AOC Goes Beast Mode During Zohran’s Rally
NY governor endorsed Mamdani. How much will she support or stand in the way of his policy goals?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uyuzDvViUE
Tag: New York
9/11 Muslim Victims
It can be true that the greatest victims of 9/11 were those killed and their families, while at the same time, 9/11 caused people to unfairly discriminate against and harass Muslims, making them additional victims of 9/11.
Zohran Mamdani’s Socialist Housing Plan Could Crash New York’s Rickety Rental Market
“The city has the nation’s most regulated housing sector and the largest stock of government-owned and subsidized housing, and yet progressives blame its real estate troubles on the free market.
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These buildings are falling apart, with an estimated $78 billion repair backlog, including “non-functioning smoke detectors, antiquated electrical components, damaged interiors, missing child guards…deteriorated roofs, deteriorated pumps, and leaking pipes,” according to a recent report. The system for making repairs in New York public housing is rife with corruption. Heat and hot water service are routinely interrupted. The elevators, which are crucial in multistory buildings housing elderly residents, are constantly breaking down.
When public housing was created, it was assumed that the residents would be two-income, working families whose rents would cover upkeep. That plan failed as stable families opted for home-ownership. Today, only 2 percent of New York public housing households include two adults with children, and just a third of households report income from wages.
The perverse incentives of public housing help explain why the city is perennially plagued by shortages. According to data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), fully 30 percent of the city’s public housing residents are “overhoused,” meaning single adults are living in 3- or 4-bedroom apartments. About 10 percent of residents have lived in their units for more than 40 years.
This problem also applies to rent-regulated units: Artificially cheap rents mean tenants don’t vacate after their kids grow up and move out, leading to inefficient use of a limited stock.
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The “affordable housing” program championed by Mamdani will likely take the form of new private apartment buildings setting aside units for lower-income families, whose rents are subsidized by the federal government. These programs require developers to navigate extensive red tape, which adds cost and slows housing production. The system allocates units via lottery, so it’s based on luck.
Similarly, rent-regulated units in Manhattan go to tenants lucky enough to get them, or, in some cases, inherit them from their parents or grandparents. Since New York lawmakers have made it so hard to evict tenants for nonpayment of rent, landlords are incentivized to pick high-earners to inhabit this scarce resource.
As mayor, Mamdani would select the members of the Rent Guidelines Board, which sets price increases on nearly 1 million apartments. According to Census data, turnover in rent-regulated units is half that of market-rate units, which is one of the reasons the city’s overall turnover is 46 percent lower than the national average.
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thanks to a 2019 law that made New York’s rent regulation laws far more stringent. Some 200,000 rent-regulated apartments, many in need of ongoing maintenance, don’t generate enough income to cover basic operating expenses, according to Mark Willis of New York University’s Furman Center. He also noted that “such rent shortfalls are likely to continue to grow over time, potentially exponentially, jeopardizing the long-run economic sustainability of these properties.””
https://reason.com/2025/10/20/zohran-mamdanis-socialist-housing-plan-could-crash-new-yorks-rickety-rental-market/
Mamdani’s Ideas Have Been Tried Before — and Worked
“It was a no-name market in one of the city’s low-income districts — not much to look at from the outside. But inside were shelves packed with bread, lentils, cheese, oil and even basic household appliances. Most of the items were cheaper brands sourced from small manufacturers that I had never heard of — companies happy to donate goods to the city stores because they could write them off their taxes. The non-profit stores run by the municipality were only available to households whose low-income status had been verified by the city. Prices were low, and families received pre-loaded monthly loyalty cards that worked exclusively at these municipal markets. The balance wasn’t tied to wages or a bank account — it was direct public support, and it was very popular with residents of the neighborhood.
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the markets created both a safety net for the poor and a distribution channel for small producers who rarely made it into high-end supermarkets in wealthier neighborhoods.
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Across Europe, Latin America and Asia, local governments have long used targeted subsidies to ease the burden of urban living.
