This is Julio's Corner, my corner of the internet where I talk about whatever is on my mind.

I'll mostly talk about stuff I've watched, read, or listened to, but I may get introspective at times and reflect on life or on society at large.

This episode is being recorded on Monday, June 30th, 2025.

And so here we are, another week, something a little different from my previous episodes.

But first, a little bit about myself.

I've been struggling to get a haircut for the last few weekends.

I just keep waking up late because of my vampire hours, and just haven't been able to make it on time to the barbershop.

And this week has been no exception.

So one more week, and my hair is, you know, many weeks past its haircut due date.

So hopefully, the following week, or maybe tonight before work, I'll get my haircut done this Monday.

Anyways, something else going on.

I started working out with OBS, playing around with it, and I figured out how to do background removal successfully with another app called Prism.

I learned through the YouTubes how to do that.

So now I am currently, as of this episode, episode 6, I am recording the podcast as a video and audio podcast.

So now my YouTube videos will actually have video.

And the audio podcast will obviously still be audio, but now I'll be editing video on top of audio to get this thing posted and all that good stuff.

So hopefully I'll just stream line it, just do the video and then make an audio version of that so I don't give myself too much extra work.

And yeah, so that's what we're doing.

I don't really have much more to say about myself other than what I just discussed here.

So we're gonna get into the news.

So let me go ahead and use the the news jingle.

Maybe I'll put some some graphics in the video for the post.

So here we go.

So, not a lot, well, no.

There's been a lot going on still.

Things, you know, haven't really...

It's sort of a holding pattern going on in the Mideast with the whole Iran, Israel, US situation and still mass deportations happening, still plenty of genocide going on.

So, yeah, there's a lot of horrors happening in the world.

But this episode will be a little more optimistic.

And that's because here in New York City, Zohran Kwame Mamdani has won the Democratic Mayoral Primary for New York City, for the New York City mayorship.

Come November, in the General, he'll be running as a Democrat, because he won the primary.

And I'm ecstatic about it.

Zohran won the primary with 43.5% of the vote to Andrew Como's 36.4% in the first round.

So it was an immediate annihilation, an immediate windfall for Zohran.

Como gave his concession speech that same night, because he realized, because he knew, based on the numbers and whatnot, he just didn't have a chance to win it in the second or third round.

It was just immediately, he was going to, Mamdani was going to get the 51% needed to get the Democratic position.

So he just conceded, and he may, in fact, run in the general as an independent.

As of now, I think he still hasn't been made official, but I'm sure he's still mulling it over.

It didn't seem like he was all that excited about running for mayor since he was previously the governor of New York, which is definitely a higher position, running the whole state of New York versus just the city.

However, he did have to retire in disgrace because of all his sexual allegation scandals, not to mention killing so many seniors during COVID, even though he wrote a book trying to make himself out to be a hero.

But reality is showing that he sent a lot of COVID victims into nursing homes to try to hide them and cover it up.

And it just killed off a lot of old people.

So there's a lot of stains on his, a lot of blemishes on his legacy.

And I think this was going to be his like last hurrah to try to have a final comeback and immortalize his name in the annals of democratic history.

But yeah, he lost to Mamdani, which is great.

We need some new blood.

We need some new progressive blood in politics.

And the progressives out here in the country are ecstatic about it.

All the shows that I've watched or listened to on YouTube and on the podcast apps have been singing his praises.

Obviously, the establishment not so much.

So there's a lot of negativity going on out there.

There's a lot of PR spin, propaganda.

Trying to, what's the word I'm looking for?

Trying to extinguish some of the jubilee and exhilaration and joy and trying to let out the gas, leak out the, what's the word?

You know when tires are running out of air?

Try to leak the tires, try to deflate.

That's the word I'm looking for.

They're trying to deflate the enthusiasm that is being garnered by this win.

Because even though it's for the mayorship of New York City, this is still a big deal nationally.

And the reason for that, when Eric Adams, eight years ago, or no, actually four years ago, he was only, it feels like eight years, because he was such a horrible mayor.

But as soon as Eric Adams won the mayorship, of New York City, the media, a lot of people in the establishment democratic machine and in the establishment media was already praising Eric Adams' success as winning the election and projecting him as the next possible presidential candidate for the Democratic Party in four years or whatever, in the future.

So the mayorship of New York City is a very big deal in this country.

Even though it's just the mayor of a city, it's New York City, which is where Wall Street is.

