Christian nationalist podcaster Eric Metaxas, a “public intellectual” turned MAGA activist, recently hosted Naomi Wolf, feminist author turned right-wing conspiracy crank, to talk about claims that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani stole his 2025 election. Wolf called it “the biggest story of the 21st Century” that “there’s been a coup in Manhattan.”
“It sounds like a crazy talking point,” Metaxas conceded, before asserting, “Naomi doesn’t do crazy talking points.”
That’s debatable, given Wolf’s takes on a range of topics, including vaccines and Jan. 6
Speaking of crazy talking points, Metaxas declared, “Mamdani is a boil that needs to be lanced. How the boil will be lanced, we don’t know.”
Metaxas set the tone for the August 3 segment by saying, “I think most New Yorkers do not like Mamdani,” adding, “That’s putting it mildly.” Maybe that’s true for the New Yorkers Metaxas hangs out with, but in June, a Siena poll found that Mamdani’s favorability among New York City voters was 58 percent.
Wolf didn’t present hard evidence of the “unbelievable systemic fraud” she was claiming. She said her husband went to vote with a fake name and was given a “waiver” slip that anyone could have photocopied. She mentioned photos of printers, boxes of ballots, fake addresses, supposed election integrity experts claiming to have identified tons of illegitimate voters. Sound familiar?
Wolf and a bunch of right-wing media outlets are hyping claims made by Marly Hornik—an activist associated with RealAmerica.vote and New York Citizens Audit—that her group’s database analysis had found more than 230,000 illegitimate voters, a number larger than Mamdani’s margin of victory. The RealAmerica.vote website currently features a blaring graphic claiming, “Mamdani FRAUD evidence is under aggressive investigation by US Attorney John Sarcone and the FBI for criminal election misconduct by the NYC and NYS boards of election."
Here it’s worth noting that the organization Democracy Docket has described Hornik as “a leading promoter of unfounded claims about voter roll inaccuracies and election-related conspiracy theories,” and the New York Citizens Audit Civic Fund as “a group of extremists known for promoting election-fraud conspiracy theories.”
In 2023, the New York Attorney General’s office sent NY Citizens Audit a cease-and-desist letter in response to reports that the group’s volunteers “have confronted voters across the state at their homes, falsely claimed to be Board of Elections officials, and falsely accused voters of committing felony voter fraud”—election “vigilante” practices that could amount to a form of illegal voter intimidation.
Wolf isn’t the only one promoting Harnik’s claims. Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, discredited by his bogus claims about Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, appeared this week on MAGA podcaster Benny Johnson’s show. Giuliani said he didn’t know if Mamdani’s election was actually fraudulent given his 200,000 vote margin of victory, but went on to say, “Do I think the Democratic Party cheated in this election? The answer to that is a resounding, ‘yes.’ The Democrat Party has cheated in almost every election since Boss Tweed. And when they don’t have to, they do it for practice.”
Metaxas, who started off by talking about “how Mamdani seems to have stolen the election,” may not have been completely won over by Wolf’s claims, asking Wolf why, if there is anything to it, conservative journalists at the New York Post or Free Press were not all over the story.
Wolf said it’s hard to tell the story because the fraud happens in a dozen small ways, saying it’s “death by a thousand cuts.” She claimed that “multiple little problems” add up to a “systemic breakdown” that makes it necessary to “invalidate” both the primary and general election.
After about 20 minutes of that, Metaxas said he wanted to change the subject and asked if Wolf wanted to talk about Christian nationalism or “the threat of Islamofascism.”
It’s “all the same story,” Wolf said, connecting “the fall of New York to a jihadi Marxist mayor without a shot being fired” to what she described as an ongoing Islamist effort to take over and dominate Europe and a recent incident in which migrants flooded into the Spanish town of Ceuta.
Muslim immigrants, she claimed, are using our open society to advance their goal of a closed society operating under Sharia law, saying “I used to think that was such a right-wing fever dream that that was even a goal; now it’s clearly a goal.”
“How would you fight the Islamist Marxist takeover of city after city after city?” she asked. “They’re doing it perfectly lawfully.”
Metaxas said he is “cautiously optimistic” that the American people will overcome a “post-truth” society and lack of “cultural confidence” to meet the threat. Wolf seemed less certain, saying, “It’s like we’re hurtling toward the Apocalypse,” she said.
During controversy over her 2019 book “Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love,” the New York Times’ Parul Sehgal called out Wolf’s “distinguished career of playing loose with facts and the historical record.” Criticism of Wolf’s scholarship led to cancellation of the book’s publication in the U.S.