In Europe, subsidized housing and free health care are pretty much the norm. Berlin, London and Vienna have spent decades building and maintaining public housing that keeps rents within reach for working-class residents and young families. In Mexico City, programs like Leche Liconsa provide subsidized milk and other food staples to low-income households. Bogotá runs transit subsidies that lower fares for the poor. Seoul has built youth dormitories to help students cope with sky-high housing costs. Barcelona has experimented with rent caps and municipal housing support.
These programs aren’t revolutions. They don’t come with Karl Marx Boulevards or Rosa Luxemburg libraries. They’re pragmatic, relatively low-cost subsidies with outsized political impact — and a familiar part of modern urban governance around the world. And while Mamdani’s critics seem to suggest that such ideas are un-American, the truth is that the U.S. has its own history of subsidies and income support, from the New Deal to food stamps to Medicare and Medicaid — programs now recognized even by Republicans as critical components of public welfare.
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Mamdani’s municipal populism may or may not work in New York. But the idea behind it is hardly fringe.
Pragmatic, relatively modest redistribution that people can see and feel won’t be the end of capitalism — or America.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/10/20/mamdani-groceries-politics-turkey-00613292
Zohran Mamdani Explains His Rise
Zohran Mamdani Explains His Rise
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2xOS0qW1aA
These Voters Were Overlooked. Then They Helped Mamdani Win.
“Mamdani’s victory was a sign that South Asians, one of the fastest growing immigrant groups in the city, are beginning to assert themselves as an influential political demographic, not just making themselves heard at the polls, but becoming more politically engaged and organized at the neighborhood level. And South Asian women are front and center of that change…
Some Indian American groups in the greater New York region opposed Mamdani, running ads on trucks and airplane banners claiming the mayoral candidate had an “extremist agenda and history of hateful rhetoric” — a reflection of rising Hindu nationalism in India. And, as the writer Yashica Dutta reported before the primary, some South Asians did not seem to be on board with, or even know, the Uganda-born Mamdani, the son of a Muslim father and a Hindu mother.
Even so, in June, as primary voting maps show, those same South Asian areas in Queens and Brooklyn that had lost Democratic support and shifted towards Trump in 2024 went decisively for Mamdani.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/07/27/south-asian-voters-mamdani-win-00475700
Adams, top aides ran ‘coordinated criminal conspiracy’ at NYPD, former interim commish alleges
“Former interim NYPD commissioner Tom Donlon is suing the department, New York City Mayor Eric Adams and several former and current police executives alleging the nation’s largest police force operated as a vast criminal enterprise designed to enrich top officials.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/16/former-nypd-chief-accuses-top-city-officials-including-the-mayor-of-overseeing-coordinated-criminal-conspiracy-in-lawsuit-00455791
Zohran Mamdani’s SAT Score Revealed
“According to the materials, Mamdani scored a 2140 out of 2400 on the SAT, placing him in the 89th percentile nationwide. At the time, this was below the median SAT score for admitted students at Columbia and, given the prevailing distribution by race, well below the median SAT score for Asian students, but likely well above the median SAT score for black students—hence, the advantage of marking “black.”
The wrinkle in the story, however, is that, despite having a father on the faculty and marking black on his application, Columbia rejected Mamdani. There are two plausible theories for why this happened. First, in general, Columbia is a highly competitive university with an admissions rate of less than ten percent, which means that candidates around the median will not make the cut.
Second, there is a possibility that Mamdani’s box-checking gambit backfired. The full application includes the name and contact information for his father, Mahmood Mamdani, and his mother, Mira Nair, both of whom are public figures and neither of whom is black. The application also included a flag noting that the elder Mamdani appeared to be “affiliated with Columbia” and another line noting the family’s address in an exclusive Manhattan neighborhood. With even cursory research, an admissions officer could have seen that Mr. Mamdani was neither black, nor underprivileged”
https://christopherrufo.com/p/zohran-mamdanis-sat-score-revealed?r=254a0i&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
My City Just Voted for Socialism
“So what does Mamdani actually want to institute, if elected in November, and why would it suck so much?
