"A New Generation in NYC Confronts 'The Machine'"[Corrected]

My Speech at the Donald J Trump Kings’ County Republican Club, Aug 21 2025

“The Republicans gave me a standing ovation. No, I'm really moved. See, I'm actually weeping.

This is such an honor. Athena [Clarke, running for City Council, District 46], I am so moved because there's not a young woman that I admire more right now than you, Athena Clarke.

Athena Clarke

I speak around the world, and I'm not easily rattled, but I'm quite nervous tonight. The number one reason is I don't usually 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 are so many people here that I've met before—first responders, cops, teachers such as Athena Clarke, teachers such as Michael Kane [of Teachers for Choice], lawyers such as the amazing Jimmy Wagner who put this all together—and the firefighters and the citizens. Part of why I am so humbled and moved to be here is that I'm 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 tend to say, ‘yes, yes, yes.’ But almost no one ever does it —- except you guys.

Jimmy Wagner

(I should say the [WarRoom] Posse out there, too, takes action, which is why I love the Posse and Bannon as well.)

You could say, ‘She’s a lifelong Democrat’, which I have been. Now I am an Independent. I have walked away.

What I really want to say is that it really doesn't matter that Steve Bannon, who gave me a platform when all the doors were shut against me, doesn't believe everything I do, and vice versa. I don't even know what Michael Kane's politics are on a policy level, or yours, or the firefighters’.

But 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. That makes us here, whatever our labels past or present, brothers and sisters.

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 it didn’t matter. Famous feminist, worldwide Democrat liberal fixture on legacy media for 40 years—it 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. I was canceled. Every door closed. I was smeared worldwide. I saw that it was the administration for whom I voted —it was the Biden administration—that did that to me.

So there was no hiding, for me, from how awful they really were.

I couldn't lie to myself anymore about what was happening to my beloved Democratic Party—it was so obvious. Honestly, it's obvious to millions of us; it's just embarrassing to talk about, and we all get canceled if we do.

But obviously for years, this party—which had been a party of justice and inclusiveness and the championing of the little person—began to instead present this weird checklist of values and policies that are psychotic and marginal and crazy and alien to moderate, sane people.

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.

That's the machine called the DNC and its aligned interests and candidates.

We bought a place in Brooklyn about two and a half years ago. 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.

We moved into this apartment in Brooklyn. It’s a working-class neighborhood, deeply established. 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. That's how machinist the machine is and was.

I didn't hear from my city council member except for a day she held, at which you got to skate on free roller skates in a playground and also to get literature about programs for immigrants and refugees—not necessarily legal immigrants or refugees. That was her priority.

She has a very nice staff. I asked the staff, well, what are her other policies? There was nothing on infrastructure, nothing on environment, nothing on making schools better, nothing on safety, nothing on the voice of the citizens. When I said, ‘Where do I go to express myself to her?’ There were no regular meetings about which I was told. I was given a flyer.

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, except for this: I said, I'm a small business owner, 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 loan programs, advertising programs, workspace programs—nothing to help me actually grow my business in Brooklyn, hire Brooklynites, develop customers—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.

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, who are deployed without respect for the elderly, the disabled. I see small businesses struggling.

I learned to my surprise that there's a development going up a few blocks away from our apartment—about which we had no idea —which is just for mentally ill and drug-addicted people: 200 units. I thought, well, I now own property in this neighborhood. No one disclosed this. What's the process of approval? Then I found out there isn't a citizen-led process of approval in Brooklyn.

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

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 Mira Nair. 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.

All of his haplessness—which by the way reminds me of a lot of the haplessness of rich kids with whom I went to school at Yale and Oxford— isn't as serious as his unwillingness to become an American.

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, but 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.

This is deeply offensive to me.

Oh, by the way, is he an American now? He is not simply an American. No—he kept his Ugandan passport. He 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.

This is profoundly offensive to me.

He’s actually a Marxist, as you know. We think that's just 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. That is not the worst of it. And this is where the machine gets very, very machinist.

He didn't just show up via grassroots support and become a household name overnight.

