A conversation with Zohran's lead strategist Morris Katz

In our second Fighting Fascism episode, we discuss why the Democratic Party sucks and how we can make it suck less with the guy who helped make Zohran Mamdani, Graham Platner, and Dan Osborn.

I’m not planning to write a post about each new installment of our Fighting Fascism Podcast (which is why you should subscribe—episodes come out every Monday).

But I really thought you’d enjoy today’s conversation, in which Matt, Jonathan, and I spoke with our friend Morris Katz about his experience steering Zohran Mamdani’s campaign, how important effective storytelling is in the fight against fascism, and why Democrats need to start naming villains if we’re going to turn things around.

You can check out the episode here on Apple Podcasts or here on Spotify. And below I’m sharing a transcript from the conversation. Take a look—Morris has some smart things to say!

Aaron: We are excited to welcome to the Fighting Fascism Podcast our friend Morris Katz. How’s it going, Morris?

Morris: Great to be here, guys. I missed you.

Aaron: Yeah, we missed you too! So what’s it felt like to go from being just a guy to a certified big deal magazine profile guy?

Morris: I think for better or for worse—and I think maybe you can relate to this Aaron—I feel like I was born with a certain level of what others could perceive as obnoxious arrogance. So I’ve just always behaved like someone who thinks they’re right. And now I say the same things I’ve said before in the same way, but now other people are like, “Wow, that’s really profound,” and I’m like, this is the exact way I’ve always been.

There’s also an element of feeling a little fraudulent. People are like, “How did you make Zohran Mamdani?” And Zohran Mamdani is Zohran Mamdani. At my best, I’m like, yeah, you should do this really good idea that you have.

So I feel lucky and fortunate, and hope that I can kind of capitalize on some of the clout or whatever, to pull things in the right direction.

Aaron: I was crashing at your place in October of ‘24.

Morris: Ye of little faith.

Aaron: Yeah. And I was like, “Hey, so what’s going on with the mayor’s race?” And you were like, “There’s this Zohran guy.” I was like, that sounds crazy? And you literally laid it out—we’re gonna turn out all these South Asians, and there’s all these people that nobody is paying attention to. And then it just fucking happened!

Jonathan: Walter Benjamin has this famous quote: “Behind every fascism, there’s a failed revolution.” Which I’ll interpret to mean fascism arises in the aftermath of the left failing to take advantage of a crisis moment. Our hypothesis is that genuine economic populism combined with skilled and savvy political execution is the anecdote to authoritarianism—it deflates authoritarian appeals, it takes the wind out of Trump’s sails. Do you agree with this hypothesis, and what does Zohran’s campaign have to say about this idea?

Morris: Yeah, I mean, I fully disagree. [Laughs] No, I absolutely agree.

And I think the main thing when you look at the Trump stuff that I think certain bad faith neoliberals intentionally miss is the idea of small government, and the kind of posture Democrats take around government size. We’ve had decades of Democrats who are apologetic about government. It’s like how can we never make it feel like we’re being active, or we’re trying to expand government. And then you look at what Trump’s doing. This obviously is a form of authoritarianism, fascism. But that is a man who is not afraid of big government and whose supporters are not being turned off by big government.

What people are actually asking for, given the realities of income inequality right now, and other social currents, people are desperate for intervention in their lives to make things feel better. They just want to see an aggressive act towards improvement. And Democrats are running away from that. That created a vacuum for Trump. And I think what you see with the Mayor is someone who’s deeply committed to not just delivering on an agenda, but of telling a story of how government can make people’s lives better. And that is both an expansion of a social safety net, but also a demand of excellence in the services government does provide. And whether it’s a small act like paving the bump over the Williamsburg Bridge, or a profound act like the step towards universal childcare. To me, it’s one in the same—you’re telling a story that government is here for you, government’s in your life, making things better.

Jonathan: I actually had some back and forth with some fellow socialists post election, where people were saying it’s socialist policy, this shows that socialist politics are popular. And I was like, yeah, but…

Matt: He’s got a lot of swag.

Jonathan: The socialists who are reading what you’re writing about, they don’t need to be persuaded that socialism wins. What they need is to learn how to do the style and the charisma and the savvy and the campaigning and the relating to a mass multiracial working class base. So I’m just curious about your thoughts about some of these non verbal, non quantifiable, “this guy’s in my corner, he cares about people like me” vibes.

