Thursday, September 18, 2025

Part I

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Is Mayor Zohran Mamdani Inevitable? The Muslim, Democratic Socialist Appears to Have New York Mayoral Race in the Bag, Unless Something Unexpected Happens

Let’s be honest, if about two years ago you were told that a 33-year-old Muslim Democratic socialist is about to be elected mayor of New York City, I think you would’ve thought this is some kind of a mini-series. But no, it’s not a mini-series. It’s not fiction. It’s fact. And it appears right now that Zohran Mamdani is moving fast towards election as the mayor of New York City, America’s largest city and population and the epicenter of America’s cultural elite.

We need to understand the outsize influence of New York. Just ask New Yorkers. It is the center of finance in the United States. It is the center of so much of the business world in the United States. We talk about the New York Stock Exchange and that just basically says a very great deal right there. We’re talking about Wall Street, we’re talking about cultural assets, the opera, the orchestras. We’re talking about New York as the center of the museum life of the nation. You just go down the list.

And of course, in terms of the TV networks and entertainment and all the rest, academia and outsize influence in this city, which seems to be outsized in virtually every way, which makes it all the more outsize, a realization that it appears the city is about to elect a 33-year-old Democratic socialist Muslim as mayor. Now, one of the things we need to note is that saying there’s anything amiss here is considered something of a thought crime among many in the United States, to suggest that it might be, let’s just use the word odd, that there would be a 33-year-old Democratic socialist Muslim mayor of New York City to suggest there might be something amiss here.

Well, for Democrats in particular, that is turning out to be the recipe for political disaster, maybe even political suicide, and that’s why Democrats are now lining up to endorse and support Mamdani who did win the Democratic nomination because they may fear having a Democratic socialist Muslim mayor, but they can’t say so. They may fear the future of even the implications for their party of having a 33-year-old Democratic socialist Muslim mayor. But they’re afraid of the left wing or their own party and their running scared from the young people in their own party. Because this party has veered so far left, especially in its metropolitan areas and its urban concentrations and in its generational pattern that major Democrats are getting in line.

New York’s Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul is the latest big-name Democrat to endorse Mamdani. Now, by the way, the interesting thing here is that this is coming months after he won the primary. So, that tells you there’s a big problem here if this endorsement is coming in September, in the middle of September, as is the case. She did so. The governor made her statement in an opinion piece published in The New York Times. That’s predictable, but it’s also very interesting to notice how she endorsed the candidate because in so many cases, an endorsement is supposed to be, this is the best possible candidate we could possibly have.

History has been waiting for this candidate to arrive on the scene. This is the candidate I supported from the very beginning. She’s not saying that at all. Here’s what she says, “I’m endorsing Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani. In the past few months, I’ve had frank conversations with him. We’ve had our disagreements. But in our conversations, I heard a leader who shares my commitment to a New York where children can grow up safe in their neighborhoods and where opportunities within reach for every family. I heard a leader who’s focused on making New York City affordable a goal I enthusiastically support.”

Later she says this, “I didn’t leave my conversations with Mr. Mamdani aligned with him on every issue, but I am confident that he has the courage, urgency, and optimism New York City needs to lead it through the challenges of this moment.” At the end of her statement, the governor writes, “Mr. Mamdani and I don’t see eye to eye on everything and I don’t expect us to. I will always reserve the right to disagree honestly and to argue passionately. But I also believe that New York State and New York City are at our best when we stand together against those who attempt to tear us apart. For all these reasons, I’m endorsing Zohran Mamdani in the upcoming election for mayor and I look forward to working with him to ensure that New York City’s best days lie ahead.”

Okay. In political terms, let’s just look at this. This is a very awkward endorsement. This is an endorsement, but it’s an endorsement, we don’t agree on everything. This is an endorsement, I completely reserve the right to disagree with him. It’s an endorsement that says, “I like him because he wants clean air and healthy babies, basically. But the mechanism to get to his political goals,” she just skips over entirely. And by the way, in this case, we just need to note something.

