"A New Generation in NYC Confronts 'The Machine'"

Opinion - Naomi Wolf

My Speech at the Donald J. Trump Kings County Republican Club, August 21, 2025

The Republicans gave me a standing ovation. No, I'm really moved. See, I'm actually weeping. Can you all hear me?

And let's check, if you would, that the interwebs can hear me as well. This is such an honor. And Athena, I am so moved because there's not a young woman—a woman of your generation, I should say—that I admire more right now than you, Athena Clarke.

Okay, so I speak around the world and I'm not easily rattled, but I'm quite nervous tonight for a number of reasons. But the number one reason is I don't usually really, really, really have profound, humbling respect and awe for just about everyone in my audience. And that is the case tonight here at the Donald J. Trump Republican Club in deepest Brooklyn.

There's so many people here that I've met before—first responders, cops, teachers like Athena Clarke, teachers like Michael Kane, lawyers like the amazing Jimmy Wagner who put this all together—and the firefighters and the citizens. And part of why I am so humbled and moved to be here and so honored is that I'm always, always talking about what needs to be done right in the face of authoritarianism, tyranny, injustice. You have to run people for office, get out the vote, draft the laws, pass the laws, know the legislative process, go to Albany, harass your representatives peacefully and organize. And people are like, yes, yes, yes. But no one ever does it except you guys.

And I should say the Posse out there, which is why I love the Posse and Bannon as well. And you could say she's a lifelong Democrat, which I have been. Now I am an independent. I have walked away. But what I really want to say—and I've been saying it for like four years now—is that it really doesn't matter that Steve Bannon, for instance, who gave me a platform when all the doors were shut against me, doesn't believe everything I do and vice versa. And it doesn't matter. I don't even know what Michael Kane's politics are on a policy level or you or the firefighters. It doesn't matter because what matters is that we align on the fundamental DNA of being American—freedom, self-respect, respect for others, autonomy, liberty, justice, rule of law. And that makes us here, whatever our labels past or present, that makes us here brothers and sisters.

So I'm going to jump right in. Why am I here? As you outed me, I'm a lifelong Democrat. It's public. I was indeed an advisor to the Clinton re-election campaign and to Vice President Al Gore in his bid for the presidency and nonetheless didn’t matter. Famous feminist, worldwide Democrat liberal fixture on legacy media for 40 years—didn’t matter—because in 2021, I did accurate reporting about damage to women and their reproductive health, which is a subject I've been writing about as an iconic feminist writer for 40 years. But that went against the script put together by the elites who decided to be in charge of everything all at once in a totally un-American, un-Western way. And I was canceled. Every door closed, as I mentioned. I was smeared worldwide. Didn’t matter what happened to me, except that I saw that it was the administration I voted for—it was the Biden administration—that did that to me.

So there was no hiding from how awful they really were for me. But apart from what happened to me, I couldn't lie to myself anymore, even leading up to that crisis in my life, about what was happening to my beloved Democratic Party—it was so obvious. And honestly, it's obvious to millions of us; it's just embarrassing to talk about, and we all get canceled if we talk about it. But obviously for years, this party—which had been a party of justice and inclusiveness and championing the little person—began to instead present this weird checklist of values and policies so psychotic and marginal and crazy and alien to moderate, sane people. And there was no way to pretend that wasn't happening.

And so what has clearly been establishing itself throughout the West, but certainly in the United States, is a crazy machine that is part Soros, part globalist, and part Karl Marx. Right? That's the machine called the DNC and their aligned interests and candidates. So we bought a place in Brooklyn about two and a half years ago, and I've missed the city. I spent decades in the city. We left in 2020 because we saw what was going to happen, but I missed everyone. I wanted to come back. So we moved into this apartment in Brooklyn, and it's a working-class neighborhood, deeply established—very deeply neighborhood—but I could see up close how the Democratic machine was betraying the people of my own neighborhood, but there didn't seem to be an alternative, right? That's how machinist the machine is and was.

I didn't hear from my city council member except for a day she held, where you got to skate on free roller skates in a playground and also get literature about programs for immigrants and refugees—not necessarily legal immigrants or refugees. That was her priority. She has a very nice staff. And I asked the staff, well, what other policies? And there was nothing on infrastructure, nothing on environment, nothing on making schools better, nothing on safety, nothing on the voice of the citizens. And when I said, where do I go to express myself to her, there were no regular meetings that I was told about. And I was given a flyer basically.

That's not the worst of it. I came out of the subway on Parkside and there was a table set up for my assembly member, and her staff was really nice too, but again, there was nothing for small businesses, nothing for et cetera, et cetera, except for this. I said, I'm a small business owner, which I am, and I'm a woman. And so they have programs for women-owned small businesses, but it's nothing that would actually help my business grow in Brooklyn and employ Brooklynites—nothing like that. Nothing like loan programs, advertising programs, workspace programs—nothing to help me actually grow my business in Brooklyn, hire Brooklynites, develop growth—nothing. But they were so proud that they had a program that will cut me into government contracts. I can have a piece of their giant, corrupt pie, even though nothing I do has anything to do with government contracts. That's what they had to offer me.

