accessory to his campaign. It was the campaign.
His approach drew praise even from outlets like the Guardian, where journalist Adam Gabbatt noted that Mamdani “has won social media with clips that are always fun — and resolutely on-message.”
His team treated TikTok and Instagram like serious growth channels. Short videos were not vanity content; they were experiments. Different neighborhoods, different faces, different tones, different pacing. What held attention? What sparked comments? What traveled across boroughs? Each post generated data, and each data point informed the next iteration.
This was politics run as a full-funnel acquisition strategy. Awareness led to engagement. Engagement led to identification. Identification led to turnout. Republicans can mock the aesthetics, but the mechanics work.
Energy is a signal
One of the most underrated elements of Mamdani’s campaign was how it looked. He was constantly in motion — walking Manhattan, running a marathon, bouncing between boroughs. Rarely behind a lectern. Rarely static. Always visible.
That energy communicated youth, optimism, and confidence in the same way John F. Kennedy outperformed Richard Nixon on television in 1960. A similar contrast appeared in 2024, when Donald Trump’s unscripted, high-visibility media strategy stood in sharp contrast to Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’ tightly controlled appearances.
The predictable response on the right is dismissal. ‘That’s just TikTok nonsense.’ ‘Our voters aren’t like that.’ Those excuses are comforting — and dangerously wrong.
In an age of low trust and low information, energy reads as competence. Movement suggests effort. Visibility substitutes for familiarity. Mamdani’s omnipresence created the impression — fair or not — that he was accessible and engaged with everyday life.
Republicans often confuse seriousness with stiffness. Mamdani showed that message discipline does not require lifelessness.
RELATED: When Bernie Sanders and I agree on AI, America had better pay attention
Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images
From supporters to fans
The most uncomfortable lesson for traditional campaigns is that Mamdani did not just mobilize voters. He activated fandom.
Much of the campaign content that flooded social media did not come from official accounts. It came from supporters remixing clips, creating fan art, cutting moments to music, and sharing them within their own networks. The campaign made Mamdani easy to clip, easy to celebrate, and then got out of the way.
Wired magazine described it as a rare case of participatory political culture usually reserved for celebrities.
This matters because peer-to-peer persuasion scales faster and carries more credibility than anything a campaign can manufacture. Fan-made content travels further, feels more authentic, and costs nothing. Republicans, by contrast, tend to over-police their messaging, choking off organic enthusiasm in the name of control.
Younger voters understand fandom instinctively. They grew up online. Mamdani did not lecture them about politics; he gave them something to belong to.
The wrong reaction
The predictable response on the right is dismissal. “That only works for Democrats.” “That’s just TikTok nonsense.” “Our voters aren’t like that.”
Those excuses are comforting — and dangerously wrong.
Trump understood this dynamic in 2024 when his campaign was largely shut out of legacy media. Figures like Charlie Kirk reached millions of Gen Z voters by blending serious political content with the humor and energy of youth activism.
Algorithms do not have ideologies. Participation is not a left-wing monopoly. Visibility, simplicity, and community are not progressive inventions. In a low-information, high-attention environment, the side that understands distribution wins.
The real danger is not Mamdani’s policies alone. It is a Republican Party that keeps confusing being correct with being effective.
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Blaze Media Illustration
What Republicans should learn — now
First, treat digital as organizing, not advertising. Stop thinking in posts and start thinking in systems. How does attention become action?
Second, simplicity wins. Republicans often pride themselves on being right — and then lose because they are incomprehensible. Clarity scales. Long explanations do not.
Third, loosen control. Let supporters remix, clip, and share. Reach matters more than perfect phrasing.
Finally, build communities, not just campaigns. Email lists decay. Ad budgets run out. Communities endure.
The bottom line
I do not agree with Zohran Mamdani’s politics, and I do not want his policies implemented anywhere. But ignoring how he won would be malpractice.
He demonstrated how power is built today — not through party machinery or television dominance, but through attention, participation, and relentless simplicity. Republicans can learn from that reality, or they can keep losing to it.
