Zohran Mamdani Begins Radicalizing New York The Spectator

The radicals are now in charge of NYC. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has unveiled his transition team and voters who agreed with his diagnosis that “everything is too expensive” will now have to live with the anti-police activists, anti-merit educrats and anti-Zionist radicals... The moderate center is in for a shock.Take Alex Vitale, Mamdani’s “safety advisor” and author of The End of Policing, who seeks to abolish police departments, viewing them as “a tool of white supremacy.”... They support Mamdani’s plan to replace the NYPD with a “Department of Community Safety” for a range of police calls. They also reject federal law enforcement assistance – presumably including the successful efforts that recently cleared rival drug gangs from Washington Square Park and the ICE raids that cleaned up Canal Street.The education committee... Goldmark played politics with Yeshiva students’ education by delaying a report that showed students were not receiving the “substantially equivalent” education the law required in 39 schools, and got caught red-handed.

Both promise a return to raw politics over quality education for public school families. Equity advocates are also returning, including Zakiyah Shaakir-Ansari, who serves on the Youth and Education Transition Advisory Committee, and admires convicted cop-killer Assata Shakur and supported every effort to rid NYC public schools of... Familiar figures include Linda “Nothing is creepier than Zionism” Sarsour, who shares Mamdani’s unbridled animus towards Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. The BDS contingent is particularly strong: Waleed Shahid, a “political strategist” who portrays Zionism as a capitalist conspiracy; Tamika Mallory, “equity committee co-chair” and defender of Holocaust denier Louis Farrakhan; Hassaan Chaudhary, a communications... His campaign was nearly flawless, propelling him from relative obscurity to mayor of one of the world’s most important cities, but his radicalism will have a cost – and presents a unique opportunity for... Millions were spent trying to defeat him, and consequently more than a million voters – mostly Democrats and independents – did not vote for him.

Andrew Cuomo’s independent “Fight and Deliver” line effectively served as an “Anyone But Mamdani” option, drawing Democrats, Republicans and independents, many of whom held their noses to vote for Cuomo, primarily to block Mamdani.Those... More New Yorkers voted for Cuomo than for past mayors like Giuliani, de Blasio, or Adams and though he lost, Cuomo demonstrated the depth of opposition to Mamdani’s vision. New York is better than rich-kid socialism and intersectional grievance studies as a governing philosophy and many New Yorkers know it. One clear voting divide was between longtime residents and recent arrivals: the longer one has lived in New York, the more likely they were to support Cuomo; newcomers (five years or less) overwhelmingly backed... The long term native New Yorkers are the voters a revitalized GOP needs to court. The transition team’s extremism foreshadows challenging times ahead for New York City, but they also offer NYC a chance to reset.

The question is will a real opposition emerge? According to the New York City Department of Records and Information Services, Zohran Mamdani will not actually be the city’s hundred-and-eleventh mayor, as many people have assumed. A historian named Paul Hortenstine recently came across references to a previously unrecorded mayoral term served in 1674, by one Matthias Nicolls. Consequently, on New Year’s Day, after Mamdani places his right hand on the Quran and is sworn in at City Hall, he will become our hundred-and-twelfth mayor—or possibly even our hundred-and-thirty-third, based on the... “The numbering of New York City ‘Mayors’ has been somewhat arbitrary and inconsistent,” a department official disclosed in a blog post this month. “There may even be other missing Mayors.”

New York City has already had youthful mayors (John Purroy Mitchel, a.k.a. the Boy Mayor), ideological mayors (Bill de Blasio), celebrity mayors (Jimmy Walker, a.k.a. Beau James), idealistic mayors (John Lindsay), hard-charging mayors (Fiorello LaGuardia), mayors with little to no prior experience in elected office (Michael Bloomberg), immigrant mayors (Abe Beame), and even one who supported the Democratic Socialists... (That would be David Dinkins.) Whether Mamdani turns out to be a good or a bad mayor, he will also not be alone in either respect. He will, however, be the city’s first Muslim mayor, and the first with family roots in Asia. He is as avowedly of the left as any mayor in city history.

And the velocity of his rise to power is the fastest that anyone in town can recall. Since his general-election trouncing of the former governor Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani has been preparing for the sober realities of governing—appointments, negotiations, coalition management, policy development. Trying to preserve the movement energy he tapped during the campaign, he has also made an effort to continue the inventive outreach practices that brought him to broad public attention. Just last Sunday, for instance, he sat in a room in the Museum of the Moving Image, in Astoria (a few blocks from the rent-stabilized apartment he’s giving up to move into Gracie Mansion),... It was a gesture to show that he could look his constituents in the eye, and that he could listen to them. Mamdani ran a disciplined campaign, and he has run a disciplined transition.

He didn’t take the bait when Mayor Eric Adams criticized him, told Jews to be afraid of him, and pulled other last-minute maneuvers seemingly designed to undermine him. Mamdani met with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office—and they startled everyone by having an outwardly productive meeting. (Trump happily told Mamdani that it was O.K. to call him a “fascist.”) Mamdani discouraged a young D.S.A. city-council member, Chi Ossé, from staging a primary challenge next year to the House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries—a magnanimous move, considering Jeffries’s ongoing chilliness toward Mamdani. In rooms full of wealthy business leaders and in others filled with donors, he has tried to win over skeptics among New York’s élite.