And it was so demoralizing, so machinist. Meanwhile, I see all around me addiction, homelessness, kids needing a quiet, safe place to do homework after school. I see streets that are at the mercy of the apps—the DoorDash drivers, the Uber drivers—that are just deployed without respect for the elderly, the disabled. And I see small businesses struggling, and I learned to my surprise that there's a development going up a few blocks away from our apartment—which we had no idea about—which is just for mentally ill and drug-addicted people, 200 units. And I thought, well, I now own property in this neighborhood. No one disclosed this. What's the process of approval? And then I found out there really isn't a citizen-led process of approval in Brooklyn.

So my point is, I learned firsthand as a Brooklynite that the machine is so entrenched it doesn't even need to pretend to try. It's not even pretending to try. You know why it's not pretending to try? Partly, they're not counting on Jimmy Wagner and Athena Clarke. They thought we would never show up and that they could do this forever.

So exemplifying the machine is what we're facing right now with the looming train wreck of this terrifying candidate, Zohran Mamdani, who just represents everything machinist about the machine. He's 33 years old, he's had no real job, a handful of short-term gigs, one of them working for his mom, the famous filmmaker. He somehow managed to become an assembly member in 2021 from Queens, and he's managed to have the most absences of any assembly member and to pass only three bills. He has no business experience, and he's running to take over one of the largest city economies in the world.

Now, all of his haplessness—which by the way reminds me of a lot of the haplessness of rich kids I went to school with at Yale and Oxford, very similar haplessness—all of that isn't as serious to me as his unwillingness to become an American. Now I'm the daughter of immigrants and the granddaughter of immigrants; I believe in legal immigration, but this guy didn't even bother as an adult. He came here at seven from Uganda—that's fine. He's a child. He gets to be not American until he's 18. He goes to American schools, he goes to an American university. He has 11 adult years, not as an American, as a Ugandan citizen in America, benefiting from America, educated in America, working in America. He doesn't bother to become an American citizen for 11 adult years.

I'm sorry to pound the table—in America, he can't be bothered. Now there's a clock that ends at 12 years. I don't know if this is the clock that motivated him, but it just happened that right before that milestone, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2018, right before he ran for assembly member in Queens. So this is deeply, deeply, deeply offensive to me. And oh, by the way, is he an American now? He is not simply an American. No—he kept his Ugandan passport, is a dual citizen of the country of Uganda. Did he bring his assets to this country? He did not. He has $200,000 in raw land in Uganda and a couple of thousand on his financial disclosure in our economy here.

If you're not familiar with Uganda, you really should pay attention to it in this election; it is one of the worst countries on the planet morally, in terms of policy. They target critics, they lock people up for their opinions, and they sentenced gay and lesbian people with the death penalty until recently. And you can still get long, long prison sentences for “promoting homosexuality.” It's catastrophic on the scale of human rights, way down at the bottom. Did Zohran Mamdani, the Ugandan adult help Uganda? No, he did not. But he just decided 11 years into adulthood to become a naturalized half-citizen.

And this is profoundly offensive to me. Now he's actually a Marxist, as you know. We think that's kind of a metaphor. But I just saw a clip on socials, which seems to be real, in which he's actually talking about seizing the means of production, and he calls himself a socialist. Now, that's not the worst of it. And this is where the machine gets very, very machinist. Can you all hear me in the back?

He didn't show up. I know these people well enough to know you don't show up out of nowhere and become a household name overnight. That takes millions of dollars in campaign funding, media planning, a rollout, execution, paid volunteers—paid volunteers—and so on. And it takes big bucks behind you. And his offerings are so tested to deceive people into thinking, yeah, I want free bus fare, I want subsidized groceries, I want accommodation for lower-income people with housing. Not to notice that if you give people free bus fare, we lose $5.2 billion in revenue for the city. And that experiments like that in other cities have failed, just like in the Soviet Union state-run grocery stores have failed. And just like the projects, which have been around for 90 years since the 1930s, have also failed, right?

There's a direct line from the projects to very serious kinds of bad management, crime, violence, and so on. These are policies that have already failed, but they're very well tested to sound good to a young generation—especially that doesn't remember what the lines looked like in Moscow in the early eighties. So a guy named Sam Antar, who's now a whistleblower and was once the CFO of Crazy Eddie, and he calls himself a white-collar felon, but he knows about forensic financial analysis—he showed that there's a complete circle of billions of dollars going into this machine.

And it goes like this: there's a Soros-funded Open Society Institute, one of the biggest nonprofits. Michael knows exactly what that is. It's a $4.2 billion nonprofit. So you donate to them and you get the tax deduction. But there's supposed to be a wall between nonprofits and what are called C4s, which can help candidates—help people learn about candidates and issues—but they're not observing it. So they just shuttle millions in tax-deducted money into the C4s like Tides Advocacy, Make the Road. And that in turn goes to help actual campaigns like the Working Families Party, other campaigns on the ground.

