The Social World

Tag: Andrew Cuomo

  • Andrew Cuomo was the spoiler, not me

    In the final weeks of the New York City mayoral campaign, there was heavy involvement from billionaires and masters of the universe. Donald Trump and Elon Musk joined the chorus of the Democratic Establishment. And the message was clear: a vote for me was a vote for Mamdani. There was a 72-hour barrage from super PACs running this message on conservative radio and news shows in an attempt to convince Republicans and conservatives to abandon their beliefs and principles and effectively join the Democratic party. No longer was the focus on what each candidate stood for. The point was to rewrite history and distance fact from reality.

    We had Andrew Cuomo – a failed governor who left office in disgrace – being presented to the public as NYC’s only savior. He was the architect of “no cash bail,” “raise the age” and the man who sent more than 15,000 seniors to their graves because of his Covid nursing-home mandates. Yet here he was, repackaged to Republicans as the only candidate they could rally behind. Really? The most important initiatives Cuomo stood for were things the Republicans he was openly and aggressively courting stood against. On virtually every issue, I stood alone with the principles of the party. When you abandon Republican principles in this way, what do you get? A weakened and fractured party met by a strengthened opposition, the face of which has become Zohran Mamdani.

    Zohran never wanted to run against me, Eric Adams or Cuomo; he wanted to run against Donald Trump. He knows he will not be able to fulfill his promises: his fallback will always be that “Trump prevented us from doing this” and “Trump is the reason we are suffering.” He can make Trump the problem plaguing New York City, rather than admitting that he spun a web of fantasies.

    The Democratic Socialists of America’s goal in New York was to rupture the status quo, undermine independent Republicans and conservatives by separating them from the core of their beliefs and create a frenzied state in which the electorate was positioned not to support the person who represented their values, but to act from a mindset of fear. As it turned out, Cuomo was the spoiler, not me. Even if he had taken every vote that went to me, he still would have lost – again. He was trounced in the Democratic primary and his failed attempt to siphon off Republicans left him on the outside.

    I continue to focus on what matters. First, I realize we are witnessing a generational change in politics. No longer are the baby boomers the loudest voices in the room. Making sure younger voters know what you stand for is essential. I was able to harness the reach of my existing social media platforms thanks to my campaign team, which was primarily made up of millennials. As a proponent of retail politics, I spent nine months on the campaign trail in every borough of NYC. Our team ensured that for every hand I couldn’t shake, someone who wanted to learn more about my policies could do so online.

    I also realized that accessibility is key. In the final week of the election, I was invited to Baruch College by Turning Point USA to participate in a debate with students. This type of open conversation with young voters is a must. It was an excellent, peaceful debate at a liberal college, so even though some may not have been on board, they came away with a better understanding of where I stood. You can’t be afraid to go into a hostile environment: it’s the only way to hear every voice.

    Last, and most importantly, I have learned that standing by one’s beliefs is paramount, in politics as in every part of life. I called myself the “Mayor of the People” because I stood with the working class on the issues that mattered most to them. I was realistic in my approach to fiscal responsibility to elevate NYC. I didn’t promise free things I knew could never be delivered. I stood up for the rights of animals and the majority of people with pets who consider them family because I believe a good leader is strong, caring and compassionate. So, while this mayoral election was plagued by calls to abandon party, belief and principles, I stood firm. I continue to stand firm in uniting people with the message to “improve, not move.” I hope all New Yorkers will hear it. 

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • Mayor Mamdani will terrify America

    Mayor Mamdani will terrify America

    Zohran Mamdani is the mayor-elect of New York City, and the progressive wing of the  Democratic party is Champagne drunk celebrating his ascension. 

    But should it be? Mamdani has only narrowly prevailed in a race with a clear spoiler candidate, Republican Curtis Sliwa, lead-blocking for him against a charmless opponent, former governor Andrew Cuomo. With tougher, more honorable competition, it’s possible – likely, even – that he may not have even made it to the general election, much less won it.

    Only when compared to a corrupt, sleazy, nepobaby with blood on his hands, and a beret-clad, narcissistic cat-man whose own friends begged him to step aside, did voters view Mamdani as a much-needed alternative. Both the Republican and Democratic establishments in New York have much to reflect upon – and atone for. Mamdani’s victory is less a ringing endorsement of his agenda than it is an indictment of the lazy, complacent power brokers to whom he’s meant to be a middle finger.

    Moreover, while he may scratch every neurotic, fanciful itch to plague his party’s radical base, Mamdani’s mayoralty will most assuredly prove a failure. And on a scale that neither the nation, nor even the Democrats, will be able to deny. 

