‘He’s a phony’: David Frum on Zohran Mamdani’s TikTok politics and Canada’s Indigenous property dilemma

Leading author, journalist, and thinker David Frum and The Hub’s editor-at-large Sean Speer discuss New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s rise as a TikTok-powered progressive populist. They explore how his left-wing populism may signal a new, popular progressive auxiliary to Trumpism that could have political implications beyond New York City. On the back half of the show, they discuss the B.C. court decision granting Indigenous land rights over privately-owned property, and whether Canada’s reconciliation framework has created an unsustainable “fourth level of government” that harms property rights and economic development. You can listen to this episode on Amazon, Apple, and Spotify. If you liked what you heard in the first half of the program and wish to subscribe to full-length editions of In Conversation with David Frum, please consider becoming a Hub Hero. Hub Heroes also get access to all our paid content on TheHub.ca. All these benefits are conferred for one year. Sign up now! Program Transcript This is an automated transcript. Please check against delivery. SEAN SPEER: Welcome to In Conversation with David Frum. I’m your host Sean Speer, Editor at Large at the Hub. I’m grateful to be back in conversation with David for another installment of our bi weekly video and podcast series on the key issues concerning Canadian policy and politics. In the first half of the show, we’ll discuss New York City mayoral frontrunner Zorb Mandani, whose left wing populism may be a sign of a new popular progressive auxiliary to Trumpism. On the second half, exclusive to Hub heroes and fellows, we’ll cover recent developments in British Columbia over Indigenous land claims and their interaction with contemporary property rights and, of course, politics. David, thanks as always for joining me. DAVID FRUM: Thank you, Sean. SEAN SPEER: David, thanks for indulging my interest in talking about Maidani’s candidacy. We both have a personal stake in the matter. I spend a lot of time in New York City where my wife works and we live. And of course you have a new granddaughter here in the city. And so I’ve taken a greater interest in this mayoral election than I’ve had in a long time. But it’s not merely because of what it means for New York City. One gets the sense that Mondani, the Democratic candidate and ostensible frontrunner in this election, may tell us something broader about American politics in general and American progressivism in particular. How are you interpreting his candidacy at this stage in the race? DAVID FRUM: Well, first, I do feel that as a corrective to all this American cultural content on the Hub platform, I should make clear that I’m speaking to you from Toronto today and from the Hub offices. And so there is some Canadian content in this discussion of the New York election. Here are some things I take away from it. First, it is a dramatic testament to the power of TikTok in American politics. If you’ve been watching the debates between Mamdani, Curtis Lewa and Andrew Cuomo, I think you’ve noticed that as a debater, Mamdani is not a very impressive performer. He is defensive, he is high Handed, he seems to be skating on the very thinnest of ice of his very glib knowledge. And he makes Justin Trudeau look like a well briefed candidate a lot of the time. But he is a maestro of TikTok. Without TikTok, I don’t know that he would be a candidate. And it’s well to understand that TikTok doesn’t just happen. TikTok has been and is, as we speak, still controlled by the Chinese government. And its algorithm seems to be loaded to help candidates who are opposed to the mainstream American political consensus. And there has been some research that suggests that the TikTok algorithm has been goosed in some way to make you more aware of Mamdani’s videos if you’re a New Yorker than you might otherwise have been if, if it were a completely neutral algorithm. That’s suggestive, not definitive, but it does look that way. But in any case, he’s a TikTok candidacy and we’ll see more of those. SEAN SPEER: What’s fascinating, though, is that, well, on one hand, he’s a TikTok candidate, which is to say a modern manifestation of the intersection between technology and contemporary politics. He’s also a bit of a throwback. Yeah, he’s talking about things like public ownership of grocery stores and other ideas that one associates with 1970s left wing economics. Help us understand the extent to which his candidacy suggests that we are relitigating a lot of the debates that we thought we had left behind. DAVID FRUM: Well, there is a movement within the Democratic Party to emphasize a kind of Bernie Sanders kind of left. We see this in Maine where there’s a Democratic primary fight between the popular but elderly Governor Janet Mills and an insurgent candidate named Graham Platner, who not only has a lot of Nazi tattoos, but has a lot of Nazi tweets and a lot of Nazi Reddit posts. So he seems to know what he was signing up for and to have believed in it. I think it captures a fight that has been going on since 2016 in the Democratic