Morris: First I’ll say that everyone takes what they want from the Zohran victory, right? You have centrists who are like social media matters and good web content matters and we should say the word affordability. And others are like, it has nothing to do with Zohran, it’s just the right moment for someone with the right ideology. And I think we needed both things to be true. If Zohran wasn’t a socialist, he would not have won. And if he wasn’t Zohran, I don’t think he would have won. Those things combined to make the successful campaign that it was.

Where the language and storytelling and tactics come into it is we spend a lot of time on the left in general talking about things explicitly through the expansion of social services. There’s not a ton about efficiency and effectiveness of government. And I think if we want people to believe in a larger government, we need people to believe in excellent government. And that’s mostly boring stuff. I think what the Mayor is really good at is finding ways to communicate about everyday government, ways to improve government, ways people feel government in their lives in a way that breaks through. It’s like in the campaign, his Halalflation video.

Voiceover from ad: New York is suffering from a crisis, and it’s called Halalflation. If I was the mayor, I’d be working with City Council from day one to make Halal eight bucks again. Tastes like 10 bucks, but it should be eight.

Morris: That is a permitting reform video. And instead, it’s like a fun viral video that feels New York, that’s authentic, that blows up. Paving the bump on the Williamsburg Bridge is another good example—now there’s all these people posting on social media about riding over the Zoh-ramp. That is an act of rebellion, in some ways, against the currents of authoritarianism and fascism. But what it requires is understanding that people in positions of power have an ability to decide what stories we’re telling.

If you contrast the way the Mayor approaches a lot of these things with Biden’s time in office, where they accomplished big things. And yet I don’t know if I could actually tell you a real, tangible thing right now. The one Biden thing I remember seeing is driving through Michigan at some point and seeing a road under construction. The sign read, this is paid for and funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill. It’s so lame! Almost no Republicans voted for it, it’s bullshit, and it doesn’t feel like a story of government success in those instances. It’s like, what? Who? No one cares.

Matt: I was gonna ask you about your other favorite ads from Zohran’s campaign. Because I know the rebrand is now Morris Katz, strategist. But like, he’s an ad man.

Morris: Leave it to you to undo the work of my rebrand.

So one was the Mayor going out after Trump won, and talking to Trump voters.

Voiceover from ad: Did you get a chance to vote?

Yes.

And who did you vote for?

The million dollar question. Trump.

Trump.

Donald Trump.

Well, I actually early voted. I voted for Trump.

Morris: So many politicians just solely exist in response to dialogue, versus doing something to help shape dialogue. And I think in many ways, a lesson from the campaign is you’re not going to be winning if you’re constantly just in response to narrative, versus shaping it. This video started to change the dynamics of that race towards the affordability agenda in a way that expanded people’s minds about what was possible, and began to highlight the different coalitions that could be formed.

Then on the paid media side, there was an ad we ran in the primary that was filmed at one of our rallies. And it starts with, “There’s a myth about this city.”

Voiceover from ad: There is a myth about this city. It’s the lie that life has to be hard in New York. I believe we can guarantee cheaper groceries, we can raise the minimum wage, we can freeze the rent for more than two million tenants and build hundreds of thousands of affordable homes.

Morris: “It’s city government’s job to deliver that. We’re done settling for less.” And I think the reason I like that one is it rejects the narrative in which we lose. It’s easy for people to be like, “Oh, yeah, fuck, things are too expensive, but it’s not government’s job to change that.” We need to be doing more work as a party and as a wing of the party to reframe the grounds of debate such that we can win our arguments.

Aaron: That was the most amazing thing to me about the campaign—just creating the arena that you knew you could win in, around affordability. We’ve seen national Democrats see that, and start saying the word affordability a lot—like, voters care about affordability, so I’m gonna talk about affordability as if it’s like a Chat GPT response. So what do you see as the essential components of creating that narrative? Are there some real takeaways for other Democratic candidates who are serious about learning from that success, beyond just using the word?

Morris: I think you can run a very hopeful, forward-looking campaign, like the Mayor did, and also be clear about villains. To me, it’s incredibly hard to talk about an affordability crisis with an inability to talk about anyone responsible for the affordability crisis. It’s literally like telling someone, “You are being so fucked right now. But I’m not gonna tell you who’s doing the fucking.” It’s like, well, why? That’s weird. Private equity buying up homes, price gouging, just like the general resentment of corporations and the billionaire class—all this shit is not French, you hear this all on doors, this all is felt by people. And I think if you’re not articulating that, you’re undercutting your ability to say anything else on affordability.

