Getting to know Mamdani – a bit late in the game
Of course, lots of people would agree with Mamdani’s remark here, and they’ll be voting for him in November:
ZOHRAN MAMDANI: “I don't think that we should have billionaires.” pic.twitter.com/optpzkp28w
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) June 29, 2025
That’s instructive in so many ways. If you watch it, you’ll learn how smooth and smiley and downright pleasant Mamdani sounds. He just wants less inequality, that’s all, and he’ll work with everyone in New York to make the place more fair. It sounds good to a lot of people who don’t think much beyond the happy vision. Who really needs a billion dollars, anyway? Mamdani is just imagining a world in which billionaires don’t exist, but he doesn’t explain how that would occur or what the consequences would be.
We can guess. The methods that come to mind are to confiscate the money of anyone earning over a certain amount, either through an astronomical tax rate or some other method; or cap salaries and investments. The kind of “fairness” he’s talking about can only be accomplished through income redistribution and government control. Government decides how much people “should” earn. The effect this would have is that, on a local level, the rich would move away – and take their job creation with them. Or they’d just stop striving.
Kipling said something of the sort long ago:
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”
I don’t know what Mamdani would have the power to actually do about it if he did become New York’s next mayor. But it’s just one of many worrisome statements of his.
He’s certainly got the attention of the press and pundits, and there’s a lot of analysis since last Tuesday of just who voted for him to account for his win. Here’s one article on the subject:
Less than 30% of Democrats voted in the mayoral primary. Of those, supposedly, 43.5% voted for Mamdani. So some 12.9% of New York Democrats voted for Mamdani.
56% of registered voters in the city are Democrats so some 7.2% of city residents voted for him. …
Mamdani’s base isn’t New Yorkers, it’s a coalition of white hipsters and Muslim immigrants, most of them weren’t even in the city during 9/11, like Mamdani, have no roots in the city, and no connection to its history. The quintessential New Yorker, as envisioned by a thousand Hollywood movies, TV shows and Broadway musicals, still exists, but is harder to find than ever. The city of those movies and shows can be glimpsed as a palimpsest under layers of chain stores, illegal migrants, social justice projects and vegan eateries before it vanishes again in the rain.
What happened to New York is what happened to legendary cities across the country and around the world, from Philly to London, which is that the revival of the 90s was the final act in driving out its working class and middle class population. Rents soared until the only young people who could afford to live there were white hipsters and third world immigrants.
And their politics became based on coalitions between the hipsters and the new arrivals. In New York City, as in London, it produced a Jihadist coalition that paved the way for a Muslim mayor.
Interesting observations. But unless a decent alternative is presented to the voters, and unless the opposition becomes focused on just a single candidate, Mamdani will probably win because his supporters are passionately involved. There’s apathy and disarray on the other side, and that’s not good.
There’s a certain period of time between when his election seems certain and, after he takes office he gets things arranged his way. In that period, many of his victims will be gone.
His supporters will shriek “GREEDY” at the backs of those fleeing. Almost as good as winning.
Will U Haul actually pay people to drive their trucks back to NYC and California?
Mamdani doesn’t understand human nature, or reality either. Billionaires can afford an army of tax accountants and lawyers to shield their money from people like Mamdani, or as a last resort they can simply move away. As is always the case the people who Mamdani will end up socking it to are small business owners and the middle class. And for those AWFLs who think Mamdani’s policies won’t hurt them, only other people, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
The pendulum is still swinging to the “left.”
————
Neat image!
If Cuomo, Adams, and Sliwa GENUINELY care about NYC, they would work together to ensure that someone can mount a decent battle against Mamdani in the election. So someone NORMAL-ish serves as Mayor. I did read that despite news to the contrary, Cuomo did NOT concede, so the final outcome really won’t be known until July. Hope springs eternal.
The grocery stores in the Soviet Union worked soooooo well. (Sarcasm, in case you didn’t get it.)
Anybody who knows something knows city-run anything is a recipe for disaster. New Yawkers have been repeatedly warned. Leave. Now.
Of course he does his parents were driven out of uganda by idi amin father came back under museveni
Zohran Mamdani’s Socialist Policies Would Put The Final Nail In New York’s Coffin
Spoken by someone who has never gotten a punch in the face. No one who has gotten a punch in the face believes that punch in the face was a “social construct.”
