HALF-FULL REPORT 11/07/25

Published November 7, 2025 | By Mike Ryan

Mamdani’s Triumph, Tariffs on Trial, and Cheney’s Shadow

Zohran Mamdani’s Mayoral Victory and the Clash Over Islamic Finance

Just like bin Laden, the election of Mamdani was underwritten by Islamic interests and targets the financial New York system.

Much of the public conversation has been about socialism and eventual communism, but Mamdani’s backers are strong Sharia law supporters. Sharia does not ring well with American liberals. But socialism does, so the plan was to just call everything socialism for the win.

The election creates an inherent conflict between Islamic principles and the foundations of Western capitalism. The mayor’s base could function as a fifth column, seeking to impose Shariah-compliant finance on the city and thereby introducing regulatory uncertainty that drives businesses away.

This might manifest through regulatory sabotage, where the administration uses its powers to impose burdensome disclosure requirements on interest-based products, appoints critics of usury to oversight roles, and initiates investigations into routine banking practices.

Additionally, the city could divert public funds and pension assets from conventional investments into Shariah-compliant alternatives like sukuk and Islamic equity funds, which critics would interpret as an ideological imposition on a secular system.

Public rhetoric emphasizing the moral corruption of usury in everyday financial tools, such as credit cards and mortgages, would further erode confidence, potentially accelerating capital flight as banks and hedge funds relocate to more welcoming locations like Miami or Texas. Texas is already moving to set up a rival stock exchange.

Old school liberals like Chuck Schumer call for coexistence, suggesting that while the base holds strong convictions, the administration would prioritize effective governance and economic stability in a global metropolis. The core idea here is to join with London and Toronto to expand opportunities in Islamic finance without dismantling the conventional system.

This, they say, would involve positioning New York as a leading hub for both traditional and Islamic finance through reforms that facilitate sukuk issuance and establish clear regulations for Islamic products, thereby attracting the growing trillion-dollar Islamic sovereign wealth finance market.

Rhetorically, they say, shifting the focus to symbolic measures, like offering Shariah-compliant retirement options for public employees while relying primarily on conventional bonds, could satisfy the base without substantive upheaval.

At its root, this approach treats Wall Street usury as a personal ethical issue instead of as a deep conflict with Islamic principles. At least until the next immigration cycle.Mamdani’s base, meanwhile, envisions the Islamic critique of usury as a catalyst for broader systemic reform, aligning it with progressive challenges to private property ownership and capitalism. This narrative posits that the base could coalition-build with leftist groups to target property owners rather than unleash the dogs against religious nonconformity.

The term “usury” will be repurposed, they say, as a moral indictment, equating it to predatory lending, Wall Street greed, and financialization’s harms, providing a theologically rooted vocabulary for modern progressive causes.

Alliances with organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, housing activists, and unions are expected to drive policies such as establishing a public bank, imposing interest rate caps framed as usury limits, and taxing financial speculation.

New York’s resources could support divestment from fossil fuels and non-union schools, while redirecting investments toward public housing, green projects, and cooperatives, where Islamic prohibitions on haram industries complement progressive goals.

This confrontational stance would directly challenge powerful financial institutions, using the mayor’s platform to depict them as exploiters of the vulnerable. Fundamentally, Team Mamdani sees usury, as defined by Sharia, as the emblematic flaw of an inequitable capitalist system, positioning the Islamic base as the new vanguard for socialism on TikTok, but Sharia in practice.

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The Strategic Genius Behind Mamdani’s Campaign

Morris Katz, a consultant from New York’s Fight.Agency, served as the media strategist for the Mamdani campaign. Fight.Agency backs progressive and left-wing political efforts, specializing in extreme left messaging and content creation.

Katz put together a mobilization system that totally shifted the makeup of the electorate. The Mamdani campaign stuck to the script right through to the finish.

This whole Mamdani effort was a real generational shake-up, one that deserves a deep dive. Katz got that politics, at its heart, is all about managing energy; narrative energy, moral energy, and logistical energy.