Jonathan: And it makes people not trust you! Because they know someone’s to blame. And it shows that you’re not willing to stand up to powerful people, if you’re not willing to name culprits.

Aaron: The most revelatory moment for me in this cycle was the Graham Platner introductory video, and that line where he says, I’m not afraid to name an enemy.

Voiceover from ad: I did four infantry tours in the Marine Corps, in the army. I’m not afraid to name an enemy. And the enemy is the oligarchy. It’s the billionaires who pay for it, the politicians who sell us out. And yeah, that means politicians like Susan Collins.

Aaron: That, to me, just feels like the embodiment of what has been wrong with Democrats and what we need to fix. I’d be curious to hear the backstory of where that line came from. Was that a Graham original, was that your idea, how did that come about?

Morris: Graham is uniquely, relentlessly focused on the enemy component. I think he feels very strongly that none of this is happening by accident. And I think a lot of it’s interestingly informed by the process he experienced of going to war and spending all this time in this horrible conflict and feeling like it was the result of a corrupt political system. And that just very much attuned him to an ability to be like, here’s the fucked thing happening, here’s the person doing the fucking.

People are not buying the idea that Donald Trump is the end all be all enemy, and they’re not wrong. This gets to the quote you opened with. It is objectively true that the Democrats held the White House for 12 out of 16 years, had majorities in both chambers for multiple windows of that, and really did not do much to fundamentally transform people’s lives. And so if we just pretend that Donald Trump emerged out of nowhere and isn’t a symptom of a broader failing that both parties are responsible for, there’s no credibility there. It’s the result of a Democratic Party that was unwilling to take on the villains.

Aaron: One thing that I’ve heard some discourse around, is yeah, the messaging, the candidate, the strategy was great, but really the lesson here is structural. There was public financing of elections. There was this DSA organization that had been built up over many years. I’m sure the actual answer, as usual, is all of it’s essential, but just from a diagnostic perspective, where do we prioritize our time and energy?

Morris: I think in a lot of different ways Zohran doesn’t exist without New York City DSA. From his political education to his win for his assembly seat to the launch and execution of the campaign. And I think if every left group and chapter across the country operated the way New York City DSA operates, we would have a lot more power in a lot more places.

I also think, again, Zohran is a uniquely, uniquely, uniquely talented individual. But a lot of that only works because of his politics. If he had shitty politics, it would not be breaking through in the same way. It’s like his charisma opens the door, and then it’s the policies that keep them there. That’s even like Trump. He comes across as kind of chaotic, and he acts chaotically. But he’s elected as an avatar of a chaos agent, and he delivers on that. It’s the vibe, and it’s consistent. And I think, Graham, here’s a similar example of a uniquely gifted communicator, but also his policies. Like, he speaks far more villains than the Mayor does. It is a more central part of Graham’s message, and also it totally connects with how people interpret him.

Matt: He looks like he could be in an action movie.

Morris: I always say, I only work for candidates in coastal areas who I think could be in an action movie, and that’s why I’ve done Graham and Aaron.

Jonathan: There is still the proof of concept where economic populists have to win in some of these districts that are not safe blue, that are purple or lean red statewide races. I mean, I was hoping after 2016 there would be some establishment Dems who would see the writing on the wall of the failures of the neoliberal turn of the Democratic Party, and be like, these aren’t just leftists, this is actually how you win. Having more political operatives who aren’t aligned with us, being like, oh shit, if I want to win, I actually have to pick a fight with corporate power

Morris: So I think that much of the criticism at this point is clearly bad faith. How many case studies do you need? You look at Dan Osborne’s campaign in Nebraska last cycle with a 14-point overperformance, the biggest overperformance of any federal race in the country over Kamala Harris. If you look at the campaign, and what he ran on, that is a populist vision. It is incredibly different than Zohran’s populist vision, but it is still a populist vision. And then there’s Chris Deluzio, who we were told for a long time, Connor Lamb’s a star because he’s the only Democrat who could possibly win this seat, and it’s impossible to win this seat if you’re don’t take corporate PAC money, and if you’re not kind of a lame DC piece of shit or whatever. And then Chris Deluzio comes in and it’s not even a swing seat anymore. Or like, Pat Ryan, same exact thing. Sherrod Brown and John Tester were two of the other massive overperformances the last cycle. I think Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown are two of the top four or five best senators in the entire United States Senate. We don’t have to close our eyes and imagine what a big tent party looks like, because we have it here.

