Good morning. It is June 25th. It is hot again in New York City. Supposedly not quite as hot as yesterday, but I'd have to go outside to establish that, and I don't really have a reason to have to do that at the moment, so instead, here is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Zohran Mamdani won the New York City Democratic mayoral primary yesterday, running up a margin in the first round of rank choice voting so large that the former presumptive front runner, former governor Andrew Cuomo of Purchase New York, conceded defeat without waiting for the rest of the rank choice results to be sifted out. With 93 % of the vote in, Mamdani's current share is 43.5%, with Cuomo far behind at 36.4, and controller Brad Lander, Mamdani's buddy and wingman on the campaign trail, collecting 11.3 percent. The New York Times's lead headline package on the home page about the result is “A new political star emerges out of a fractured Democratic Party. The emergence of Zohran Mamdani,” the subhead says, “is likely to divide national Democrats who are already torn about what the party should stand for.” The Times writes, “the National Democratic Establishment on Tuesday night struggled to absorb the startling assent of a democratic socialist in New York City who embraced a progressive economic agenda and diverged from the party's dominant position on the Middle East.” That's quite a turn of phrase there at the end, both euphemistic and question begging. The “position on the Middle East” in question would seem to be unconditional support for whatever the Israeli government does, up to and including the slaughter in Gaza, which was the dominant Democratic position in the sense that it was the unshakable position of the last Democratic presidential administration under Joe Biden. But that does not at all match the reported position of the members of the Democratic Party. Pulling up some Gallup numbers from earlier this year, their polling found that, as they write, “Democrats sympathized with the Palestinians over the Israelis by a nearly three to one ratio, 59 % to 21%.” But all of that is really beside the point because the entire aim of the Cuomo campaign was to make the New York mayoral election a referendum on who could most vocally and unreservedly support Israel when New Yorkers were apparently voting instead for who they wanted to be the mayor of New York City.

The Times writes “that Mr. Mamdani had such success while running on a far-left agenda, including positions that were once politically risky in New York, like describing Israel's actions in Gaza as genocide and calling for new taxes on business, may challenge the boundaries of party orthodoxy and unnerve national democratic leaders.” Obviously, national democratic leaders are unnerved and many of them embarrassed themselves by endorsing Cuomo's campaign, but here, too, the Times packed a remarkable number of assumptions into a sentence. The Times couldn't even manage to meet the conventional journalistic rule of three in naming what Mamdani's supposed “far-left agenda” consisted of, given that his main agenda items were such revolutionary communist concepts as free bus service and expanded child care and rent freezes. Meanwhile, restructuring the business tax system and raising taxes on the rich was something Bill de Blasio ran on, which means the era in which running on such a thing in New York City would be a politically risky departure from the norms, only dates back to the election of Eric Adams, and, if the subject is the National Democratic Party as the Times is making it, the 2024 Democratic Party platform had an entire heading reading “making the wealthy and big corporations pay their fair share,” saying the party would finance tax cuts for middle class and low income Americans by revising the tax code to get more money out of corporations and the ultra wealthy. So that piece of what the Times calls Mamdani's far left agenda, is just the Democratic Party's agenda. That leaves the part about describing Israel's actions in Gaza as genocide, which despite the Times' characterization of it as something that was once politically risky in New York has, in fact, never been tested in a New York municipal election before last night. If you consider yourselves the custodians of the first draft of history, you really need to keep an eye on the basic timeline in which the October 7th attacks and Israel's overwhelming retaliatory military campaign against Gaza, happened in 2023, two years after the last New York City election. 

In an update to yesterday's newsletter coverage of lightning events around the United States, the mass lightning strike at Lake Murray in South Carolina, which happened between the time I started doing the item and the time I wrapped it up, now has more detail to it. Most importantly, there were no serious injuries and the number of people actually taken to the hospital was not 18, as originally reported by WLTX News. But 12, after 20 people had their injuries assessed on the scene, WLTX quotes a statement from the local fire department posted on Facebook saying, “It was bright and sunny at the lake, with clouds nearby but not overhead. The bolt of lightning that hit the water energized a metal cable with buoys on it that surrounds the swimming area. Several people had swam out to the buoys and were holding onto the cable when it hit, and others were nearby swimming. 

