Like any conservative, I'm horrified to see what New York City has chosen as its top candidate in its primary.
Slick-talking, endlessly cheerful, communist-as-they-come Ugandan-born Zohran Mamdani defeated a weak slate of candidates and now heads to the runoff in a largely one-party city at the end of the year. Low turnout, white trust-fund babies, and the Asian achiever vote are reportedly responsible for the outcome.
Overwhelming majority of the NYC Asians voted for Mamdani—namely Chinese and Indians.
— Xi Van Fleet (@XVanFleet) June 25, 2025
It’s so sad that so many Chinese still prefer socialism/communism after fleeing China as they still believe in free handouts from the government ???? pic.twitter.com/FlklML3qJ9
Other ethnics, immigrants, and blacks stayed away. The New York Times has a pretty good piece about how blacks avoided him like a bad smell:
For years, the conventional wisdom in New York among strategists and candidates alike has been that in any Democratic primary, the road to victory runs through Black communities.
Then came Zohran Mamdani.
In the race that culminated on Tuesday, Mr. Mamdani forged a new multiracial political coalition to become the likely Democratic nominee for mayor and topple Andrew M. Cuomo, the former governor, who had far more name recognition, financial firepower — and political baggage.
And Mr. Mamdani did so even as he lost many of New York City’s most solidly Black neighborhoods. A New York Times analysis of the results shows that Mr. Cuomo dominated in precincts where at least 70 percent of residents are Black, more than doubling Mr. Mamdani’s support, 59 percent to 26 percent.
So how do we stop Zohran Mamdani from becoming mayor of New York City?
— Peter B (@realpeteyb123) June 25, 2025
Let me tell you how.
I’m born and raised in NYC. Immigrant family from Greece. Nobody busted their ass harder than Greek Americans in this city, built diners, built neighborhoods, built entire communities… pic.twitter.com/8SVrPsSQBF
The dynamic seemed to resemble London's inexplicable decision to vote for a far-left Muslim mayor, after a string of other lousy white leftists in the same position. Or perhaps Chile's bad decision to elect far-left student protest leader Gabriel Boric, whom he physically resembles.
For whites on the left, he had the appeal of the "exotic" as Chris Rufo notes in this excellent tweet-piece here:
The thing about Zohran Mamdani is that he is not an Islamist, but a regime leftist who understands that the symbols of the exotic Other are an extremely valuable currency within the world of the radical Left. He was able to very skillfully combine the outward appearance of the…
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) June 25, 2025
But whether he intends to or not, what he will do is turn New York into a socialist disaster area, a third-world hellhole, having called for defunding the police, rent control, government-owned groceries, free child care, pro-Hamas stances of all kinds, and no doubt, open borders.
Now that Zohran Mamdani is the projected winner, I feel it necessary to remind everyone who is about to be the next Mayor of the biggest city in America:
— Based Bandita (@MissVega8888) June 25, 2025
- Wants to increase taxes on already struggling businesses to pay for his plans
- Wants to make public transportation… pic.twitter.com/pB2wcCt1vg
Being a socialist who has never run anything, his potential for fiscal mismanagement is off the charts.
Wasn't Bill DeBlasio enough? It seems they want worse than Bill DeBlasio with this complete idiot.
Some have viewed him through the lens of a crazed Islamist but I don't think that's what's going on here. He's more comparable to a third-world intellectual of the '60s variety -- Eric Hoffer and V.S. Naipaul knew all about these characters and wrote extensively about their attitudes and capacities for ruining everything they touch.
Born in Kampala of ethnic Indian parents, and then coming to the states to live the life of academic elites, he's a hothouse flower of third world ideologies and intellectual diseases, untouched by the tempering hands of experience or exposure to conservative Americans, or probably much of any Americans. Guys like Sukarno, Idi Amin, Nehru, Nasser, Saddam, Gadhafi, Mobuto, Julius Nyerere, Trujillo and certainly Castro, with Hugo Chavez bringing up the rear in this sequence were all the same way. They fist-waved at the U.S. they created intensely bureaucratic states ruled by fourth-world intellectuals convinced that they knew what was best for the masses with hundreds of thousands of laws and regulations, and left their nations in ruins, a sad effect that in many has lasted to this day.