And so it drives me crazy when people pretend that the brand issue is coming from the left. I’m like, no, we have a big tent brand actually figured out. It is a tent that is big enough for John Tester and Summer Lee. That is a sustainable, coherent vision that is rooted in clear villains and clear prose. But instead, we just have all this bullshit corporate filler in the middle that’s seeking to misinterpret it. So I don’t think there’s any number of case studies that will prove the case, because they don’t want the case to be proven, because they are part of the same corporate establishment.

I do think this year is a uniquely good year to be able to beat these candidates, even with the entire Democratic establishment against us. You look at Graham Platner, you look at what’s happening to Haley Stevens [failing] in Michigan, you look at some of these exciting primaries across the country, and I think there’s just such an appetite that we can change enough of who has power, even in Washington, that it then kind of forces out the folks standing in the way.

Jonathan: Yeah, I mean the Democratic Party makes a lot more sense today if you realize that there’s a lot of politicians and operatives who would rather keep their jobs and status in a party that loses than lose their jobs and status in a party that wins.

Aaron: Morris, you now exist both as a thought leader in the populous left political world, but also as someone who is, I assume, frequently interacting with establishment consultant shills who got us into this mess. How is that world reacting to you? To get us back on track, can that consultant class be turned from the dark side, or do they need to be just rooted out completely?

Morris: Well, if I’m a thought leader, we’re so fucked.

Sometimes I’m surprised in a really good way. Then there are other instances where I think there’s such an ingrained brain rot. You’re just in the bubble in which there’s this moderate versus left fight, which is just so far from any voter. I think that’s the main thing that either needs to lift as a spell or people need to be replaced who are holding on to it, the way people throw around liberal or left or, you know, too crazy left.

I was talking to someone who actually might run for office. I won’t say where. He’s a steel worker. And he says, Yeah, I’m a moderate. And I was with some of my team. We’re doing a bio call, and I muted for a second. I said to my team, I’m going to ask him who his favorite politician is. And I guarantee you, he’s gonna say Bernie Sanders. So I say, who’s your favorite politician? He’s like, Bernie Sanders. What issue do you care most about? Medicare for All and getting billionaires to not be allowed to buy our elections.

The point is that he was identifying as a moderate. And it’s like, that is the average voter. The biggest problem, I think, is the consultant class talks about moderate and they’re picturing someone who’s like, what I really want to see is a public health option and universal background checks.

Aaron: Yeah, a moderate who’s like, we don’t want to suppress AI innovation with too much regulation.

It’s a question of, do we have a tent pole for our majoritarian tent that’s based on us versus them, there should not be five creepy pedophiles who own all of the wealth in this country, common sense that everyone agrees on, or should the tentpole be, like, AI and crypto are great and saving us? It’s just crazy, the bankruptcy of the side that still is running things.

Jonathan: There’s a really important insight in what you just said, Morris. It’s really important for us to distinguish between moderate as a position that is intuitively popular to low information voters—like moderate, yeah, I’m my own man, I’m between these two extremes, I think for myself, which is actually a thing that we encounter all the time at the doors. Versus moderate as this bludgeon used by political operatives and elites to mask an unpopular status quo with this false optics of popularity.

Aaron: Morris, as someone who thinks a lot about images and storytelling and narrative, that has also always been a big part of fascism and successful fascist takeovers. You think of Goebbels and Triumph of the Will—Nazis understood you need a whole apparatus for this. What are you seeing right now from Trump and MAGA on this front? They have had powerful storytelling in the past. It kind of feels to me like they’re falling apart in that regard, which is obviously a big opportunity. But how are you thinking about our opposition right now?

Morris: I think they’re certainly losing the plot a little bit. I’m not a conspiracy person, but I wonder how much the Epstein stuff has played a role in triggering a series of distractions.

But I think in general, the biggest thing that we have forfeited is the element of nostalgia. Their visual esthetics and language are incredibly nostalgic and sentimental. It feels like Americana, and we’ve just ceded that to them.

The Harris campaign is the best example of this. You’re trying to win the Rust Belt. And so in 2022 for Fetterman, the slogan of the campaign was no No One Left Behind. Because lots of towns across Pennsylvania feel like their best days were a generation ago or more. So Harris, you’re running a campaign for the rust belt, and your slogan is Forward. This is a place that is sad, that wants to go back.