And speaking of yesterday's news, on the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead news spot, two columns wide, is one more effort to pin down the random irrational gyrations of the Donald Trump-Israel-Iran relationship into some sort of news update. “ISRAEL-IRAN TRUCE IN PLACE AS TRUMP SCOLDS THEM BOTH.” The subheadline on the right-hand column is “Qatar Helps Talks —Netanyahu to Shift Focus to Gaza.” The story begins, Dateline “Jerusalem, a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Iran appeared to take hold on Tuesday after a volley of deadly strikes between the two countries infuriated President Trump and highlighted the difficulty of ending a war that had raged for 12 days. The details of the ceasefire,” the Times continues, “remain unclear. But it came together after Mr. Trump asked for Qatar's help and the Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdul Rahman al-Thani persuaded Iran to end the fighting with Israel, according to three diplomats who were briefed on the matter and insisted on anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.” I think that's the same three diplomat team that was in yesterday's paper lending the gloss of authority and meaning to whatever Trump said two days ago. But when the top of the front page lead news story contains an “appeared to,” followed by a “details remain unclear” it’s probably not time to start cashing in your peace dividend, particularly given the second column over from the right, where the story begins. Dateline, “Washington, a preliminary classified U.S. report says the American bombing of three nuclear sites in Iran set back the country's nuclear program by only a few months, according to officials familiar with the findings. The strikes sealed off the entrances to two of the facilities, but did not collapse their underground buildings, the officials said the early findings concluded.” Then there's more about how Iran probably moved its enriched uranium supplies before the bombing happened. And in some genuinely heartening news writing, the Times waits until well after the jump before it gets around to publishing the Trump administration's lies and bluffing to prop up President Trump's claim that the facilities had been “obliterated,” a word that has pretty clearly become one more basic loyalty shibboleth for the president's underlings. “In a statement on Tuesday, the Times writes, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reiterated Mr. Trump's early claim, saying, ““Based on everything we have seen — and I’ve seen it all — our bombing campaign obliterated Iran’s ability to create nuclear weapons,” he said. “Our massive bombs hit exactly the right spot at each target and worked perfectly.” Then the Times quotes Caroline Levitt, the White House spokesperson, “declaring that the classified assessment was flat out wrong. ‘The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran's nuclear program’, she said in a statement, ‘everyone knows what happens when you drop 14 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets. Total obliteration.’” Can't help noticing as she live action role plays her way through real attacks with real bombs that Levitt is pretending to take umbrage on behalf of fighter pilots when the mission was flown by bomber pilots. 

The rest of the top of page one is four pictures of mayoral candidates on election day to show that the Times knew that the election happened, even if they couldn't print any news about it. Besides referring people to NYTimes.com, the caption sends them inside the paper to page A17, where the headline is, “ranked choice, looming as the potential decider in New York City's primary.” Nice try, no dice. 

Nowhere in the paper is the news that 128 Democrats in the House of Representatives joined the Republicans to prevent Texas Representative Al Green from getting the House to vote on impeaching Donald Trump for his congressionally unauthorized attack on Iran. 

On Axios, where savvy nihilist reporters cover the savvy nihilism of elected officials, the coverage begins, “House Democrats privately vented their fury Tuesday about what they said is a ‘premature’ and ‘unhelpful’ vote on impeaching President Trump for his strikes on Iran. Further down, the story says, a completely unserious and selfish move,’ one house Democrat told Axios on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about a colleague.” The item adds, “Green said the vote was a matter of conscience, adding, ‘do we really want to give this president the power to take over 300 million people to war without consulting with Congress?’” Apparently, yes, we really do. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Max Scocca-Ho.

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