Former Governor David Paterson has issued a stark warning to New York Democrats, cautioning that a socialist wave could leave moderate Democrats sidelined, threatening the party’s very survival.

Paterson, who has also served as the state’s party chairman, delivered this cautionary message in the wake of surprising victories by a slate backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America. They achieved sweeping wins in crucial congressional Democratic primary contests and nearly dominated the state legislative seats.

“This is undeniably a wake-up call for the Democratic Party,” Paterson remarked during his appearance on the “Cats Roundtable” program on 77 WABC radio. “We need to heed this message and act swiftly to avert becoming obsolete.”

Paterson highlighted the election of controversial socialist candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier, who managed to unseat five-term incumbent Representative Adriano Espaillat in the 13th House District, a region that encompasses Harlem, Washington Heights/Inwood, and parts of the Bronx.

This victory, however, was achieved with the votes of only 32,790 Democrats—a fraction of the eligible voters in that district.

“There are 700,000 people who live in that district, which means that she got 5% of the people that live there to vote for her,” Paterson said. “I would suggest that within two years a real organized campaign gets put together and she can take her 5% and go back to wherever she was before she ran the first time.”

Paterson used to represent Harlem as a state senator in a district that overlaps with the congressional district, before he became lieutenant governor and later governor.

He served as chairman of the state Democratic Party in 2014-2015 under former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Since becoming a radio analyst, Paterson has not been shy in criticizing his party’s left-leaning policies.

He slammed Democrats in Albany for going too far when approving the controversial soft-on-crime cashless bail law and ripped into former President Joe Biden for letting the migrant crisis spiral out of control by failing to police the border.

Current state Democratic Party chairman Jay Jacobs said Paterson and other critics are overreacting to last week’s Democratic primary results.

“Everybody is overreacting,” Jacobs said, who called Paterson “a friend.”

He said the DSA won races in very progressive districts in New York City and “that doesn’t speak for the entire Democratic Party.”

Jacobs noted that state Democratic Comptroller Tom DiNapoli easily won his Democratic primary against two progressive rivals by a 2-to-1 margin.

“Why do we ignore that?” he asked.

He also noted Rep. Tom Suozzi staved off a primary challenge in New York’s 3rd Congressional District, which includes part of Queens and Long Island. Suozzi has distanced himself from socialist policies and calls himself a moderate.

“Congressman Tom Suozzi hasn’t suddenly become a socialist,” Jacobs said.

Experts have raised concerns about Tehran’s new strategy on Western social media platforms, suggesting it has launched a stealth campaign aimed at influencing Americans and countering President Donald Trump’s pursuit of a nuclear agreement.

Following the U.S. strikes in February that severely impacted Tehran’s leadership and the subsequent signing of an interim memorandum of understanding (MOU) between Iran and the U.S., analysts assert that Iranian officials are increasingly utilizing digital proxies to exert centralized control.

“Iran’s leadership now operates on X due to its weakened leadership,” stated counterterrorism expert Dr. Omar Mohammed to News Media.

“The regime has transitioned its legitimacy battle to a digital platform, optimizing for this new arena,” added Mohammed from the George Washington Program on Extremism.

“There are English, screenshot-ready lines, memeable contempt and civilizational pride. It is adaptation under pressure — an influence operation forced by the fact that the men running Iran can no longer stand at a podium.”

After Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed on Feb. 28, the regime’s senior leadership was largely eliminated, and the new leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is in hiding. Mohammed said Iran’s digital messaging has since become more centralized.

“The coordination between the leadership is visible: You watch the same lines reposted verbatim by the judiciary chief, the vice president and the security council within minutes,” the expert explained.

“That is a central media shop pushing copy, not officials independently moved by the same spirit at the same moment. And the register gives it away.”

According to Mohammed, the regime’s X accounts serve as a manufactured proxy for the leadership vacuum while exploiting political divisions in the United States, a strategy that he says surfaced even more after Trump signed a new peace deal on June 17 in Versailles.

“Tehran is not aiming at the United States as a single entity,” Mohammed said.

“It reads Washington as two power centers and pitches to both — working to embarrass the deal the president owns while speaking the language of multipolarity back to the worldview it attributes to the vice president.”

In the wake of the signing and the first round of negotiations in Switzerland, for example, Trump said on Truth Social that unfrozen Iranian assets would be used to buy American agricultural products, including soybeans, wheat and corn.

The Treasury Department, he wrote, would release the Iranian assets “into escrow, controlled by the United States, and will be used for the purchase of food and medical supplies, exclusively from the United States, including corn, wheat and soybeans from our great American farmers. These are things that are desperately needed by Iran.”

The regime’s posts from its lead negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, mocked the claims as “trash talks.”

“America falsely claims our unfrozen assets will buy their agriculture. Interesting. The only crop we’re harvesting is what you planted: decades of mistrust. It’s organic, abundant, and homegrown. But apparently the U.S. only exports GMO soybeans, broken promises and trash talks,” Ghalibaf wrote on X.