I didn’t even think of this at the time, but the closing metaphor of who played at that big concert they did towards the end. It was like a Lady Gaga concert at Carrie Furnace, which is this abandoned old steel mill, for a rally about abortion rights. It’s such an incredibly emblematic-of-why-we-lose moment—you’re standing in a steel mill that used to employ tens of thousands of people, that has been gutted by trade deals ushered in by Democrats, talking about moving further forward with Lady Gaga and abortion rights. That’s incoherent.

Now Democrats are like, they want to take us back. And people are like, I want to go back. We need to be on the side of nostalgia, we need to make people scared of the future that fascism is presenting, and kind of flip this dynamic.

Aaron: You think of the best ad from 2016 and it was Bernie’s America, right? That was all in on that exact feeling.

Jonathan: And Trump’s closing ad did the same thing.

Aaron: Yeah, it was a Bernie ad with 15 seconds of racism. That was Trump’s whole campaign in 2016—Bernie with 15 seconds of racism.

Jonathan: Now, one thing that was really striking about Zohran’s campaign is, while he was a broken record on affordability, he didn’t just avoid other questions. He didn’t do what a lot of unstrategic establishment Dems are trying to do, which is actually throw vulnerable people under the bus and throw coalition partners in the Democratic Party under the bus.

We wrote in a strategy memo about this—that Zohran represented the difference between voting for the greater good versus voting for the lesser evil. That when people are voting for the lesser evil, there’s not going to be a lot of enthusiasm, and the shitty things that they disagree with might be demotivating to turn out or let alone volunteer. But when people are voting for the greater good, low information voters, even if they have prejudices, they’re like, Yeah, but this guy’s fighting for me. He’s in my corner and and then they respect them almost for going out on a limb on other issues that they might disagree with. I’m curious about your thoughts about how to handle this, because we know that Republicans are going to attack all of our candidates on cultural war issues, no matter what we do or say or do not say.

Morris: This is a Platner line, but a politics that sells anyone out is a politics that will eventually sell everyone out. And I think if you can frame things centrally around that, you give yourself a lot of room. I also think people misinterpret so much about what worked with Trump pulling the debate towards social issues. The reason the debate was able to get pulled towards social issues is because we did not have an economic agenda, not because Americans cared more about social issues than economics. Everyone talks about “She’s for they them.” No one talks about “He’s for you.” And that’s the more important part. If people knew who Kamala was for, then she wouldn’t have been so vulnerable to that attack.

And that’s not to say every Democrat needs to talk about these things the exact same way. I’m not naive to thinking that New York City should be the same as an Oklahoma Senate race or something. There should be room to use different language, different words, different policies. But that’s different than, say, Colin Allred, who cut an ad that was him sitting in his living room, looking kind of proper, being like “We got to stop these girls from infiltrating our boys sports, I’m a football player. I know that.” And the thing is, he looked fucking weak. People aren’t responding to Trump on this because of the policy. They’re responding because he looks strong.

My other biggest pet peeve is when Democrats call Trump a bully. I’m like, people want a fucking bully. You want a bully fighting for you. When you’re calling him a bully, you sound like you’re the one shoved in a locker, and who’s gonna believe that person is gonna fight for them? And so it’s such a misread, whereas, I think Fetterman in 2022 actually did a good job of this, which was to say what kind of a fucking man is Dr. Oz to be picking on some fucking kids? And Dr. Oz shut the fuck up about it, because that’s a winning debate for us.

I’m soft launching a new metaphor I haven’t used before. We’ll see how it goes.

Matt: Let’s go!

Morris: It feels like when you’re in a relationship that’s going through a rough patch, and you’re fighting about the dumbest thing, but you’re spending 45 minutes fighting about the dumbest thing because the relationship’s not working. It’s like, yeah, we’re fighting about the three transgender athletes in Maine because we are in a fucked economy. And unless you’re going to talk about that, you’re going to fight about these other dumb things. And we are imposing that on ourselves by making it a restriction that we won’t go there, and we’re gonna stay in the kind of unhappy, anxiety ridden relationship with voters, unless we go to a place of talking about the actual issue at hand.

Matt: I didn’t know if you were gonna land the plane there, but I feel like you landed it. I like it. I think that’s a good metaphor.

Morris: A Fighting Fascism exclusive.

Aaron: David Sirota had a formula for this a while ago. He had a three part equation.

