Mamdani Leaves Homeless To Freeze To Death 

Professor Gad Saad coined the term “suicidal empathy” to describe a kind of empathy so extreme it ends up harming you. 

A prime example would be the way the West has approached immigration from third-world countries. You feel bad for people. You open your borders. A plethora of people come in and harm your civilization.

But now, it seems like we are moving beyond suicidal empathy into what I would call “homicidal empathy.” That would be exemplified by your empathy for someone getting them killed.

There’s a good example in New York City with Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who promised, “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

That collectivist warmth is manifesting in people freezing to death on the streets of New York City. Despite all of Mamdani’s photo ops showing him shoveling the snow (for a man who cannot bench press 135 pounds once), I don’t think the people of New York can count on his shoveling skills.

What he usually shovels is horse crap.

Mamdani has embraced a hands-off policy with regard to homelessness. This was the policy in California. It remains the policy in places like Los Angeles. This policy is empathetic toward the homeless to the point where you’re killing the homeless.

The policy argues that they should be able to live out on the streets, that it is a form of cruelty and intolerance to involuntarily commit people who are usually drug-addicted or schizophrenic, people who can’t take care of themselves. Somehow, it is more empathetic to leave them out on the streets to get scabies or to die in the cold.

This seems to be the way the left-wing brain is working in Mamdani-land, California, and other liberal areas of the country. 18 people have died in the cold snap that has hit New York City.

Brian Stettin, who served as a senior advisor to former Mayor Eric Adams in his administration, told the New York Post, “When a person is in imminent danger, there’s no debate. Whatever ideological divides we have should not have any impact on these policies during a Code Blue.”

A mumbling homeless woman who braved some Antarctic temperatures was featured on the front cover of the Post on Monday.

The Post reported:

The unidentified woman was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, slippers and two blankets as she clipped her nails, put lotion on her hands and talked to herself while hunkered down on East 34th Street across from NYU Langone Hospital as temperatures neared 0 degrees early Sunday. She refused repeated offers for help from EMS workers and cops — who explained to The Post they had to leave the shivering vagrant in the extremely dangerous bone-chilling weather because she could answer basic questions — a factor that helps meet the threshold of Dem Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s controversial homeless policies.

That’s Mamdani’s shtick: If you can answer basic questions such as “What day of the week is it?” “What is your name?”, then they will leave you out on the streets to freeze. 

Mamdani held a press conference over the weekend. “Stay warm. Stay inside if you can. And please, stay safe,” he said.

“You’ve implored the people on the streets who feel more comfortable on the streets to come inside. But what happens if they don’t at this point? …20 minutes out in the cold could lead to a fatality. So are you not using as a last resort at this point to bring them inside and volunteer, even if just a few hours doesn’t lead to a placement?” a reporter asked.

“Involuntary transport continues to be used in the same manner it was as the prior administration,” Mamdani replied. “And thus far, we have seen clinical determinations of a number of New Yorkers who have been deemed to be a danger to themselves or to others. And sometimes that designation comes from an assessment that a New Yorker is not adequately clothed, given the weather that they are living through in that moment. And that is going to continue to be part of the assessments that outreach workers are making over the course of tomorrow or the next day.”

Mamdani’s last resort policy says that you can only be forced indoors if you are deemed a danger to yourself or others. The problem, of course, is that if you are Zohran Mamdani and you have spent your entire career ripping down cops and treating people as though they’re committing a human rights violation by pushing people indoors, people might be a little hesitant to actually take responsibility for calling somebody a “danger to themselves or others.”

The New York Post reported:

Down in Baltimore, Mayor Brandon Scott — whom Mamdani once praised for his crime reduction efforts — late last month called the cold a life-or-death issue and ordered the police department to take people off the streets even if they were refusing services. “That direction order came from me because we cannot allow folks to be out in this kind of weather,” Scott said.

The fact that this has become a matter of public controversy is totally insane.

Zoran Mamdani apparently has so much sympathy for people. I’m going to put it out there: If you are out on the streets sleeping on the sidewalk, that is not a housing problem in the middle of a cold snap. That is a crazy problem if other options are given to you. No sane and rational person, by definition, who is not a danger to themselves, is sleeping out on the street in zero-degree weather. That is not a thing that sane and rational people do unless they are Arctic explorers of some type.

This comes down to Mamdani’s bizarro world empathy that legitimately gets people killed. This sort of policy, when you apply it to crime, leads to more criminals on the streets. When you apply it to homelessness, it leads to more homeless people on the streets.

The empathy that you have for the purported victim of America’s “evil, racist, abusive” system leads to the very people you are supposedly trying to help sometimes dying.

On February 6, the New York Post reported that Mamdani was still refusing to clear homeless camps and forcibly remove people from the streets, despite a rising death toll and a fresh snap of deadly deep freeze. Instead, he implored people to come inside.

If people refuse to come inside in the middle of zero-degree weather while living on the streets, it will not be solved by you imploring them.

City Journal reported:

During last year’s campaign, Mamdani promised to end a program initiated by his predecessor, Eric Adams, that deploys clinicians, backed by police officers, to assess people’s ability to care for themselves and, if necessary, to transport them involuntarily to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation. He repeatedly said that involuntary commitment was a “last resort,” preferring instead an approach that would have civilian workers “help that person navigate their housing options.” He has also disavowed dismantling homeless encampments. 

That was a proactive move by Adams to determine whether somebody ought to be on the streets or not. And Mamdani wanted to kill that. I guess the presumption was that unless they were in the throes of some sort of crime, they should never have an engagement with law enforcement.

The message being sent to the homeless is, basically, you have a right to live on the streets. And the message being sent to public service workers, cops, and mental health professionals is that you’re going to be called on the carpet if you make the mistake of bringing somebody in.

It’s nuts, it’s bad, and it’s stupid.

It’s indicative of a deeper brain rot that has set in large parts of the Left: That empathy amounts to humoring people in their delusions, even if it’s dangerous to them.