So far, Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year old who won the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, is still just a candidate. But in heavily Democratic New York, the Republican, radio host Curtis Sliwa, has little chance of winning. A recent <a href="https://www.racetothewh.com/nycmayorpolling">poll</a> puts Mamdani at 36.4% compared to Sliwa’s 16.3%.
That means the only man standing between Mamdani and the mayor’s office is Eric Adams, a Democrat who last year was <a href="https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/new-york-city-mayor-eric-adams-charged-bribery-and-campaign-finance-offenses">charged</a> with bribery and campaign finance violations. He has also angered his own party by failing to oppose immigration enforcement as much as other “sanctuary city” mayors like Chicago’s Brandon Johnson or Los Angeles’s Karen Bass.
New Yorkers have heard some of Mamdani’s proposals: rent control, free buses, higher taxes on higher earners, city-owned grocery stores, freeing criminal suspects without bail, legalizing prostitution, and replacing some police with social workers.
If one is unfamiliar with history, these promises might sound good. As the Babylon Bee put it, “<a href="https://babylonbee.com/news/democrats-discover-innovative-strategy-of-promising-free-stuff-to-stupid-people">Democrats Discover Innovative Strategy of Promising Free Stuff to Stupid People</a>.” This is funny, but unfair. There is a difference between ignorance and stupidity. New Yorkers aren’t stupid. And plenty of smart people are ignorant – meaning they just don’t know certain things.
Like how New York was back in the 1980s. Those of us who remember the city when Times Square was a den of squalor will know that Sliwa also founded the Guardian Angels, the red-beret sporting extended neighborhood watch that rode the subway to fight crime.
But that was 40 years ago. Most New Yorkers today have no direct experience with that era. At least half of them weren’t educated in New York; they came from abroad or from other states. Nationally, only 13% of U.S. eighth graders are <a href="https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=1160">proficient</a> in American history. I doubt they know much more about world history, or how “<a href="https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/commentary/we-must-educate-future-generations-the-myths-and-realities-socialism">true socialism</a>” worked when tried.
Those who were raised in New York mostly went through a public school system where, a <a href="https://medium.com/@newyorkteacher/update-guess-all-bs-on-nys-january-regents-exam-3dd8f2a0a713">researcher found</a>, students could pass a math exam by just guessing answer “C” every time.
Some New Yorkers may not know what Mamdani means by “socialism,” “Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS),” and “owning the means of production,” which he talked about in this short clip <a href="https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/1939516740909621286">posted</a> to X by @EndWokeness. Let me briefly explain.
“Socialism” is how communists describe themselves. Look at the now-defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the current communist countries, the People’s Republic of China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Republic of Cuba, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and the Lao People’s Republic – none of them mentions “communism” in its name or its official description of itself.
The only thing that makes the American version “Democratic,” as in the “Democratic Socialists of America” organization that Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Summer Lee belong to, is that they seek to come to power through elections, rather than violent revolution.
The “BDS” Mamdani wants is about Israel. The <a href="https://bdsmovement.net/what-bds">BDS movement</a> is a “Palestinian-led movement” that seeks to force Israel to accept a Palestinian state on dictated terms by pressuring governments and private companies to boycott (meaning not buy) Israeli goods and services; divest (meaning pull out all investments in Israel and Israeli companies); and sanction (meaning bans on business, finance, travel, etc.).
When he says he wants to “raise class consciousness,” Mamdani is talking about Karl Marx’s vision for how capitalist societies turn communist. Once the worker masses realize they are being exploited, Marxist theory goes, they will overthrow capitalism, take over the government, and “establish a more equitable society.” (Yes, that’s the same “equity” as in DEI, the ideology that captured Western <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7524478/">governments</a>, <a href="https://www.ie.edu/insights/articles/education-for-a-more-equitable-society/">education</a>, <a href="https://www.unitedwaygcr.org/news/together-we-can-build-more-just-and-equitable-society">NGOs</a>, and <a href="https://www.unilever.com/news/news-search/2021/how-we-will-help-build-a-more-equitable-and-inclusive-society/">companies</a>).
Mamdani said the “end goal” of socialism is “seizing the means of production,” by which he means the government taking over factories, companies, mines, energy producers, farms, restaurants, service providers, your aunt’s Etsy page – anything or anyone that creates value, from a Barbie doll to an F-150 truck. The core idea of socialism is that all of it should be taken from private ownership and given to the government to run.
The government will then decide what each of us needs to live on – “<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm">from each, according to his abilities; to each, according to his needs</a>.” If this sounds familiar, it&#8217;s because it has been tried before – first in the USSR, then in China, Cuba, North Korea, and in various countries in between in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. And with a 100% failure rate.
Every time, once the coveted “means of production” got into the hands of government functionaries — who inevitably grew corrupt — they ceased to produce efficiently and were run into the ground. Under socialism, instead of markets efficiently allocating capital to industry to produce what people need and want, bureaucrats do it through central planning, resulting in starvation, poverty, and misery.
China might be seen as a slight exception to the rule, but that’s only because it ditched much of communism’s economic orthodoxy and let favored people make money, while keeping the corrupt, nepotistic structure of the Communist Party and its social control machinery.
Mamdani reminds us “we need to remember what the stakes are.” He’s right. He’s smart, charming, and media savvy, which makes it all the more important that New Yorkers closely scrutinize his past and current comments and policy positions.
If Mamdani makes it to Gracie Mansion and keeps his promises, he will bring socialism to New York City, good and hard. It will work just as well as it ever did. And some of Manhattan’s wealthy residents will react just like Havana’s did in 1959 – they’ll go to Miami.
* * *
Simon Hankinson is a Senior Research Fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, and author of the forthcoming book “The Woke Ten Commandments (You Must Not Obey)” from Academica Press.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

US-POLITICS-NEW YORK-MAMDANI

Socialism In A Designer Suit: NYC Is In For A Hard Lesson If Mamdani Is Elected

Communism

Democratic Socialism

Heritage Foundation

New York City

Opinion

Zohran Mamdani

There is something chilling about watching Angel Studios’ documentary “Live Not By Lies!” 
It is not merely a recounting of history, though it does that with remarkable clarity — testimonies of men and women who survived totalitarian communism in Eastern Europe echo across the decades with a resonance we ignore at our peril. 
What is most unsettling about the adaptation of Rod Dreher’s bestselling work, however, is the gnawing realization that their warnings have already become our reality.
The film introduces us to brave Christians who, under Soviet rule, faced surveillance, intimidation, and prison — simply for refusing to pretend that evil was good. As they share their stories, one can’t help but feel the familiarity of it all: the demand to affirm ideologies we know to be false, the punishment for dissent, the slow corrosion of the conscience. The question is no longer “Could it happen here?” but “How far has it already gone?”
The same dynamic Dreher exposes—state and cultural forces colluding to crush dissent — is alive in the contemporary West.
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Live Not By Lies | Official Trailer | Streaming April 1 | Angel Studios" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lJh8wJKAnm8?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Consider Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, a woman who was arrested not for vandalizing property or committing acts of violence, but for the silent crime of praying in her head near an abortion facility in Birmingham, England. No slogans, no placards — only the private communion of her thoughts with God. She was questioned by police, searched, charged, and brought before a court. She was found innocent – but promptly arrested again weeks later for the very same thoughts in the very same place. Thankfully, after a long and grueling investigation, Isabel won compensation from the police with support from ADF International.
Then there’s Adam Smith-Connor, an army veteran who stood silently and imperceptibly in prayer near another facility in Bournemouth in memory of his lost son. He too was interrogated by police and criminalized for the contents of his conscience – worse, leading to a conviction and a criminal charge. Adam was ordered to pay £9,000 to the court – amounting to perhaps the most expensive three minute prayer in history.
<div id="attachment_624329" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-624329" class="size-large wp-image-624329" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/09/Screen-Shot-2023-09-22-at-12.25.15-PM-1024x574.png" alt="Credit: Alliance Defending Freedom." width="1024" height="574" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/09/Screen-Shot-2023-09-22-at-12.25.15-PM-1024x574.png 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/09/Screen-Shot-2023-09-22-at-12.25.15-PM-300x168.png 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/09/Screen-Shot-2023-09-22-at-12.25.15-PM-768x431.png 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/09/Screen-Shot-2023-09-22-at-12.25.15-PM-1536x861.png 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/09/Screen-Shot-2023-09-22-at-12.25.15-PM-2048x1148.png 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Credit: Alliance Defending Freedom.</div>
These cases are the canaries in the coal mine. They warn us of what happens when the state arrogates to itself the power to police interior conviction. In the novel “1984,” George Orwell called this “thoughtcrime.” Today in Britain, it is called a “buffer zone,” but the principle is identical: certain beliefs must not merely be suppressed — they must be eradicated from the public square.
