A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial. For over a decade—!!!—Donald Trump has defied political gravity. After […]
The acclaimed academic and writer Mahmood Mamdani speaks with Democracy Now! about the rise of his son, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. The professor cites Zohran’s “refusal to budge, to soften his critique of the state of Israel” as a critical aspect of his rise to power. “His refusal to change his stance told the electorate that this was a man of principle, that affordability was not just merely rhetoric, that he could be taken seriously at his word,” Mahmood says.
Don’t discount the threat of AI political videos fooling people, but for now, they’re mostly about bolstering group identity and cashing in on viral content.
We speak with the acclaimed academic and writer Mahmood Mamdani, who has just released a new book, Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State. Mamdani, who has taught at Columbia for decades, was raised in Uganda and first came to the United States in the 1960s to study. He and his family were later expelled from Uganda during Idi Amin’s dictatorship. The book “is about the reversal of the anti-colonial movement” in Uganda, says Mamdani. “The anti-colonial movement fought to create a nation out of a fragmented country … and I speak of slow poison as a gradual, piecemeal, step-by-step cutting up of the country so that you no longer have a single citizenship.”
Leaked files reviewed by The Grayzone show the US gov’t covertly funded Nepalese youth groups in the run-up to a violent coup. The “Gen Z” shadow army mobilized as the US sought to neutralize Chinese and Indian influence over Kathmandu – now controlled by a leader chosen by an informal social media poll.