(“They are finding themselves, unexpectedly, charmed,” the Times reported recently.) It was a relief to the city’s political establishment when he asked Jessica Tisch, the current police commissioner, whom Adams appointed, to stay in... Last week, when a top appointee’s old antisemitic tweets surfaced, Mamdani accepted her resignation within hours. Having rocketed, in a matter of months, from one per cent in the polls to mayor, Mamdani seems comfortable facing his doubters. But what he’s up against cannot be overstated. It’s been an open question for centuries as to whether New York is “governable” in a top-to-bottom, municipal, positive sense. For a long time, city government here was considered little more than a trough for Tammany Hall.

In the past century, the city proved that it could (more or less) pick up its own garbage, get a handle on crime, and operate large school and hospital systems, even if sometimes just... It can do more than that, of course, but can it durably make life in New York better, and not just more tolerable, for the bulk of its residents? In his effort to answer affirmatively, Mamdani will have to navigate problems of management, budget, and bureaucracy inside City Hall, and also Trump (does anyone think their chumminess will last?), ICE raids, intransigent billionaires,... The billionaire exodus that was forecast during his campaign has shown no signs of materializing, but one bad blizzard in January could hamper Mamdani’s ambitious agenda for months. Zohran Mamdani secured the New York primary as the Democratic nominee for mayor, resurfacing concerns of the Democratic Party’s direction toward socialism. (READ MORE: What Can We Expect from a Mamdani Administration?)

On this episode of The Spectacle Podcast, hosts Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay discuss Mamdani’s rise to political power that pushed Andrew Cuomo out of the running. Melissa and Scott liken Mamdani’s affluent background to that of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and discuss Mamdani’s proposed communist policy plans for New York. They also predict and analyze the future implications for the people of New York if Mamdani wins the mayoral race, and the weary future of the Democratic Party as a whole. (RELATED: The Fourth Era Comes to the Big Rotten Apple) Listen to The Spectacle with Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay on Spotify. Watch The Spectacle with Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay on Rumble.

As a general rule, writers — especially those of us...Read More The Seattle Public School system is forcing students — from...Read More Mr Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old elected mayor of New York, who has described the police as ‘racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety’, says that his top policy priority is implementing free... How very Marxist! The Greek comic writer Aristophanes (d. c.

386 bc) would have loved it. It was he who invented communism, after all, and had his audience in hysterics. His comedy Ecclesiazusae (‘Women Running the Assembly’) was produced in Athens in 391 bc. The women of Athens decide to seize power for themselves. They disguise themselves as men, enter There’s no shortage of catastrophic predictions for New York under Zohran Mamdani’s leadership.

While the city probably won’t see breadlines, the wildly expensive, exhaustingly derivative restaurants that dominate its food scene are likely to become more dominant. Mamdani’s big pledge on food is to ‘make halal eight bucks again’. But it’s a ‘false promise’ of street-food affordability according to Heritage Foundation economist Nicole Huyer. She says Mamdani’s economic programme, which includes higher taxes, steeper leasing regulations and a pledge to raise the minimum wage to $30 an hour by 2030, will effectively make restaurants even more expensive. ‘All of these great socialist policies that [Mamdani’s] planning to implement – he’s Home The King ‘initiated a formal process to remove the Style, Titles and Honours of Prince Andrew’, who is now known as Mr Andrew Mountbatten Windsor; his lease on Royal Lodge, Windsor, was relinquished...

His former wife, Sarah Ferguson, will find her own accommodation. Their daughters remain Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice. Richard Gott, who resigned as literary editor of the Guardian in 1994 after The Spectator accused him of having been in the pay of the KGB, died aged 87. Gopichand Hinduja, the head of Britain’s richest family, died aged 85. Eleven people were Zohran Mamdani is widely expected to win the race to be the next New York City mayor.

The contest is now a three horse race between Mamdani, the Republican candidate Curtis Silwa and Andrew Cuomo, the former Democratic governor. Current democratic mayor Eric Adams was also running but pulled out this week. David Kaufman, who worked on the Adams campaign, joins Freddy Gray in New York to dissect the race. They discuss the democratic ‘cock ups’ that led to Mamdani’s selection, the impact of the war in Gaza on the race and the dimension of identity politics. Could he win as the ‘anti-Trump’ candidate? This week: one year of Labour – the verdict In the magazine this week Tim Shipman declares his verdict on Keir Starmer’s Labour government as we approach the first anniversary of their election victory.

One year on, some of Labour’s most notable policies have been completely changed – from the u-turn over winter fuel allowance to the embarrassing climb-down over welfare this week. Starmer has appeared more confident on the world stage but, for domestic audiences, this is small consolation when the public has perceived little change on the problems that have faced Britain for years. Can Starmer turn it around? Tim joined the podcast alongside the Spectator’s editor Michael The radicals are now in charge of NYC. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has unveiled his transition team and voters who agreed with his diagnosis that “everything is too expensive” will now have to live with the anti-police activists, anti-merit educrats and anti-Zionist radicals...

The moderate center is in for a shock. Take Alex Vitale, Mamdani’s “safety advisor” and author of The End of Policing, who seeks to abolish police departments, viewing them as “a tool of white supremacy.” Vitale will collaborate with convicted armed robber... They support Mamdani’s plan to replace the NYPD with a “Department of Community Safety” for a range of police calls. They also reject federal law enforcement assistance – presumably including the successful efforts that recently cleared rival drug gangs from Washington Square Park and the ICE raids that cleaned up Canal Street. The education committee includes retreads from the Bill de Blasio era, such as former Deputy Chancellors Josh Wallack and Karin Goldmark, a Park Slope resident who promoted de Blasio’s signature diversity plan in Brooklyn’s... Goldmark played politics with Yeshiva students’ education by delaying a report that showed students were not receiving the “substantially equivalent” education the law required in 39 schools, and got caught red-handed.

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