The New York Times’ Jeffery C. Mays set out on Saturday to rehabilitate Zohran Mamdani’s image. Mamdani is the socialist front-runner for New York City’s mayoral race. Mays’ job was to make socialism sound respectable — even harmless.
According to Mays, it is “derogatory” to call Mamdani a socialist — even though that is what Mamdani is. If anything, this piece is a tacit admission that socialism is bad — why else would Mays be working so hard to distance Mamdani from it? The answer is simple: Mays, a propagandist working for a propaganda outlet, is trying to desensitize Americans to socialism.
“He is a democratic socialist, which means his beliefs are similar to those of socialists but not exactly the same,” Mays assured readers, before conceding: “He is a member of both the national Democratic Socialists of America and its local New York City chapter.”
Don’t worry — Mays insists — because “The closest thing Mr. Mamdani gets to socialism is in his belief in treating people more equitably.”
But that’s not true (as most propaganda is false).
Mamdani has made it perfectly clear his problem with capitalism isn’t about a lack of equity, but the very idea of private property.
Back in 2020, while campaigning for state assembly, Mamdani endorsed the forcible seizure of privately owned luxury condos, arguing they should be redistributed to house the homeless. Mamdani has also called for “moving away from the status quo in which most people access housing by purchasing it on the market and toward a future where we guarantee high quality housing to all as a human right.”
In a separate instance, Mamdani said he’d be in favor of the “abolition of private property.”
These are the positions of a Marxist revolutionary. Mays and The Times pretend otherwise, of course, insisting Mamdani is just a well-meaning idealist who wants free and fast buses. But that is the purpose of propaganda — deliberately whitewashing extremism until people stop recognizing it as extreme.
But Americans must recognize it. Because freedom and property go hand in hand. If you can’t own your home, your money, or your work, then you’re not really free. That is why the Founders understood property to be a natural right.
All people are born with certain natural rights that are pre-political — grounded in reason and nature. These rights include life, liberty and property — none of which come from government but rather precede it.
When men recognize these rights, they form a social compact to establish a government whose purpose is to protect those rights — not take away rights at its discretion.
James Madison argued in his 1792 essay Property that a government ceases to be just the moment it violates “the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty” through “arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest.” In other words, redistribution by force is not merely bad policy — it is the mark of a government that has broken the social compact.
The same principle was affirmed in Vanhorne’s Lessee v. Dorrance (1795), one of the earliest constitutional decisions in U.S. history, which declared that “no man would become a member of a community, in which he could not enjoy the fruits of his honest labor and industry.”
In other words, no republic can survive once property is up for grabs by whoever wins the next election.
That’s what makes Mamdani disqualified to govern in America, and that’s what makes The New York Times so dangerous. Not only is The Times laundering socialism under a softer label of “democratic socialism” (as if that’s any better) but it’s attempting to move the goalposts of what’s considered legitimate in American politics.
Natural rights aren’t up for debate. They aren’t up for a vote. And if someone tells you they are, then that person is un-American and unfit to hold office. And if a newspaper tries to defend those un-American principles, they’re probably propagandists for a radical movement seeking to destroy America. Only someone intent on advancing socialism would write such an obvious defense of it.