right-wing media – New York Democratic primaries that boosted democratic socialist and progressive candidates have been met with a wave of right-wing rhetoric tying local electoral change to “replacement” narratives—alongside renewed emphasis on Supreme Court fights over immigra
On Tuesday night, voters in New York delivered Democratic primary wins in districts that are, as a rule, overwhelmingly Democratic—so the shock wasn’t that these candidates would win in November. The shock was what those victories were made to symbolize.
Three candidates backed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. a democratic socialist whose upset election last year reshaped New York politics. prevailed in Democratic congressional primaries. Former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander defeated incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in Manhattan and Brooklyn’s 10th Congressional District. In the 13th District, community and union organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier unseated veteran establishment figure Rep. Adriano Espaillat. State assembly member Claire Valdez won decisively in the open seventh District. With each district heavily Democratic, each race is heavily favored to end in victory in November.
Those results added to a broader pattern conservatives have been watching closely: Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidates building influence across major U.S. cities. In addition to gains in New York. Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidates have won city council seats in Los Angeles. Chicago. Minneapolis. Portland and San Antonio. In Washington, D.C., DSA-backed Janeese Lewis George captured the Democratic mayoral nomination. Seattle elected self-described democratic socialist Katie Wilson as mayor. In Los Angeles, DSA member Nithya Raman advanced to the mayoral runoff.
For right-wing media, the political meaning was immediate—and the destination was not primarily the ballot box. It was the courts.
The reaction follows organizing efforts that have been building for years, not weeks. The broader trend reflects progressive groups including the Democratic Socialists of America. Justice Democrats and Our Revolution. which have become more sophisticated in recruiting candidates. raising money. mobilizing volunteers and challenging incumbents.
At the same time, the picture conservatives describe as an unstoppable takeover is not cleanly one-directional. Only two sitting Democratic members of Congress lost renomination this cycle. Progressives won several open-seat primaries in states including New York, Texas, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, while also advancing in California. Yet left-wing candidates also suffered notable defeats. In Illinois. establishment-backed Democrats repelled progressive challengers in high-profile statewide and congressional races where the Democratic Socialists of America declined to even offer endorsements. Establishment-backed Democrats also won New York’s comptroller primary and prevailed in the state’s most competitive Republican-held House district.
Mixed results haven’t stopped conservative messaging from leaning into existential framing. To sustain that pitch. right-wing media spent the days following the primary digging into the past statements of the victorious candidates to construct a composite monster tied to the broader Democratic brand ahead of the 2028 presidential election.
Chevalier’s since-deleted social media posts from the early 2020s have been a key focus. In those posts. she referred to the United States as a “f**king disgrace. ” called Joe Biden a “war criminal. ” and boasted about using an American flag as a napkin. Other replayed statements include advocating for a world completely devoid of borders and police. and declaring that Israel “doesn’t exist.” When candidate backgrounds don’t supply quick ammunition. conservative outlets have leaned on personal attacks.
In coverage of Brad Lander’s victory, the rhetoric veered into anti-semitism. On Newsmax, Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman—operating with an explicit endorsement from Trump—labeled Lander a Nazi. “He’s a disgrace,” Blakeman said. “He’s anti-American, he is anti-Semitic, even though he’s Jewish. This guy would be a camp guard in a concentration camp if he could.” Hours later. Ben Shapiro told his Daily Wire audience that Lander only “calls himself a Jew so that he doesn’t have to call himself a white guy.”.
Republicans are already signaling that figures like Mamdani and his allies will be used as symbols of the Democratic Party as a whole, regardless of the party’s internal diversity. The goal is to nationalize a set of local races and frame them as representative of a radical shift.
President Donald Trump moved quickly to embrace the narrative. Posting on Truth Social. Trump declared that he had been preparing for the return of communists “for a long time.” At a Friday speech in Washington. Trump framed the upcoming midterm elections as a contest between Republicans and “communists.” He attacked Mamdani’s rent freeze and warned that apartment buildings would become “ghettos and slums” because landlords were effectively having their property confiscated.
On Fox News, hosts and personalities amplified the same message all week. Across multiple programs, they asserted that the election results reflected immigration rather than ideology.
Jesse Watters described New York’s primary results as “a third world takeover. ” adding. “This is what happens when you import the third world.” Laura Ingraham connected progressive politics with foreignness rather than domestic political preferences. “The entire lead-up to July 4, I consider it one big trigger warning to the Mamdani minions,” she scoffed. “They’re happiest when foreign flags are flying. Because to them, red, white, and blue . . . is like sunshine to a vampire.” Steve Bannon echoed the theme on his “War Room” podcast. calling New York a “foreign city.” “Go look at Mamdani’s base. ” Bannon told listeners. “It’s foreign. These sanctuary cities — this is all by design.”.
Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh dispensed with subtlety altogether. writing on X: “Third world communists are the enemy.” He added. “They’ve taken over our greatest American city. They’re taking over one of our two major political parties. They hate this country. They hate white people. They hate our heritage and traditions.”.
The line running through the coverage is not only about policy differences. It’s about legitimacy—how to treat citizens who vote for candidates with democratic socialist views. In the framing pushed by conservative media. voters can become “imported” interlopers whose participation in the franchise is recast as contamination.
And in the same breath, conservative messaging turns to the nation’s highest court. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller—described here as a central architect of Trump’s immigration agenda—spelled out the connection more explicitly than anyone in the administration. In a series of posts following Tuesday’s results. Miller declared that Democrats had “imported a new electorate.” Appearing later on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program. Miller told viewers that “a vote for any Democrat anywhere for any office is empowering a party that wants to strip this country to the bone.”.
Miller also told Will Cain on Fox that “Half of college graduates in New York City are either foreign born or come from immigrant households.” He said. “We have completely changed New York City. New York is not the New York seen in movies or the one you visited as a kid.” He continued. arguing that the financial future of New York and Los Angeles was “controlled in large measure by people that we just brought into this country who have no history or experience or faith or competence in any case in American democracy.”.
Progressive victories, in this tell, provoke alarmist coverage. That coverage reinforces a sense among conservative audiences that the country is slipping away. The result fuels support for more aggressive interventions—particularly through the courts.
This is where the right-wing pivot becomes clearest: the broader “great replacement theory”—the conspiratorial belief that elites are replacing native-born Americans with immigrants who will reshape politics and culture—finds a roadmap from political reaction to judicial strategy.
It’s not just rhetorical. Within the same news cycle as these election results. conservatives turned their attention to favorable Supreme Court rulings for the Trump administration on immigration policy. A 6–3 decision allowing the continuation of certain border restrictions was celebrated not only as a legal victory but also as a cultural one. The reaction exposed how quickly policy fights are being framed as identity fights.
Megyn Kelly. on her podcast. linked the Court’s decisions on Temporary Protected Status to the broader cultural panic over national identity. “Look. this has been going on for over a dozen years. ” Kelly said of the migrant populations affected by the rulings. “Go home, get out!. We know our country is better than yours!. That’s because we filled it with our work ethic and our culture and our values!. You being here only dilutes it for us. those who built it and live it!” She added. “And half of you people. more than half. you won’t assimilate!. We don’t want you!. We don’t care if you’re offended. Get out!. Go home!. Go back to f**king Haiti!”.
She then mused about why the U.S. could not instead attract immigrants from European nations like Norway, describing them as doing “their row thing” during the World Cup. Her vision of American citizenship, as described in her comments, was defined by racial homogeneity.
That same courtroom emphasis is now aimed at the anticipation surrounding an upcoming Court decision on birthright citizenship. For more than a century, the 14th Amendment has guaranteed citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. The amendment was ratified in the wake of the Civil War to overrule the “infamy of the Dred Scott decision.” The Trump administration’s effort to reinterpret that guarantee—excluding children of undocumented immigrants—is described as a legal long shot that has nonetheless taken outsized symbolic importance. For many on the right. it is portrayed as a way to redraw the boundaries of national belonging through judicial power rather than electoral competition.
The sequence has become hard to separate: when cities appear “lost” and the electorate is described as “changed,” the judiciary becomes the arena where outcomes can still be controlled. The shift runs from campaigning for votes to limiting who can be legally recognized as citizens.
Right-wing media’s choice to center replacement theory rather than grapple with competing policy arguments is also a confession of a different kind: when election results don’t match the desired outcome. the system becomes framed as illegitimate by definition. The political question now is what happens when that framing becomes routine—when one side increasingly treats unfavorable votes as evidence that democracy itself has failed. and the remedy is to narrow the electorate through the courts.
In that setup, conservative media messaging doesn’t just react to primaries. It turns them into fuel for an institutional fight over the meaning of citizenship—and over whether the rules of electoral participation should be redrawn by judges rather than voters.
New York primaries Zohran Mamdani Brad Lander Dan Goldman Darializa Avila Chevalier Adriano Espaillat Claire Valdez Democratic Socialists of America Supreme Court Stephen Miller birthright citizenship Temporary Protected Status Trump 2028 presidential election