    The tragedy of it all, though, is that for the country to avoid falling into the hands of an explicitly anti-American socialist, its greatest city will have to do just that. For New Yorkers, it’s difficult to imagine Tuesday night’s results yielding anything but pain, and, indeed, suffering. Four years ago, Eric Adams swept into office amid not only the Covid-19 pandemic, but the crime epidemic that accompanied it. The intervening years have seen a partial recovery, with significant decreases in some of the most important categories.

    Mamdani threatens to reverse what progress has been made. In 2020, amidst the pandemic crime wave, he declared that “police do not create safety,” and “actually create and amplify violence,” even going so far as to suggest that non-cops should be the ones to respond to domestic violence calls. In other comments, Mamdani smeared law enforcement as “racist,” “wicked,” and “anti-queer,” lamented the “boot of the NYPD” on residents’ necks, and reveled in officers’ tears.

    The mayor-elect may have tacked to the center and apologized to the NYPD during his campaign, but the sheer number of prior statements expressing his vitriol in no uncertain terms suggests that his backtrack was one borne of convenience rather than a genuine change of heart. Not only can New Yorkers expect Mamdani to implement policies that will leave them and their loved ones less safe, but his presence in Gracie Mansion will send unmistakable messages to police and criminals alike – with terrible consequences.

    Similarly, while Mamdani has succeeded, in large part, thanks to his focus on affordability, his agenda in action will make life anything but. Price controls have failed anywhere and everywhere they’ve been tried, but that hasn’t stopped Mamdani from touting them as the fix for the city’s housing crisis. What else? How about free transit and childcare, a ludicrous minimum wage hike up to $30 an hour, and, get this, city-owned and operated grocery stores.

    These heavy-handed interventions into the free market, which are meant as stepping stones toward a seizure of the means of production, if Mamdani himself is to be taken at his word, are sure to have the exact opposite effect they’re meant to. It has been said that a rising tide lifts all votes. By driving wealth out of the city and punishing that which remains, Mamdani will lower the tide to the detriment of every boat on the Hudson, from the most magnificent yacht to the smallest dinghy.

    New York’s fall is a moral one, too, of course. It isn’t just a city in America, it’s a symbol of it. Alas, there is little sign Mamdani has anything but resentment for his adopted country or the values for which it stands. Hence his shameless photo-ops with an unindicted co-conspirator of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and a far-left influencer who believes the United States had 9/11 coming. 

    And all of that is to say nothing of his undeniable sympathy for Hamas, or his obsessive hatred for the world’s Jewish-majority state, about which he has articulated conspiracy theories worthy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. 

    So yes, New York has fallen, but not permanently. The good news is that David Dinkins and Bill de Blasio’s disastrous tenures both led to furious, righteous backlashes, and so too will Mamdani’s. 

    The better news is that Mamdani’s shortcomings will serve as a warning system for the nation. 

    The closest parallel to Mamdani on the national stage, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, lives in his city. Both rose to national prominence inside of blue bubbles where progressive politics are not just popular, but required. Both have proudly claimed, rather than run away from, the dreaded “socialist” descriptor. Both have been praised for their communications skills and social media strategies. And both defeated avatars of a complacent – even stultifying – Democratic establishment on their way to victory.

    Ocasio-Cortez is among the early favorites in the 2028 Democratic primary, and was a vocal backer of Mamdani’s campaign. Ironically though, she may end up a victim of his success.  

    For the better part of a decade now, Ocasio-Cortez has been able to skate by as a congresswoman – one of 435 – whose unpopular, destructive ideas are never actually put into action. Now, those ideas will take centerstage as New York plays the role of a lab rat seemingly blissfully unaware of the toll the experiment took on its forerunners, let’s call them San Francisco and Chicago. 

    America as a whole is seemingly next up, but will have every opportunity to opt out after surveying Mamdani’s handiwork.

    So enjoy that Champagne tonight, progressives. It isn’t the kind that ages well.

  • What to expect from today’s elections

    Americans head to the polls today, with gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey and mayoral elections in New York City and Minneapolis. The races are being talked of as an early test for Trump, a bellwether for the public mood after a breakneck ten months back in the Oval.

    A qualifying remark. Each of these races are taking place in traditionally blue cities and states – Virginia has not voted for a GOP presidential candidate since 2004; New Jersey since 1988; Minnesota since 1972. Still, these places – even New York – trended strongly purple at the last election; in this sense, today’s elections will be a test of the so-called “vibe-shift” and its extent.

