Can I Bench More Than a Socialist? | Episode 60

So at the end of last week, New York City mayoral candidate Zoran Mamdani went viral for not being able to bench 135.

And the internet has had a field day with this.

It just keeps snowballing.

But guys, there is a reason why people care and why you should care.

And it's not just because it's funny.

All right, so without further ado, let's watch the video.

Roll the clip.

This is how you move up in the ball.

Yeah.

Let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go.

Yeah!

Let me get one more.

Let me get one more.

Let me get three.

Let me get three.

Let me get three.

Yeah.

Guys, there is so much happening in this clip.

So, first of all, I love the fact that the guy who's filming, I don't know if it's the guy who's filming, but he's the one yelling in the background, is like, this is how you move up in the polls.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

If he only knew that what he encouraged Mamdani to do would just wreck him on the internet, he would have shut his face because it has only caused him to just spiral out of control.

This campaign is now spiraling.

Also, the fact that at the end of the clip, he's like, three, yeah, get three, get three.

This man cannot even do three reps.

So he is trying to bench 135.

He has a spotter, which is good.

This isn't like a public event.

A spotter should be there like for insurance and liability things.

Like that makes sense.

But this guy, if you watch the video, like people have screenshotted it and zoomed in, this spotter isn't just going like, oh yeah, I'm lifting the thing.

He's like,

he's lifting this for Mamdani.

And he cannot even do three.

And so this guy is like yelling, do three, do three.

And then he just gets up and walks away.

Anyway, so that is the video that has obviously gone viral.

It is all over X.

It's all over Instagram.

It even made its way to TikTok, which is never a good sign for a candidate.

Anyway, I loved this tweet from Tim Young because, as you guys know, Memdani is a democratic socialist.

He is very proud of that fact.

And Tim Young made an excellent point.

And he said, Zoran Memdani cannot bench 135.

So like a good socialist, someone else basically does all the work for him and he celebrates like he did it himself.

Yikes.

It's pretty perfect.

It really is perfect.

And like all the other good socialists standing around him, they're clapping and cheering him on, ignoring the fact that he did not do any of the work himself.

Also, this comment was hilarious.

My producer sent me this one.

Zoran, not benching 135 isn't a huge deal.

I actually served with a few Marines who couldn't do that, and we never gave them a hard time.

We didn't want them worrying during pregnancy, and we knew that they'd get strong again after coming back from maternity leave.

Maternity leave, that you are being compared to me, Zoran.

That is embarrassing.

Now,

one thing that I want to say is that I texted my team and I was like, guys, I'm going to go see if I can bench 135 because I posted on X, I said my postpartum fitness goal is going to be being able to bench more than Mamdani.

And everybody in my comments was gassing me up.

They were like, Brett, you're newborn could do this.

You could probably do this right now.

And I was like, you know what?

Yes, I can.

I absolutely can.

Have I worked out in the last nine months?

No, I have been doing at-home Pilates in front of my TV on a good day, on a good day.

But I was like, no, I'm so overconfident that I'm going to be able to go and bench 135.

So I mosey on over to the gym.

I have Alex come and spot me.

I get my little like girly bar that he bought me.

It's purple.

It's from Rogue.

It's very cute.

And he gets it all set up.

Lo and behold, I cannot.

I cannot.

Zoran can in fact bench more than me.

However, I do not think that that speaks to my weakness.

I think it speaks more to his inability to bench and the fact that he is struggling with the same thing that a 39 weeks and five days pregnant lady is struggling with.

And if you want to see picture evidence of this, Max, you can pull up this photo.

I have agreed to share this with you all.

I did in fact take pictures of myself attempting to do this, and that is Alex literally having to lift the bar.

So Mamdani and I, we are apparently just the same.

Anyway, back to the story.

I'm not just here to make fun of him.

Again, there is a real point in why I am bringing this up.

This is not punching down, in my opinion, because again, this speaks to something that the left has been doing in their culture.

And Mamdani's video, his inability to bench press this, it is just pulling back the curtain.

But before we get into that, if you guys want more breakdowns of internet chaos just like this, make sure that you are following our podcast page and please rate the show if you're enjoying it.

It helps us out so much in the algorithm.

So all of this took place at the annual Men's Day event in Brooklyn, New York.

This is an open street event.

I have never heard of it before.

Apparently, it's a big deal.

They have like outdoor workout things, food, musicians.

They have like car shows.

It's just a whole men's day event.

And people saw Mamdani.

He was there campaigning, shaking hands with the people, and they wanted him to try and lift, as you saw in that video.

resulting in the humiliation ritual that has been going on on X for the last five days.

Now, I actually did not think that I would cover this story on the show because this happened like four days ago.

And I was like, okay, this is just going to go away.

It's an internet fluke thing.

People are going to move on.

Oh my god, they have not moved on.

It just keeps getting worse.

It keeps getting bigger, keeps getting growing as more people join in, including the two other candidates that are running against him.

Because he was not the only candidate at the event.

The current mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, was also there.

And at 66 years old, this man seems to be doing a lot better in the fitness department than Mamdani.

And he also went and did that exact exercise.

And he posted this clap back at Zoron.

All right, we can roll this clip.

So this is what he posted.

He said, Mayor Eric Adams, Zoran, Mamscranny is what he posted and his caption reads, 64.

Oh, sorry, he's 64, not 66.

64 versus 33.

A lifetime of hard work versus a silver spoon.

The results speak for themselves.

The weight of the job is too heavy for Mamscranny.

The only thing he can lift is your taxes.

And I'm not going to lie, that's a pretty great dunk.

If you guys have not seen Eric Adams on social media, it is, I don't know, it's like a drug trip, genuinely.

He like sometimes hosts incredible things.

Sometimes he's doing really random day-in-the-life videos.

Sometimes he's like fighting the rats on the streets of New York.

It is insane.

But I appreciated this tweet.

Now, that response got almost 7 million impressions.

I'm so glad that he was there at this event.

Speaking of, you know, being handed a silver spoon, Eric Adams was basically handed this dunk on a silver platter, which is great.

But there was still

one person missing from this narrative, and that is is none other than Andrew Cuomo, who is also running.

Now, he was not at the event, but don't worry, he still wanted to pile on.

He still wanted to be part of this viral moment.

So he posted this in response to a New York Post article about the entire scandal.

He said, it's easy to talk.

It's hard to carry the burden.

This guy can't bench his own body weight, let alone carry the weight of leading the most important city in the world.

Now, Andrew Cuomo, this is true.

That's a great point.

We're going to talk about that later, but stop tweeting.

Like, you don't, you're inserting yourself into this drama.

You were not even there.

Like, literally, you tweeting this looks like a futile attempt to stay relevant because unfortunately, nobody cares that you're running.

It'd be great if they did care because I don't want Mamdani to win, but nobody cares.

He is outpacing you in fundraising.

He is outpacing you in virality, obviously.

And you are just trying to insert yourself into this drama when you were not there lifting weights yourself.

But anyway, it provided good entertainment for me.

I don't know where Cuomo was.

He was probably stuck in traffic trying to help somebody jumpstart their car and filming it.

I don't know if you guys saw this.

He was probably told that he could win the male vote if he would work on cars.

Max, let's roll this clip.

It is just so weird.

This is a real thing that he posted.

He posted this with no caption, nothing.

It's just him jumpstarting somebody's car, dapping up a guy.

Like, Like, yeah, that's me.

Like, that is not how you win the male vote, Cuomo.

Neither is inserting yourself into some weightlifting drama.

But I'm glad that you tried.

Like, you are, you know, just go home.

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All right.

Genuinely, if Cuomo could just take a nap, recalibrate, we'll be on a better track for his campaign.

Anyway, the point is,

this story just kept growing.

Cuomo and Eric Adams helped with that and the internet cannot look away.

And I saw some comments online.

This is why I wanted to do this story, because I saw comments online of people saying, like, leave it alone.

Like, what Mamdani can bench doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter if Eric Adams can do more.

This just feels like punching down.

Let's focus on policy and all the important issues.

And granted, policy is really important, and Mamdani has some insane policies, but I disagree that this is punching down.

And I also disagree that this is not relevant to this campaign or to our culture and politics at large, because I actually think that this is incredibly relevant to the culture and the society that we live in.

And it is a clear display of how the left has caused this culture to completely shift.

Because just a few years ago, like pre-COVID, let's say 2018, 2019, you could argue that the left owned the the health space they owned the crunchy Americans that was them now they don't and they didn't just lose it they outright rejected it and villainized it now like remember these articles from a couple years ago guys oh my god I can't even speak I was about to say remember these articles from a couple of years ago I did comment section episodes on them But here's some headlines.

These are from 2022.

The white supremacist origins of exercise and six other surprising facts about the history of U.S.

physical fitness.

Pandemic fitness trends have gone extreme, literally.

And the sub-headline reads, white supremacists' latest scheme to valorize violence and hypermasculinity has gone digital.

And then they say something else.

Physical fitness and violent hypermasculinity have always been central to the far right.

Here's another one.

This is from 2024.

Getting fit is great, but it could turn you into a right-wing jerk.

Okay, so you saw all those headlines.

Now, another little reminder.

What about all the TikTokers from around that same time, from like 2020 to 2022, telling us that working out was not only racist and ableist and all these things, but actually it was inherently fat phobic.

Let's jog your memory.

If you work out because you want your body to look a certain way, you don't care about health, you are fat phobic.

If you work out strictly for appearance-based reasons, you are fat-phobic.

