Transcript - America This Week, June 27, 2025: "Zohran! Can Tik-Tok Socialism Save Gotham?"

Walter and Matt disagree on the prospects for the victor of New York's Democratic mayoral primary. Also, has ChatGPT been reading "Catch-22"?

Illustrated by Daniel Medina

Matt Taibbi: Welcome to America this week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, how are you doing? You’re back in your own space.

Walter Kirn: I’m back in my own space. I’ve got my apocalyptic painting behind me to remind everyone of what a short time we have on this cursed earth. Doing great. I had a ring that was very important to me, obtained on the Hopi Reservation of Arizona, something that means more to me than any piece of jewelry should to a man. And I lost it at the gym yesterday. I set it down because it was cutting into my finger when I was pulling on the rowing machine, and I set it down in some AstroTurf carpeting. And this morning I woke up and I realized it was gone and where I’d left it. And I ran, ran to the gym thinking, “It’s a thick piece of silver. It just feels valuable the moment you pick it up.” And they had made a sweep. They had found it. I hadn’t even called. They had placed it in the place where you would hope a lost item of value would be placed, and no one had taken it from that place. And I just said a prayer that small town America never changes. So my faith has been restored.

Matt Taibbi: Just reaffirms your faith in the essential decency of the American citizen, doesn’t it?

Walter Kirn: It so much did. So I’m here, completely backing the American experiment, as they call it, the rules-based international order, and everything else that we called here and ready to discuss the New York mayoral race, which is another of our triumphant experiments in democratic self-rule.

Matt Taibbi: Absolutely. Yeah. Just quickly, I had a nearly opposite experience earlier this week. You’ve been to New York recently, right?

Walter Kirn: Yeah, I go all the time.

Matt Taibbi: So I’ve obviously seen the padlocks on all the products in the drugstores and every place else.

Walter Kirn: I don’t go to drugstores in New York City anymore.

Matt Taibbi: Really?

Walter Kirn: I really don’t. No. If I need some antihistamines, or some Benadryl to go to sleep, or something like that, I just do without, because the fandango of obtaining anything that costs over 75 cents in New York is too much.

Matt Taibbi: That’s what I was going to say. I had never seen padlocked soda before, like individual sodas in a chain drugstore, were now padlocked. So I guess we are now at a state where we must take preventive measures to prevent people from shoplifting even things that are essentially valueless. Right?

Walter Kirn: Right.

Matt Taibbi: It’s incredible, but yes.

Walter Kirn: But what happened? You just saw it?

Matt Taibbi: I just saw it. I’m, I’m used to having to ask to unlock, I don’t know, a razor, or I don’t know, a bottle of Listerine, or something like that, but a single can of Coke, that was new for me.

Walter Kirn: How about the time in Washington DC around the inauguration when I needed, I think it was a razor or something like that, and went, stood by the case. Somebody came through, I said, “Could you unlock it? They said, I don’t do that, but I will call the person who unlocks it.” They called the person who unlocks it. They came and unlocked it. I walked to the checkout counter and found out that it wasn’t eligible for self-checkout because it was an item of value. But there were no people at the checkout counter. They were all helping people unlock razors. So it was a, “You can’t get there from here,” catch 22, once again.

Matt Taibbi: This is really funny because I hadn’t made this connection before, but I once wrote an entire article about what you have to do to buy products in Russian grocery stores. They have this incredibly complex system of what they call Kassas, where you can only buy things that are behind counters from certain places, but you can’t buy them at the counter. You have to go to a cashier that’s on the other side of the store, pay, go back with a receipt, get the product, then go to a different part of the store, get a different price, go back to a different cashier. That’s what we’re turning into, apparently. Okay. Well, that’s a good segue to-

Walter Kirn: But this won’t happen in city owned grocery stores if Zohran Mamdani wins.

Matt Taibbi: Zohran. So yeah.

Walter Kirn: Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: Okay. We got to talk about it. I’m already publicly enemy number one, apparently with sort of left leaning commentators because I wrote an unkind column about Zohran yesterday.

Walter Kirn: Based on what? You find him excessively good-looking, or talented, or eloquent, what?

Matt Taibbi: No, I mean, one of the things I said is I think he’s a dynamic political talent who has a huge future in this country. I just think his ideas are ridiculous, and they’re actually a couple of steps beyond Bernie, whom I supported, obviously for a variety of reasons, but we’ll get into that. So for those that don’t know, the New York City mayoral race has suddenly become this enormous story because seemingly out of nowhere, a young politician, a 33-year-old politician, an immigrant from Uganda named Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary against the desiccated, sort of collapsing gorgon, disgraced gorgon, Andrew Cuomo.

Walter Kirn: Allegedly nipple ring wearing, okay?

Matt Taibbi: Allegedly nipple ring wearing gorgon, Andrew Cuomo on Saturday. And because of the extreme unlikelihood, I mean, the Republican candidate is Curtis Sliwa of the Guardian Angels. Have you met him, by the way?

Walter Kirn: Yeah, I’ve met him in the lobby of Fox News.

Matt Taibbi: I met him in the lobby of another green room, but yeah. That’s funny.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, Curtis, I remember his first incarnation as head of the Guardian Angels when they were a going concern, they were red-capped, white T-shirted, crossed between missionaries and vigilantes or something who rode the subways at a time in New York when that was considered dangerous and was in some respect. And they-

Matt Taibbi: That was totally dangerous. What are you talking about?

Walter Kirn: Well, yeah, it was, but once those Guardian Angels cleaned it up ... No.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah.

Walter Kirn: But they did things like help people with their bags and so on, because they weren’t armed or anything. They were just

Matt Taibbi: They just worked out.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. It just worked out. And so Curtis, who was a fresh-faced, young guy from, I don’t know, is he from the Bronx or something? He’s actually from whatever place AOC claims to be, probably. And he had this fame, but that he would become a perennial mayoral candidate is interesting. I mean, it shows that Republicans, the actual Republicans have nothing. Democrats who become Republicans have a chance in New York, but actual law and order Boy Scout dudes don’t.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. I mean, not since Giuliani, obviously. Right? And he was kind of an aberration brought on by a series of forces. But because the Republicans aren’t really mounting any opposition, there are some talk about independent candidacies, but it’s almost it’s very likely that Mamdani will now be the mayor of New York City, which, if it happens, I think one could argue this is the biggest electoral for a socialist, like an avowed, honest to goodness, real socialist in this country in quite some time, probably a hundred years. I mean-

Walter Kirn: Well, I grew up in the socialist state of Minnesota, which has the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party still to this day, and had the perennial Harold Stassen, who I believe was a socialist candidate often, for president even. I don’t know if he was ever governor, though. But we had near socialists and I’m trying to-

Matt Taibbi: Him and Eugene Debs running for president, right?

Walter Kirn: Right.

Matt Taibbi: Let’s just start with, so the-

Walter Kirn: Let’s just crown him the biggest socialist in a long time to win major office or to threaten to win major office. Okay?

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. And we’ll get into why this is a bigger deal than say, Bernie winning the Senate, even though Bernie endorsed him, even though it’s also the Democratic Socialists of America, he’s a very different character than Bernie Sanders.