    On the other hand, back in 2021 the success of Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial bid in Virginia was said to be a bad omen for the new Biden presidency. Serious reversals in what can still be called Democratic strongholds would likely throw the party into renewed crisis. 

    Virginia

    In the Old Dominion, Republican Winsome Earle-Sears takes on Democrat Abigail Spanberger for the governor’s mansion. As Margaret Mitchell has noted, the issues that carried Youngkin’s candidacy – such as critical race theory and transgender bathrooms – are not nearly as salient as they were in 2021, with much of this agenda having since been rolled back. In this sense, Earle-Sears is a victim of the right’s broader success. In their absence Virginia politics is now returning to its default mode: as a state dominated by government and government-adjacent employees concentrated in “NoVa” (Northern Virginia) – fertile ground for the former CIA officer Spanberger. RealClearPolitics’s poll of polls has her leading by around 10 points.

    Meanwhile, the race for the state’s Attorney General has achieved a rare national prominence due to a scandal involving the Democratic candidate, Jay Jones. Last month it was revealed that in 2022 Jones had, in a series of texts and calls to a GOP colleague, called for the deaths the then-Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert as well as his children. Polls have Jones and the Republican incumbent Jason Miyares neck-and-neck. 

    Polls close in Virginia at 7 p.m. ET, with most precincts expected to report by 9-10 p.m.

    New Jersey

    Republican Jack Ciattarelli is having another tilt for the governorship after coming within 3 percent of victory back in 2021 – this time against Democratic Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill. New Jersey is probably the most promising prospect for the GOP tonight: the state only plumped for Harris by 6 percent – an unthinkable margin ten years ago. A Republican in the governor’s mansion of this stalwart blue state would be a major endorsement of the President’s agenda. RealClearPolitics’s poll of polls has Sherrill leading by 3.3 percent.

    Polls close in New Jersey at 8 p.m. ET, with most precincts expected to report between 10 p.m. and midnight. 

    New York

    Easily the most prominent of today’s contests, the race for the New York mayoralty has become a proxy war for the future of the Democratic party, with millennial socialist Zohran Mamdani unexpectedly beating hoary old Andrew Cuomo to the nomination, who is now running as an independent. If Mamdani wins, as the polls still suggest he will (despite narrowing considerably in recent days), then this will represent the first triumph for the American hard left since Bernie Sanders’s victory in the Nevada primary back in 2020.

    There’s also the perennial Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa, whose homespun manner and trademark red beret (the uniform of the “Guardian Angels” neighborhood watch, which Sliwa founded in 1979) has won him a devoted following. Donald Trump has, however, chosen to endorse Cuomo as the best chance to ward off the socialist tide. RealClearPolitics’ poll of polls has Mamdani on 46.1 percent, Cuomo on 31.8 percent, and Silwa on 16.3 percent. The Mamdani camp is said to be feeling bullish amid reports of record youth turnout. 

    Polls close in New York City at 9 p.m. ET, with a projection expected at 1 a.m.

    Minneapolis

    Another intra-Democratic scrap in Minneapolis, where the hard-left Omar Fateh seeks to oust Jacob Frey – who, as you may remember, played a key role in the events of summer 2020 after the death of George Floyd. Fateh was endorsed by the Minneapolis branch of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (the local Minnesotan chapter of the Democratic party), but the endorsement was revoked in August amid claims of electoral skulduggery by the Fateh camp at its convention. Another complicating factor is that Minneapolis uses a ranked-choice voting system, meaning that – unlike Mamdani – Fateh cannot rely on division among the non-socialists to win.

    Polling for this race has been scant, but a recent survey found that 51 percent of city residents had an unfavorable view of Frey.

    Polls close in Minneapolis at 9 p.m. ET, with a projection expected between 11 p.m. and midnight.

  • Boomer New York’s last bellow

    Boomer New York’s last bellow

    New Yorkers received visits from two ghosts of Christmas past and one ghost of Christmas present at its last 2025 mayoral debate on Wednesday night. Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa and champion of himself Andrew Cuomo lobbed Grumpy Old Man insults across the stage at each other while Zohran Mamdani stood center stage, fresh and gleaming, deflecting blows and acting with all the confidence of a football team that has a three-touchdown lead at the two-minute warning. The historical turn, potentially tragic, that will lead to the Democratic Socialists taking over America’s largest city, is reaching its conclusion, and there won’t be a final twist.