Party, which is, look, the Democratic in the age of Trump. The Democratic Party has become more and more attractive to people with a stake in society, especially to older people, better educated people, more affluent people, especially to women. And that has caused a certain kind of Democratic politics to emerge. Hillary Clinton was the expression of that. She was a candidate for people with something to lose. And there are Democrats who have an idea that the Democratic Party should be a more revolutionary kind of party, a more ideological party. And those people were attracted in 2016 to Bernie Sanders and you got that very bitter fight. They often. And I’m gonna just editorialize here, please. There often seem to be questions of personality and temperament that Bernie Sanders often appealed to. People who are very angry and not just about social issues, but just angry people, bitter people, and often who express their anger, especially toward women. And you’re seeing that in some of these contests too. Now Mamdani is more of a smiley face. Graham Platner is classic Bernie, very male, mildly misogynistic, and just generally an unpleasant kind of person. Mamdani is able to act the part of a more pleasant person, at least so long as the TikTok camera’s running. But there is this kind of contest in the Democratic Party between people with a stake in society and people who are aggrieved at society. And it’s a big question that the left of the party has convinced themselves that if you put together the people who are aggrieved for left wing reasons, you can attract the people who are aggrieved for right wing reasons and lure over blue MAGA types who will join a coalition of the aggrieved. I think the math on this is just not going to work. I think the Democratic Party and parties of the center just generally need to accept, you know what, when you’re sending 40% of your population to college, when you have the level of economic productivity that modern societies have, aggrieved people are very visible on social media. They’re not so visible at the voting booth. SEAN SPEER: We’ll come to what, if anything, we can extrapolate from the New York City race for the rest of the country and indeed the Anglo American world. But before we get there, just to stay on Mondani and his his own politics for a minute, we’d be remiss if we didn’t reckon with the fact that he has to be amongst the most anti Zionist and borderline anti Semitic candidates that we’ve seen in mainstream US Politics in a long, long time. DAVID FRUM: He’s at the front of the wave because again, Platner and the others, this has become a real touchstone for progressive. Progressive politics in the United States is increasingly anti Israel to the point of being anti Jewish. You know, once you are hurling around blood libels about genocide, completely delusional. Once you are flirting with slogans like globalize the intifada. The intifada meaning suicide bombings that kill Jews in buses. And when you’re doing this in the context of violent, murderous attacks in the streets of the United Kingdom, in the streets of the United States. Two people murdered in Washington D.C. by someone who shared anti Zionist politics. You know, the door is open to a lot of demons and the demons are walking in. And so just generally, and I don’t want to make this exclusively a left wing thing because of course on the right you are seeing that anti Semitism is becoming an important organizing force for many on the right hand side of politics. All these neo Nazi group chats that are surfacing. Who knew there were hundreds and hundreds of Republicans young in the sense that they’re ambulatory, not collecting Social Security, but not young in their parents. I mean people, their parents at the same age had houses and children, high schoolers sometimes. And they say we’re just youthful 41 year olds who don’t know what to mean. Young and irresponsible. So this is I think Internet politics, I think the war in Gaza, the distance From World War II, the convergence of the far right and far left in so many aspects, the influence of Russian propaganda and you can put a lot of things here, but generally anti Semitic politics in the United States a little less in Canada, a little more in Europe a little more than that. And in Great Britain a great deal is becoming an important unifier for this cross ideological movement of people who are hostile to Western civilization and its achievements. SEAN SPEER: You excused yourself for editorializing a moment ago. Permit me to editorialize. I mentioned that I spent a lot of time here in New York City. I’d been observing the race and I’ve been struck that the anti Madani coalition has principally litigated a case against him on economic terms. That his proposals to raise taxes and increase spending is going to chase away entrepreneurs and investment. And that argument, it seems to me, has. Has landed with a thud. One would have thought that the far more salient argument is that Madani’s views on public safety and policing are quite radical. He remains one of the true holdouts when it comes to defending defund the police. And in a city that feels always like it’s