It's the economic capital of this country, and for most of the world, because again, Wall Street, there's like thousands of billionaires living in New York City.

So, a lot of money goes through here.

And this Democratic Socialist has a chance of running it, and that has establishment media, the establishment Democrats, Republicans, of course, and right wingers and everyone, it has them running scared, because if he wins the mayorship, and he's successful in the moderate steps of progressivism that he wants to enact, you know, a couple of policies of free busing, universal child care, I believe kindergarten and pre-K for all New Yorkers, rent freezes, gift baskets to the families of new borns.

You know, if these programs, oh, a couple of co-op, you know, one co-op grocery store, one co-op supermarket in each borough of the city for the five boroughs to help regulate the cost of food and try to lower the prices to make it more affordable.

If he's successful in these programs, in New York City, it's going to send ripples throughout the country.

And being a mayor, which is an executive position, he has a lot of power to do things.

And the results will be more apparent.

So if these programs are successful, the outcome of that, the expectations, the bars that will be set for everyone else is the big deal to all these people, because they want the status quo.

They want the poor to keep suffering, the rich to keep reaping the benefits of tax cuts and the current laws in society.

And of course, Trump and the Republicans want to continue their fascism that's currently happening in our country and completely destroying our civil liberties and so on.

Because one of the other promises that Zohran has is that he's going to stop helping, he's going to stop the police department, the NYPD from supporting ICE in deporting immigrants in this city.

So they're not going to aid ICE agents anymore.

If anything, they're going to protect New Yorkers from them.

So because we are, because New York City is a sanctuary city, and he is going to fight back against Trump's fascist agenda.

So these are things that the establishment Republicans right now, and of course the establishment Democrats that aren't lifting a finger to do anything, they don't want to see, you know, an alternative to what they're doing, which is nothing.

And of course, what the Republicans are doing, which is a lot of horror throughout the country.

So, because of that, you have, you have a lot of anti-Zohran propaganda happening in the media.

You have, so, when Barack Hussein Obama was president, everyone, and by everyone, I mean right-wingers and Fox News and everything, they kept trying to paint Barack Hussein Obama as this scary, African, democratic, socialist, Muslim.

Because Muslim, being a Muslim is the same as being a terrorist in our country, apparently.

That is the fear that they want to evoke when you hear the word Muslim.

So it's ironic, because Obama is not a Muslim.

He was, he's a Christian, and he's not African.

He does have a Kenyan father, but he was born in Hawaii.

So he is a US citizen.

That's how he was able to become president.

Mamdani, on the other hand, is, in fact, a democratic socialist Muslim who was born in Uganda.

So he is, he's actually the thing that they feared, that they tried to paint Obama back in the day when he was president.

We have right here an African Muslim democratic socialist right now, running for mayor, who's also of Indian descent because his parents are Indian, even though he was born, in fact, he was born in Uganda, Africa, in the city of Kampala, I believe.

So anyway, so because of all these checkboxes that the right wingers like to use to scare everyone, it's hard for them to pin down and to hone their bigoted focus when trying to slander and slur Zohran because he's a socialist, he's a democratic socialist to be more specific and accurate.

He's Muslim because apparently being a Muslim is automatically anti-Semitic.

And he's from Uganda, so he's African, and he's also an immigrant.

And this current administration is all about getting rid of immigrants of color, because they don't like people of color here, which clearly Mamdani is.

What am I missing?

Muslim, African, democratic socialist, and the same thing, person of color.

So, yeah, so there's been a lot of like Charlie Kirk and other right wingers keep trying to use 9-Eleven, because, you know, that happened in New York City.

How 9-Eleven should be a harbinger and a reminder to New Yorkers that we should not vote Muslim, vote for someone who is Muslim.

Like, that makes no sense.

Yeah, the terrorists of 9-Eleven were Muslim, but that doesn't make all Muslims terrorists.

Zohran Mamdani is a proud Muslim who is all about anti-discrimination.

He's not anti-Semitic.

He believes Israel should be a country of equal rights for everyone who lives there, not just Israeli Jews, but the Palestinians who live in that area as well, and Arabs who live there.

But Israeli Jews believe in an ethnostate.

They believe that there should be a hierarchy, you know, Israeli Jews, Arab Jews, and everybody else that's not Jewish or, yeah, that's not Jewish.

Like Palestinians, your second-class citizens.

And Mamdani doesn't believe that.