Life's too short to exercise.

I'm just gonna be honest.

There are so many better things to do than exercise.

Nobody cares about

when you do that and there's like muscles there.

Nobody cares about that.

We don't want to see that.

That's not what we want to see.

If you are losing weight because you want to feel better, be in less pain, be healthier, all of these, these things,

that's fat phobic.

I mean, it's just pure outright projection.

They don't want you to work out.

They don't want you to be fit and care about your health because that makes them feel inferior.

And when they feel inferior, that actually just means that you are fat phobic, that you are a bigot.

That's what you are.

So now they make it into some big social issue.

They blast this online.

The journalists pick it up.

And suddenly, the left has lost health.

The left has lost fitness.

And that is where we are in 2025.

And interestingly, this wasn't just in 2022 or even 2024.

They have kept up this entire message.

I don't know if you guys remember.

I've talked about this a couple times because it's just so funny to me, but there was a hit beats that was done on me and a few other people.

Candice was included in it.

Alex Clark, the owner and founder of EV Magazine.

Brenda Hugo Boom was in it.

But it's that article that reads, these women want you to be,

what is it?

Like fit.

Oh no, thin, hot.

Oh, no, my God, guys, this is the pregnancy brain.

These women want you to be thin, fertile, and Republican.

There we go.

I got it.

And their entire message was that we were bigoted and we were these awful conservatives because we want women to be fertile and we, you know, encourage people to be healthy.

And we argue against the fact that working out is inherently fat phobic.

That article came out three months ago.

There was another one in Vanity Fair that was saying that MAGA needs to be blamed for this dangerous and scary protein craze.

They did a whole profile on Hassan Piker where they said that because he worked out, because he has like visible abs and flexes and posts photos on his Instagram and them, that he has a MAGA body.

Like they are saying the quiet part out loud.

They are acknowledging that health is not important to them, that fitness is a right-wing thing.

Like that is where we have gotten right now.

So no wonder your revolutionary left-wing democratic socialist candidate, Zoran Mamdani, can't even bench 135 without a spot.

And you might be saying, Brett, you can't even bench 135.

I know, I know.

But when you go on X, there were so many women on there who are saying, okay, I know that I can't do this, but like, men, this is your wheelhouse.

Like, what is, you know, an average.

What do I want to say?

PR?

Like, what do you guys actually bench?

And the replies were hysterical.

People were like, no, 135 is like my warmup.

And people were like, there are all of these threads of like, yeah, 250, 180, whatever.

I asked Alex, apparently his PR was, I think it's 285.

Hopefully I'm not butchering that.

Love you if I am.

He said, don't expect him to do that anymore because he like blew out his shoulder in college trying to do that.

But anyway, that is what is going on here.

Like, no wonder.

your big candidate can't do that when this is the culture that you've created, when you have created a culture that has villainized health and fitness.

And I don't even know if the left cares at all.

They villainized this, they've walked away from it, they have lost this.

I don't think they care.

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Everybody just needs to sleep.

and relax and recalibrate and hit the gym so that you can bench more than 135 and be stronger than Ramdani, including myself.

Anyway, moving on back to the left and them caring about their culture, the funny thing is, even though the left was, you know, putting out these articles and these opinion pieces just three months ago, now randomly, they do care about fitness.

They do care about hitting the gym.

And that's because they've realized that it's losing them votes.

Because remember, a few months ago, right around the time that all those, you know, articles were coming out, that hit piece about me came out, the Democrats announced that they were going to be investing $20 million in order to figure out how to win back young men.

Now, one of the things that they discovered after this incredible research into the syntax and the interest of young American men is that men are going to the gym.

So Democrats should be as well.

One MSNBC opinion piece talked about this, and in this article they said, After losing big with men under 30 in the 2024 election, Democrats have spent $20 million on a program called Speaking with American Men, called Sam, to help figure out which spaces they need to show up in to fare better with this demographic.

A smart place to start would be the gym.

The booming men's fitness market is expected to more than double by 2029, which is amazing.

Good job, boys.

Love that for you.

Growth driven by men under 25 who are joining gyms almost twice as fast as women.

I mean, first of all, congratulations to the men.

You are moving ahead faster than Mamdani.

That is amazing.

But the Democrats have taken note.

And this immediately turned into into some Democrats posting videos of themselves working out.

And thankfully, to spare them embarrassment, they could bench more than 135.

But CNN wrote about this just a couple of weeks ago, actually, or last month.

But the thing is, these Democrats still don't seem to get it because, again, this is not them actually caring about health.

This is not them wanting to get back in on this issue because it matters to them and the health of the American people and the strength of the American people matters to them.

It's because it is just a tactic for them to win, as Democrat strategists have openly pointed out.

One guy said, people want to see vigor.

They want to see action.