on a knife’s edge, those types of radical views when it comes to public safety and policing could have real life effects for millions of people. What do you think explains the thinking behind the anti Momdani forces in a way subordinating? What strikes me as such a first order issue? DAVID FRUM: Well, first we have to stipulate the anti Mamdani forces, which are principally the Andrew Cuomo campaign. There’s something wrong with them. I mean they have just. It’s a weird. It’s a terrible campaign around a terrible candidate who should never have run for this office, whose political career was over, was properly over, and who is running for an ego trip. And so you shouldn’t impute to that campaign a lot of good decision making. It’s a whole series of bad decisions. And if there were a proper candidate, I don’t think Mamdani would have gotten so far. So he’s had the good luck of running against Andrew Cuomo and the vestiges of what was the Andrew Cuomo machine. Second, to the extent there’s a rationality, I think the Cuomo campaign had to be ready for Mamdani to flip his views on public safety, which it looks like he’s doing. He’s promised to. I mean, in a way, those people who are on the cusp and who sort of are prone to vote for him, he’s given them enough of an excuse. He said he will keep on board the very competent New York City Police Commissioner Janet Tisch, and he’s ready to flip flop. I mean, the whole point to him is the Justin Trudeau comparison, I think is very. He is to a great extent a phony and doesn’t believe in much. In fact, the only settled conviction he’s got, the one consistent, the one for which he’s willing to take heat, is his anti Jewishness. That is bedrock. The idea that he would, weeks from the vote, go campaign in a mosque of an unindicted co conspirator in the 1993 World Trade center bombing. Extraordinary. Because that is important to him. I don’t think it’s because he’s so religious. I very much doubt he’s so religious. I think it’s more that his form of leftism has made Islamic and Arab nationalism a left wing rather than a right wing. Cause he’s interpreted it that way. And so that’s central to who he is. It’s a way that somebody who is in many ways grew up as an outsider, as a South Asian immigrant in Uganda, where there’s been horrific prejudice and discrimination and expulsions in the past against the South Asian population, makes himself a kind of insider in another community, the Islamic community. And so for that reason, he’s very deeply attached to this item. But it’s the one thing he won’t change. But if you’re campaigning against him, you have to be ready. He’s a nimble flip flopper. And public safety is the place where the flip is going to be flopped. SEAN SPEER: Well said. Final question before we end this first half of our conversation. People who are listening to this Discussion in different parts of the United States or different parts of Canada may doubt that it has a broader application that there are unique particularities about the city of New York. Madani, of course, rode a wave around concerns with respect to affordability and cost of living and rising rents and so on. Can we glean anything about broader political trends in the United States, broader trends within progressivism through Madani’s unique campaign? DAVID FRUM: I think you put Mamdani together with Platner and Maine. As you say, there are unique things about Mamdani, including the amazing feebleness of the opposition that he’s encountered and the willingness of a lot of New Yorkers to suspend disbelief when they are dealing with the known quantity of Andrew Cuomo. They are trying the unknown quantity. But I think that what you’re seeing is certainly with Platner and with others, you’re seeing how much what was progressivism has turned into outright socialism and how integral anti Jewishness is becoming to that kind of politics and not anti Jewishness in the sense that there’s no escape for Jews. I mean, if you’re a Jew and you say, you know what, I apologize on behalf of my people, I don’t want to be a Jew anymore, leave me out of this. Eat me last, you will be eaten last. But if you’re a Jew who identifies with the concerns and feelings of Jewish people worldwide, cares about the state of Israel, it’s pretty clear you are target. Because when Platner was campaigning, he didn’t just say, I have negative things to say about the state of Israel. He said, I am refusing to accept any support from the American Israel Political Action Committee aipac, which is an American group of Americans who believe in a strong relationship with the State of Israel. And that is a statement about how you feel about American Jewry on the central concern or a central concern of American Jewry. And it’s telling. And there is a lot of that going around. There’s a lot of it going around on the right too, and in different forms, but a lot of it going on. That is becoming a defining feature of American progressivism. And as so often is the case, Jews are being selected and self selecting, but mostly being selected as the test of the health of the broad center of a liberal minded society attached to markets, democracy and for human rights.