It’s particularly complicated because New York City’s own government, New York City’s mayor does not have the power to bring about many of his basically socialist proposals that will require action by New York State’s government, that will require support or depend on non-support from New York State’s Governor, the very person making this endorsement. She is likely to be opposed to Mamdani on these proposals from day one. But you know what? She wants to survive as a Democrat. And thus, the endorsement has come even with all the footnotes that I think are hilariously obvious.

All right. I want to give The New York Times credit for some really good reporting here. And it’s a very liberal newspaper, but there’s liberal and liberal and it turns out that Mr. Mamdani scares The New York Times that should tell you something. And he scares The Washington Post editorial board, that should tell you something. If The Washington Post and The New York Times are really concerned and they’re concerned about something from the left. Ladies and gentlemen, we should be concerned.

And one of the points I’m going to make coming up just shortly is the fact that what happens in New York doesn’t stay in New York. So, you could say this is just New York City being New York City. Well, the problem is, given the influence of New York City, this is likely to be a widespread problem and we’re going to see the patterns already spread to some other cities. All right. New York Times front page article, “As Mamdani Picks Up Steam, he Tones Down his Stances.”

Listen to this, “In the roughly five years since Zohran Mamdani first started campaigning for public office, he has argued that prostitution should be decriminalized. He has called to defund the police. He has said that billionaires should not exist and that the admissions test for New York City’s elite public schools should be abolished.” This story continues, “But before he began his long shot bid to become the Democratic nominee for mayor last year, he abandoned some of his most provocative views and during the course of his campaign, he has sought to downplay others,” interesting.

We are told that he has recently tried to distance himself from the platform of the National Democratic Socialists of America. That’s the National Party of which he is a member. The Democratic Socialists of America really lean into that second word, socialist. That’s going to be a major part of our consideration today. The New York Times goes on to say, “His supporters and those who have met with him behind closed doors describe him as open-minded and eager to find common ground.” At the same time, it is very clear this is extremely leftist common ground. He wants government-owned grocery stores in New York City there to operate by selling groceries without a profit.

Now, anyone who knows anything about the grocery business knows that there is money to be made in the grocery business, but what most Americans don’t recognize is that not so much of that money is in food. Because the profit margin on food is, in many cases, just over 1%. And a lot of food items actually do not bring much of a profit opportunity. And that’s one of the reasons why in the grocery business you’ve seen a diversification into so many other things other than just basic groceries. You see prepared foods. You see all kinds of other things. You see specialty items.

You see a lot of things that actually aren’t groceries that you now expect to find in a grocery store and you put them in your cart in a grocery store even though they’re not groceries. And that stuff is paying for the fact that you’re able to go get the jar of pickles you want off the grocery shelf. No one in the grocery business is getting rich on pickles. And when it comes to the staples of food that most people think about, we want people to have food on the table. Most of the stuff you’re talking about is not much of a profit opportunity except in massive quantity. And so, the idea that is part of just the socialist dream, we will just do all of this together basically in the name of the people we will have grocery stores.

Well, number one, you’re going to find out that the prices can’t be much lower than what you can find in the competitive grocery market, and you’re not going to eventually find what you want in these stores. It is going to be the opposite of the free market approach, which by the way, right now in the grocery business has produced in most places in America, especially in any place of moderate size, you have all kinds of different price point levels, and models of grocery stores all the way from high-end stores down to, of course, one of the most rapidly expanding grocery models in the United States is the European model, Aldi. And I’ll just say right now, I think it’s going to be very, very difficult for a socialist model to come in with anything like the model that the free market can supply. 

Listen to this again, The New York Times, New York City has the second largest Jewish population of any city in the world. Listen to that. Of all the cities in the world, New York City’s Jewish population ranks number two, you would think that would be a particular problem when it comes to a Muslim mayor who has accused Israel of being guilty of genocide and has promised that if the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu comes to New York, he will see to it that he is arrested and turned over to authorities for the International Criminal Court and that apparatus because he finds him guilty of war crimes and he should be arrested.