That “violence is a social construct” quote helps explain why he got the vote in the white, educated areas: those who have been “educated” to believe that “social construct” isn’t just another example of gobbletygook.
I am reminded of an Orwell quote:
NB, measured as a ratio of of nominal personal income per capita, a billionaire in our own time occupies the same position in society as someone with $60 million in 1970 or someone with $8.5 million in 1929.
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Influence is correlated with wealth, but not identified with it. The petty rich are seldom influential. They navigate bureaucratic institutions and legal systems more adroitly than does an ordinary person, but no better than the broader professional-managerial bourgeoisie.
==
You should take little interest in wealthy people unless their wealth was acquired by means that are socially unsalutary or their wealth is being used for nefarious purposes. In regard to the former, you should hunt for them truffles in the following sectors: organized crime, law, finance, media. Here there and the next place you have compliant boards who approve looting the enterprise to benefit the CEO and his camarilla. As for nefarious purposes, look to the media and to the tech barons so intent on manipulating public opinion at the behest of the security state. Mandani cares nothing about that.
==
Please note also Mandani’s hostility to law enforcement. This does not spring from any interest in ‘equality’, but from the notion that deplorables of the sort who go into the military and the police are of an inferior stratum and cannot properly exercise authority over their social superiors among the Democratic Party’s mascot groups.
==
Note also that Mandani cares nothing for actions toward improving the living standards of impecunious wage-earners and their elderly and disabled relatives. He’s only interested in augmenting the capacity of politicians to allocate benefits. ‘Affordable housing’ is awardable housing.
miguel cervantes
Ironic that the son of someone who was driven out of Uganda for being a “settler” is hostile to the “settlers” in Israel.
Ah yes, The Gods of Copybook Headings. It is to conservatism what John Lennon’s Imagine is to left wing fantasy.
https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_copybook.htm
It also embodies a fundamental problem conservatism and conservatives have, and this is especially true of social conservatism. That problem is that our message really is fundamentally a bit depressing and unpleasant, at least at first pass.
A true conservative is talking about how things are, as opposed to how things should be or we wish them to be.
Which in turn means that our message really does tend to come across as ‘eat your vegetables’. ‘No, you can’t.’ ‘No, you can’t have freedom without weapons’. ‘No, you can’t ‘cure’ criminals.’ ‘You have to work to live.’ Etc.
We see this dichotomy even in the divide between conservatives and libertarians. I noticed years ago that libertarians, even very smart, sharp ones like Glenn Reynolds, loved to quote The Gods of Copybook Headings, but it would usually be the segments about weapons and economics. The libertarians tended to skip over this one:
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”
Of course, these days Glenn Reynolds is a lot less dreamy about his libertarianism, and sounds more socially conservative than he did 20 years ago. He himself will note that he is no longer as enthusiastic about the information tech revolution precisely because he’s seen the problems emerge predictably precisely because of human nature.
But that’s why socialism/’free love’/etc. keep rebounding over and over and over, no matter how many times they fail, often bloodily. They sound good. They appeal to deep human desires that real life can never fulfill. Conservatives (the real kind, not just the business advocates who sometimes get called that) are inevitably the killjoys who have to keep saying “No, you can’t. Not ever.”
The details change, of course. But the underlying dynamic is eternal.
Ah,… fairness.
The champions of the left all say that they want the rich to “pay their fair share.” But they never say how much, or what percentage that is. Because the reality is that they want to take as much as they possibly can without causing some kind of rebellion.
The second reality that the smart and knowledgeable politicians understand is that the extremely wealthy rarely, if ever, pay these extraordinarily high tax rates, for a variety of reasons. One reason is that usually a successful pol has at least one or more of these people funding them. So the high tax burden usually falls on the middle to upper middle class.
Sgt. Joe Friday covers another of those reasons.
Influence is correlated with wealth, but not identified with it. The petty rich are seldom influential. They navigate bureaucratic institutions and legal systems more adroitly than does an ordinary person, but no better than the broader professional-managerial bourgeoisie. — Art Deco
Mostly true, but with a caveat. At the very high end, personal wealth usually correlates with what I call indirect wealth, that is, wealth that is not legally, officially owned by the person, but still effectively at his or her direction. Art Deco touched on this later in his post, about the boards and so forth.
In our society right now, so much wealth is concentrated in a very small segment of the population that it seriously distorts our politics and society. That wealth is often not personal property. It often takes the form of corporate money, or other forms where it is not specifically owned by but still effectively controlled by a relatively tiny group.
Why do you think it’s so desperately hard to reduce immigration? Why do various illegal immigrant amnesty bills keep reappearing, even though it has long since been demonstrated that that are electoral poison? Why did Congress keep trying, over and over, to pass more ‘free trade’ bills, even though the base of both parties had come to loathe them?
Because a small but super-influential, because super-wealthy, group wanted them badly, and used their power and influence to keep pressing them. The first attempt by GWB at immigration amnesty cost the GOP Congress is 2006. He and the GOP leadership in Congress tried twice more, and every time the result was a rebellion by the GOP base. It helped elect Obama in 2008.
Of course Obama and the Dems wanted the same thing, but Obama was at least politically adept enough to know that they dared not pass it with just Democrat votes, because the backlash would destroy them in the next election. That’s why they didn’t pass amnesty between 2008 and 2010, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid knew they needed GOP votes for cover.
But eventually they tried again, in 2013, after the GOP captured the House in 2010. In a bipartisan effort, the ‘gang of 8’ immigration amnesty. It passed with lots of votes in the Senate, went to the House, and if it had passed Obama’s signature was a given. But yet again, the GOP rank and file rebelled, they hated it, and it cost the GOP House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor, his seat in a GOP primary that year. That was the first time a majority leader had been turfed out by his own party in about a century. After that the bill collapsed.
But they tried again during the first Trump Administration, in a pretended rebellion against Paul Ryan (who was actually encouraging it), and they tried to bury amnesty provisions in other bills, and to a lesser extent that’s still happening, even though the toxic nature of it is obvious now.
It also destroyed Marco Rubio’s presidential ambitions, at least for that time. He had been one of the GOP Senators who sponsored that bill. Now as it happened, Rubio entered Congress as a TEA Party favorite, but in a New Hampshire straw poll in 2015, Rubio came in eighth out of eight options for GOP voters in 2016. Dead last. The Gang Of 8 effort had destroyed his conservative support, and that haunted him all through the next several years. I said at the time in 2016 that whenever Rubio was on a screen running for President, the chyron might as well have been flashing: “GANG OF EIGHT” above his head, as far as GOP voters were concerned.
(Rubio has been one of the big pleasant surprises of the second Trump Administration, he may be finally rebuilding his long-term prospects. If he is, he should be desperately grateful to Trump for the opportunity.)
Ted Cruz surprised everyone when he announced he was running for President in 2016, because the announcement was greeted with laughter. But he raised 30 million dollars in two days, and people’s heads were spinning because he seemed to be building momentum in the pre-primary period a fast clip.
Then he coauthored an op-ed in the NYT with Paul Ryan supporting giving Obama full trade negotiation authority. His momentum suddenly fell apart and that created the opening the Donald stepped into.
The problem is that the GOP big donors, and the GOP voters, increasingly despise each other. The corporate class can and do use their vast wealth to keep pushing priorities and goals that are anathema to MAGA. Even Elon Musk and MAGA find themselves at odds over many issues.
(MAGA and working class Dems actually agree on quite a bit.)
The problem for the corporate donors is that while they control huge wealth, they are a tiny group, and vastly outnumbered. Whether they realize it or not, they are dicing with danger by alienating the general population. The rise of people like Mamdani is a red flag early warning signal, but I don’t know if they’re aware enough to comprehend it.
Bravo to Art Deco @ 12:21PM. Well stated.
Strip him and his vile mother of their citizenship and send them back to Uganda or South Africa or the Laurentian Abyss.
What I find hilarious is Muslims calling other people occupiers. Any land outside central Saudi Arabia that is Muslim is land taken by conquest.
Plutocrats versus plebeians is hardly an unfamiliar power dynamic throughout history I guess. In modern times what’s changed is the methods of obfuscating infuence with wealth as well as true intentions. But the base desires of creating a perminent serf class of gormless immigrants who are completely dependent on the largess of a sort of pseudo-nobility under the guise of fairness sure feels like a pretty familiar tale. Not to mention the pseudo-nobilites’ delusion of doing it all for these peasent’s own good. It’s tiresome and depressing.
HC68,
Agree. I learned recently that the ’65 immigration bill was unpopular with the public (by a margin of about 55-25, IIRC), so they sent Teddy Kennedy out so sell it, figuring that the brother of the recently slain president would make it more palatable to the public. I think that Hart and Celler also saw the wet-behind-the-ears junior senator as gullible, and one that could be easily rolled, so they did.
So yes, immigration is just one example of something that powerful interests want, the public be damned.
I’m old enough to recall that just about every populist revolt of the last 50 years has been blunted by those powerful interests. Prop. 187? Torpedoed by a federal court judge. Props. 209 and 227? The UC system ditched any kind of objective admissions standards in favor of “holistic” admissions. Bilingual education (in reality, native language instruction with just enough English thrown in to skirt the intent of the law) is still taking place. Prop. 13 (property tax relief) passed but the Democrats hate it and have been trying to undo it since 1978.
Hmm.. It looks like there were significant voting shenanigans just a few days before the elections. The Democrats just can’t help themselves. Will they investigate?
https://www.frontpagemag.com/tens-of-thousands-of-new-voters-registered-to-vote-for-mamdani/
Enablers of Mamdani: America’s Universities
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/74475.html
A great realignment is underway. States like New York, Illinois and California are sinking and Florida, Texas and North Carolina are rising. As a native and current New Yorker I find it painful but it’s natural and perhaps one day it will be time for renewal.
But not any time soon.
Interesting and informative series of comments today, for which thanks. **
In a nutshell, it would seem that corruption and dishonesty are endemic—which, of course is well known and brings Reagan’s “trust but verify” to the fore.
Nonetheless, in the annals of American government it would seem that there is corruption…and then there is…“Biden”….
“…Despite Warnings, Biden’s Energy Department Disbursed $42 Billion in Its Final Hours.”—
https://instapundit.com/729369/
** E.g., in what other blog can one learn so much about skunks…and bees?
Mamdani reminds me quite a bit of Ilhan Omar, same thing. A pleasant, attractive, friendly-looking person with a nice smile. This will carry a politician a long way. Mamdani is slick, smart with keeping his message simple and upbeat – but he’s poison.
I’ve read a couple of articles on the dark money side of his campaign – this will probably tie in with the story of voter registration swarms just before the vote was taken. There’s big money financing this, and it’s from where you would expect: Socialist and Communist organizations.
So this is a phenomenon, yes, but not a grass roots one, and not a coincidental, fabulist rave that came out of nowhere. It’s not a case of Mamdani generating instant excitement among a group of young voters. This is a crafted campaign.
Will he win? If he wins, will he govern well? I think it’s doubtful.
But I am also mindful that history’s Socialist/Communist monsters often came from upper middle-class, well-educated families, and built their following by preaching similar ‘it should all be free’ platitudes, as their preferred way to steer the populace to their inevitable catastrophes.
Omar is not even “pleasant”, she is an up-front nasty anti-American and antisemitic bigot. Of course all leftists are nasty, hiding a shiv behind their back when they don’t flash it outright but some like Mandummi and BO at least try to make a pretense of cordiality occasionally.
So, what is the mystery?
Mamdani is a shoo-in to be the next mayor and given that the NYC city council is very leftist progressive / socialist, he will be able to implement his leftist agenda. And he can rely on the NY Times to support his agenda as well as the moneyed folks who reside on the upper west side of Manhattan.
And the denizens of NYC will just suck it up and bear it; more crime, higher taxes, more street people, more rules, more regulations, more abandoned buildings, etc. etc.
NYC folks will complain, but that is pretty much all they will do.
And when it comes time for him to be re-elected after his first term, NYC folks will re-elect him as mayor, just like the good folks of Chicago, LA , Seattle, Portland, Detroit, Baltimore, etc., keep electing lefties to destroy what remains of their cities.
Likewise
https://m.piqsuite.com/reuters/over-170-charities-call-for-end-to-deadly-new-gaza-aid-distribution-system-2025-07-01-11-42-39
They are ghuls or djinns pick your poison
https://thespectator.com/topic/education-zohran-mamdani-bowdoin/
Putting aside his ridiculous politics and vile religion, Mamdani has a certain feminine appeal. His voice is almost that of a soothing woman, high in timbre and without an ounce of threatening male force. He’s a perfect example of a significant segment of his parasitic generation – a get-even, worthless lout ruled by envy. The smile belies pure evil.