The Frightening Dream House of Zoran Mamdani

Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness

After his first-place win in the New York City mayoral primaries, Zohran Mamdani is furiously denying everything that he once glibly thought was cutting-edge and cool.

So, like a good postmodern relativist, Mamdani now claims he didn’t really mean that violence was merely a “construct.”

I suppose Mamdani asked Jewish New Yorkers—the target of 44 percent of all hate crimes in the city—and discovered that their concussions and blood were all too real.

As a good soldier in the ranks of Black Lives Matter, Mamdani now insists he did not trash the police and advocate defunding them. Neither did he really, really mean to claim falsely he was African-American when he applied to college nor did really, really mean to do a video mocking the Jewish holiday of Hannukah.

Mamdani once thought it was cool to boast about defunding the police when he was an edgy, rising, left-wing community activist.

But then it was smarter to play it down as a candidate. And now it is essential to lie and deny it as a front-runner.

As a good communist, Mamdani echoed Karl Marx by bragging about his ultimate agenda: “the end goal of seizing the means of production.”

But whose “means of production” would Mamdani start seizing?

Trump Tower? Tesla dealerships? Amazon warehouses?

Mamdani warns us, “I don’t think that we should have billionaires, frankly.”

Then, please tell us, how would you get rid of them?

Confiscate their money? Tax them at a 99 percent rate?

Maybe dox them and let the public handle the rest?

Mamdani brags he would “globalize the intifada.”

Given that most define the intifada (“shaking off”) as the two violent Palestinian waves of terrorism against Israel, what then does Mamdani mean by globalizing it?

Is the violence at universities like Columbia insufficient without escalating to the old PLO or current Hamas levels?

Mamdani said that, as mayor, he would arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he came to New York City.

But what crime would Netanyahu be guilty of?

Trying to stop another Hamas October 7 massacre of Jewish civilians?

Attempting to prevent the Iranians from getting a nuclear bomb and thereby fulfilling their daily promise of destroying Israel?

If Mamdani believes the democratically elected Netanyahu deserves to be jailed, then would he similarly arrest a visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping for putting a million Uyghurs in labor camps?

How about arresting Venezuelan communist dictator Nicolas Maduro, who has “disappeared” some 20,000 of his own people?

How about Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, whose government executes homosexuals?

Or is it just Jewish leaders who would be subject to Mamdani’s warrants?

Mamdani promises to target “richer” and “whiter” neighborhoods for higher taxes.

But in all analyses of median family household income, so-called whites rank far from the top at a distant eighth.

Who, on average, ranks as the richest ethnic group in America?

Asian immigrants of Indian ancestry—like Mamdani and his own family.

So, why didn’t the supposedly erudite Mamdani say he was going after the statistically “richest” group in the nation for his tax hikes—like Indian-American households?

Or was race more important than income in Mamdani’s Marxist view of collective enemies?

Mamdani touts free transportation, rent control, and state-owned grocery stores as if they were new ideas. But they are stale, old-fashioned policies that have failed everywhere from the Soviet Union to Castro’s Cuba—and often here in blue-state university cities.

Mamdani reflects a pattern of affluent, left-wing, and highly educated immigrants from impoverished countries.

Barack Obama’s father, Kamala Harris’s father, and Rep. Ilhan Omar’s parents fled the poverty, violence, and corruption of their homeland only to find prosperity, even affluence, amid the safety and the rule of law in the United States.

They and their American-born children were often the recipients of generous government scholarships and favorable preferences in admissions, hiring, and career advancements under affirmative action and diversity/equity/inclusion protocols.

But instead of appreciating the unique security and magnanimity of their adopted country, they so often embraced boilerplate invective against America as an unkind, unfair, and unequal place.

For Obama, America needed to be “fundamentally transformed.” For Omar, her adopted homeland was one of the “worst” countries, and she added it had become even worse than the Somaliland dictatorship she fled.

For Mamdani, whose parents rank in the top one percent of income and educational brackets, the America his family sought as a refuge must be transformed into one of the socialist-communist nations of the sort that have failed everywhere.

The glib Mamdani has canned answers for all of his past embarrassments—except one.

Why would he wish to turn New York City into a social basket-case like Uganda, which his now-rich parents fled to reach America in the first place?