1. If Democrats define themselves by shitty identity politics primarily, then they’re going to have trouble winning in conservative and swing areas, because nobody likes that, even if they are pretty good on economic stuff.

2. If they try to define themselves as Republicans, they’re also going to have trouble winning in those areas, because voters are going to choose the real thing.

3. But if they define themselves as the party of economic populism—that they’re fully committing to fighting against oligarchy, to standing up for regular people—then they can win in those swing districts and redder states without abandoning these social issues.

I think that’s right. And the problem is the entire Democratic Party apparatus—donors, think tanks. everything—for many, many years, has been built to push people into one or two and not into three. Which is why it’s exciting to see your work trying to push people into three, or help people in three.

Morris: It’s just the case that if we applied purity tests to taking corporate money, half the party would be gone. That is one of the most universally popular things out there, and good policy, yet that’s a line too far for us.

Sometimes we’ll be on a race and someone in a primary is like, you can’t come out for Medicare for All, because you know how they’ll use that against you in the general. And I’m waiting to see the general election ad attacking someone over Medicare for All. I just have never seen it. It’s crazy that we bought into this myth that literally has never existed.

I went back the other day and was watching the Obama 2012 ads, and that is one of the most populist presidential campaigns possible. It is literally “Mitt Romney is a fucking Wall Street crook, and we brought the hammer down on people like Mitt Romney.” That was effectively the campaign.

Aaron: That’s what’s so fucking insane, is they were like, “Oh, we’re the incumbent, the economy’s not great, we’re kind of in trouble, we need to do the thing that will help us win. Let’s do economic populism.” People do seem to understand that this is how you win.

Matt: All right, I feel like we should wrap up. But before we end, we do want to hear your 2028 predictions.

Morris: I think there’s a handful of people who are doing interesting things right now. Obviously AOC is a uniquely compelling figure to a lot of people, and has her finger on the pulse of the very politics we’re talking about in a uniquely strong way.

Aaron: I love AOC. I feel like there are people who see her as too coded in the social liberal camp, and maybe that’s just because she’s a Latina woman. I would be so excited about her candidacy. But I do feel like there is that discourse. What do you think about that?

Morris: Look, any concern about any of these 2028 people is totally valid and fair. That’s why we have primaries. And everyone should get punched in the face 200 times. And let’s see who’s left standing.

That being said, I don’t hear those same people share those concerns about more corporate candidates who have those same vulnerabilities. I’ve yet to hear a really good theory of the case for Pete Buttigieg.

Everyone’s gonna have different questions. What I will say about AOC is, a coalition that you’re seeing increasingly be a profoundly powerful electoral coalition is young people, Latino voters, and more white working class voters. That’s the Mamdani coalition, that was the Talarico coalition—and she seems uniquely equipped to win that.

And her numbers. I think there’s a little bit of polling derangement syndrome around Bernie and AOC, where it’s like, poll after poll, the most popular politicians in America, and then everyone’s like, they’re just unelectable. So I think, you don’t know until you know, but I’m skeptical of some of that criticism.

And then there’s Ro Khanna. Obviously a very steep uphill climb, but he’s doing all of the right things. He’s bet well on a few things. He bet well on the Epstein class stuff. He is endorsing across the country in an aggressive way. He’s got a lane on the AI stuff that’s interesting and unique

And then I think there are other interesting folks like John Ossoff, Gallego, there are other people who are a little less to the left, but check some of these boxes that we’re talking about.

I’ll tell you, I think it definitely shouldn’t be Gavin Newsom or Josh Shapiro. People treat Josh Shapiro like he’s an electoral juggernaut because he beat someone who dressed up as a Nazi all the time.

Matt: Yeah, he beat some, like, dumb Nazi Italian. Like, I could do that. That’s ridiculous.

Aaron: Matt, we cannot, cannot bring the Rhode Island Portuguese-Italian white ethnic conflict into this podcast. We just can’t.

Jonathan: Any parting wisdom for us, Morris?

Morris: There are a lot of these races across the country that don’t necessarily get the same levels of attention, but that are equally important. There are only so many Zohran Mamdanis and Graham Platners. And not only are there only so many of them, there’s an element of luck to all of this. There’s an element of luck to the algorithm that allows you to go viral and all that. And we need to be doing our collective jobs, of amplifying, of donating to, of investing, of spreading the gospel of the larger populist slate.

Jonathan: Thanks Morris, and thanks for your work.

Morris: Thank you. Great to be here. I’ll talk to you guys soon.