“The agriculture jab is aimed straight at Trump, who personally sold the frozen-assets release to American farmers as a corn-and-soybean windfall, so mocking ‘GMO soybeans and broken promises’ is built to embarrass the deal he owns,” Mohammed claimed.

“Tehran gains if it can discredit the deal the president is selling,” he added.

“That is also not a 64-year-old Iranian speaker writing for himself; that is a young social media team writing in his name,” Mohammed said.

Mohammed also noted Trump’s posts are his own, with the “account and the man the same.”

“The Iranian accounts are the reverse. They come from an institution manufacturing a public presence for a leadership that can no longer appear in person,” he said.

As ordinary Iranian citizens continue to face strict internet restrictions at home, Tehran’s elite enjoy open access to foreign platforms to target Western audiences.

Alp Toker, of internet monitoring firm NetBlocks, told News Media that the regime had “learned” asymmetric information warfare.

“These regimes are learning to combine social media, AI and internet censorship as tools for asymmetric information warfare, benefiting from a global audience while sidestepping accountability to their own citizens,” he said.

“There is a two-tier system in which government officials can use the platform freely to promote their agenda while denying access to their citizens, as they do in Iran.

“It’s a double-edged sword — you get more open politics at the cost of regime propagandization.

“Iranian authorities, among others, are getting better at gaming this system,” Toker added.

Mohammed said the parallel systems — a heavily censored internet at home and what he described as an “open megaphone” aimed at Western audiences — provide the strongest evidence the campaign is an external influence operation rather than organic domestic speech.

In a grim revelation, rescuers working amidst the wreckage of collapsed structures in Venezuela captured a video that revealed an unsettlingly flimsy material used in construction — what appears to be Styrofoam. This unsettling discovery highlights construction vulnerabilities in a country besieged by a recent natural disaster.

Earlier this week, Venezuela was struck by the might of a double-earthquake, registering magnitudes of 7.2 and 7.5. These seismic twins left a trail of devastation in coastal La Guaira, near Caracas, severely impacting the region. Despite tireless efforts from international and local rescue teams, the official death toll has climbed to 1,430, underscoring the earthquake’s deadly impact.

Describing the severity of the situation, prominent lawmaker Jorge Rodríguez deemed it ‘the most disastrous event’ Venezuela has faced over the past 123 years. Countless neighborhoods across the nation have been reduced to little more than piles of debris, marking a national tragedy of monumental proportions.

The gravity of the catastrophe is further underscored by government figures reporting over 3,000 injuries and an equal number taking refuge in shelters. Disturbingly, nearly 50,000 individuals remain missing, as listed on a website endorsed by the opposition. This number casts a shadow of uncertainty and anguish over the affected areas.

A video that surfaced on TikTok, shared by a Venezuelan rescuer using the handle @maximilianohernan36, offers stark evidence that many buildings were not designed to endure the wrath of natural disasters. This raises urgent questions about building standards and regulations in the country, demanding immediate attention from authorities.

In the video, a man can be seen recording himself pulling away pieces of what appears to be collapsed walls with just his hand. The outside of the wall has a thin layer of concrete, while the inside is clearly Styrofoam or a similar material. 

‘Look at this sh**,’ the man recording can be heard saying in Spanish as he pulls away chunks of Styrofoam and digs his finger into the material without resistance. 

‘No wonder everything crumbled like cardboard,’ he later said before he and a fellow rescuer could be heard criticizing the government for the shoddy construction. 

Hundreds of people reacted to the video, with many calling the ordeal a ‘socialist scam.’ 

Wednesday’s double-earthquake leveled entire neighborhoods and blocks of buildings, many of which were constructed as part of socialist revolutionary president Hugo Chavez’s ‘grand housing mission.’

The program came in response to previous natural disasters that killed and displaced tens of thousands of people in 1999, the first year of Chavez’s tenure. 

The government built apartment complexes for thousands of families to move into, but it only loosely followed its own laws and codes meant to prepare the buildings for future natural disasters, an earthquake risk-reduction specialist who worked for Chavez’s government, Alejandro Linayo, told the Washington Post.

After Chavez died and Nicolas Maduro took power in 2013, the project was accelerated, and construction was rushed to meet a political deadline. 

At a four-building apartment complex in La Guaira that was constructed as part of the ‘grand housing mission,’ three of the buildings were leveled by the earthquakes, destroying at least 960 apartments and burying countless people.

Although it is unclear where the TikTok video of the alleged Styrofoam walls was recorded, it offers insight into the cheap construction methods that the Venezuelan government appears to have used for its socialist housing program.

That cheap construction has come with a high cost of life. The US Geological Survey estimated more than 10,000 deaths were possible from the magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 quakes, which would place them among Latin America’s deadliest of the last century.

Families and volunteers spent days pulling survivors and bodies from the rubble before more than 1,600 foreign rescue workers arrived. 

Additional teams from Europe have been trying to make it to Venezuela to provide assistance, but Simon Bolivar International Airport, the only international airport that serves Caracas, was also ravaged by the earthquakes, so travel into the country is ‘severely affected.’

