We know that New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani doesn’t want to defund the police, because he just assured us that he didn’t, despite having repeatedly called for defunding the police during the darkest days of the nationwide George Floyd riots. The budding statesman has since clarified what he says he really meant: that he’ll dismantle the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group (SRG), which handles counterterrorism and riot control, and send social workers instead of cops to take care of cases of domestic violence and the like. Oh. Well, that makes it all okay, doesn’t it?
In the face of plans of this kind, it becomes an even greater shame than it already was that America has no journalists anymore. There is no intrepid young reporter who has the guts, and the freedom from the left’s intellectual straitjacket, to dare to ask Mamdani the obvious question that such recommendations should have everyone asking: “Mr. Mamdani, are you stupid? Or do you actually want to destroy New York City?”
It sounds like the kind of rude question leftist reporters sometimes ask President Trump, and it is, but it is more than that as well. After all, does Zohran Mamdani really think that New Yorkers will really be safer if there is less of a police presence at riots, fewer police devoted to stopping terror plots, and no police at all answering domestic violence calls?
The leftists who were calling for the defunding of the police ultimately backed off of that call, as has Mamdani himself, because of the patent absurdity of it. Even the most committed, most wild-eyed, most blue-haired leftist of them all wants the cops around when xe is facing a threat, and even in Zohran Mamdani’s New York, the lion is not quite ready to lie down with the lamb, at least not without a fork and knife within ready reach.
And so it really is a fair question: what exactly does the incoming mayor have in mind? He can’t really be so naïve as actually to think that if the big, bad NYPD is just kept at bay, New York will become a serene socialist paradise where people can walk around desolate areas in the middle of the night without fearing for life and limb? And if he really isn’t that stupid, why he is making these proposals, which he seems to have every indication of carrying out?
The other possibility is that he actually wants to make New York City a crime-ridden hellhole. Inconceivable, right? No one would run for mayor of a major city because he hates the people who live there and wants them to suffer, right? Well, in ordinary times we could take that for granted, but these are not ordinary times. Although some still insist that Mamdani is not a communist, but a democratic socialist (generally without explaining what exactly they think is the actual difference between the two), Mamdani himself has repeatedly made his taste for Marxism authoritarianism quite clear, as Intifada on the Hudson: The Selling of Zohran Mamdani shows.
On a practical level, what that means for New York is that Mamdani very likely wants to sow chaos. Totalitarians throughout history have sown chaos in the societies they wanted to bring down, so that they could exploit it in order to destroy the existing system and replace it with one more to their liking.
Related: Did You Catch the Scariest Part of Mamdani’s Victory Speech?
Zohran Mamdani couldn’t be planning to do something like that in New York, could he? Inconceivable, right? After all, if things get too far out of hand in the Big Apple, Trump will send in the National Guard and restore order, right? Sure he will, unless some leftist judge stops him from doing so, with a little help from Mamdani himself and his propagandists in the establishment media, who will inundate us with more stories about how Trump is a fascist who is trying to make himself a dictator.
Whatever he ultimately may be able to do to New York, Zohran Mamdani is clearly a radical leftist who hates America as it is currently constituted and wants to bring about its fundamental transformation, as another America-hating radical once promised to do. There really isn’t any indication at all that he is a stupid man; throughout his life, he has shown himself to be clever, quick-thinking, and articulate. And so given the policies he is advocating, that leaves only one other option.