    Sliwa, who won’t become mayor in this or any other reality, offered passionate proposals to reform the housing-court system and to protect New York’s forgotten animals. If cats and dogs could vote, Sliwa would be a shoo-in. He played the populist card in his opening, saying “it’s us versus them, it’s us versus the insiders and the billionaires. It’s us versus Cuomo, it’s us versus Zohran. We’re not going to be silenced any more, we’re going to fight.”

    Cuomo spent most of the night deflecting attacks on his now-settled sexual harassment allegations, on his mishandling of the MTA in the summer of 2017, and on his disastrous policies in the early days of COVID that led to the deaths of thousands of elderly New Yorkers. He countered by saying that if (when) Mamdani wins, Donald Trump will be running the city. “He has said he will take over New York if Mamdani wins, and he will. He thinks Mamdani is a kid and he’ll knock him on his tuchus.”

    Mamdani said, “My opponents, who spend more time convincing each other to drop out, speak only of the past, because that’s all that they know. I am the only one who speaks to the future of the city.”

    He had a point. At times, the debate was like watching a community-theater production of The Sunshine Boys. One of the moderators even said, at one point, as Sliwa and Cuomo carped at each other over some ancient issue that even they barely understood, “we’re going to stay in this century, guys.”

    The three candidates debated housing issues, transit issues, policing issues, education issues and various finer points of New York policy that matter to me only marginally, because I live in a state with no income tax in a city recently named the most-affordable housing market in the United States. Not my movie. But antisemitism is my movie, so my ears perked up substantially when the candidates started debating the “Jewish question” like this was Berlin in 1931.

    “I will be the Mayor who doesn’t just protect Jewish New Yorkers, but also celebrates and cherishes them,” said Mamdani, who hundreds of rabbis denounced this week.

    “Not everything is a TikTok video,” said Cuomo. “You’re the savior of the Jewish people? You won’t denounce ‘Globalize the Intifada,” which means “kill Jews.” Sliwa, who apparently has Jewish children, said they view Mamdani “as an arsonist who fanned the flames of antisemitism. You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, a lot of apologizing to do.”

    Mamdani said he has never once “spoken out in favor of global jihad” and said that criticisms of him were, in fact, Islamophobic. “New York deserves a leader who takes antisemitism seriously, not one who weaponizes it to score political points.”

    Mamdani, who has an uncanny ability to wriggle out of tough spots, has run a slick campaign, but he’s also been fortunate in his choice of opponents. Sliwa is a quintessential New York tough-guy character, and might even be a good mayor if given a chance, but he’s also extremely goofy and there’s no way liberal New York will elect a Republican populist mayor in the age of Trump. And Cuomo is perhaps the most flawed candidate in a generation. This attempt to revive his political fortunes, given the disgraces he suffered earlier in the decade, has been a pathetic display of hubris. He touted himself as the candidate of “experience,” which led Mamdani to say,

    “We have all experienced your experience. We have experienced you taking a five million dollar book deal while sending seniors to their death in their nursing homes. The Issue IS your experience.”

    This debate was the last bellow of Boomer New York. The ghosts of Christmas past are vanquished and the Free Palestine Gen-Z TikTok kids are taking over. Winter is coming. To paraphrase Tiny Tim, God help us, everyone.

  • The Democratic establishment has fallen

    The Democratic establishment has fallen

    For nigh on two decades in Washington, the political right has envied the ability of the left to control its ranks and silence its extremists. As Republican consultants and donors groused about the irascible “jihadi wing” of their coalition through the Tea Party and MAGA eras, the Democrats exercised control over their far-left cohort using a combination of bribery and fear.

    The old guard of the left, the neoliberal and corporate-friendly media, has lost control

    Given how often the pens of Washington observers hailed the masterful ability of Nancy Pelosi to herd cats, you’d think she had aspirations of transitioning from America’s best investor to the next Andrew Lloyd Webber. What was often left out of the equation was any recognition of how the fealty of the far left was achieved: through a series of gatekeeping institutions owned or funded by Democratic donors and ideologically sympathetic corporations known to the public as the media. They were the ones whose coverage could guide and determine the limits of what the party should abide, rejecting the extremes as unacceptable to the country’s voters, tolerating their fairy tales and underpants-gnome strategies to a degree of op-ed page blather – only to stomp them whenever elections got serious. There is still only one Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez only exists in the public eye because she snuck up and ambushed an out of touch ten-term boomer.

    It has been hard, very hard to break through the Democratic gatekeepers, who still wield power on a completely different scale than anyone on the right – but there were signs it could be done. The left’s volunteer army of socialist aspirants who were denied their hopes in 2016, 2020 and again in 2024 – when the Democratic-media complex cleared the path for Hillary, for Joe and then (shockingly) for Kamala – are finally seeing their work come to fruition. The old guard of the left, the neoliberal and corporate-friendly media which entertained extreme racial politics and environmental doomerism (so long as it didn’t hurt their bottom line) has lost control. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the experience of America’s largest and most important city.