When you get those three in sync, with the story, the people, and the operations all moving together, a campaign quits just reacting and starts reshaping the battlefield itself.

Katz’s take is basically a political version of John Boyd’s OODA Loop. There’s a US Army War College podcast that breaks down the OODA loop right Here .

Boyd focused on military or kinetic scenarios, but Katz applied the same idea to civic stuff: the campaign becomes a system blending observation (like voter trends), orientation (framing the story), decision (aligning morals), and action (running operations) into one ongoing loop. That lets it set the pace and control the ground in political fights.

In the Mamdani election, the ground had already moved. The old political machines, hooked on endorsements, big donors, and party setups, still thought elections were about persuading the usual voters.

Katz steered things toward Generation Z instead. These Zoomers are a fidgety bunch of young digital natives, renters, gig workers, and fresh immigrants. Some of those immigrants could vote, others maybe not, but hey, who’s really checking in deep-blue New York?

What Katz figured out, and it’s been covered a ton here on the Half Full Report, is that Zoomers don’t want to just watch the show; they want to star in it. The goal wasn’t to sell them on why politics matters, but to create a language, rhythm, and setup that channeled their energy. That happened through thousands of self-made TikTok videos, dishing out dopamine rushes and virtual crowd cheers with every clip.

Exit polls found 81% of Mamdani voters were young, white, urban, liberal women. The below video is a parady, but it is spot on:

Most of Mamdani’s voters were young women (81% of them), and they used the campaign as a stage for social validation.

The starting point was the narrative. Katz shaped Zohran Mamdani’s message into a straightforward moral pitch: city life should be affordable, dignified, and inclusive. Rather than dry policy arguments, they talked rent, transit, and the gritty, everyday stuff.

The story stressed belonging, promising that even a fat girl with no friends and terrible hygiene would get endless applause in this new socialist utopia. Just like Skinner’s pigeon boxes, TikTok gave the young women a gold star every time they posted.

By rooting the platform in shared struggles for peer approval, Katz made politics feel deeply personal. Supporters just needed to sense that he cared about them individually, not as a faceless crowd.

With the story clicking, Katz shifted to targeted mobilization. Old-school campaigns chase swing voters or reliable turnouts. Katz flipped that and zeroed in on overlooked groups of deeply emotional folks who seldom vote. After all, backing Mamdani was the ultimate payback for an emotional young woman raging against her dad. Unlike her daddy with issues, Mamdani loves her for her vibrant life choices.

The campaign got big funding from CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, hinting that foreign governments were the real backers. But hey, it’s New York! It’s an open globalist blue hub, not some American-only spot. For these young cosmopolitans, it is globalism all the way, baby.

A lot of Democrat campaigns play out like movie remakes. Take Biden 2020. It was basically a redo of Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming. The Mamdani campaign? It was like Obama’s remake of Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner?, but rebooted for Zoomers instead of Millennials.

Gen Z women were the main target, but the campaign drew strength from a wider mix: immigrants, artists, service workers, and students. These folks have loose ties to institutions but tight digital networks. Katz’s crew turned that networked vibe into a real operational edge.

Digital tactics became hourly TikTok clips instead of press releases. Memes spread policy ideas much better than speeches. Every post was designed to pull people in: comment, volunteer, register. Social media tied straight into boots-on-the-ground work, mixing online buzz with actual fieldwork.

Crucially, campaign volunteers jumped in to flood fan-made TikToks with thousands of likes and re-posts. Katz knew that in the digital world, logistics are about turning emotions into dopamine hits.

Out in the neighborhoods, volunteers knocked doors with laser focus, using analytics to spot clusters of first-time voters. They got pumped by the thrill of turning those interactions into TikToks that racked up hundreds of fake thumbs-ups. Instead of a chore, door knocking became a chance for a young woman to put on her most outrageous outfit and most obnoxious persona to become a TikTok star.

Music gigs, art shows, and streetwear drops doubled as voter sign-ups. Blending art with activism built scenes where Mamdani’s young female backers could act out their fantasies on video. And they did.Each one swapped New York’s future for 30 seconds as the heroine in her own tale. What used to take decades of party building now sprouted naturally from networked self-absorption.

