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Toronto Sun
17 hours ago
- Politics
- Toronto Sun
SHAPIRO: Revolutionary Democrats moving to take control of the party
Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks at his primary election party, Wednesday, June 25, 2025, in New York. Photo by Heather Khalifa / AP Photo They did it. They finally did it. Those maniacs. They blew it up. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. THIS CONTENT IS RESERVED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. SUBSCRIBE TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. REGISTER / SIGN IN TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account. Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments. Enjoy additional articles per month. Get email updates from your favourite authors. THIS ARTICLE IS FREE TO READ REGISTER TO UNLOCK. Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments Enjoy additional articles per month Get email updates from your favourite authors Don't have an account? Create Account As New Yorkers walk dazed through the streets of the world's greatest city, seeking perhaps the half-buried Statue of Liberty lying beneath the silent sands of a deserted beach in the Forbidden Zone, one thing has become clear: The young revolutionaries of the Democratic Party are ready to take control of their party's future. And there's hardly anyone left to stop them. On June 24, Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old Ugandan-born trust-fund baby — the scion of a Columbia University post-colonialism professor and an Oscar-nominated Hollywood director — won a stunning Democratic primary victory over disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani immediately declared that he would be running against 'billionaires' to preserve 'democracy.' In Socialist-speak, this means he will propose massive rent-freeze regulations, city-owned grocery stores and a bevvy of free goods that would make a child running for fifth-grade president blush. Your noon-hour look at what's happening in Toronto and beyond. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. Please try again This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Meanwhile, Mamdani regularly hits the highlights of the so-called left-wing omnicause: He calls for the disestablishment of the State of Israel as a Jewish state, while vowing to arrest the prime minister; he's sympathetic to a bevy of terrorists throughout the Middle East, so long as they oppose Israel; he vows to spend millions of dollars subsidizing the transgender hormonal and surgical mutilation of minors. He's a walking meme, a Columbia University student, a decade too old for school … and now the frontrunner to become New York's next mayor. It serves the Democratic Party right. For years, they've strung along the hopes and aspirations of the Bernie Sanders wing, and now they're paying the price. After Sanders narrowly lost the 2016 Democratic nomination for president to Hillary Clinton and then was deprived of the 2020 Democratic nomination by Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) and other more traditional Democrats, young Democrats have rallied to Sanders' cause. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who campaigns with Sanders to 'fight oligopoly,' is currently the Democratic frontrunner for the 2028 nomination, despite the machinations of more typical Democrats like California Gov. Gavin Newsom or Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. And those typical Democrats don't know what to do. They're stuck between praising the supposed ardour and sincerity of the Sanders socialists and condemning them for their radicalism. Do the former and they may continue to lose steam with normal Americans who aren't eager to build Moscow on the Hudson. Do the latter, and they may lose the white, college-educated base they've cultivated. Do the latter. They're stuck. And they deserve to be stuck. But that doesn't mean they can't win. And herein lies the problem for America. Americans should want two major parties that at least live within earshot of reality. That's because, effectively, we're a two-party system, which means that any major party nominee has at least a 40% chance of becoming president, no matter how insane. It's why Republicans should have wanted Joe Biden to stop Bernie Sanders in 2020, even if it meant a higher likelihood of President Donald Trump being defeated, because a Sanders presidency would have been exponentially more dangerous than a Biden presidency. Republicans shouldn't root for Democrats to fly off the cliffs of reality like Thelma and Louise because they might take America with them. Mamdani's victory shows that Democrats seem to be careening toward those cliffs at full speed. We should all hope and pray that rational Americans reject the Sanders revolution and all its acolytes, before it's too late. Canada Toronto Maple Leafs Music Toronto Raptors Toronto Raptors
Hindustan Times
19 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Trump-Jeffrey Epstein dancing sculpture mysteriously appears on National Mall
The White House has strongly condemned a controversial sculpture that recently appeared on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The artwork, depicting President Donald Trump dancing alongside convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, has sparked outrage and drawn sharp criticism from officials. This golden television sculpture follows another anti-Trump installation that was unveiled on the National Mall just a week earlier. The National Mall witnessed another controversial sculpture where Trump is dancing with Jeffrey Epstein.(X) Also Read: Jim Ryan resigns: Here's what led to UVA president's decision - timeline of events The sculpture of a golden television shows clips of the president dancing in different locations and is adorned with a bald eagle. In one of the clips displayed on the TV, Trump was seen dancing next to Epstein, who was charged with sex trafficking minors in 2019. A plaque that rests at the base of the statue reads, 'In the United States of America you have the freedom to display your so-called art, no matter how ugly it is.' — The Trump White House, June 2025," as reported by the Irish Star. Since the controversial sculpture was placed directly in the view of Capitol Hill, the White House lashed out at the mysterious House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told the Washington Post, 'Wow, these liberal activists masquerading as 'artists,' are dumber than I thought!' She added, 'I've tricked them into taking down their ugly sculpture and replacing it with a beautiful video of the President's legendary dance moves that will bring joy and inspiration to all tourists traversing our National Mall. Thank you for your attention to this matter! Maybe they will put this on their next sculpture.' Also Read: Jim Ryan resigns: Here's what led to UVA president's decision - timeline of events Who is the artist behind these anti-Trump sculptures? The artist behind these sculptures is yet to be identified. According to the organizer's permit application filed with the National Park Service, the artwork aims 'to demonstrate freedom of speech and artistic expression using political imagery,' as reported by The Post. Earlier this month, another provocative piece titled Dictator Approved appeared on the National Mall. It was an 8-foot-tall sculpture featuring a giant thumbs-up crushing the head of the Statue of Liberty.