And as a matter of fact, he said, “If he is arrested, he would see to it that Netanyahu is arrested.” Federal authorities almost immediately said, “You have no such authority to do any such thing.” But nonetheless, you understand he’s making himself abundantly clear. Listen to The New York Times article, “While he is a frequent critic of the Israeli government and wrote on social media last month that he believes Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza, Mr. Mamdani privately told a group of business leaders that he would discourage the use of the phrase globalize the intifada in relation to Palestinian rights. Though he himself has not used the phrase, he explained his thinking in a television interview shortly afterward.” Is he for casinos or not? Well, he had expressed skepticism before, but not so clearly now. The article points to a political controversy that erupted between Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo, the former Democratic governor of New York, who was defeated by Mr. Mamdani in the Democratic primary but is now running an independent race.

Mr. Cuomo had made accusations about the radicalism of Mamdani and speaking of certain proposals that were presented as PowerPoint slides “Detailing the platform of the National Democratic Socialists of America, including its support for abolishing prisons and ending funding for police. Mr. Cuomo demanded of Mr. Mamdani, do you support these proposals? Yes or no?” He said, “People have the right to know before they vote.” The story continues the next day, “Mr. Mamdani responded. My platform is not the same as National DSA [meaning Democratic Socialist of America] after days of speculation in the press about whether Mr. Mamdani agreed with the National DSA’s proposal to eliminate misdemeanor offenses, he said definitively for the first time that he wouldn’t force misdemeanors as mayor.”

By the way, how you do that if you’ve abolished the police and if you’re abolishing prisons, the contradictions mount. “He issued a blanket statement to try to clarify some of the questions around his views.” “If you cannot find a policy on my website, then it is not a policy that I’m running on.” Okay. In other words, he didn’t really deny anything. He just said, “I’m running on the things I put on my website and list on my platform.” Folks, people are buying this. He seems to be moving towards an inevitable victory unless there’s some major change in the race.

Part II

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National Democrats are in a Panic: Mamdani is Attempting to Soften His Positions, But No One, Not Even Democrats, Believes Him

Okay. Washington Post, again, another historically very liberal newspaper, the editorial board released the same with the headline: “Zohran Mamdani Backs off Some, But Not all of his Wildest Positions.” The subhead in their own statement was “The Front-Runner for New York Mayor Signals Some Moderation, But Color us Skeptical.” Okay. Something’s going on in the world. When the editorial board of The Washington Post responds with a statement like this. The opening line of the statement reads, “As Zohran Mamdani looks increasingly like the next mayor of New York. He’s working hard to convince voters he’s not the radical that his own words make him out to be.”

I love that sentence, brilliant sentence. Kudos to the editorial board of The Washington Post. He’s trying to convince people he’s not the radical that his own words make him out to be. The next statement. “Democratic partisans are starting to fall in line, but consider us unimpressed.” All right. This is something very interesting. This is seismic in American politics. And I think what you see here, by the way, is more than meets the eye.

How interested would the editorial board of the Washington Post be in the mayoral election in New York City? Will certainly be significant. I think there’s a lot more going on here. I think National Democrats are in an absolute panic over the Mamdani-ization of the Democratic Party. So, here’s the thing, and this is why some Republicans are looking at this with a mixture of fear and awe and opportunity. It is because the Democratic Party is going to be saddled with everything Zohran Mamdani does.

And it is because this very charismatic Muslim Democratic, socialist candidate has become the darling of the left wing of their party and they cannot disappoint that left wing. They are going to be in the most horrifying position. And I think that’s what The Washington Post, you can say this is a more center-left Democratic Party concern. They are about to be dragged along, let’s just say a very rocky political road by Zohran Mamdani.

The editorial board of the Washington Post actually refers to Zohran Mamdani’s scariest ideas. That’s their words. He says this, “Mamdani remains vehemently anti-Israel, which he accuses of genocide. Under pressure from the Jewish community, however, he agreed in July to discourage the use of the phrase ‘globalize the intifada.’ He repeatedly declined to do so before the Democratic primary, despite its violent connotations.”

In other words, he refused to separate himself from the call for a global intifada. That’s a rising up against Israel and it means the elimination of Israel as a state. He refused to condemn it during the Democratic primaries. Now, that he’s in a little tougher spot running for election in the general election in the Fall, he’s willing to say, “Okay. I won’t go that far. I’m not going to use that language.” Anyone who’s buying this deserves exactly what they get.

The editorial board of The Washington Post goes on to say it is significant where he hasn’t shifted, “Mamdani has not backed off his signature calls for free universal child care and buses, city-owned grocery stores, freezing rent on 1 million regulated apartments, increasing the minimum wage to $30 an hour and crippling new taxes.” Okay. Wait just a minute. These are the people who like big government now, they are worried about crippling new taxes?

Well, let’s just think about this. It takes an awful lot of tax increase to get these kinds of folks to refer to those tax increases as crippling. I go back to the statement, “These aren’t new ideas and versions of them have failed elsewhere, yet they test better with voters in liberal Gotham than Mamdani’s soft on crime tendencies.” Okay. Very interesting stuff. Again, the entire point is he’s trying to soften some of his positions or wildest positions. The Washington Post says, the editorial board says, “Color us skeptical.” Well I say underline that. Put an exclamation point at the end of that sentence.

Part III

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Socialism Always Fails – History Makes That Point Emphatically and Brutally Clear

All right. There’s more here, too. I mentioned the fact that Mamdani has said that he will honor the International Criminal Court’s indictment and arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Here’s someone who seems to believe that the mayor of New York City gets to have a foreign policy. And once again, there’s very dangerous assumptions baked into this, but there’s a bigger worldview issue I want us to consider and we really need to take a moment and consider what it would mean that there would be a democratic socialist, let’s just say a socialist mayor in New York City?

What is socialism and why should we think about it? Well, for one thing, let’s just say the most basic definition of socialism here means that you would have either government ownership of all the means of production or you would the very least have government investment and government control of all the means of production. And that basically means over the entire economy. And so, you see this, where you look at socialist experiments, where everything is declared to be under the authority of the state.

And even in some situations, all private property–that’s communism–is eliminated, which is just socialism taken to its logical conclusion. The elimination of private property, the democratic socialists of America, don’t say that right out loud, but they do call for an economic system a limitation on the economy, government control in the economy and levels of taxation that would basically result in the same thing.

And what you have in history is the fact that socialism has come with an enormous toll. It has come at an enormous cost and it has come with mounting millions of deaths. I’m stating that just the way I intend to say it. Socialism isn’t just a bad idea. It kills. 

Evidence for that is found, for example, in the work of Alan Charles Kors, professor emeritus, the University of Pennsylvania. He asked the question as a very well-known historian years ago, “Can there be an after socialism?” And he basically says there isn’t an after socialism because once socialism in this dial is put in place, the society just doesn’t survive. And this is fully demonstrated if you just take the 20th century alone. He says this, “All around us, if we count those who died of starvation during communist experiments with human interactions, 20 to 40 million in three years in China alone, we may add scores of millions more shot dead by deliberate exposure, starved and murdered in work camps and prisons meant to extract every last fiber of labor from human beings and then kill them. And all around us widows and widowers and orphans.”

he goes on to say, “No cause ever the history of all mankind has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents and more orphans than socialism with power. It surpassed exponentially all the other systems of production and turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us, and here is the problem. No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one does penance for them. No one has committed suicide for having been an apologist for those who did this to them. No one pays for them. No one has hunted down to account for them. It is exactly what Solzhenitsyn meaning the Russian prophet Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn foresaw in the Gulag Archipelago, ‘No one would have to answer, no one would be looked into. Until that happens, there is no after socialism.’” 

Later in the article. I really think his language is important. He says, the record of socialism is truly plain, “Socialism, wherever it has had the means to plan a society. To pursue efficaciously its vision of the abolition of private property, economic inequality and the allocation of labor and goods by free markets culminated in the crushing of individual economic, religious associational and political liberty. Its collectivization of agriculture alone led to untold suffering, scarcity and contempt for property as the fruit of labor.” 

But Professor Kors points to something else, and that is the willingness of so many in the western liberal elites to go along with it, to look at the reality and say, “Problem. What problem?” He says this, I, “The pathology of western Intellectuals has committed them to an adversarial relationship with the culture.” That means free markets and individual rights against those things, “That has produced the greatest alleviation of suffering, the greatest liberation from want, ignorance and superstition and the greatest increase of bounty and opportunity in the history of all human life.”