    The Democratic voters of New York rejecting a Cuomo, even one with as troubled a history as Andrew, for Zohran Mamdani, an honest-to-goodness Democratic Socialists of America member, would have been laughable under the old regime. In the run-up to his primary victory, nearly every corporate media outlet of significance spoke out against Mamdani’s brand of hammer and sickle policies – the Atlantic warned “Zohran Mamdani Won’t Make Groceries Cheaper,” CNN fretted “Do Democrats have a Zohran Mamdani problem?” and the New York Times editorial board said that, given his extreme views and lack of experience, they “do not believe that Mr. Mamdani deserves a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots.” All for naught. The 33-year-old failed rapper, whose big idea is a network of city-run grocery stores, triumphed in the ranked-choice system.

    Cuomo and the scandal-ridden incumbent Eric Adams (who eventually dropped out of the race entirely) were forced to turn to other policy positions to retain their chances. And almost as soon as Mamdani won, the Democratic establishment lost interest in his calls to “globalize the intifada” and arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes the next time he came to the United Nations, and started to accentuate the positives. Condé Nast publications went full throttle with their glowingly soft coverage of the mayoral aspirant.

    The New Yorker followed Mamdani’s Instagram-fueled glad-handing with fans at the US Open (“Zohran Talks Love and Deuce With New Friends”), Bon Appetit talked to him about the challenge of eating with his hands (“For Zohran Mamdani, Food Is Personal, Political, and Powerful”), and Vanity Fair gave him the cover treatment and compared him to JFK (“The Legend of ZOHRAN”).

    Media concerns about Mamdani’s pie-in-the-sky promises vanished overnight. Having failed to stop his rise, the party organs had a different job to fulfill: whitewashing his defects for a credulous public while reassuring themselves that things would still be OK. Kathryn Wylde, a spokesman for the largest corporations in her role as president of the Partnership for New York, said on CNBC that the city has proven resilient enough to survive bad mayors in the past. How much could those grocery stores cost taxpayers, anyway?

    Yet this attitude presumes that Mamdani is a one-off, a fluke brought on by scandal-spattered opponents and the far left’s backlash against Donald Trump’s return to the White House. In reality, it’s far more likely that this energetic young socialist represents a future where the old-guard institutions of the left, including their most prominent leaders, no longer exercise determinative power over the direction of their coalition. Pelosi is no longer the cat-wrangler, and the two most powerful Democrats on paper, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, could do nothing to prevent Mamdani’s ascent – despite both being from New York. It’s possible that the last great hurrah of the Democrat-media complex was clearing the path for Kamala Harris, whose flameout was so gigantic it brought the whole system down with her.

    A sign that this dynamic is potentially a permanent reality for the left is that the media outlets in question are no longer attracting the eyeballs they once did. In the past, the deployment of mass opposition to a fringe leftist by the guardians of the party’s political hopes could have worked. But the younger leftist electorate is not consuming media as their parents did. Mamdani’s rise was fueled by the massed power of TikTok, Instagram and social media combined with an existing volunteer structure built out of the city’s active DSA community.

    Social media’s influence far outstrips the legacy media that once played the tune for the left to dance to

    Combined, their influence far outstrips the legacy media that once played the tune for the left to dance to. Instead, the magazines and cable news shows and even the podcasts of the Obama-era establishment figures (who once bucked the party leadership with similar online fervor) are taking their lead from the trends they see dominating social media, not the other way around. That’s why you see one billionaire-owned entity after another bowing to the musings of a candidate who says “I don’t think we should have billionaires” – and in the case of some of them, donating money to fund his efforts directly. It’s the cost of staying relevant, even if it requires you to resemble the “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme.

    A leaderless Democratic party now risks being taken over entirely by radicals who cannot be controlled or guided by any sense of a need to appeal to the mainstream. Even the great neoliberal hope of 2028, California Governor Gavin Newsom, is smart enough to see the shift. His latent campaign, which seems largely based on his ability to swear a lot, is an attempt to model the attitude of an aggressive progressive rather than the Fox News-watching Clintonian centrist he once aspired to be. The inevitable walkback of his comments that policies around trans people playing single-sex sports are “deeply unfair,” made in his first podcast interview with the late Charlie Kirk, will be something to behold. Perhaps he can make up for it by calling for government-owned franchises of the French Laundry.