Atlantic
20 hours ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
What the Islamophobic Attacks on Mamdani Reveal
Coming up with nondefamatory ways to attack Zohran Mamdani is not exactly an insurmountable task. The 33-year-old Democratic nominee for New York City mayor is an avowed socialist from a privileged background, has defended inflammatory rhetoric such as 'Globalize the intifada,' and has a back catalog of hyper-woke social-media posts that would be electoral poison in any remotely competitive district. Instead, many leading voices within the Republican Party have decided to criticize him on the grounds that, like 4.5 million other Americans, Mamdani is Muslim. After Mamdani's victory over Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary earlier this week, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene shared an image on X of a burka-clad Statue of Liberty. Influential activists including Charlie Kirk and Laura Loomer invoked 9/11, unsubtly implying that all Muslims, even secular ones like Mamdani, are jihadists. The New York Young Republican Club urged the Trump administration to deport him—Mamdani, who was born in Uganda, is a U.S. citizen—as did Representative Andy Ogles, who called Mamdani 'little muhammad.' None of this comes as a shock when the party is led by a president who has, among many other offenses, called immigrants 'animals,' claimed that 'they're poisoning the blood of our country,' and told a radio host that they commit murder because 'it's in their genes.' In one sense, the outburst of nakedly xenophobic and anti-Muslim rhetoric from today's Republican Party is simply a dog-bites-man story (or maybe, in Donald Trump's case, a man-claims-people-eat-dogs story). In another sense, however, there is something odd about the response to Mamdani's victory. Trump won a second term in part because he drew larger numbers of minority voters, including Muslim Americans and immigrants, than any other Republican in decades. This shift was especially notable in big cities like New York. And yet, rather than cement this new coalition, the MAGA movement seems almost desperate to break it apart. In 2016, 88 percent of Trump's voters were white, according to a Pew Research Center survey of validated voters. In 2024, just 78 percent were. His expanded support among minorities seems to have been a reaction to inflation and unpopular progressive stances on immigration and other social issues taken by the Biden administration. Some Arab and Muslim voters also recoiled at the administration's support for Israel's war in Gaza. Of course, elected presidents don't always govern in a way that perfectly matches their campaign messages or winning coalitions. Joe Biden won largely thanks to voters' displeasure with Trump's chaotic governing style and mismanagement of the pandemic, and then pursued transformative climate-change legislation. George W. Bush famously ran for reelection on opposing gay marriage and mocking John F. Kerry's manhood, and then tried to privatize Social Security. But Trump's second-term agenda is not merely unrelated to the source of his campaign success. In some ways it is diametrically opposed to it. Trump was bound to impose less restraint on Israel than Biden did, but Trump has exceeded his predecessor by proposing mass population transfer from Gaza and by bombing Iran. Rather than cater to support among Latinos for stricter border control, Trump has seemed determined to alienate those voters by encouraging the indiscriminate detainment of Latinos, inevitably sweeping up legal residents and even citizens. Treating brown-skinned Americans like criminals has had the predictable effect of driving up support for comprehensive immigration reform and driving down Trump's approval among Latinos. Rather than pursue policies to bring down costs, as he promised to do during the campaign (at least when he was reading from scripted remarks prepared by advisers familiar with what voters wanted), Trump has largely ignored this imperative in office. Instead, his major economic initiatives—raising tariffs, deporting day laborers and other low-wage employees en masse, and blowing up the deficit with tax cuts—have put upward pressure on inflation. Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell has explained that some of these policies will delay interest-rate cuts, to which Trump's response has been to berate him rather than adjust to economic reality. Jonathan Chait: Why won't Zohran Mamdani denounce a dangerous slogan? Trump has governed as if he was cryogenically frozen when he left office and awakened in January. He has prioritized taking revenge on enemies from his first term, and learned almost nothing from the four years in between. He seems to continue to subscribe to the 'Great Replacement' theory, which posits that Democrats have deliberately encouraged mass illegal immigration in order to transform the electorate. Trump recently claimed on social media that Democrats 'use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens.' Stephen Miller, his unofficial secretary of everything, concluded that Mamdani's election shows 'how unchecked migration fundamentally remade the NYC electorate.' Just a few months ago, Trumpists were bragging about the multiracial working-class coalition that got them a second term. Now it's as if they've forgotten that coalition entirely. Or perhaps, at some level, they don't want to keep it intact, because they refuse to recognize those communities as fully American, or even fully human. Replicating the formula that won the 2024 election would mean turning Mamdani into a symbol of out-of-touch urban progressivism. Republicans seem unable to resist attacking him for his religion instead.