Consider free childcare, which his canvassers seemed to believe would be persuasive to me as I walked past them last night with my 2-year-old. Under Mamdani, the state would provide childcare—via taxpayer-funded daycares, akin to the universal 3K program currently in place (which doesn’t always provide parents with options they actually want)—for all aged six weeks to 5 years old. But if the idea is to lighten parents’ financial load, why aren’t all forms of childcare treated the same? Why don’t stay-at-home mothers get vouchers from the state to recoup loss of income? Why don’t neighborhood babysitting collectives get help? Why is one form of childcare—administered by the state—privileged above all others? Many education savings account programs, such as the one administered by Florida, recognize that assistance from the state, if it is to exist at all, ought to be handed straight to families so that they may use it as they wish. For socialists to offer universal state-run childcare as some great liberator is frankly insulting to many mothers; in the magnificent post-work future the socialists herald, won’t many women choose to spend more time with their children, not less?
City-run grocery stores—another of Mamdani’s proposals—look like a solution in search of a problem. Food deserts—geographic zones where there aren’t any affordable, healthy options available to residents—don’t exist in New York City.
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Then there’s Mamdani’s rent freeze. He hopes to fully eradicate all rent increases for the roughly 2 million New Yorkers who are currently the beneficiaries of the city’s rent-stabilization scheme, claiming this will be a boon to the working class. What he does not realize is that decades of city-sanctioned housing market distortion is what has led to untenably high rents in the first place (plus it being too difficult to build), and that many of the beneficiaries of rent stabilization are not the poorest of the poor, but rather people whose friends or family have treated other people’s real estate as their own inheritances.
And don’t even get me started on the will-he-or-won’t-he of defunding the police. Mamdani, like all progressives swept up in the cultural fervor of George Floyd Summer, once talked big talk about defunding the police (a feminist issue, he says!), but has now motte-and-baileyed his way back to more social workers and investing in mental health services including voluntary rehabilitative programs. Other hints about what Mamdani believes: “Jails are not places where people can recover from a mental health crisis, and they often have punitive responses to mental health needs” and lots of talk about reducing stigmas and improving access to care. As with food deserts, Mamdani seems to genuinely believe that violent people in the midst of mental breakdown just don’t have access to care, and that if it is simply offered to them, they will no longer resort to terrorizing their fellow man. This strikes me as a simplistic understanding of this problem which would erase the improvements in crime rates made so far in 2025.
In order to pay for all these proposals—the grocery stores, the daycares, the corps of social workers, the fare-free buses (which 48 percent of New Yorkers fail to pay for in the first place, unfortunately)—Mamdani will simply press the button socialists love: Institute a 2 percent flat tax on those earning over $1 million. What Mamdani does not realize is that you cannot abuse the “tippy top.” It is the HENRYs (“high-earners, not rich yet”) or the “working rich” who are perhaps the best examples of meritocracy in action; they’re not the “idle rich”—those who’ve inherited their wealth or made it long ago, who are now mostly price-insensitive and untouchably well-off—and they’re frequently glued to Manhattan for industries like finance, law, and tech. Meet your tax base, Zohran. You should worry if they flee to the outlying suburbs.”
https://reason.com/2025/06/25/my-city-just-voted-for-socialism/
Why the New York Mayor’s Race Matters
“How on earth are voters in America’s largest city choosing between a 33-year-old socialist and a sex pest for mayor?
But seriously, these are the choices Democrats here have before them when they go to the polls Tuesday in the most revealing primary election since the party’s debacle last year.
There’s Mamdani, a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America by way of a noted workers’ paradise, Bowdoin, who’s calling for city-owned grocery stores and offending the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by trying to rationalize calls to “globalize the intifada.”
Then there’s former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who was forced out of office less than four years ago after multiple women accused him of sexual harassment, now says he regrets resigning and has expressed little contrition about his personal conduct or his deadly mishandling of Covid-19.
Cuomo is despised by much of the city, including some of his biggest benefactors, and is the favorite to win.
Oh, and if either Mamdani or Cuomo falls short in New York’s ranked-choice Democratic primary, each already has secured a separate ballot line in the general election; if they win, they’ll get to use it in addition to the Democratic party line, and if they lose, they’ll still get the chance to run as independents. Neither ruled out remaining in the race when I asked them if they’d run on a third-party line this fall.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/06/22/new-york-mayor-race-cuomo-mamdani-column-00416423