Disagree with his ideology. But study his marketing. Ignore the lesson at your own risk.
Mamdani Transition Adviser’s Nonprofit Under Congressional Investigation for Allegedly Teaching Illegal Aliens How To Evade ICE
New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s (D.) transition team includes a man whose organization is under congressional investigation for allegedly teaching illegal aliens how to evade ICE officers, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.
The post Mamdani Transition Adviser’s Nonprofit Under Congressional Investigation for Allegedly Teaching Illegal Aliens How To Evade ICE appeared first on .
The New Yorker Makes a Shrine to Itself
The New Yorker was founded in 1925 as a humor weekly — a whimsical little Roaring Twenties bauble written largely…
New York City Policing at a Crossroads
NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has appointed my Brooklyn College colleague Alex Vitali to his advisory committee on public safety. The…
Creep accused of slapping NYU student’s backside, knocking her to ground is repeat sex offender who was paroled in September
The 45-year-old male accused of slapping a New York University student’s backside and knocking her to the sidewalk while she was on her way to class earlier this week is a repeat sex offender who was paroled in September.
James Rizzo was arraigned late Wednesday night in Manhattan Criminal Court, WCBS-TV reported.
‘I let NYU security know to let students know that this man is going around doing this to other women.’
Rizzo — a Level 2 sex offender with 16 prior arrests and a history of violence against women— was paroled in September after serving time for sex abuse, the station said, citing the New York State Department of Corrections.
Police told WCBS that Rizzo kept on attacking women while he was out on parole.
The station said Rizzo appeared emotionless while pleading not guilty to three new assaults — all the victims women — at his arraignment. WCBS said the judge remanded Rizzo and that he is scheduled to appear in court again next week.
The station said the most recent alleged attack occurred Monday in Greenwich Village; surveillance video shows NYU student Amelia Lewis walking to class when the suspect slaps her backside and shoves her to the ground.
Lewis, 20, spoke about the incident on a Wednesday podcast, WCBS said.
“I wanted to report this, and after I did tell the cops I let NYU security know to let students know that this man is going around doing this to other women,” Lewis said, according to the station. “They also told me they were already aware of the man in the blue towel around his neck running around the city.”
Officials told the New York Daily News that Rizzo’s criminal history stretches back to the 1990s, when he stabbed a 74-year-old woman in the face during a burglary in Brooklyn.
The Daily News said Rizzo cut through a screen window at a home on East 83rd Street on June 13, 1997, and punched and stabbed his victim in the head before ransacking the residence. The paper, citing police, said a neighbor found the bloodied victim lying on the floor.
Cops arrested Rizzo and charged him with attempted murder, the Daily News said, adding that he ultimately pleaded guilty to burglary and was sentenced to up to 54 months in prison.
More recently investigators told WABC that Rizzo randomly punched a 59-year-old woman on Mercer Street in December 2023. That same month, Rizzo was arrested for forcible touching when police said he groped a 33-year-old woman on Greene Street in Greenwich Village and asked, “Oh, you want more,” WABC-TV reported.
On Thanksgiving Day last week, Rizzo allegedly attacked 68-year-old Dianne Brazell from Houston as she was walking in Midtown Manhattan, WABC said, slamming her into glass.
“I have a laceration in my forehead that required six stitches,” Brazell said, according to WABC. “I have a bruise on my left leg from my knee to my ankle. I have a bruise on my left shoulder. I bit my tongue.”
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‘Slam Frank’: The Anne Frank musical with something to offend everyone
Ten years ago, I sat in the dark at the Public Theater in downtown New York City, surrounded by a murmuring crowd, waiting for the curtain to rise on a brand-new play called “Hamilton.”
At that point in time, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop musical had yet to become the behemoth it is now. Quite the opposite — there were no cast albums or Disney+ recordings, and aside from a few regional workshops years earlier and its word-of-mouth reputation as the “next big thing,” no one in the audience had any idea what we were in for.