Elizabeth MacDonald points out his basic background:
Socialist Zohran Mamdani and his parents are in the affluent 1% w a net worth estimated at least $5M, they got wealthy off of capitalism while his academic father, Mahmood Mamdani, got rich pushing Marxist communism, and Mamdani campaigns in working class identities. The father… pic.twitter.com/KEAWsLwPHI
— Elizabeth MacDonald (@LizMacDonaldFOX) June 26, 2025
Having only been a U.S. citizen for the past seven years, his mom explained that his roots in the U.S. were not deep, and his loyalties were nonexistent:
Zohran Mamdani's mother on her son:
— captive dreamer (@avaricum777) June 25, 2025
"He is not an American at all. He was born in Uganda, raised between India and America. He is at home in many places. He thinks of himself as a Ugandan and as an Indian" pic.twitter.com/mSCm8mvTXy
Rep. Ilhan Omar would understaned well. The Rufo "exotic" claim explains the both of them. Apparently they are a trend -- immigrants who don't really immigrate, let alone integrate or assimilate, and the result is the same corruption, poverty, unrest, snitch culture and low social trust that we see in places like Somalia and in Uganda's past.
In the rubble of 9/11, with the smoke still smoldering in lower Manhattan, I worked for Forbes as a reporter. I took a train across the river to New Jersey and wrote about what the third world was like based on interviews with local people, writing the first paragraphs to this piece here:
A good way to find out what's wrong with the economies of the Middle East is to go to Jersey City, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from the World Trade Center. There you'll find plenty of Middle Easterners who planted their entrepreneurial seeds in turf a lot more fertile than that found back home.
"All it takes is $150 here to make a corporation, a couple of thousand to rent office space and a couple of thousand for bond. In Egypt, it costs half a million Egyptian pounds, $150,000, for a license to begin the same business," he says. Forget about renting an office. Fifty-year-old rent controls have dried up the market. "Nobody wants to rent an office to someone for $200 a year," Nour says. "So if you want to start a business, you have to buy a building." Or an apartment.
There's more, of course. An exporter's letter of credit requires a 100% deposit in Egypt. In the U.S. it is 10%. You want a telephone line quickly? That will cost you $700 in bribes. Taxes? A nightmare, says Nour. "If you make $1 million a year in your business, the government will say that you made $5 million. The burden is on you to prove you didn't."
The catalog of woes is much longer, but you get the picture: lots of red tape and corruption; plenty of dormant capital and not enough access to it. And this is Egypt, which has one of the more reform-minded governments in the region.
Plenty of that will start showing up in New York now.
What's more, rent control will ensure that the housing stock will go away, or become Fort Apache, which has already happened to New York, dating from the '60s and '70s. Rubble and waste like only the third world can produce will be the outcome of those ideas.
Government-owned groceries? Ask a Venezuelan how Mercal worked out for them. Hugo Chavez set up a network of government-run stores, shortages followed, and it wasn't long before bureaucrats within them were stamping citizens' bellies with purple ink to mark down who got the chicken meat amid rationing if there was any chicken meat at all. Government mismanagement and corruption quickly engulfed the enterprise and within a few years imported food (the once-productive farms thus expropriated were not producing anything) was rotting on the docks -- state supplier Pudreval soon became known as Putreval, meaning exactly what it sounds like.
As with all socialist regimes, people fled. That is part of why we have such a surge in illegal migrants. The intellectuals among them would like to impose their third-world ways on Americans, as they think they know what's good for us so much better than we do, and it doesn't help that, as Hoffer noted, they all have a thirst for power.
The net result is the transposition of the third world and its bureaucratic values and wasteful spending and NGO culture onto a great American city, brought on by imported third world intellectuals and white leftists with a hankering for the exotic. This guy will make New York just like India or Uganda were a few decades ago, as if to equalize the misery and make America a little less attractive to all the world's places suffering under socialism.
What a horrible picture that will be when New York drinks from that cup, a great American city turned into a third world hellhole. It will if voters don't get together and pick someone, anyone, who won't be Mamdani or have his hideous values, I hope they can avoid this coming disaster because it can only end in ruin.
Image: Wikimedia Commons // public domain