They want to see that you're prepared to do the job, doing more than just sitting behind a podium, regurgitating a litany of nonsensical acronyms.

Yes, which is why, Mamdani, you should be hitting the gym.

But anyway, that is true.

However, just posting cringy, like lifting videos is not going to help when the message behind them just seems vapid and unbelievable.

It's why men were not swayed by Tim Walls when he was tinkering on his car and he was like, ooh, pulling out an air filter from his like vintage,

oh gosh, what did he have?

An International Harvester Scout.

They weren't convinced by that because he was simply using it as a tactic to segue into talking about Project 25 and fear-mongering Americans.

It's why Andrew Cuomo jump-starting a taxi in New York City isn't going to reach men because it's random and it's weird and it's inauthentic.

Like young people, especially young men, they will be able to sniff out what is authentic and what is not.

Thankfully, in this same CNN article, another strategist warned Dems of this.

And he said, I would caution Democrats against pulling out a checklist.

You know, for young men, we'll do some bench pressing.

For young women, we'll talk about the Barbie movie.

People don't like checklists and they don't like being pandered to.

They remember you for who you are.

You need to be authentic in a way that is believable.

Correct.

I cannot believe that this is something that has to be said, but in our current political system where everybody is pandered to, where voters are taken advantage of, this seems to be something that does unfortunately need to be said.

And this like faux interest in fitness that has just come out of nowhere, it's not like believable when you all spent the last five years villainizing working out, villainizing fitness, villainizing the Maha movement again for the last five years.

So when you just change on a dime and suddenly everybody's like lifting weights, that's not going to convince anybody.

Like the right did not come in and just see an opportunity to get voters and pander to them.

You guys fell behind.

You villainized people who cared about this.

You villainized masculine men who enjoy working out.

You villainized the crunchy moms that care about vaccines and what their kids are, you know, eating.

And so these people, they had to go elsewhere.

And they came over to the right because the right genuinely did seem to care.

That is why you guys have Mamdani, who can't bench 135, and we have RFK Jr., who begrudgingly came over to the right after being a lifelong Democrat who is doing this in jeopardies at 70 years old.

I mean look at him go.

That is the same amount of weight I believe that Mamdani was trying to lift.

He has what is this a resistance thing?

He's in jeans.

He's like twice his age.

How many reps is he on now?

Certainly more than two, Mamdani.

And this is not the only V, and like it's not the only video.

You have RFK at Gold's Gym, shirtless, bench pressing on an incline.

He's like rock climbing with, you know, Dr.

Oz.

You You have Pete Hegseth.

Like RFK is not the only example.

You have Pete Hegseth actually working out with American troops.

You have Tulsi Gabbard working out with American Truths.

So like so strong.

Marjorie Taylor Greene just posted a video a couple of days ago of her like sprinting around her backyard with a huge medicine ball.

And yes, these are all politicians.

These are all people in government, but they represent what has changed in our culture and what has changed in the political parties.

And it is so glaringly obvious.

So that, my friends, is why people care about what Memdani conventch.

That is why you should care about what he can bench.

And obviously, it's funny.

And yes, it is embarrassing.

And people like having somebody to laugh at on the opposite side.

That's just normal in politics and in the world and on social media.

But this did seem deeper and there was a bigger issue there.

This is just another example of how the left has royally screwed themselves on another issue and how they are now trying to desperately backpedal to win back voters.

But per usual, it's not authentic.

It's, you know, contrived by millions of dollars and strategists that are pointing them in this direction.

But I obviously, I don't think that this is fooling anyone.

They only care about health when they can make a social media video about it, when it's convenient.

They only care about men and masculinity when the cameras are rolling and when it's convenient.

And this Mamdani video was a perfect way to pull back the curtain.

You caught him at an exposed moment where he couldn't be perfect.

He couldn't, you know, have the right outfit on, the right amount of weights.

He couldn't be like prepared and ready to do his three reps or however much he was doing.

This

was the authentic Mamdani and everyone has seen it.

And that is why it is so embarrassing.

And to be fair, Cuomo's, you know, tweet, it was laughable because he was inserting himself and he, you know, is not there.

He wasn't there.

But he did make a really good point.

If Mamdani cannot even bench lightweight, if he doesn't care about his health, if he mocks people who work out, if he calls them fat phobic, maybe he's done that, I don't know, then how will he be able to physically support a metropolis like New York City?

If he doesn't even care about taking care of his own body, how will he be able to care about taking care of a city?

I just said care so many times and I'm so sorry, blame my child, blame pregnancy, but I think you guys get the point.

American people who care, oh my God, I just said it again.

What is happening to me?

Anyway, American people respond to strength and competency and capability.

And it is now blatantly obvious that Mamdani likes that.

So yes, it was funny, but per usual, there was a deeper issue, as there always is.