Meanwhile, the Cuomo side campaigned like it was still 1995. They banked on newspaper nods, big institutional cash, and the idea that TV ads and mailers would seal the deal.

Their pitch targeted a voter base that was vanishing fast. On paper, their fieldwork seemed solid, but it had no spark. Tools that once screamed professional work like polls, scripted consultants, and tight messaging, turned into drags in a world craving dopamine and flexibility.

Katz built a feedback loop where edge creativity bolstered central control. Viral hits fed voter lists; events cranked out data; volunteer loops refueled on raw excitement. It wasn’t a bossy top-down setup but a self-growing ecosystem. The energy kept refreshing because folks felt like owners.

The Mamdani campaign was like a starfish next to Cuomo’s spider setup. Al-Qaeda nailed the starfish model in the post-Cold War era, same as Anonymous. Now the Islamic political machine is doing the starfish organization thing.

Like what bin Laden and Zawahiri created, Team Mamdani spun a spread-out ideological web. Copying al-Qaeda’s method of the core dishing out vision and training, the campaign also worked through local digital cells sharing a story, not orders. They even issued a book of suggested tactics and narratives called Beautiful Trouble.

Old-guard Democrats saw Mamdani as a spider: cut off the head, watch it fall. But his power stemmed from those cells of independent believers.

The twist is obvious: going decentralized made the campaign tough and resilient, but it also risks idea drift. Without firm leaders, Mamdani’s ideology will wander and split into factions.

Young voters and newcomers swarmed the polls, creating a new voter pool. The opposition’s incumbency bunker fell apart because they missed the times. In systems speak, they ran at a slow vibe and couldn’t sync with the dopamine-driven culture buzzing everywhere.

To grasp the weight, look at history. Every big American shift follows a generational beat. In the Revolution, pamphlet writers and correspondence groups used printing presses to tie a dispersed populace to a cause.

In the Civil War, young people and moral crusaders turned conviction into huge mobilizations, with telegraphs and newspapers as the glue. The New Deal used radio and union halls to build a coalition.In every shift, a new generation grabs the latest comms tools and flips them to rebuild the republic and reshape the common view of citizenship.

Katz’s Mamdani push slots right in. Gen Z, with digital nets instead of printing presses, wires, or radios, pushed the same rebel urge for direct participation. The tools evolved, but the pattern holds of a young group wielding fresh technology to remake politics in their likeness.

What set Katz apart was his sharp grasp of generational change’s basics. He saw that every fourth turning calls for a story refresh. When that new narrative is written, the old middlemen are thrown out like tea into Boston Harbor.

Power shifts from institutions to networks, bosses to bonds. Winning campaigns turn cultural chaos into focused drive. Katz crafted exactly that tight structure.

By election night, the win was obvious long before tallies. The other side got out-talked, out-hustled, out-amped. The classic Dem model lost its Mojo. Even Nancy Pelosi gets it and said she won’t run again.

Industrial-era institutions are crashing into a digital-born electorate. Old machines that gated voters can’t hold sway or trust anymore. Campaigns stuck on outdated ranks won’t last in a fast-flow info world where moral stories and social nods outpace red tape.

The lesson’s plain: Katz’s campaign proves old political rigs don’t survive fourth turnings. They see elections as fixed persuasion battles, but campaigns are now fluid fights over generational creds. In every fourth turning, power reboots; clingers to old institutions vanish.

Katz nailed the cycle. He engineered a machine synced to a new era’s vibe, fueled by dopamine and a rising generation’s networked world.

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Trump’s Tariff Wars and the Supreme Court Showdown

In early 2025, Trump came roaring back into his second term with the gloves off. He invoked the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or the IEEPA. It is a Cold War tool meant for national security crises, designed to be a blunt instrument for economic warfare.

Through a series of executive orders, Trump slapped tariffs on nearly every major trading partner. Ten percent on most imports. Up to 145 percent on Chinese goods. The message was clear: America would no longer subsidize its own decline through dependency, theft, and narcotics flooding across the Pacific.