Rescuers complained of scant heavy equipment and a limited official presence as hundreds of aftershocks deepened damage and kept residents on edge.

Years of socialist mismanagement under Chavez and Maduro, as well as US sanctions, gutted Venezuela’s private construction sector, which has left the country ill-equipped to respond. 

The government – headed by interim president Delcy Rodriguez since her predecessor was removed by the US in a January raid – thanked civilian volunteers ferrying aid to La Guaira soon after the earthquakes. 

But since then, the port city has been declared a disaster zone, and Rodriguez has heavily tightened access to the road, saying traffic was preventing efficient movement of emergency vehicles.

Officials said anyone who wants to enter would now have to seek official permits, but provided few details of who would be allowed in.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking for rescuing people still living amid the rubble. 

‘There exists a window of roughly three days, 72 hours, where the probability afterwards decreases that you can save people alive,’ Sebastian Eugster, the leader of a Swiss rescue team in the country, said on Saturday.

In Caraballeda on Saturday, US rescuers worked alongside remaining civilian volunteers, some of whom were searching for their own family members.

Rescuers had originally spray-painted the rubble with the name of the apartment building that used to stand there. By Saturday evening, they had marked debris with coding indicating they believed no living person remained in the ruins.

Pope Leo on Sunday told worshippers gathered for the Angelus prayer in Rome that he wanted ‘to express my closeness to the Venezuelan sisters and brothers affected by the recent earthquakes’ and expressed gratitude to rescue workers.

European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said on X that the EU had mobilized 5 million euros ($5.7 million) in emergency assistance and that its Copernicus satellite system is helping map the damage and direct assistance to the areas most in need.

A senior U.S. official said on Saturday that a funding package worth hundreds of millions of dollars is expected to be announced within the next day or so, in addition to $150 million that the Trump administration had already committed.

The disaster could have political consequences for Rodriguez, who has portrayed herself as an agent of change even though she served as vice president under predecessor Nicolas Maduro.

During a visit Rodriguez made to a Caracas neighborhood that was all but razed to the ground, residents voiced their anger.

Many screamed at her: ‘The government isn’t doing anything for the people.’

Others said: ‘Get out! Get out!’

Indeed, it appears to be a grand case of theft!

Devotees of the Grand Theft Auto franchise are expressing outrage over what they perceive as exorbitant pricing and extensive paywalls for the eagerly awaited new installment in this iconic video game series.

Gamers were caught off guard by Rockstar Games when they announced two editions of “Grand Theft Auto VI,” releasing pre-order options last week in advance of the game’s scheduled November 19 launch.

The release of the standard game edition at $80—already surpassing the industry norm by $10—disheartened loyal players. This version restricts numerous story elements, such as in-game stores, vehicles, custom modifications, outfits, tattoos, weapons, and missions, all of which are only accessible via the $100 “ultimate edition.”

“It seems they initially intended to set the price at $100 but feared the backlash,” shared Andrew Duran, a dedicated GTA enthusiast and PC gamer. Duran invested in a $600 PlayStation solely to enjoy this upcoming title in November, given the absence of a pending PC version.

“There’s no other reason they would paywall a bunch of story content and shops throughout the in-game world,” he added.

Other gamers agreed, and said that Rockstar games was being “greedy.”

Some fans of the series also shared how perplexed they were, and said the price of the game shows how bad the economy has become — pointing out that back in 2013, when GTA V was first released, the same company was selling a bundle that included the game, a PlayStation 3 and headphones for $300.

Gamers also expressed their fears that this pricing strategy could be just the latest aspect of daily life that is seeing prices soar as businesses cater to deep-pocketed customers willing to spend anything — driving prices up for everyone else.

“I can’t help but feel this is what the developer actually wants the standard version to be, while its $80 version is feeling distinctly like a Lite Edition,” Molly Taylor, a gaming reporter, wrote in an opinion piece in PC Gamer magazine.

Taylor went on to call the company’s pricing scheme “anti-consumer” and leaves her concerned for the future of the video games industry.

Beyond just the “ridiculous” $100 price tag for the full, unrestricted version of the game — fans pointed out an additional obstacle will likely turn into a massive payday for Rockstar Games off of the backs of unsuspecting players.

Pre-ordering the game comes with a “free month” of GTA + for everyone who purchases before the Nov. 19 release date, which gamers described as a “trap,” since the billing on the premium online gaming membership auto-renews after the month ends.

The “physical” version of the games won’t include a disc, just the case with a code for a digital download inside, according to the company.

But the price tag isn’t scaring any fans away.

A recent poll of over 10,000 gamers found that over 80% plan on purchasing the $100 edition of the game, according to Insider Gaming.

In the first 24 hours of pre-orders, Grand Theft Auto VI supposedly surpassed 39 million pre-orders worldwide, generating more than $3 billion in revenue and already turning profit on its estimated $2 billion budget, according to USA Today.