For the Right, Playing Dumb is a Full-Time Job

There are real criticisms you can make of any politician. Screaming “communism” at boilerplate heat-wave advice probably isn’t one of them.

New York is hot right now. Not regular July hot. Forecasters spent the week warning that Central Park could hit 100 degrees for the first time since 2012 (and it did!), with a heat index that could make it feel as hot as 112 through the holiday weekend. So the city did what cities do when the weather turns dangerous: it opened more cooling centers, extended pool hours, and added 150 outreach volunteers to check on the people most likely to die in this kind of heat. And on Wednesday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani posted this to X:

“New York: it’s hot out there, and the power grid is working overtime to keep us cool. Set your AC to 78 degrees, turn off lights/electronics you’re not using, and unplug what you can. Our City is doing its part too: maintaining the 78 degrees rule in our buildings, dimming/turning off our lights during peak electricity demand, asking private partners to do the same, and powering down non-essential equipment. A stable grid means the AC stays on, and lives are saved. Let’s ease demand — and get through the heat — together.”

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. A request. “The City is asking every business and every New Yorker to do their part,” is how the mayor’s press office put it to Newsweek. Asking. Con Edison, the utility company, made the same plea to its customers. There’s no mandate here, no fine, no inspector coming to look at your thermostat. You can read that post, mutter “absolutely not,” crank your AC to 65, and nothing will happen to you.

Rama Duwaji and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on June 18, 2026 in New York City. (Photo by Angelina Katsanis/Getty Images)

You wouldn’t know any of that from the reaction on the right.

“78 degrees??? Welcome to communism people! Hope you enjoy!” wrote Barstool’s Dave Portnoy. Sen. Rand Paul declared the post “Proof that communism is (unfortunately) alive and well,” while Sen. Lindsey Graham warned, “This is the future that WOKE Democrats want not just for NYC but for South Carolina too!” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis went with “Is this what was meant by the warmth of collectivism?” (all three via The Hill). The post has been viewed more than 58.4 million times as of this writing, and seemingly every Republican with a working phone showed up to explain that a suggestion about air conditioning is what the breadlines were like.

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Full disclosure: my thermostat is not set to 78. If I lived in New York, I’d probably read the mayor’s post, feel vaguely guilty for a minute, and go right on ignoring it. (I like being cold in the summer. Sue me.) But whether the request is annoying has nothing to do with whether it’s authoritarian. It’s a suggestion. A suggestion is the thing you’re allowed to ignore. That’s the entire concept.

And that’s what makes this freakout so exhausting: they know. Of course they know. The federal government’s own energy guidance recommended this exact thermostat range until, oh, roughly yesterday (more on that later). Their own states make the same request, during every heat wave, year after year. Nobody quoted above is confused about what a voluntary conservation notice is. They’re doing a bit. And we’re all expected to sit through the bit every single time a Democrat suggests anything, delivered by people who treat playing dumb like a full-time job with a quota to hit.

Their own states say the same thing

Start close to home. In July 2025, with a heat advisory in effect, then-Mayor Eric Adams told New Yorkers to set their air conditioners to, you guessed it, 78 degrees. City Hall says the practice goes back a lot further than that. A Mamdani spokesperson told TMZ the city was following utility recommendations that had been “implemented under previous Mayors, including Adams, De Blasio, Bloomberg, and Giuliani”.

People spend time at Washington Square Park during hot weather in New York City, United States, on June 29, 2026. (Photo by Selçuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Then there’s the federal government. Like I said, until this week, the Department of Energy’s home cooling guidance told Americans to “Start with an indoor temperature between 75-78°F during the day.” The standing recommendation of a federal agency that answers to Donald Trump sat right there on a government website while the president’s allies spent two days calling the same number communism. Apparently, the page was deleted some time after Bulwark reporter Sam Stein posted about the Trump government’s guidance being the same as the NYC guidance being torn to shreds by the right on Thursday morning.

And then there’s Texas. ERCOT, the state’s grid operator, asked Texans to raise their thermostats to 78 over and over through the brutal summer of 2022, and raising your thermostat during peak demand remains standing guidance on ERCOT’s website today. Back in 2015, Gov. Greg Abbott personally appealed to Texans to “set air conditioning thermostats to 78 degrees or higher.”

Which brings us to Ted Cruz, who fired off “In a first-world country, you could turn on the A/C.” This is the senator from the state whose grid failed so completely in February 2021 that Texans froze to death waiting for the power to come back, and whose grid operator has spent every summer since asking residents to do precisely what Mamdani asked. Cruz’s post promptly got hit with a community note laying all of this out.

It changed nothing. It never does.

DeSantis’s “warmth of collectivism” quip ran into the same problem: the Florida Public Service Commission, whose members he hand-picked, issued the identical 78-degree recommendation as recently as June. Of this year. The one we’re currently in.

And the number itself? The 78-degree standard traces back to Jimmy Carter, who ordered federal buildings kept at 78 in the summer during the 1979 energy crisis, and utilities have pushed it for decades for the deeply boring reason that every degree above 78 shaves roughly 2 percent off cooling costs. It’s the HVAC equivalent of “drink more water.”

They run this exact play over and over

The thermostat freakout isn’t even original. We’ve sat through this routine before, and it’s worth remembering how it goes.

