S05E05 – Mamdani in New York and Hegseth in Venezuela

In this episode of Finding Common Battle Grounds, we tackle three topics. We start with a discussion of Zohran Mamdani’s election as Mayor of New York City. Josh and Tom are really disturbed that so many people were willing to elect a democratic socialist. Ryan is fine with it. When pressed, Josh and Tom seem to be okay with some of the specific actions Mamdani wants to take (e.g., free child care), though not all of them (e.g., rent control and free buses). But their bigger concern is that they think democratic socialism is a slippery slope into communism, which Ryan points out is not the case (c.f. every other developed country on the planet). Ultimately, we agree that Mamdani won’t be able to institute most of the changes he wants because of the oligarchs who really run the US. Josh then dropped a surprise topic on us: White Christian Nationalism. We ignore the “white” in this label and focus on Christian Nationalism. Ryan explains what it means: that you prioritize your nation above all others AND believe that your nation should be Christian. The implication is that anyone other than Christians will be second-class citizens without equal rights to Christians. Josh and Tom seem fine with that, even when Ryan directly confronts them and asks them if they think he should not have the same rights they have. They seemed reluctant to answer that question directly. Finally, we turned to the bombing of boats off the coast of Venezuela by the US military. Ryan brought this up because it is illegal, unethical, and reflects the shocking level of moral depravity of Pete Hegseth and the Trump Administration; they are gleefully killing people without a trial to demonstrate their guilt. Josh agrees it is wrong, but only because it is really just an attempt to start a war or regime change in Venezuela. Tom thinks it’s fine to send a message to drug traffickers (even though roughly 2% of drugs that enter the US come from Venezuela). Ryan cannot fathom how someone can believe they should have the authority to take other people’s lives when they are not being violently attacked (perhaps he’s becoming a pacifist as a result of this podcast).