That doesn't end there. He showed that they have interlocking office staff and interlocking offices—physically they're the same thing; they're just calling themselves two different things. Then they give their officials $1.7 million salaries with those tax-deducted funds. Then they elect the officials with all that illegal money—IRS-law-violating money. And then the officials—and this is where the circle comes full circle—give $16 million in grants to the C3s and the whole thing begins again.

However, also, those funds that got the initial tax deduction are in an offshore instrument, which could also have foreign money—an opaque offshore instrument. So this is why this city and its boroughs, full of sensible, sane, hardworking people, can't break the stranglehold of this psychotic machine.

What does Mamdani propose? Legalizing sex work—inviting the cartels into the heart of Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx and so on. These are not policies that are popular, but with this flood of money, by the time people get to the ballot box, they've heard of him, and they barely know who Curtis Sliwa is, for example, who has served this city with nobility and personal risk for decades.

So that's the machine. Now, I also found out in talking to these amazing candidates that there's other interests that are behind some of the horrible policies in Brooklyn, and that's big tech. Uber, for instance, and the app companies—the rides as well as the delivery companies—want to reconfigure Brooklyn streets. You told me about this and Janine A.A. told me about it. And I see it. I see disabled people and elderly people terrified because the streets are being cleared out for Uber and people are just taking over. There's nowhere to park. There's no way for people to commute. This is not grassroots policy. These are deep pockets from Silicon Valley treating our city and our people as digital data for them to harvest and to manipulate.

Alright? In contrast to all of this—and now the darkness, I wish I had a soundtrack behind me, the clouds parting, the strings, the uplift—what I've just described is very, very dark and corrupt. But there is incredible light because this guy and these people on either side of me and in the audience said, no, they're not going to have it anymore.

And I know that it seems like a hill that's very, very hard to climb, but I'm just going to be mushy a little bit. I've been reading through the Geneva Bible chapter by chapter, and our history as humans is so full of stories of people who were facing a giant army. And just by human terms, there's no way this could succeed. But somehow the wind was at their back. They were the right people at the right time with their hearts oriented in the right direction, showing courage, and impossible things manifested and became possible—became real.

And that's what I'm seeing here. I mean, in just a few months, an idea has gone from an idea to candidates who are so extraordinarily impressive and growing more formidable by the day—opposition that isn't even bothering to respond. I think they're scared, except to go after the 23-year-old three times to try to nitpick him to death and intimidate him not to run.

And I also think if you know the numbers, you wouldn't be disheartened because there's very low turnout in Brooklyn and in New York generally—it's like 30% turnout—and there's two-thirds Democratic voters to one-third Republicans and independents. But with low turnout and motivated—whoever you are—those odds you can beat. You can beat those odds the way that Jimmy and Michael said: knocking on doors, showing up. And other people have horrible choices, right? The non-Athena, non-Janine, non-Elijah choices are terrible choices. So there's a spiritual good chance, and there's a material real chance.

So I think I'm going to close by saying from these candidates, I've learned so much already, which is why I'm in awe. So many things from Athena Clarke. I have learned that there are lithium-battery facilities where her husband is a firefighter. So I believe this when she says it: you can't put the fires out if they catch on fire. You have to let them burn until they go out and destroy everything around them and make the air toxic and the earth toxic. That's going up and it's going up in the boroughs. I used to live in Manhattan. They're not going up in Manhattan. So that's an injustice.

And no one's speaking up for the people who live around those planned facilities. No one said that was okay in Brooklyn. I have learned from Elijah Diaz that they went after him three times. I learned from Luis Quero that his slogan is so great: you just want to go to work without being stabbed or burned. I learned that there's an entrenched kind of NGO infrastructure that I've talked about that needs to be dismantled. He wants to train young people in AI and other tech skills—high-paying jobs—because the delivery jobs and the service jobs have been outsourced or handed over to not them.

And I'm learning hope from the candidates. I learned from Janine Acquafredda all about what is wrong with the real-estate situation, how to fix it, how to support small landlords, support small business owners, and details. And these are people who literally are living their integrity. They listen to the people around them, so they're bringing up issues that their neighbors are bringing to them.

And so I’m profoundly moved. Your opponent has weird policies. She does. And then I will close. She has things like making sure that cops interact with autistic people in a certain way. That's an actual bill of hers, which cops have said is insulting to them. She has a bill to make mental-health support available for immigrants and refugees, but not for people who are legally here. Americans, exactly. White people.

Well, I don't want to go here. And a bunch of weird random bills that again have nothing to do with the problems that you've described in District 46.

Okay, so I'll close by saying the DNC is done here. They just don't know it. When people know there's an alternative—which they're going to know because we are livestreaming and showcasing you, and you're showcasing yourselves—when they know there's an alternative, they're going to flock to all of you. These candidates are miracles. Brooklyn, in its beauty and real, not fake, diversity, is a miracle. The hard work and high aspirations of its citizens have been miracles for 400 years. New York City is a miracle. Let's support these fighters and let's save this city.

Watch the full event here.

To support Athena Clarke’s campaign for NYC Council District 46, learn more here.