So, again, this professor of history, University of Pennsylvania just says, “Look, history makes the point emphatically clear and it’s written in red because it’s written in blood.” He says this, “This pathology allows western intellectuals to step around the Everest of bodies in the victims of communism without a tear, a scruple, a regret, an act of contrition or a reevaluation of self-control and mind.” Okay. So, fairness, accuracy. Is Zohran Mamdani a Communist? No. There’s no evidence he’s a communist. He is, however, a long-term member of the Democratic Socialist of America. Socialism is the economic theory behind communism. Socialism leads to the absolute breakdown of the economy. It doesn’t produce wealth, it produces want.

It doesn’t feed stomachs, it leads to empty stomachs, all in the name of an ever more powerful government and the deadly results of that ever more powerful government should be all around us. I am not saying that there could not be improvements to the situation in New York City. I promise you there could be. I’m not telling you I know exactly how they should be brought about. That’s not my job. I am telling you that it should be shocking to all Americans and absolutely challenging in worldview terms that all of this can be put together again and don’t take the Muslim part out of it.

I’ve given most of the attention to socialists, but one of the biggest questions is how does a Muslim, who after all is such an avowed enemy of Israel and won’t even absolutely repudiate the call for a global intifada? How can someone like that be elected, the mayor of a city which is supposed to be the capital more or less of the Democratic Party in the United States, and also in a city which has the second largest municipal population of Jews in all the world? It just doesn’t make sense.

However, there is other good work being done on how all of this can happen, and at least a part of it is because as has been pointed out by several others, including organizations such as the Center for Security Policy, that there is a growing political alliance between America’s democratic socialists and radical political Islam. Those two things added together, I think you can understand this is a recipe for disaster. 

Eli Lake writing at the Free Press raises what he calls the ties that bind Islamists and progressives together. He says this, “The Gaza War has reignited the strange alliance between the Western left and fanatical Islamist.” Okay. If you think that’s an overstatement, let me just say it’s very well documented and it is documented in blood as well as in print. One of the things that you like points out is that when you look at the Iranian revolution, toppling the Shah back in the 1970s, Western liberals largely sided with those who were in the Islamist movement that eventually toppled the Shah and established a theocracy and Iran.

But by an act of will, just decided that they would label these Islamist extremists as well about to become Democratic socialists. The man who became the Ayatollah Khomeini and of course, the first theocratic head of the Islamic Republic in Iran, he had made statements trying to explain himself to Western intellectuals, and this is where Eli Lake picks up, “The gambit worked. Western journalists and intellectuals swallowed the spin hole. And it wasn’t just the reporters. Andrew Young, Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations told reporters shortly after Ayatollah Khomeini return that the Ayatollah would eventually be regarded as a saint.”

I continue, “Richard Falk, Princeton professor of international law, who met with Khomeini during his exile outside of Paris, offered a particularly cringe-worthy evaluation of Khomeini. In February of 1979, after his triumphant return to Iran, he went to the pages of The New York Times to scold those who insisted that Khomeini was a reactionary and a terrorist. ‘To suppose that Ayatollah Khomeini is dissembling seems almost beyond belief. His political style is to express his real views defiantly and without apology, regardless of the consequences, he has little incentive suddenly to become devious for the sake of American public opinion. That’s the depiction of him is fanatical, reactionary, and the bear of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false. What is also encouraging is that his entourage of close advisors is uniformly composed of moderate progressive individuals.’”

Just leading to the statement that when you look at liberal response to this kind of tyranny, they try to say that it’s something else, but I think we know the story. Not one of those western liberals would be safe even stepping an inch into Iran. 

One final issue, because there’s so many worldview dimensions of this story, Mamdani also says that he wants to really replace the police. He did at one point call for abolishing the police. He’s backed off of that. But he’s now calling for basically replacing the police in response to 911 calls by a mental health agency, basically social work. And he’s pointed to some experiments in other cities where this has been tried. I will just tell you that if you’re in New York City and you need to call 911, I’m just going to guess you want a police officer to come to the door and not a social worker. Just one final thought. When it comes to Zohran Mamdani, the people of New York have no right to say they don’t know what they’re doing because you can’t hide all of this. Not even close.

The worldview conflicts are massive. We need to see them for what they are, even if people in New York refuse to do the same.