That takes millions of dollars in campaign funding, media planning, a rollout, execution, paid volunteers—many paid volunteers—and so on. It takes big bucks behind you. His offerings are 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 as in the Soviet Union, state-run grocery stores have failed. Just as the ‘projects’, which have been around for 90 years since the 1930s, have also failed.

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.

Sam Antar, who's now a whistleblower and was once the CFO of Crazy Eddie, calls himself a white-collar felon. He is now a whistleblower helping law enforcement track fraud.

Antar knows about forensic financial analysis. He showed that there's a complete circle of billions of dollars going into this machine.

There’s the Soros-funded Open Society Institute, one of the biggest nonprofits. It's a $4.2 billion nonprofit. 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 people learn about candidates and issues—but they machine is not observing it. They just shuttle millions in tax-deducted money into the C4s such as Tides Advocacy, and Make the Road. And that in turn goes to help actual campaigns such as the Working Families Party, and other leftwing campaigns on the ground.

That doesn't end there. Antar showed that the C3s and the C4s 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 back to the C3s and the whole thing begins again.

However, those funds that got the initial tax deduction are in an opaque offshore instrument, which could also have foreign money.

This multibillion dollar circle of fraud is why this city and its boroughs, full of sensible, sane, hardworking people, can't break the stranglehold of this psychotic leftwing machine.

What does Mamdani propose, for instance? Legalizing sex work—inviting the cartels into the heart of Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx.

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, yet 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.

I also found out in talking to these amazing candidates that there are other interests that are behind some of the horrible policies in Brooklyn, and those are Big Tech donating to candidates and campaigns.

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, Athena Clarke, and Janine Acquafredda, running as a Republican too, for Borough President, told me about it. I see it. I see disabled people and elderly people terrified because the streets are being cleared out for Uber and Lyft, the sidewalks are subjected to Doordash ebikes. Lyft sponsored Citibikea, which did away with parking spaces. So now for Brooklynites, there is nowhere to park. There's no way for people to commute. But with no parking and with terrifying subways, the car apps make out like bandits, in what is becoming a 15 minute city.

This is not grassroots policy. These are deep pockets from Silicon Valley treating our city and our people as digital data for these tech companies to harvest and to manipulate.

In contrast to all of this—and now 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 ahead, because this guy Jimmy Wagner, and these people on either side of me and in the audience said, ‘No.’ They’re not going to have it anymore.

I know that it seems like a hill that's very, very hard to climb. I'm just going to be emotional for a little bit. I've been reading through the 1560 Geneva Bible chapter by chapter, and our history as humans is so full of stories of people who were facing a giant army. Just by human terms, there's no way their efforts could succeed. But somehow the wind was at their backs. 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. 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—and opposition that isn't even bothering to respond. I think they're scared, except to go after the 23-year-old candidate Elijah Ziaz three times to try to nitpick him to death and to intimidate him not to run.

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— 30% turnout—and there are two-thirds Democratic voters to one-third Republicans and independents. But with low turnout and motivated voters, whoever you are—those odds can be beat. You can beat those odds just the way that Jimmy and Michael said: knocking on doors, showing up.

And the other people are 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.

I'm going to close by saying that from these candidates, I've learned so much already. So many things from Athena Clarke; I have learned that there are lithium-battery facilities being built in District 46. Her husband is a firefighter. So I believe this when she says it: you can't put the fires out if these facilities 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. Those factories are going up and they are going up in the boroughs. They're not going up in wealthier Manhattan. So that's an injustice.

I have learned from Elijah Diaz that they went after him three times. I learned from Luis Quero [running for Brooklyn City Council] that his slogan is: ‘you just want to go to work without being stabbed or burned.’

Elijah Diaz

I learned that there's an entrenched kind of NGO infrastructure that needs to be dismantled. Quero 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 new populations, not available to local young adults.

Luis Quero

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. These are people who are living their integrity. They listen to the people around them, so they're bringing up issues that their neighbors are bringing to them.

So I am profoundly moved.

Your opponent, Mercedes Narcisse, Athena, has weird policies. She does. She passed laws 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 prioritizing people who are legally here. Americans.

A selection of weird random bills that again have nothing to do with the problems that you've described in District 46.

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—they're going to flock to all of you. These candidates are miracles. Brooklyn, in its beauty and its real 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.”

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Watch the full event here.

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