In April 2021, Joe Biden announced a target of cutting U.S. greenhouse gas emissions roughly in half by 2030. There was nothing in his speeches or his policy papers about anyone’s diet. The Daily Mail, a British tabloid, filled in the blank itself, publishing a piece speculating that the plan “could limit you to eat just one burger a MONTH” based on a 2020 University of Michigan study that had no connection to Biden¹ or his plan whatsoever. Fox News converted the tabloid’s guesswork into an on-screen graphic presenting “cut 90% of red meat from diet” and “max 4 lbs per year” as “Biden’s climate requirements”, and from there it went straight into the mouths of elected officials. “Joe Biden’s climate plan includes cutting 90% of red meat from our diets by 2030,” tweeted Rep. Lauren Boebert. “They want to limit us to about four pounds a year. Why doesn’t Joe stay out of my kitchen?”

Fox’s factually incorrect graphic, which claims there were “requirements” that would include cutting 90% of red meat, putting a 4lb per year cap on meat, and only allowing people to eat one burger a month. Totally false.

And here’s Abbott, right on schedule. The governor of Texas tweeted out the fake Fox graphic with the caption “Not gonna happen in Texas!” Greg Abbott, 2021: outraged over a meat restriction that did not exist. Greg Abbott, 2015: personally asking Texans to turn their thermostats up to 78. The same man, working both sides of the same con, six years apart. Fox eventually walked the whole thing back, with anchor John Roberts acknowledging on air that a graphic and script “incorrectly implied” the study was part of Biden’s plan (”That is not the case”). By then the story had done its job.

The 2023 gas stove panic ran a slightly different version. This was slighly more justified… at first. A Consumer Product Safety Commission member, Richard Trumka Jr., really did call gas stoves “a hidden hazard” and really did tell Bloomberg that “products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” A real quote, from a real official, and if the outrage had ended when the facts came in, fair enough. It didn’t! Big surprise. Trumka clarified within days that “CPSC isn’t coming for anyone’s gas stoves,” and the commission’s chair stated flatly: “I am not looking to ban gas stoves and the CPSC has no proceeding to do so.” Two days after that clarification, Rep. Ronny Jackson was fundraising off “Biden and Democrats want to BAN gas stoves in EVERY home! INCLUDING YOURS!” A year and a half later, with no ban, no proposed ban, no regulatory action of any kind, the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee was still describing the episode as “a backdoor attempt to advance the current administration’s radical green agenda.” The facts had been settled for eighteen months. The show stayed on the road anyway.

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And you remember the pandemic. Every ask, no matter how mild or voluntary or obviously sensible, went through the same machine: a recommendation became a mandate became tyranny became a whole personality. The people loudly refusing understood exactly what “recommended” meant. Refusing was the point.

Which is why the replies to Mamdani were so predictable. “As a New Yorker I’ll be setting my AC to 62 degrees for the foreseeable future as a direct retaliation to your authority,” wrote one reply guy, apparently prepared to detonate his own Con Ed bill to own the mayor. Normally, that kind of oppositional defiance nonsense is just sad. This week it might have stakes. The premise of the request is that the grid is strained, and that’s not hypothetical: New York’s grid operator issued an early energy warning Thursday over declining operating reserves. If enough people crank their ACs as a political statement and the grid buckles, the air conditioning could go off for everybody, in 100-degree heat, and people could die. Will the health of the grid hinge on whether or not people who see the mayor’s post set their thermostats at 78 degrees? Probably not. But hey, it doesn’t hurt for the government to ask, as part of a larger strategy for handling the heatwave. It’s fine. Just ignore it if that’s what you want to do. That was the entire content of the mayor’s post. They’re all pretending not to understand it.

There are real criticisms. Make them.

And the truly maddening part of all this is that none of it was necessary, because Mamdani isn’t above criticism. No politician is, and this one happens to be attempting some of the most ambitious and most contested municipal policy in the country.

If you want to come after the mayor over this week specifically, there’s material. Start with the grid. The premise of the whole request is that New York’s power system gets shaky when every air conditioner in the city runs at once. Okay: why? Why does the largest city in the wealthiest country on Earth have a grid that needs coaxing through a predictable summer? What’s the plan to fix it, on what timeline, at what cost? Those are real questions, a serious opposition would be asking them loudly, and I’d honestly like to hear the answers myself.

Or push on fairness. Asking people in sweltering walkups to conserve while Midtown blazes all night and Taylor Swift holds her wedding at Madison Square Garden is a genuinely uncomfortable look, and plenty of New Yorkers said exactly that. The city has an answer: Con Edison says the Times Square billboards run on separate distribution networks, so darkening them wouldn’t free up power anywhere else, and the Times Square Alliance asked screen operators to dim their displays anyway. Maybe that answer holds up. Maybe it doesn’t! A critic’s job would be to stress-test it instead of tweeting through the feeling.

Nobody did that. Not one of the senators or governors quoted at the top of this piece asked a single question about grid capacity, energy policy, or who carries the burden of conservation. They do not actually care about any of this, just like they didn’t care about Peanut the Squirrel when the right rallied around its owner in 2024. They just want material to attack their political opponents with.

Do we really have to do this with every single thing? You have actual disagreements with this mayor. Some of them are even interesting! His agenda (rent freezes, city-owned grocery stores, fare-free buses) is full of substantive debates, with tradeoffs serious people can argue about in good faith. Yelling about a thermostat suggestion your own states make every summer contributes nothing to any of it, and everyone doing it knows that. It’s intellectually bankrupt work: performing confusion for an audience you’ve decided is too dumb to check.

1. Please enjoy this song from the amazingly talented and hilarious Nick Lutsko making fun of the right’s “Joe Biden Wants to Take Your Meat” freakout.