Some policy announcements produce considered debate. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani asked New Yorkers to voluntarily set their thermostats to 78 degrees Fahrenheit during a heat dome to ease strain on Con Edison’s power grid, and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina responded by warning South Carolinians about the socialist future Democrats want for them, personally, based on what the mayor of New York City recommended to New Yorkers.
“First AOC tried to come for your steak and ribs and now the Socialist Democrats are coming for your AC,” Graham said, which is a sentence that treats a voluntary thermostat suggestion from a city 700 miles from Columbia, South Carolina, as an imminent threat to the people of South Carolina, who were not asked to adjust their thermostats and cannot be asked to adjust their thermostats by the mayor of New York City, a fact Graham did not address because it would have ended the post.
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who typed “In a first-world country, you could turn on the A/C,” received a community note informing him that the Public Utility Commission of Texas recommends 78 degrees during heat events for the same reason Mamdani recommended it, which is that power grids become strained when everyone cranks their air conditioning simultaneously during a heat dome, a phenomenon Texas knows better than most states given that its power grid failed entirely in February 2021 and killed at least 246 people. Cruz did not respond to the community note. He did not delete the post. The note remains there, attached, doing its work.
Matt Walsh announced that his air conditioning does not go above 68 degrees in the summer, which is a thermostat setting, not a political position, though Walsh presented it as both. Spencer Pratt, the former reality television personality who ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Los Angeles earlier this year, wrote that communism “always goes the same way” and ends with “You used too much energy, comrade,” which is a theory of communist governance that does not appear in any existing literature on communist governance but which Pratt delivered with the confidence of a man who has read the brochure.
The Department of Energy recommends 78 degrees. Texas recommends it. The federal government recommends it. Mamdani recommended it. The difference, according to the Republican response, is who recommended it.
When the thermostat setting that Texas’s own utility regulator endorses becomes socialism because a democratic socialist endorsed it, what exactly is the objection to?
Sources
HuffPost: Right-Wing Critics Denounce Mamdani’s AC Guidance As Communism
Raw Story: MAGA flies into rage over air conditioners
