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If you’re looking for a reason to feel even a touch hopeful after seeing the most radical Democrat Socialists sweep New York’s Democratic primaries, consider the following number: Eight.
That, roughly, is the percentage of all residents in the 13th congressional district that cast their votes this week, giving Darializa Avila Chevalier a commanding victory over the incumbent, Adriano Espaillat.
Remember that next time some breathless pundit tells you that the Big Apple is turning full Commie red: the people who voted for Chevalier last night are in the absolute minority.
And that is either very good or very bad news, depending on how you look at it.
The bad news first: the primaries show us, as if those of us who live here needed any more proof, that New Yorkers are very hard to impress.
Having the mayor call pro-Israel advocates “monsters” just this Sunday while saying nothing about Hamas apparently wasn’t enough to propel people to get out and vote against his hand-picked choices.
In part it’s because the candidates this year were, let’s be honest, nobody’s idea of exciting.
But in part it’s because so many of us New Yorkers, bless us, live in fantasy land.
We remember a time, not too long ago, when the streets were safe and clean, and you didn’t have to worry about getting stabbed on the subway by some maniac every time you took the train.
And we assume that New York is always going to be all right no matter who runs it, because hey, New York is magical and it’s somehow bigger than the sum of its politicians.
It’s not.
New York is a real city, and one that’s very complex to govern.
And if left to nutjobs who say things like “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag” (that would be Chevalier), it may soon crumble beyond repair.
This shouldn’t be too hard for normal New Yorkers to comprehend.
Which means we’ve got a massive silent majority on our hands still slumbering, still refusing to see the very real danger these hateful candidate pose.
Which brings us to another bit of bad news: No one seems ready, willing or able to organize this massive silent majority into a viable political force.
Not the Jewish community, the nation’s largest, which for years has pretended like it could still wield some political influence even as the only party they considered supporting, the Democrats, turned increasingly more hostile.
Not the Republicans, who have continuously failed to produce attractive, viable candidates that could at least give a voice to people’s frustrations the way Spencer Pratt did in Los Angeles before he was trampled by the Democratic Party machine.
And that, hallelujah, is very good news.
Why? Because it means we have a tremendous, generational opportunity to truly remake New York.
As this week’s primaries make clear, the winning strategy of the Democratic Party these days is singular and simple: We hate America. That’s it.
It’s no longer about pretending to care about the cost of housing, or immigration, or even dunking on Trump.
It’s about parading around like third-worldist would-be revolutionaries and saying vile and vicious things about the flag, the country and the American way of life.
Rampant Jew-hatred is part and parcel of this approach: Knowing full well America is not the kind of benighted hellhole where refusing a Jew service at a coffee shop — as a Brooklyn establishment did recently to Dan Goldman, the sitting congressman who just lost his reelection bid to Mamdani crony Brad Lander — is tolerable, the radicals push for more performative bigotry to test the limits.
They want to let us know that they’re in control now, and that they hate us and everything we stand for.
And a looney strategy like that should still be plenty easy to defeat in America.
Which means that the Republicans, if they wise up, should have plenty to work with.
If the GOP goes on the offense locally, investing, say, in minority groups who are beginning to realize the catastrophe that is Mamdanistan, it could win big.
Rally up Hispanics who believe in family values, not radical laws requiring we refer to mothers as “gestating parents.”
Rally up Chinese landlords being squeezed by insane rent policies that rob them of the fruits of their labor.
Rally up black New Yorkers who refuse to see themselves as perpetual victims.
Rally up Jews who are no longer willing to walk into a coffee shop and wonder if they’ll soon be kicked out just for being who they are.
There’s a great, diverse coalition of fed-up folks out there.
Whoever figures out how to mobilize it is going to make New York City great again.
Liel Leibovitz is editor at large for Tablet and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
English (US)