The move filled the Treasury’s coffers with over $151 billion in just six months. But it also set Washington’s legal establishment on fire. Small firms like Learning Resources and boutique importers like V.O.S. Selections, backed quietly by vast pools of globalist money, sued to stop him.

A dozen states joined the fray. Lower courts predictably sided with the plaintiffs, claiming Trump had overstepped IEEPA, which lets presidents regulate commerce in emergencies but doesn’t explicitly mention tariffs. The old guard wanted to preserve the illusion that Washington’s exuberance since the New Deal for “regulating” commerce and “taxing” Americans were separate acts. Trump’s opponents framed the tariffs as unconstitutional taxation without Congress’s consent.

By November 5, the fight landed before the Supreme Court under Learning Resources v. Trump. The core question cut to the bone: when does a president’s power to regulate foreign trade become a power to tax, and who ultimately controls that lever? The Constitution’s Article I gives Congress authority to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises” and to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations.”

Chief Justice John Marshall said back in 1824 that those were distinct powers, but modern statutes like IEEPA have blurred that line, letting presidents act fast when global markets turn hostile. Trump’s team argued that national emergencies like China’s weaponized fentanyl and IP theft demand flexibility, not congressional gridlock.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer stood at the lectern for two and a half hours defending the tariffs as regulatory tools, not taxes. He framed them as pressure valves and as economic sanctions by another name, citing Nixon’s 1971 import surcharge and past presidential actions under similar statutes.

Sauer warned that stripping this aIn early 2025, Trump came roaring back into his second term with the gloves off. He invoked the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or the IEEPA. It is a Cold War tool meant for national security crises, designed to be a blunt instrument for economic warfare.

They invoked the “major questions doctrine,” the Court’s latest weapon against executive overreach, insisting that decisions with massive economic impact like tariffs reshaping trillion-dollar trade flows require clear congressional approval.

Across the bench, skepticism was bipartisan. Roberts reminded Sauer that tariffs “tax Americans,” not foreigners. Gorsuch asked pointedly whether the President could simply “declare emergencies” at will.

Barrett pressed on the lack of historical precedent and why now, and why everything from toys to wine? Kagan, usually sympathetic to executive flexibility, still questioned the limits.

Sotomayor cut straight through the fog: “You say tariffs aren’t taxes, but that’s exactly what they are.” Even among the conservatives, there was little appetite for granting the executive unchecked power to rewrite the global trade order by decree.

Beneath the constitutional formalities, this case is about where sovereignty resides. In Congress, a body now addicted to delegation and deflection? Or in the presidency, where someone still feels the burden of defending the Republic in real time?

The decision will either reassert the legislature’s dormant power of the purse or cement the presidency as the nation’s permanent economic commander-in-chief.

Economists have long said tariffs behave like domestic taxes and as costs passed straight to consumers. But that is a technocrat’s perspective, not a strategic one. Trump wasn’t tinkering with markets; he was rebalancing civilization’s supply lines.

Still, markets reacted in real time. Prediction traders on Polymarket, which is America’s new oracle of sentiment with results well beyond traditional polling methods, sensed blood in the water. Before oral arguments, odds of the Court siding with Trump hovered near 50-50.

By November 7, they’d cratered to 22 percent. Over $887,000 changed hands as the betting crowd decided the justices were poised to clip executive wings.

When the decision lands in early 2026, the stakes will decide whether America can still act like a sovereign power in an economic war, or whether it must ask permission from a Congress that’s forgotten how to fight one. The Court may rule on procedure, but history will remember it as a verdict on willpower.

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Dick Cheney’s Controversial Legacy

Dick Cheney, the influential former U.S. Vice President who passed away on November 3, 2025, has long been a figure of controversy, particularly in foreign policy circles.

Accusations have swirled that his decisions, especially the 2003 Iraq invasion, were driven less by American security needs and more by a desire to conquer Israel’s adversaries, painting him not just as a neoconservative hawk but as a Christian Zionist prioritizing biblical alliances over U.S. interests.

