On July 21, 2005, Patrick Lawrence wrote a commentary concerning Gaza, income inequality, Israel and politics entitled “Sun Valley vs. Queensbridge”.  It was published in Consortium News, one of the very few still reliable independent sources of information (Volume 30, Number 202 —Tuesday, July 22, 2025).  To a great extent the article dealt with the cataclysmic victory of Zohran Mamdani in the recent New York City Democratic Party mayoral primary, apparently as unexpected as the purported victory of the mythic David over the equally mythic Goliath over three millennia ago.  The article brought to mind, at least for me, how deluded, confused and manipulated most of the United States’ electorate has always been and the panic which the awakening of even a portion of that electorate is generating among the corrupt elite who has maintained us politically and economically enslaved since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.  A sign I for one view as positive.

To many of my friends, especially among well-educated and intelligent fundamentalist Christians (as well as to many among some of my Jewish friends), Mr. Mamdani poses an existential threat because he is a vocal critic of the abuses of what passes for capitalism (but is in reality kleptocracy) as well as because he vocally opposes the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people orchestrated by American and Israeli Zionists.  He is thus, in their perception, a “communist” anti-Semite.  Those “buzz” terms are essential in order to deflect from factual analysis of his beliefs, beliefs which coincide with the premises underlying the economic and civic philosophy of the “messiah” who my Christian friends claim to worship and adore.  Ironic, but that pavlovian reaction had been carefully crafted using behaviorist psychology long before B.F. Skinner invented that art form.  It is essential in order to secure the counterintuitive support of decent people for indecent realities and for policies that are clearly against their own interests, policies such as universal healthcare and universal education at all levels and a real social safety net, something artfully crafted by the kleptocrats who rule us.

The foregoing has led me to reflect on the strange distortion of terminology that the kleptocratic corporate media has imposed on us.  For example: “antisemitism” now means opposition to mass murder, torture, rape as a political tool, ethnic cleansing, organized mass theft and genocide.  And “communism”?  Well, that now apparently means daring to support mercy, equity, meritocracy, economic justice and the golden rule, but especially, the economic doctrines espoused by that certain Palestinian who, two millennia ago, taught that hoarded wealth was the surest route to perdition.  You may well have heard some of the sayings attributed to him in the Christian gospels, “that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a hoarder of wealth to enter into the kingdom of heaven” and promising that “the meek shall inherit the earth”.  Evidently horrible ideas.

Mr. Lawrence´s article, for some reason, also made me reflect on another hysterical current campaign, one again attributable to the kleptocratic elites who control us, in this case, through their so called Democratic Party (the kleptocracy of course controls both the Democratic and Republican parties).  In this ancillary campaign, massively hypocritical outrage is being expressed at the association of Jeffrey Epstein which took place prior to 2003[1] with Donald Trump, ignoring Mr. Epstein’s similar association with myriads of Democratic Party heroes.  It seems designed specifically to distract from the real scandal associated with the late Mr. Epstein, that being his role as an agent of the Israeli Mossad in which he used and abused under age men and women to obtain compromising material on leaders in politics, industry, commerce, etc., all apparently in order to blackmail them into supporting Israeli goals, a role which led to the deaths of thousands of Americans and millions of innocent people in the Middle East and elsewhere through perpetual wars whose primary goal has been the implementation of the Zionist final solution to the Palestinian problem and the creation of the “Greater Israel” to which Zionists aspire.  Indeed, the Democratic Party’s orchestrated outrage seems designed to deflect consideration of related, recently declassified information concerning probable Mossad involvement in the assassination of United States President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (ironically a Democratic Party hero) as well as concerning likely Mossad involvement with the destruction of New York’s World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.  That same campaign, of course, also deflects attention from the genocide that has been perpetrated on the Palestinian people by Israel during the past seventy-five years, genocide affected with the full cooperation of the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany as well as with the tacit assistance of the Middle East dictatorships such countries established and maintained following the Second World War.  You know, the war purportedly fought to eliminate the threats to human rights posed by the Nazis and their allies.

Not that Mr. Trump does not deserve serious criticism but, that the foregoing criticism is directed at his amorous misadventures during the past century rather than his current support for Zionist genocide or his increasingly incoherent international economic policies or the betrayal of his promises not to perpetuate the cycle of endless wars and foreign military interventions in which the United States has been engaged during the past century, is not only ludicrous, but is blatantly malevolent.  Then again, the Democratic Party is at least as guilty as Mr. Trump with respect to much of the foregoing so, … birds of a feather, … in every respect.

Caveat: 

• I am not a fan of Mr. Trump, who, for personal reasons, I dislike. 
• I am not a believer in any organized religion and find the Abrahamic religions especially disturbing and, inter se, incoherent.  Especially given that of the three Abrahamic branches, Islam is the most reviled while being the closest to both of the others.  Indeed, it is the bridge between them. 
• I am bitterly opposed to most political parties, both in the United States and abroad, finding that they are the embodiment of the “factionalism” rather than statesmanship that, in the Federalist Papers, James Madison promised would not occur. 
• As a historian, I am not a respecter of the collection of fallacies peddled to all of us as history but designed, not to elucidate, but to keep us deluded. 

As I write this I am completing my seventy-ninth year on our planet, most of them depressed by how consistently we devolve into the people we would least like to see staring back at us from our mirrors.  Nonetheless, it seems that hope is not yet altogether extinguished, especially when people like Mr. Mamdani continue to appear from time to time, although admittedly, usually only briefly and all too often all to quickly converted into that against which they once railed.

But, back to Mr. Mamdani who has become the focus of hate, fear and despair from followers of Mr. Trump and especially from traditionalists in the Democratic Party.  He is, at least for now, perhaps a sign that, paraphrasing the articulate albeit hypocritical Abraham Lincoln:

“Perhaps the kleptocracy cannot fool all of us all of the time.”

Fortunately for the kleptocracy, because he is a naturalized rather than native born United States citizen, Mr. Mamdani can never become president.  But, then again, perhaps sometime soon, someone who shares his values will appear on the national stage and, unlike Mr. Trump, will not so quickly betray the principles he promised to sustain.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

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[1] Mr. Trump purportedly ended his fifteen-year friendship with Mr. Epstein that year, barring him from Mar o Lago because of an incident involving unwanted advances towards the fourteen-year-old daughter of another of Mr. Trump’s acquaintances.