    What Democrats are currently experiencing is the inevitable danger of failing to incorporate and subsume the party’s extremes into a negotiated arrangement where the socialists remain content with a slim piece of the party’s agenda. But that was based on a misunderstanding: the Marxists were always going to demand control once the opportunity presented itself. They were not going to be kept down by the people who made peace with corporate powers and deployed a compliant media to maintain their hold on the reins. And the political pablum dished out by Democrats hoping for a palatable centrist – an Andy Beshear, a Josh Shapiro, a Wes Moore – will not be enough to satisfy the crew that can’t get enough of the Zohran.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • Andrew Cuomo is the lesser of two evils

    Andrew Cuomo is the lesser of two evils

    New York City politics has rarely offered voters a clean choice. This year, with Eric Adams out of the mayor’s race, the city faces one of its grimmest dilemmas yet: Andrew Cuomo or Zohran Mamdani.

    Let’s be clear – this is not an endorsement of Cuomo. The former governor has baggage that most voters can recite from memory. But politics isn’t about picking saints; it’s about survival. And when survival is on the line, sometimes the only responsible thing to do is choose the lesser of two evils.

    Cuomo may be corrupt, arrogant and heavy-handed. But at least he governs from a place of pragmatism. Mamdani, by contrast, represents the radical left’s fantasy of New York City – a city where utopian slogans replace hard choices, where affordability gimmicks mask fiscal chaos and where public safety is sacrificed at the altar of ideology.

    If that sounds harsh, let’s take a walk down memory lane.

    Do you remember the “Market of Sweethearts” in Roosevelt, Queens? That area became infamous for its open-air prostitution scene. It wasn’t just an embarrassment – it was a full-scale community crisis. Families couldn’t walk their own streets without being confronted by sex work, drug dealing and human trafficking.

    To his credit, Eric Adams at least tried to clean it up. Under Zohran Mamdani’s vision for New York, that problem wouldn’t just return – it would multiply. He would welcome prostitution zones as some sort of progressive liberation, never mind the devastation it causes to families and neighborhoods. Imagine the man in the mayor’s office not on your side, but on the other side of the football field, actively cheering on the breakdown of community values.

    That’s the reality New Yorkers risk under Mamdani. New Yorkers don’t need another cheerleader for decline – they need someone willing to stop the bleeding.

    Mamdani isn’t just another Democrat. He’s part of the Democratic Socialists of America, the same ideological club that gave us Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He talks like her, governs like her and dreams of turning New York into a socialist laboratory.

    The problem is, New York is not a laboratory. It is a living, breathing city of eight million people – families, immigrants, small business owners, police officers, students – who can’t afford to live under ideological experiments.

    If Mamdani wins, AOC wins. And when the Squad wins, ordinary New Yorkers lose.

    Mamdani’s big-ticket idea of free buses sounds wonderful – until you do the math. The MTA already runs deficits and routinely comes begging for subsidies to keep the trains moving. Wiping out fare revenue would blow a hole in the budget the size of the Midtown Tunnel.

    Where would that money come from? Higher taxes, of course. The same taxes that already drive families and businesses out of New York. Mamdani calls it “affordability,” but in practice, it’s a recipe for fiscal collapse. Free rides today, higher taxes tomorrow.

    Then there’s his rent-freeze proposal, another crowd-pleasing slogan that sounds like relief but delivers the opposite. When you freeze rents indefinitely, you don’t just cap prices – you cap incentives. Developers walk away, construction slows and the housing supply shrinks. The result? Fewer apartments, higher competition and ironically, less affordability.

    For a city already struggling with housing shortages, Mamdani’s plan is not a fix but a death sentence. It’s economics 101, and yet the radical left refuses to learn the lesson.

    Crime remains the elephant in the room. Adams ran and won on restoring public safety, though his record is mixed at best. But at least Adams acknowledged the crisis. Cuomo, for all his flaws, has too.

    Mamdani? He wants to cut NYPD overtime, pair social workers with officers and further shackle a police force that, despite its imperfections, remains one of the best-trained in the nation. I am not opposed to accountability. No one serious is. But undermining law enforcement when crime is still a top concern is reckless at best, dangerous at worst.

    Ask yourself: do you want a mayor who takes crime seriously, or one who sees crime as a laboratory for social experiments?

    This is why Cuomo, battered and bruised as he may be, becomes the only defensible option. He won’t save New York. He won’t inspire confidence. But he won’t accelerate the city’s decline, either.

    Sometimes the best you can do in politics is buy time. Cuomo represents damage control. Mamdani represents a freefall.

