Socialists Never Learn

Zohran Kwame Mamdani — the 33-year-old Ugandan-born son of a professor and movie director who, after a brief stint as a rapper, recently won New York City’s mayoral Democratic primary race — proudly describes himself as a “democratic socialist,” with a policy platform that includes promises of government-run grocery stores, rent controls, efficient public transportation and seizing “the means of production.”

That’s an actual quote.

Throw in some drama-kid-style street performances — including eating rice with his hands to apparently demonstrate his immigrant roots, despite having previously been photographed eating a burrito on a subway with a fork — and a dose of Islamist antisemitism — Mamdani is supported by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and refused to condemn Hamas for its Oct. 7 pogrom, refused to support legislation regarding Holocaust remembrance and cheered on “global intifada” while likening Israelis to Nazis — and you’ve got the perfect candidate for the new American left. Mamdani is young, an immigrant, Muslim, overtly radical and talented on social media. If he was a lesbian, they would nominate him for president.

But as New York City stands on the brink of electing a jihadi socialist who makes Bill de Blasio look like Rudy Giuliani, there are many conservatives who are almost reveling in the sense of preemptive schadenfreude. New Yorkers made their bed, we say, so let’s sit back and watch them sell it for bread. Maybe if we let New York circle the drain to cries of “Free Palestine” and “Eat the rich,” people will learn that socialism is an immoral, doomed and deadly ideology that brings nothing but failure and misery.

That would make perfect sense if people were rational. But they’re not.

This is certainly true for voters who are ushering in their own economic and cultural suicide by supporting someone who cheers on the same form of terrorism that delivered the darkest day in New York City’s history: Sept. 11, 2001.

When Mamdani inevitably fails, and his city fails, what will happen? Well, what happened when Portland fell, or Seattle or Chicago or Los Angeles? Gavin Newsom oversaw the collapse of San Francisco and Californians made him their governor!

The truth is that socialists don’t learn. Not only that; they can’t learn, because their entire belief system is based on a pig-headed refusal to live in reality. For them, Mamdani won’t fail because socialism is doomed to failure but because he wasn’t socialist enough. When billionaires leave to escape financial tyranny, the definition of rich will slide downward. When poverty spreads, homelessness explodes, crime surrounds and trash riddles, the answer will be: more socialism, more socialism, more socialism.

“More cowbell,” as the famous “Saturday Night Live” sketch goes.

We must fight socialism with every ounce of our being, because socialism is simply the amalgamation of some of the deepest flaws in the human heart: envy, greed and sloth. If we allow the greatest city in the world — New York City — to fall, it won’t stand as a lesson for socialists. It’ll simply become the epicenter of the ever-descending spiral that socialism brings upon its victims. Whether or not Mamdani becomes mayor — and let’s be honest, he’s almost certainly going to be mayor — we must save New York City from itself.

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