As I watched the bloodbath in New York on Tuesday evening, all I could think of was the last episode in Game of Thrones, when Daenarys sicced her dragons on Kings Landing.
Of course, there were some significant differences. In the first place, Dany was one person seething with anger and grief, whereas the voters of Manhattan could be counted in the millions.
Second, Kings Landing was destroyed immediately, burnt to a crisp by the loyal lizards, while New York will suffer a slow death over the next four years.
But the end result is the same: people destroying the thing they loved, in a momentary flash of madness.
That is how I see the election of Zohran Mamdani. The citizens of the greatest city in the country just anointed a 34-year-old neophyte who has had a very difficult time condemning Hamas, to lead them into 2030, and possibly beyond.
His words, far from repelling them, attracted them to his campaign like suicidal flies to a Raid Air Strip.
They embraced his promises of free buses, free food, free lodging, free health care, free falafel, and everything else that they could desire.
Cognizant of the fact that he’d alienated many Jews in a city that has an extremely high concentration of the chosen people, he spouted some platitudes about fighting antisemitism.
Aware that he’d been caught in a number of lies during his campaign, including inventing imaginary family members, he cracked a self-deprecating reference to hijab-wearing “aunties,” with a wink to his true believers.
And then, he used his words like the dragons’ hellfire to incinerate his enemies, including those who didn’t vote for him, those who don’t believe in socialism, those who see his bigotry, and those who understand that you cannot govern from a place of vengeance.
He was the voters’ dragon, and they unleashed him on their beloved city.
I watched this in real time, listening to his words, which were tinged with hatred and which danced very close to the level of incitement.
Many of my readers will react with “but Donald Trump does the same thing,” and they are actually correct.
But Trump is a happy warrior in his own way, smiling and smirking through his jabs at political enemies. If he didn’t have overwhelming power to actually hurt them, it would be an entertaining set for standup.
The guy is funny. You also get the sense that in his own flawed, twisted and toxic way, Trump loves this country and wants to maintain its foundations. He’s a builder, after all.
Mamdani, on the other hand, wants to tear it all down, and rebuild a Workers Utopia, where immigrants are not the victims of ICE but are, at the other extreme, the rulers of the Earth.
He prattled off a list of them, making sure to hit his favored immigrant groups like “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas, Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses, Trinidadian line cooks, and Ethiopian aunties. Yes, aunties.”
It’s nice that he mentioned them. But what about the Korean convenience store owners and the Irish policemen, the Polish Uber drivers and the Filipina nurses, the German line cooks and Italian pizzeria owners.
These are the sorts of immigrants that fly a bit under the radar screen in Mamdani’s New York, which is par for the course for a man who somehow believes that the United States and Israel are complicit in “genocide” in Gaza.
As I wrote on social media in a post that triggered a lot of blowback, “New York elected a Jew Hater to govern a city with millions of Jews. What prayer do I even have for that?”
Some of my friends suggested “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
But I think they know exactly what they are doing.
Like Dany in Game of Thrones, they are angry people, saddled with grievance and perceived insults. They feel like Atlas, unfairly carrying the weight of the world on their fragile shoulders.
Those bodega owners and abuelas and taxi drivers just aren’t getting a fair shot, and the rich billionaires are exploiting them.
So, make them suffer. Try socialism, where everyone is equally aggrieved, equally poor. Or to put it another way, the enemy of my enemy should be broke.
It did not end well for Kings Landing. It also did not end well for Dany, who ended up shish-kebabbed on the sword of her beloved.
The only ones that made out fairly well in the deal were the dragons, because they always have a slight advantage.
I think the same thing will happen to New York. The millions of Danys who voted for Dragon Mamdani will suffer mightily for their anger and their hubris.
As far as this mayoral lizard, he should end up with a national profile, and future political gigs.
That’s because he, like the winged pets of Westeros, has a slight advantage.
This article was originally published in the Delco Daily Times.