This narrative emerges from critiques like those in John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s The Israel Lobby which argue that pro-Israel influences shaped U.S. Middle East strategy, often at great cost to America.

Supporters of this view highlight Cheney’s inner circle, filled with neoconservatives deeply tied to Israeli interests. Advisors such as David Wurmser and John Hannah, linked to pro-Israel think tanks, contributed to key documents like the 1996 A Clean Break report for Benjamin Netanyahu, which advocated regime change in Iraq to weaken threats to Israel, including Syria and Palestinian groups.

These individuals allegedly skewed intelligence to emphasize Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda links framing Saddam Hussein as a greater peril to Israel than to the U.S., given his 1991 Scud missile attacks on Tel Aviv.

Cheney’s speeches to groups like AIPAC reinforced this, promising that toppling Saddam would foster a democratic Iraq beneficial to Israel, potentially enabling territorial expansions. Critics contend this diverted resources from the real post-9/11 threat in Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda regrouped, leading to a war that claimed over 4,400 American lives and trillions in costs, while empowering Iran and destabilizing the region in ways that indirectly aided Israeli security.

Furthermore, Cheney’s push for military action against Iran in 2007, reportedly at Israel’s behest, exemplifies this pattern. He collaborated with figures like Richard Perle through the Project for the New American Century, exaggerating threats to justify aggression.

Some analyses tie this to a broader coalition of secular neocons and evangelical Christian Zionists in the Bush administration, who saw Israel’s defense as intertwined with end-times prophecy. Though Cheney himself was Presbyterian and not overtly evangelical, his alliances suggested an ideological overlap, where remaking the Middle East served Zionist goals more than American ones.

Mitt Romney and Dick Cheney shared nearly identical, hawkish Zionist views rooted in strong support for Israel’s security and self-defense. Romney, a Mormon, praised Israel’s success as divinely influenced during his 2012 campaign, aligning with GOP orthodoxy.

Cheney, a Presbyterian realist, vowed “unshakable” U.S. commitment, endorsed Israel’s fight against terrorism in AIPAC speeches, and deepened military ties. Romney’s rhetoric added cultural-theological flair; Cheney’s focused on policy and geopolitics.

The differences being Romney’s support of Palestinians, and Cheney’s occasional friction with Romney-Democrats did not really alter their core alignment: fervent, unconditional pro-Israel stances central to Republican foreign policy.

Cheney’s Presbyterian background lacks the eschatological emphasis of true Christian Zionists like John Hagee. Supporters argue that Cheney’s Iraq rationale stemmed from genuine WMD fears, oil interests from his Halliburton days, and a legitimate vision of American exceptionalism.

The 1991 Gulf War, under his watch as Defense Secretary, prioritized securing Kuwaiti oil and not just aiding Israel. Even the 2003 invasion was publicly justified by American threats, and President Bush rebuffed Cheney’s Iran strike proposals, opting for diplomacy.

Cheney supporters note that while Israeli security benefited from Saddam’s fall, the war wasn’t waged solely for that purpose. Cheney’s legacy of “endless wars” is often attributed to self-inflicted U.S. overreach, eroding global trust without direct Zionist motivations.

Defenders portray Cheney as a realist hawk focused on U.S. security, not a borderless globalist. He rarely echoed pure neocons like Paul Wolfowitz on exporting democracy, emphasizing threats like Saddam Hussein’s WMDs (later debunked) and oil interests tied to his Halliburton tenure.

His CFR membership and skepticism of post-Cold War optimism (e.g., doubting Russia’s stability) align with elite internationalism, but he opposed unchecked multilateralism, favoring unilateral U.S. action.

In his later years, his anti-Trump stance, endorsement of Kamala Harris, and calling Trump a “threat to the republic” positioned him as a defender of traditional GOP global engagement against isolationism. Yet, this only amplified populist views of him as a key “globalist establishment” figure.

Dick Cheney passed from pneumonia at age 84.

Mike Ryan is a Chemical Engineering consultant to heavy industry.