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Photo: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg/Getty Images

With the city’s mayoral candidates officially looking toward November, the field has remained unsettled as opponents to Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani continue to bicker about the best path forward.

Mayor Eric Adams, who has shown no signs of stepping aside despite his dismal poll numbers, is trying to chip away at the presumed front-runner and writing off his fellow opponents. In a recent interview with MSNBC, Adams continued to paint Mamdani as someone who is out of touch with the average New Yorker and promising things he can’t achieve. “He is an academic elitist. He studied poverty. I lived poverty. His programs are going to impact working-class people,” Adams said.

Zohran Mamdani studied poverty. I lived it.He’s an academic elitist with plans he can’t implement, or worse, that would hurt working-class New Yorkers. Affordability is a real crisis, and I’m fighting for the people who feel it every single day. I grew up poor, joined the… pic.twitter.com/08tszOVJi5

— Eric Adams (@ericadamsfornyc) July 11, 2025

While Mamdani’s primary campaign has been praised for building an extensive coalition to defeat former governor Andrew Cuomo, Adams downplayed the achievement and suggested that the state legislator took advantage of a burgeoning movement that existed prior to him joining the race.

“He already had an army on the streets. They were already in the college campuses. They were already protesting on our streets. The Palestinian movement was already underway. There was already this energy in the streets, the anti-Trump movement,” he said. “All he had to do was pop his head up and say, ‘Hey, I’m in favor of all the stuff you guys are doing. Come join me.’ And people joined.”

Adams also continued to criticize Cuomo, who he alleged has asked him to drop out of the race in order for the former governor to mount his own independent bid against Mamdani. The mayor said that Cuomo has a history of disrespect toward Black elected officials and that he followed Adams’s lead in establishing an independent ballot line to “bamboozle” his run for reelection.

“I gave you an opportunity to go one-on-one with him. You spend $25 million. The voters heard your message. You thought you were up 32 points in the poll, you lost by 13 points. And now you want to have another bite at the apple when you didn’t get out and campaign like you should have? You didn’t walk the streets. You didn’t talk to people. You lived in a cocoon. Now, you should have another shot?” he said of Cuomo.

Cuomo, meanwhile, continues to leave the door open for that second shot at defeating Mamdani, but it remains to be seen if he’ll actively campaign. His spokesman, Rich Azzopardi, is confident that Adams will fail to win over voters, telling NBC New York of the mayor’s standing in the polls, “He’s so underwater with New York voters, he should consider growing gills.”

Despite his criticism of Cuomo, Adams is facing accusations that he, too, has pressured a candidate to drop out. In an interview with PIX11, Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa accused Adams of trying to poach voters from his party, claiming that the mayor even offered a job in his administration for his troubles.

“He’s even floated the idea that he would make me the deputy mayor of Public Safety,” Sliwa said. “Could you imagine me and Mayor Adams? We would be like two scorpions in a brandy glass.”

Adams denied that such an offer was ever made. “In no way have I ever offered Curtis Sliwa a job to drop out of the race — that’s simply false. I have not said one word to Curtis in months,” he said, per PIX11.

Though the candidates continue to be at odds, the pile of money opposing Mamdani is growing, even if there isn’t a consensus pick to spend it on yet. The Wall Street Journal reports that an independent expenditure group called New Yorkers for a Better Future Mayor 25 has launched with at least $20 million behind it with the intent of defeating Mamdani in the fall. Hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman has already signaled his support for Adams, while sources tell the Journal that former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani is expected to join forces with former Trump appointee Bo Dietl on another PAC with goals of raising $10 million. As the report points out, they’ll all also need some kind of actual plan:

Political strategists and financiers say the opening weeks of the general election have been chaotic. They complain the anti-Mamdani bulwark lacks a positive message. And a candidate. And enough voters to win. They worry the flood of outside money could backfire, and make voters suspicious of special interests.

And that would suit the front-runner just fine.

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unlimited willems on the piggies

linky

The recruiter for the air marshals told a crowd of applicants they shouldn’t bother applying if they were fat. “No one likes a fat cop,” she said. She drank Pink Monster Ultra Rosá and had multiple dreamcatcher forearm tattoos.

“I learned all these skills in the army—smash and grabs, site exploitation—and never got to use them,” he said. “So I’m here to kind of do what I learned to do over there, but this time here, defending my country.”

There was the young, taciturn southerner managing a batting cage near New Orleans, and the pimply youth from Kentucky, churning out Yahoo Finance content for twenty dollars an hour. Both said they were tired and bored. The latter said his father had been in ICE, but he “didn’t really know what he did.”

The last applicant I spoke to said he didn’t care much about the politics of ICE—it was just that he thought his taxes shouldn’t be used to buy school supplies for “illegal alien children.” What he was really interested in, he said, was parlaying his wages as a deportation officer into buying Airbnbs. “My classmates came up in the same environment as me,” he said, “but now they’re off posting photographs of Lamborghinis on Instagram, standing on balconies of waterfront apartments.”

His dad had also been in ICE and had broken down the doors of a Queens family that had just sat down to dinner when he stormed in. They all happened to be wearing Obama shirts and hats and were eating off of Obama dishware. Once, in the early part of his career, the man had gotten to travel to Southeast Asia on various deportation flights and had sent his son photographs of a beautiful waterfall in Cambodia. “I was like, what the fuck dad?” the young man said. “I thought you were supposed to be deporting people!”

The motivating force behind American career fascism would appear to be wanderlust.

n+1 doing solid reporter work

The “private funds” industry is emblematic. Private funds is a catch-all term for venture capital, hedge funds, and private equity firms—the petty tyrants of finance capital. These interests grew explosively during the Biden years. Assets held by these funds grew 34 percent to nearly $28 trillion, almost matching the $31 trillion held in public mutual funds—historically the much bigger type of ownership. The number of private funds grew at an even faster rate, from about 63,000 in 2020 to almost 101,000 in 2024. Company founders and investment partnerships multiplied by the thousands. They form the financial shock troops of the new American gentry, the upper-class backbone of Trumpism. This base tends to be less complacent than the older financial establishment, which not only wants order and stability in international markets but also—at least for a time—publicly supported the ideals of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

A whole financial Freikorps of private investors, fund managers, and activist shareholders see the Trump administration as a battering ram to smash the regulatory walls guarding the big money, i.e., the enormous pools of savings managed by government-connected fund managers and banks. This includes, for example, some $8 trillion in invested retirement accounts, as well as a bigger share in the roughly $6.1 trillion pool of public pension assets. Even Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent complains about alleged central planning under Democratic governments and talks about the need to increase competition and reduce the power of market incumbents—by which he means opening the door to this vault for him and his colleagues. For the financiers backing Trump a raid on big finance could yield a jackpot of billions.