The Daily Signal - VDH: Zohran Mamdani Is Dusting Off the Old Socialist Playbook. He Hopes No One Will Notice

Episode Date: July 3, 2025

New York City Democrat Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani tells his supporters he wants to “turn the page in New York City” with a fresh new agenda. However, there’s nothing new about what Mamdani is proposing. In fact, his socialist policies are quite old. “City-owned grocery stores?” It’s called a co-op and California had plenty in the 1970s until people began to notice that their produce was no better than Safeways. “Freezing the rent?” Owners of rent-stabilized properties in the Bronx lose an average of $120 per month on each apartment, resulting in 200,000 severely rundown apartment units, according to Mark Willis, a senior policy fellow at NYU’s Furman Center on Real Estate.  “Fast, fare free buses” won’t work while people are jumping the turnstiles and using the subway for free, argues Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words.”    👉Don’t miss out on Victor’s latest videos by subscribing to The Daily Signal today. You’ll be notified every time a new piece of content drops: https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1  👉If you can’t get enough of Victor Davis Hanson from The Daily Signal, subscribe to his official YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@victordavishanson7273  👉He’s also the host of “The Victor Davis Hanson Show,” available wherever you prefer to watch or listen. Links to the show and exclusive content are available on his website: https://victorhanson.com  The Daily Signal cannot continue to tell stories, like this one, without the support of our viewers: https://secured.dailysignal.com/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We'd love to talk, business. I'd like to talk about the dream house of Zoran Mondami. He was the successful democratic socialist candidate in the first round of the recent New York mayoral elections. What's funny about Mondami is almost everything he says is a contradiction or not true. He says he's not a communist. Okay, he's a democratic socialist. He says that the key to any socialist revolution is to seize or get the means of production. That's right out of Marx's Das Kapital.

So he's quoting communist dogma as a mechanism to gain political power. He said he was going to go after affluent and whiter areas of New York. He has been a child of privilege. So most of his message is in coherent. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hansen for the Daily Signal. I'd like to talk about the dream house of Zoran Mondami. He was a successful democratic, social. candidate in the first round of the recent New York mayorial elections. He was a beneficiary

of two phenomena that might suggest he has a 50-50 chance more or less to win the general election. Number one, in the primaries, it's ranked voting, and people can vote for various candidates. And traditionally, that means in that cumbersome process that outliers are minority candidates, minority in the sense of they're not a member of either of the major parties have an advantage. And number two, while he was very preeminent as the hard left favorite, the conservative side split the vote between former governor Cuomo, Mr. Silwa, who's a perennial candidate, and, of course, the incumbent mayor, Eric Adams. So we're looking at the general election. But what's funny about Mondami is almost everything he says is a contradiction or not true. Now that he is the

frontrunner, everybody is going back over his record and asking him questions. Did you say you want to defund the police? Once the police were refunded under Eric Adams, the crime rate has gone down. And he said, no, I didn't say that. And then it's become an internet phenomenon listing all the times he did say that. He said, that he wished that billionaires didn't exist. Does that mean that he wouldn't want George Soros to fund the get out the vote groups and the activists who are actively supporting him? Will he come out and say George Soros, I wish that you didn't exist? He says he's not a communist. Okay, he's a Democratic socialist, but he says that he, that the key to any socialist revolution, quote, is to seize or get the means

production. That's right out of Marx's Das Kapital. So he's quoting communist dogma as a mechanism to gain political power. He says he has a new agenda, a new initiative, a new policy, turn the page in New York. When you actually look at what he's advocating, they're very old. He says he wants to have government-owned food markets, grocery stores. I think any of us, went to school in the 1970s in college knew that in every major university town, whether it was Berkeley or Pao Alto in California or Santa Cruz, there was a co-op. And the co-op's advertisement was we don't make a profit. But my remembrance of those co-ops were they didn't last very long. They eventually went broke. The produce was no better than Safeway or Rayleaves or Food for Less or

Save Mart or any of the competitors. So that is not new. Giving free, free ticketing on buses and mass transit. The problem we have right now is that people have free access to the subway. They jump the turnstiles. But imagine his plan that everybody, de facto or de Ure, would jump the turnstiles. So how is that going to be fun? He wants to have rent control.

We know what rent control does. Once a landlord knows that he can. not raise his rent in accordance with what he thinks maintenance, insurance, tax expenses rise commiserately, then he cuts back. He doesn't improve the property or he forces people to get out, et cetera, et cetera, and you don't build new units. There's a couple of other things very quickly. I could go on with that list of things that he thinks that are quite new. But he said something very, I think, shocking. He said he was going to go after affluent and whiter, whiter, whiter areas of New York, as if they were synonymous. But if you look at per capita income

in the United States based on ethnic affiliation, so-called whites are 17. Number one, Asians, the top 10 are Asian, but number one, Indians, Indians, Indian Americans, Mr. Mondami's people. So what he should say, if he was intellectually honest, we're going to go after affluent people, and especially the most affluent people, my people, Indian Americans. And he didn't say that. And he didn't say that because he's trying to win minority votes and he thinks he's going to lose to Eric Adams. A final note, he talks about arresting Benjamin Netanyahu, the pariah state of Israel. It's a colonial settler state. His family, were colonists or they were settlers or they were immigrants into black Africa, Uganda. And the Indian community represented in Uganda the top 1%. And they were the shopkeepers, the bankers, the merchants that ran Uganda until many of them by Edia Men were expelled. They went to South Africa, where the Indian African community was very prominent.

And then they faced harassment for their success. And then he came to California. Excuse me. Then he came to the United States. What am I getting at? He should not call Israel a colonial settler presence because that's exactly what his own family was. And he should be very sensitive to the powers of envy and popular discontent against the very wealthy, because after all, his father is a professor, very well-compensated Columbia University professor.

is a multi-million dollar successful filmmaker, and they represented the elite and the powers of jealousy and envy pushed them out of their presence in Africa, and he came to the United States. So in this fantasy world of Mr. Mamdami, he's criticizing the very thing, the very issues, the very policy that made him, whether it's his parents coming here or what they did in Africa, or his private school or his prestigious prep school. He has been a child of privilege. And so most of his message to finish is incoherent. This is Victor Davis Hansen for The Daily Signal.

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