So hedge fund billionaire Dan Loeb has declared a Hot Commie Summer following the triumphant Mamdani primary win this week. This is the stuff of Hell Yes.
I wanna know what this means. Does it mean wearing cargo shorts with pockets deep enough to carry copies of Das Kapital, a bunch of shit you stole from Whole Foods, and your RealID?
Sewing hammer-and-sickle patches on our messenger bags at Craft Night?
Thrifting Mr. Cardamom merch? Righteously jumping the weird new still-jumpable turnstiles?
Will the means of production be … air conditioned? Is it gonna be meeting hot illustrators on Hinge? Liiiiike, don’t threaten me with a good time.
And when you hear what Loeb really meant by this remark, Hot Commie Summer somehow becomes even more of a thrill. The principal concern among the rich and powerful of New York? Rich Flight: What if all the Wall Street bros flee to Florida? WHAT IF!
Trump called Mamdani a “100% Communist Lunatic” like it was a curse word, but we heard it like a campaign tagline. It reminded me of an old Ann Coulter tweet:
You are CORRECT, Ann Coulter. You are goddamn right the fat girls are in the streets this Hot Commie Summer, fighting for the lunatic communist Zohran Mamdani to win in the general. They’re writing our slogans for us.
I’m Brianna, producer of What Rough Beast and longtime friend of the Sub.
In this column, we’re featuring ongoing movements and campaigns fighting for human rights and protesting this administration’s policies and budget cuts. We’ll be bringing you updates on protests, campaigns, community organizing, and other forms of resistance that you may or may not have heard about.
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I've known a lot of socialists in NYC. There was the guy who photobombed Columbia's ur-protest in 1968 and went on to perform in Yayoi Kusama's love-ins. There was the airline executive who underwrote one of the first impactful tenant groups in the Village, and the woman who set up a chain of local food coops. I helped lead foraging expeditions into perfectly good buildings awaiting demolition, in defiance of property rights and the law.
A diverse crowd. But they had two things in common. Impeccable socialist credentials, and they liked to make a buck.
My observation is that many, many New Yorkers like to make a buck. Not just the industrial-grade exploiters in finance and development, but normal people too. My own sharecropper grandma came up from the Delta with a third-grade education and a passel of illiterate relations, and she really liked to make a buck and got good at it.
Your movement is capturing a lot of attention just now. But I see no messaging at all that says anything nice about wanting to make a buck. Instead it's mainly the rhetoric of torches and pitchforks. I've even heard Franz Fanon invoked, and with no sense of irony at all.
All of you who see great things in this, as an honorary New Yorker who left years ago, I defer. But you could do a lot worse than making it clear that you, too, envision a kinder, gentler NYC that's still amenable to making a buck.
Brianna, you devil. Sign me up for Hot Commie Summer.