Zohran Mamdani is the Mayor-Elect in New York City. Most of his critics dismiss him as a clown. He has promised things he cannot deliver. He has no idea how to run a city. He will crash and burn and be exposed as a fraud.
These critics miss the point. If Mamdani is a clown, he is most definitely of the scary variety. He said what he needed to say to get elected. Now, he will show his real face, and it will be terrifying.
Mamdani is a Communist. His party considers the United States a “prison” created by racists and “slavers”. Its objective, and Mamdani’s as well, is to destroy the existing political, economic, and social order. The new mayor is not planning on minor adjustments to the status quo. He is planning on complete, destructive revolution.
What can you expect from Mamdani? His announced policies are terrifying. He wants to:
Arrest the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Decommodify” housing, meaning he wants the City to own all housing, including what are now private residences,s and create communes in which people will live.
Seize vacant properties and make them homeless housing.
“End repression of demonstrators” and disband the SRG [the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group].
Replace police with social workers who will focus on the pain and suffering of criminals rather than the crimes they commit.
Slash police funding. Cut police overtime.
Take control of the “means of production”. Interpret that as you will.
Freeze rent.
Shift property taxes to “richer and whiter neighborhoods”.
As bad as all this is, though, a focus exclusively on what Mamdani intends to do via open, “legal” means misses the point. Lenin did not implement his Communist agenda by working through the existing Russian legal code. He was a revolutionary. He staged a revolution. The end justified the means.
Mamdani founded a chapter of the Students for Justice for Palestine (SJP), which is effectively the political wing of Hamas in the United States. He is a Marxist. He belongs to a party, the DSA, which says:
“DSA stands for the total dissolution of the United States empire.”
“The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is dedicated to a world free of exploitation and oppression, leading to the liberation of all people from capitalism and imperialism.”
“The U.S. is a prison house of nations founded on genocide, built by slavery, maintained by exploitation, and expanded through conquest.”
Do not expect that a man who ascribes to these views will then confine himself to seeking to achieve his objectives by working within the confines of a system “founded on genocide”.
Tenants’ organizations, likely styled as communes, will seize private residential and commercial property and declare themselves to be operating collectively and to have abolished private property. Mamdani will not oppose them. He will stand with them. They will be acting in accordance with his announced policies.
Other “communes” will announce they will no longer allow the police to operate within their communities and that they will police themselves. This will be in line with what we have already seen in “autonomous” zones around the country. Mamdani will not send the police against the people. He will celebrate those who have escaped from the “prison house of nations”.
SJP and other radical organizations will take control of college campuses, attack “Zionists,” and appropriate private property. Mamdani will not send in the police to clear them out and restore order. He will likely appear alongside them and cheer them on.
New Yorkers will wake up far too late and realize that the rule of law no longer exists, and the revolution has teeth.
When you read history, you realize there are hinge points at which everything changes very rapidly. In retrospect, those hinge points are obvious. They are not necessarily so at the time. Even active participants in critical developments fail to comprehend fully what is happening.
As the Roman Republic slid into the abyss and centuries of popular government were lost forever, many of the key figures in Rome still thought they were seeing only transitory problems. They assumed the ship would right itself and all would return to normal. The storm would pass.
Only when it was too late did the Romans realize that the republic was lost and that with it had gone their freedoms. When that understanding came to Cato, he committed suicide rather than face the future he knew lay ahead.
We stand at another hinge point in history today, and again, we see far too many people failing to understand what is happening. There is an ongoing Marxist Revolution in America. It just captured our largest city.
Mamdani means what he says. The rules no longer apply. Welcome to the revolution.
AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey