Cassie Wilson says that she is a comedian, and while nobody in this enlightened age should get the idea that such a title means that she is funny, it gives her a convenient all-purpose excuse: Whenever she says something that any other politician or politician’s aide would have to disavow in shame, she can simply wave her hand dismissively and insist that it was a joke, and can’t you take a joke, you fascist, right-wing, redneck yahoo?
It is not at all clear, however, that Wilson was really joking in a video that surfaced on Christmas Day. Captioned “did i ruin family dinner??,” the video depicts Wilson at the dinner table taking a long drink of water (or maybe, under the circumstances, vodka), looking around a trifle tentatively, and then saying: “We should probably kill all the billionaires, right?” As pandemonium ensues, Wilson shouts, “What? Come on! I’m just saying—” and that’s it.
This is what passes for comedy on the left these days, and it would be fairly unremarkable in these overheated days were it not for the fact that Cassie Wilson is a close associate of New York City’s Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. In another video, the two of them appear together to tout the virtues of Mamdani’s rent freeze.
And in a third, Mamdani praises her, saying, “And I also just want to thank Cassie in this room, because — I bring it up because, look, I’ve loved to make jokes for a long time, you know, humor is a big part of my life, but also the understanding that humor was one of the most effective forms of communication, especially digitally, was one that I also traced back to the video that we made together, early on in the campaign, and finding that, about a one-minute video was more effective than videos we had spent weeks trying to plan out.”
This is putting a faux-comedic face on what is actually the ugliest and most humorless of political ideologies. As Intifada on the Hudson: The Selling of Zohran Mamdani details, Mamdani’s politics are the politics of vengeance. He wants to make the productive suffer, confiscating their wealth and bestowing it upon the unproductive, as he made clear last July when he said, “I don’t think that we should have billionaires because, frankly, it is so much money in a moment of such inequality, and ultimately, what we need more of is equality across our city and across our state and across our country.”
When he said that, everyone assumed that he was just enunciating an overall goal that would not possibly be attained during his mayoral tenure. No one thought he would actually take action to drive any billionaires out of New York City, although his policies will likely accomplish that of themselves. Wilson’s new “joke” video raises the possibility, however, that in Mamdani’s New York City, the wealthy will be active targets of violence, which city authorities will make only the most perfunctory efforts (at best) to quell.
Inconceivable, right? Not necessarily. Violence has been the hallmark of every far-left regime that has ever held power anywhere on the planet. The list of leftist politicians in America who have made statements in which they call for violence, often quite openly, grows by the day. Mamdani will have the NYPD at his command and can order the police to devote more resources to combating ICE than to investigating the murders of billionaires.
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Surely he wouldn’t do such a thing, right?
Why not? In 2018, Mamdani worked for Ross Barkan, a far-left journalist who mounted an unsuccessful campaign for the New York State Senate. Barkan remembered the seriousness of Mamdani’s commitment to the cause: “What I would say about Zohran is he is deadly serious about socialism. Zohran is one of the true believers … he believes this stuff fervently.”
Yet if anyone dares to ask the incoming apparatchik to disavow Wilson’s remark about killing the billionaires, it is 100% certain that Mamdani will not do so. Instead, he will insist that it was just a joke, and that his critics are entirely too serious, and should relax, loosen up, and join the great big socialist party that a Mamdani-run New York City is going to be. Billionaires in New York City, however, should ponder Wilson’s words carefully, and not assume that once Mamdani takes office, they can assume that they will enjoy equal protection under the law.