    Conservatives understand this principle well because they’ve lived it. In blue strongholds, voters rarely get a candidate who reflects their values. But they can at least choose the candidate who won’t turn the city upside down. New York doesn’t need utopian dreams right now – it needs guardrails.

    Eric Adams’ collapse should be a wake-up call. His downfall wasn’t just about scandal; it was about a Democratic Party that no longer tolerates moderates. The radicals have seized the microphone, and their policies are poised to reshape the city.

    New Yorkers must now decide whether they want a radical experiment or a flawed but familiar pragmatist. That is not a glamorous choice, but it is the only choice.

    The “lesser of two evils” isn’t a rallying cry that stirs the soul. It’s not meant to. It’s the sober recognition that when faced with two bad options, responsibility demands choosing the one that will do the least harm.

    And in this race, that means Andrew Cuomo.

  • Zohran Mamdani’s politics of entitlement

    Zohran Mamdani’s politics of entitlement

    Zohran Mamdani’s presumptive victory will make history: if elected in November, he will become New York’s first Muslim and first Indian-American mayor. Powering his win in the Democratic primaries was a massive surge of young, urban, progressive voters changing the city’s political future. But beneath the energy and hope lies something more troubling: a generational embrace of a politics of entitlement, poised to undermine not only the city’s finances but also the values that have historically bound together American civic life.

    The city’s youth voting base turned out in force: voters aged 18–29 gave Mamdani the win. Mamdani outperformed opponent Andrew Cuomo by an average of 13 points in counties with median incomes above $117,000; conversely, Cuomo dominated in lower-income areas. The Mamdani voters are also mostly college educated, as he won 60 percent of the vote of four-year-college graduates. Most surprising, Mamdani beat Cuomo by 18 points among native New Yorkers.

    Mamdani’s base of Gen Z and millennial voters has come of age in an era of repeated economic upheavals and deepening distrust in the status quo. Many were children or teenagers during the 2008 financial crash and entered adulthood amid Covid, or are struggling under historic student-debt burdens. Only 16 percent of young Americans today feel that “democracy is working well” for them, and trust in political institutions is abysmally low. By 2022, only 40 percent of adults under 30 said they view capitalism positively and roughly 41 percent of under-50 adults have a positive impression of socialism.

    The politics of entitlement refers to a worldview in which individuals or groups perceive certain benefits – ranging from direct cash assistance to regulatory privileges and direct representation itself – as rights. The entitled believe these benefits are granted unconditionally rather than earned through contribution or reciprocal civic responsibility. In contrast, older models of American citizenship prized self-reliance and collective responsibility – the view that rights came with duties, and government aid was a last recourse, not a first demand.

    This shift is more than semantic. Earlier generations saw social programs as safety nets for the vulnerable, but zoomers and millennials transform public policy into an endless wish list. The rhetoric frames government as a provider, not just of basic needs, but also of recognition, affirmation and immediate, sweeping reforms.

    Mamdani’s campaign has thrived by explicitly promising utopian solutions packaged as moral rights, not merely possibilities. The specifics matter less to these voters than the symbolic guarantee that someone is finally taking their side.

    For older progressives, social progress, even so-called fundamental rights, has always required coalition-building, compromise and time. But today’s youth activism teaches that the right post or protest should deliver change instantaneously because it’s what’s politically correct in the headlines. This expectation gap is certain to breed frustration and political whiplash when inevitable setbacks come, further separating the political groups that currently govern New York from those that will inherit it. The reality is that politics built solely around ever-expanding entitlements can only lead to serious economic and social pitfalls.

    New York City’s budget is already enormous (over $115 billion). Layering on Mamdani’s list of promises would require either massive new revenue or deficit spending. If taxes on high-earners and businesses climb too steeply, the city risks driving away the tax base – the very outcome that devastated cities such as Detroit when 1.1 million middle-class residents fled in the late 20th century.

    Similarly, New York nearly went bankrupt in 1975 after years of spending beyond its means. During the booming 1960s, NYC vastly expanded its social programs and payrolls under the idealistic Great Society agenda – even as its population and tax base started to decline. Politicians assumed Albany or Washington would bail them out, or they simply borrowed to cover budget gaps. The result was a fiscal crisis so severe that bankers refused to buy the city’s debt and the city came within days of insolvency.

    Alongside the economic strain is the erosion of personal responsibility. As the government assumes a larger role in meeting individual needs, the incentive for people to engage in self-discipline, problem-solving or even maintaining consistent employment will begin to diminish. This cultural shift in the younger generations risks fostering a dependency mindset that weakens the America’s future and teaches our kids to expect everything and give nothing in return.

