I met someone at a conference today, and he and I got into what started out as a pleasant conversation. At one point we reminisced about New York City in the 1980s.
Then he said “I can’t believe all those people voted for him.” I assumed he was talking about Trump, and I started to respond accordingly.
But it turned out he was talking about Mamdani. He was wondering whether NYC could survive the election of our current mayor. I tried my best to navigate this unexpected turn in the conversation.
“It’s great that he kept Jessica Tisch on as chief of police,” I said, “given that she is a Republican. He is trying to reach across the aisle.”
“But he wants to defund the police,” my colleague said.
“He once held that position,” I replied, “but he now realizes that he was wrong, and he has apologized for having said that in the past.”
The guy looked at me with a puzzled look. “You mean he said that after he was elected?”
“No,” I said, “he ran on that position during his campaign. He said positive things about the NYC police when he was running for mayor.”
I was starting to realize by now that we might be talking past each other. “Sorry,” I added, “when you said you couldn’t believe all those people voted for him, I thought you were talking about Trump.”
“I love Trump,” he replied.
And that’s when I realized that I was talking to somebody from the Foxiverse. The man probably had never heard anything that Mamdani actually said while running for mayor. All he knew was the make-believe version of Mamdani manufactured by the Fox News Network.
You can’t really have a conversation with somebody who has never been exposed to reality.