Miami Herald
21 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Miami Herald
Second mysterious sculpture referencing Trump appears in DC, a week after first
A new 8-foot-tall sculpture featuring a video art loop of a dancing President Donald Trump has cropped up on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. — the second sculpture referencing the president to appear in that spot this month. The sculpture portrays a gold television broadcasting the continuous video on top of a pedestal with a plaque that reads, ''In the United States of America you have the freedom to display your so-called 'art,' no matter how ugly it is.' — The Trump White House, June 2025,' according to photos. The quote comes from a comment the White House said to the Washington Post while responding to a different sculpture that appeared days after the June 14 military parade and depicted a 'thumbs up' gesture crushing the Statue of Liberty's head. It included quotes by Vladimir Putin, Jair Bolsonaro, Kim Jong Un and Viktor Orban praising Trump and had the words 'Dictator Approved' inscribed in a large font, McClatchy News reported. The purpose of the new display is to 'demonstrate freedom of speech and artistic expression using political imagery,' according to a permit for the artwork the National Park Service shared with McClatchy News on June 27. It's still a mystery as to who is responsible for the sculptures. The same name is listed on both permits but does not include contact information. In a response to the new display, shared with the Washington Post, a spokesperson for the White House called the persons responsible 'liberal activists masquerading as 'artists.'' 'I've tricked them into taking down their ugly sculpture and replacing it with a beautiful video of the President's legendary dance moves that will bring joy and inspiration to all tourists traversing our National Mall,' the spokesperson said. The new sculpture will be on view through June 29, according to the permit.
Yahoo
21 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Marjorie Taylor Greene Grilled Point-Blank Over Her 'Very Racist' Statue Of Liberty Post
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) was challenged on Thursday to explain why she posted an image of the Statue of Liberty in a burqa following New York Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani's apparent victory in New York City's Democratic mayoral primary. The far-right lawmaker, who has a history of anti-Islam remarks, captioned the picture: 'This hits hard.' The post was widely condemned as Islamophobic and interpreted as a dig at Mamdani, who will become New York City's first Muslim mayor if elected in November. Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) blasted the post as 'very racist' and 'so outside the mainstream.' Mamdani has been the subject of multiple Islamophobic attacks from the right since his win. On The Hill's 'Rising' show, co-host Niall Stanage brought up the image of the Statue of Liberty (which, ironically, was initially conceived of as being a Muslim woman in traditional Islamic dress) with Greene and asked: 'What did you mean by that?' Greene responded: 'Well, I'm an American woman and I have all the freedoms in the world to never have to bow to a religion that would force me to cover my body up and only see my eyes and my fingertips and that is a major threat for all American women, and I think that's something that hits hard for all women.' When Stanage asked whether the post was a specific response to Mamdani's win, Greene appeared not to hear the question and said: 'Oh, a Muslim takeover or possibly Shariah law. That is a great threat to every single American woman, and I think that's something all women should never want or allow to happen in America.' Stanage pushed back, noting, 'It's up to the voters of New York City to elect whoever they wish to elect, whether that person is Muslim or Christian or Jewish or anything else. So what is the evidence…' Greene interrupted: 'Well, of course voters have the right to elect that and I'll maintain my right to say that I think Shariah law and women being forced to wear burqas is the greatest threat to our freedoms as American women.' When asked directly whether she opposes Muslims holding elected office, Greene avoided answering and said instead: 'I am 100% opposed to Shariah law in America. 100% unapologetically opposed to Shariah law in America.' Watch the exchange here: The Statue Of Liberty Was Initially Designed To Be A Muslim Woman Dem Sen. Patty Murray Trolls Trump With Hilariously Brutal Taste Of His Own Medicine Karoline Leavitt's 'Have To Save Face' Jab Instantly Backfires Mary Trump Exposes Uncle's 'Grotesque Exploitation' Of Religion With Some Family History