He believes that everyone should have equal rights in any country, not just Israel.

But because he's Muslim, whenever he goes on the, you know, the news dockets and he's on, he's going to different news media and they're interviewing him, they immediately want to hone in on, do you recognize Israel as a Jewish state?

And he doesn't say that.

He'll say, I recognize Israel as a state, but I believe it should be a state that has equal rights.

I believe they should follow the laws, the international laws that are currently claiming their leader Netanyahu as a terrorist and a international war criminal and a criminal in general, and he should go, he should be arrested by international law.

He does not shy away from saying those things, but they automatically try to paint that as immediately, he's anti-Semitic, because he is, he's not okay with the genocide that's happening to the Palestinians.

And who in their right mind, if you take a step back and think about it, like, wait, no, we should be, we should be against genocide.

Israel equaling genocide is not a good thing.

If anything, Israel equals genocide is a bad thing.

So if you want to equate Israel with genocide, yeah, you should be against that.

That doesn't make you anti-Semitic.

Because being Jewish does not automatically make you Israeli.

Because you don't automatically have a citizenship with the state of Israel.

Jewish New Yorkers are New Yorkers that are Jewish.

They don't automatically have Israeli citizenship.

They don't have dual citizenship.

Some may, but not all.

And yeah, most New York City Jews are against genocide and against what's happening with the Palestinians.

And the majority of them also voted for Zohran Mamdani.

So for this whole media picture that's being portrayed of Zohran being anti-Semitic and being something that Jewish New Yorkers should be afraid of is just a lot of hogwash and propaganda.

Because Jewish, like I said, the majority of them in New York, with the exception of certain sections, because not all, no one's a monolith.

So a lot of, there were a majority of Orthodox Jews that voted against him.

But the majority of Jewish New Yorkers voted for him.

And, you know, the majority of New York City in general voted for him.

Like I said, he got 43.5 to 36.4 to Como.

So you have that.

You have the New York Young Republican Club in New York City asking the federal government to deport Mamdani.

They want to label him a communist and use this old Eisenhower law, communist law, communist act, I think it's what it's called, to revoke Mamdani's citizenship and kick him out of the country, which is illegal.

But that's how afraid they are of Mamdani's primary victory.

It's so, with all of this happening here in June, and the actual mayoral election happening in November, you can see that, you can definitely see that we're going to have five months of this kind of propaganda and news stories being propagated in mainstream news, as well as more biased news, like Fox News and MSNBC.

Even some Democratic leaders will be saying crazy stuff that are very anti-Islamic.

For instance, one of our senators, Kristin Gillibrand, who's a big shill for cryptocurrency, because she's bought and paid off by them.

She was on an NPR show, I think Brian Lerer is the show that he was on.

That's the new show from NPR for New York City that he was on.

She was on, I should say.

And a caller called in and said some crazy anti-Islamophobic stuff about how Mamdani is anti-Semitic, and he said a bunch of infactual things.

And then Brian Lerer was asked, Gillibrand, what's your take on this?

I'm paraphrasing, obviously.

And then she in turn said more false anti-Islamic things about Mamdani and how Mamdani needs to be even more pro-Israel and pro, he needs to really basically do what all the Democrats are doing, just continue to massage the balls of Netanyahu and Israel, because whatever Israel does is the right thing, no matter what.

Even though they attack Iran first and they're committing genocide, you should always say Israel is good, everything else is bad.

Anything, if you say free Palestine, you should go to jail.

You're anti-Semitic if you say free Palestine.

You're anti-Semitic if you say Israel should stop bombing Iran.

That's what they want Momdani to do, and he's not going to.

He's a fair and balanced progressive, and he believes in equal rights for all, and he's against anti-discrimination.

He's against discrimination.

He's all for anti-discrimination policies, and so he's going to represent them fairly.

He's not going to slant one way or another.

He wants equal rights for all.

So if anything, Christian Gillibrand should be reprimanded for her crazy hot take that she did on NPR the other day this week.

What else do I want to talk about regarding Mom Donnie?

I think that's it, actually.

It's going to be a short episode because, like I said, I was spending a lot more time getting to figure out OBS.

I can get this video thing going with my fake backdrop.

I got books behind me.

So you don't see my poor messy living conditions.

You just see books behind me to make me look smart.

I got my glasses on because I mean, I'm near sighted anyway.

I always wear glasses.

And yeah, I'm happy Mom Donnie won.