    Today’s young progressives vehemently reject the old welfare-to-work mindset that made American exceptionalism, arguing that such a mindset stigmatizes poverty and that people deserve support without jumping through hoops. But the old system’s demands didn’t demand jumping through hoops, only hard work and sacrifice.

    One can already see sparks of a generational conflict: younger progressive Americans accuse baby boomers of pulling the ladder up behind them; boomers retort that zoomers and millennials want participation trophies and handouts. But this is a largely partisan phenomenon: nearly 74 percent of Democrats prefer a bigger government with more services, while only 20 percent of Republicans do.

    Mamdani’s victory heralds a new chapter in New York and reflects a broader global trend of youth-driven progressive insurgency. It’s a movement brimming with idealism and energy. There is much to admire in this young left coalition, but governing the Big Apple requires more than passion and entitlement; it requires foresight, compromise, sacrifice and responsibility. The future of the city depends on restoring a politics where rights and responsibilities work in tandem.

  • Cash in a bag? We’ll miss you, Eric Adams

    Cash in a bag? We’ll miss you, Eric Adams

    If Eric Adams were a normal incumbent New York City Mayor, he’d have a decent chance of winning re-election against slick TikTok-mastering bourgeois communist Zohran Mamdani and the decaying boomer persona of Andrew Cuomo. But Adams and his cronies can’t manage that. His New York is so corrupt it makes Coleman Young’s Detroit look like deacons passing a church collection plate. Even in the height of election season, Adams Inc. can’t help itself. 

    Yesterday the NYC political website the City reported a story involving Adams advisor Winnie Greco, who, unbidden, approached a City reporter named Katie Honan and ended up dragging her into a Whole Foods, where Greco handed Honan, as the City put it, “a wad of cash in a red envelope stuffed inside an opened bag of Herr’s Sour Cream & Onion ripple potato chips.” 

    “Honan,” the City reported, “thinking it was an offer of a light snack, told Greco more than once she could not accept the chips, but Greco insisted that she keep them.” First of all, Cockburn rejects the concept of flavored chips. Chips should taste only of two things: potatoes and corn. Maybe pepper and salt. Regardless, Katie Honan should have realized that in Adamsland, it’s never just a “light snack.” 

    Honan looked at the money, “at least” one $100 bill and several twenties, and attempted to find Greco to return the money to her. This didn’t happen. Later, when the City contacted her, Greco said, “I make a mistake,” she said. “I’m so sorry. It’s a culture thing. I don’t know. I don’t understand. I’m so sorry. I feel so bad right now. I’m so sorry, honey.”

    To make matters more hilarious, Greco (and the campaign’s) attorney is Steven Brill, founder of Court TV, who said to the City, “I assure you that Winnie’s intent was purely innocent. In the Chinese culture, money is often given to others in a gesture of friendship and gratitude. Winnie is apologetic and embarrassed by any negative impression or confusion this may have caused.” The campaign then removed Winnie Greco from its payroll. 

    Cockburn isn’t as scrupulous as the City, and may very well have just taken that money and run to the nearest underground baccarat parlor to try and spin it into a real bankroll. But Greco, one of Adams’s many shady associates, didn’t offer him a red envelope. She instead chose to target a news outlet with integrity. 

    Greco wasn’t the only Adams associate in the news this week. The New York Post reported yesterday that longtime Adams adviser and “campaign confidant” Ingrid Lewis-Martin is facing a fresh set of charges for “allegedly accepting bougie handouts in exchange for political favors.” They’re also investigating whether or not politically-connected businessmen paid for Lewis-Martin’s “well-known karaoke parties.” Lewis-Martin, who left City Hall in December, allegedly received $100,000 in bribes from a hotelier and a real-estate investor, which she then used to buy a used Porsche for her son. The Post says the bribes are related to the “McGuinness Boulevard revamp across Greenpoint.” Cockburn has no idea what that is, but it sounds very New York City. 

    All this grift and graft is a bit too petty to be outrageous. A clumsy cabal of mayoral cronies flew too close to the sun, cash in hand, and it looks like the justice system isn’t going to let them get away with it. Soon their greasy-fingered reign will end. 

    Cockburn is going to miss the Eric Adams administration. It hasn’t been perfect, but it’s also been an enjoyable throwback to the low-riding days of the 1970s, where every single public official was unapologetically on the take. Two months into the TikTok dances at city-run grocery stores in Mamdani’s New York, and we’ll all be wishing that reporter took the bribe in the potato-chip bag.