Heading into the home stretch of the New York City mayoral race, it seems that Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani is all but a shoo-in to be New York’s next mayor. One of the most common debates among conservatives across the country right now is whether to hope that he does win in order to teach New Yorkers a lesson. The million-dollar question is, if he wins will they learn from it?
The short answer is no. They most definitely will not learn the error of their ways and vote better next time around, and here’s why.
It’s called cognitive dissonance, and it’s best explained by Mark Twain: “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
More to the point, according to some peer-reviewed research on voters out of Harvard in 2007, cognitive dissonance can come into play "if an individual performs an activity that is antithetical to his beliefs, the individual may unconsciously change his beliefs to alleviate the discomfort of having inconsistent attitudes and actions.” In other words, if you vote for a candidate who in reality stands for everything you are against, you are subconsciously more likely to change your own beliefs to be more in line with the candidate’s. You’ll do this to establish some sense of continuity for yourself.
A more relevant question then is, if the candidate doesn’t stand for what you stand for, why would you vote for him in the first place? The “attraction attributes” are many. Mamdani is young, articulate, and smart. He has a very positive and upbeat demeanor on the campaign trail. All of this contrasts with the much older Andrew Cuomo, who has faced serious allegations of corruption. He’s arrogant and not nearly as articulate on his feet as Mamdani. He seems much less in touch with the people of New York than Mamdani is right now.
Once you consider all of this, it's clear why people just might vote for any or all of these reasons. Never mind that Mamdani is saying out loud that he is a socialist and is very likely to bring a non-western culture into the city’s governance in ways we can’t imagine. People will overlook that to their city’s own peril.
Once the city continues down an inevitable slide towards more crime, more violence, more hate, and more economic decline, none of the people who voted for Mamdani will blame themselves.
But if they aren’t happy, guess what they will do? They’ll leave. Those who can afford it will leave New York, and that exodus will contribute to an acceleration of New York City’s decline. Meanwhile, more non-westerners will replace them.
The New York Post is reporting that “residents are racing to secure homes in the leafy, affluent enclaves of Connecticut and Westchester County — driven by anxieties over (Mandami’s) potential policy shifts that could reshape the city’s economic and social fabric.”
According to the Post, real estate professionals in the suburbs around New York are actively looking for new homes in those areas at scale “with properties vanishing in days amid fierce competition and all-cash deals that push prices far beyond expectations.”
Call it the “Mamdani effect,” and it’s obviously driving up real estate demand and prices outside of the city.
“We’ve been seeing bidding wars, and we’ve been seeing people come out of New York City,” Houlihan Lawrence Metalios, a real estate agent, told the Post, “citing the prospect of a Mayor Mamdani as a concern.”
But there is a secondary and perhaps much more weighty question to consider than just what will happen after this particular election cycle. Assuming some people leave the city, and others stay, what will happen to New York City?
The answer may be in Dearborn, Michigan. According to the U.S. census, Dearborn’s population is roughly 54% Arab-American. The town is home to the largest Muslim population per capita in the country and also houses the largest mosque on the continent.
The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed on February 2, 2024, titled “Welcome to Dearborn: America’s Jihad Capitol,” penned by Steven Stalinsky of the Middle East Media Research Institute.
The piece alleges that Dearborn fosters an environment where there is ample support for Palestinian and radical Islamist factions, including Hamas. Stalinsky wrote that federal counterterrorism authorities have had concerns over support for terrorism in parts of Michigan, but particularly in Dearborn. He says that the majority of the 28 terror groups labeled as such by the State Department have some presence there.
There were numerous other concerning allegations in the piece, all of which merit further scrutiny. In the end, they tell a story of an ethnic group that came to America with no desire to assimilate and, in a very real sense, seek to change American culture itself. We have not seen anything like this before.
When you have this, there will be a clash, and you can only hope it’s not a violent one. But violent or not, there will be winners and losers. Look across the ocean to countries like Germany, France, and the UK, and you'll see that Western Civilization isn’t doing so well in these same scenarios.
Is that what you want for the largest city in the U.S.? Do you want the divisiveness of Dearborn to take root in New York, and possibly spread to the rest of America?