It's, you know, a sliver of hope in these dark days that we are living in.

We finally have a little bit of a shining light to pave the way.

Oh yeah, one last thing I wanted to say that I almost forgot was how these, like people like Matt Walsh and other right wingers are talking about, it's funny, like they hate New York City in general, right?

When, normally when they talk about New York, they like to talk about how it's a hellscape.

It's, you know, high, you know, that's why they loved Eric Adams because Eric Adams was all about we should bring back stop and frisk.

There's nothing but crime.

You know, when they talk about New York City, they want you to think of Batman, the Batman movie, you know, got them.

It's all dark.

There's always crime happening.

You need vigilantes.

You need to be tough on crime.

You need cops to be running around in army gear.

And, you know, and it's not like that at all.

New York is a lot more non-violent than most places in the country.

In fact, there's this YouTube show called Vanguard that I love.

And they're based in Kansas City, Kansas.

And they like to talk about how where they live is the murder capital of the country.

So there's a lot more deaths in Kansas than there is in New York City.

So, yeah, they want to paint this picture in general.

But because now Mamdani won and he's a immigrant, and like again, with this current administration, that's anti-immigration, and they want the country to be Christian and white.

They want it to be a Christian white conservative.

They want to make it an ethno state.

And so, they're trying to paint, you know, they want to believe that their audience just doesn't know history, and will listen to anything they say, which is why they lie so much.

But they're trying to now paint New York City as, you know, because of people like Mamdani, they're, the immigrants are taking over the city.

The city used to be American, it used to be white and Christian.

And it's like, do you forget that the Statue of Liberty is, I mean, oh, what's her name?

MTG, Margaret Taylor Greene, I think is her name.

She posted on, I guess, X or with Twitter or something, an AEI-generated picture of the Statue of Liberty with a hijab on it, trying to say this really hit hard, as in, you know, New York City is gonna be overtaken by Sharia law.

Again, very anti-Islamophobic, very Islamophobic, anti-Muslim.

And my point is, New York City has always been a history of immigrants for the last, since its existence, it's always been 30 to 40% immigrants in this country, in New York City especially.

And again, like I said, the Statue of Liberty is here.

And what is on the plaque of the foundation of the Statue of Liberty?

That's where the immigrants used to go through, you know, Ellis Island and then Liberty Island and Statue of Liberty and then New York City and so on.

And, you know, the famous quote on the plaque of the Statue of Liberty is, which I butchered in the last episode, it's, give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breed free.

Like, this statue was built, was created by a Frenchman, a French architect or sculptor, as a gift to our country, because the whole American dream is that you can leave your, you know, you could leave, you know, wherever you live, the country, wherever country you came from, for a better future, a better tomorrow.

And this country is a history of immigration, and New York City is definitely, exemplifies that.

Especially with the Statue of Liberty right there, in downtown Manhattan.

You just, I mean, you could see it from Battery Park, from that area in Manhattan, because it's across the sea, it's across the river, I should say, not the sea, the Hudson River, just there as a beacon, because it's supposed to be a beacon for a better future for immigrants.

And so, to now try to paint like, oh my God, I can't believe this immigrant is running for mayor of this city of immigrants.

It's just like, well, yeah, that's the whole point.

That's what New York City is.

It's a history of immigration here.

You know, it was originally before America, the Native Americans lived here.

And then the Dutch came here, you know, people from Amsterdam, not Amsterdam.

Where's Amsterdam located?

The country where Amsterdam is from, they came here.

And then the British came.

And then the British bought Manhattan from the Dutch.

So, so yeah, so there's always been a history of immigrants.

I mean, we have Hell's Kitchen, which is a history of, you know, the Irish Americans, Italian Americans came here, you know, Jewish Americans.

You know, we have 1.

something million Jews in this country, in New York City.

And, you know, we have Harlem.

We have both East and West Harlem.

East Harlem is known as Spanish Harlem.

West Harlem is, you know, known for Black Americans.

You have Little Italy in downtown New York in Greenwich Village.

You have Chinatown.

You have Koreatown.

I think we have New Delhi for Indian people.

So, yeah, New York City is known for having immigrants.

That is the makeup of New York City.

So it only it stands to reason that, yeah, why not have a immigrant, now a naturalized citizen, also run for the mayor of said city to help make it affordable again?

It just makes sense.

So, yeah, that's all I really have to say.

Let me get my music ready for this.

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And as always, thanks for listening.