A pansexual Latina Anne Frank with an Afro-Caribbean tiger mom and a chronically ‘neurospicy’ closet case for a dad? Now you’ve gone too far.
Expanding the form
The next few hours were filled with a strange, albeit thoroughly impressive, showing of lyrical prowess. Miranda had somehow managed to turn historian Ron Chernow’s 818-page Alexander Hamilton biography into a crowd-pleasing, pop-culture-infused depiction of the earliest days of a fledgling America.
More provocative was Miranda’s deliberate choice to cast primarily black and Latino actors to portray the founding fathers. While a few nitpickers balked at the spectacle of “people of color” portraying slave owners, most marveled at the audacious ingenuity of it: What could be more revolutionary than retelling the American story so that it reflects all Americans?
The crowd left the theater excited. There was no doubt that we had witnessed something groundbreaking. If Aaron Burr could be black and Alexander Hamilton Puerto Rican, what else was possible?
Decolonizing ‘Diary’
Eight years later, lyricist and composer Andrew Fox stumbled upon an answer. It came to him in the form of a (since-deleted) 2022 Twitter thread hotly debating a never-before-asked question: Did Anne Frank ever acknowledge her white privilege?
As is often the case, the online arguing devolved into acrimonious ad hominem and fruitless whataboutism. Fox realized that mere words would never get to heart of the matter. As with “Hamilton,” it would take the power of musical theater to win hearts and minds. And he would do Miranda’s non-white casting one better — reimagining Anne Frank herself as a person of color.
And so Fox and librettist Joel Sinensky set out to transform the “Diary of Anne Frank” into “Slam Frank,” an intersectional, multiethnic, gender-queer, decolonized, anti-capitalist, hyper-empowering Afro-Latin hip-hop musical.
Originally slated for three weeks at small off-Broadway venue the Asylum, “Slam Frank” has become a massive hit for the theater, which recently extended its run through the end of December.
Piercings and Patagonias
Want diversity? Look no farther than the viewers showing up in droves. At any given performance, you can find a septum piercing, a Patagonia vest, and a pair of bifocals all in the same row.
Yes, even liberals enjoy “Slam Frank,” despite the outrage it has provoked in some of their compatriots. “This whole project is head-spinningly grotesque and offensive,” went one post to the r/JewsOfConscience sub-Reddit. “Bringing up the holocaust and not mentioning the current genocide in Gaza just gives me the ick,” lamented another.
The irony of takes like these is thick, since one can imagine these same critics of “Slam Frank” being perfectly open to the idea of race- and gender-swapping other historical characters. But a pansexual Latina Anne Frank with an Afro-Caribbean tiger mom and a chronically “neurospicy” closet case for a dad? Now you’ve gone too far.
TIM SLOAN/AFP via Getty Images
A real production
The show’s earliest marketing attracted attention with a simpler question: “Is ‘Slam Frank’ a real musical?”
The answer is a decisive “yes.” “Slam Frank” is not a social media gimmick or an expertly crafted exercise in long-form rage- bait. Again: It is a full-length show, with a cast, that is being performed on regularly scheduled dates at the Asylum NYC.
I know because I’ve seen it. “Slam Frank” is not just a real production, but an entertaining one. It is smartly written, balancing humor with sincerity, featuring songs composed and performed with impressive musicianship. Think Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s “The Book of Mormon” or the award-winning puppet extravaganza “Avenue Q” — but with a final gesture of leftist piety that pushes the logic of your average keffiyeh-clad student protester at Columbia to uncomfortable extremes.
The shocking finale is played so straight that plenty will miss the satire, and even those in on the joke may notice how easily it could be mistaken for peak-wokeness agitprop. If there is a clear “message” here, the show’s creators aren’t about to clarify it. “Slam Frank” is happy to offend each viewer in whatever way he, she, or they wish to be offended. How’s that for inclusive?
Women’s March Leader Tossed Out for Anti-Semitism Lands on Mamdani Transition Team
A former Women’s March leader who was forced out of the organization for anti-Semitism has reemerged as a member of Zohran Mamdani’s transition team.
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