“Live Not By Lies!” is a clarion call to rediscover moral courage. Dreher draws on the legacy of Vaclav Havel, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and countless ordinary Christians who refused to live by the lie. They were forced to pretend that the Party was infallible, that Marxism was inevitable, that the State was God. Today, our cultural commissars demand our allegiance to a different set of dogmas — that biological sex is a construct, that unborn life is disposable, that faith belongs behind closed doors and never in public life. But the impulse is the same: bow, or be broken.
The documentary is a reminder that resistance begins not with grand gestures, but with the refusal to speak untruth. When the authorities came to interrogate believers in Prague, they demanded not only compliance but confession: “Say that you agree. Say that you believe.” Many would not. For this, they lost jobs, were blacklisted, even imprisoned. Yet their refusal to say what they did not believe was the seed from which freedom eventually grew.
<div id="attachment_943085" style="width: 417px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.angel.com/watch/live-not-by-lies"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-943085" class="size-large wp-image-943085" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/MixCollage-04-Jul-2025-12-53-PM-1283-407x576.jpg" alt="Angel Studios" width="407" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/MixCollage-04-Jul-2025-12-53-PM-1283-407x576.jpg 407w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/MixCollage-04-Jul-2025-12-53-PM-1283-212x300.jpg 212w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/MixCollage-04-Jul-2025-12-53-PM-1283-768x1086.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/MixCollage-04-Jul-2025-12-53-PM-1283-1086x1536.jpg 1086w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/MixCollage-04-Jul-2025-12-53-PM-1283-1448x2048.jpg 1448w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/MixCollage-04-Jul-2025-12-53-PM-1283-scaled.jpg 1810w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 407px) 100vw, 407px" /></a>Angel Studios</div>
How many today are willing to pay that price? We like to imagine ourselves as different — more sophisticated, more democratic, more tolerant. But the evidence mounts that our culture is simply addicted to a softer form of totalism: enforced conformity through the threat of professional ruin, reputational assassination, or — if you dare to pray silently — criminal prosecution.
There is no more potent illustration of this drift than the prosecutions of Vaughan-Spruce and Smith-Connor. In each case, the state claimed to be protecting “vulnerable women,” yet no evidence was presented that these individuals harassed or intimidated anyone. The real issue was that their mere presence — and their silent prayers — expressed a conviction the state deems intolerable. The Soviets called it “anti-Soviet agitation.” We call it “interference.” In both cases, the thought itself is the crime.
Some will say these comparisons are overwrought. They are not. For the Christian who believes God is Lord of both conscience and public life, there is no partition between belief and expression. The attempt to criminalize that wholeness — to tell a person they may think but not manifest their convictions — is precisely what totalitarian systems have always done. Dreher’s work, and this film, make clear that it begins with a creeping fear to speak, and ends with a culture that cannot remember how.
If we are to resist, we must start by telling the truth. No law should compel a citizen to lie — whether about the humanity of the unborn, the nature of marriage, or the sanctity of prayer. And no government has authority over the secret dialogue of the soul with its Creator. To surrender this is to surrender everything.
* * *
Lois McLatchie Miller (@LoisMcLatch) is a Scottish commentator and Senior Legal Communications Officer for Alliance Defending Freedom UK.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Propaganda poster : Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Lenin and Stalin, 1953.

‘Live Not By Lies’: A Documentary Whose Warnings We Dare Not Ignore

Angel Studios

Books

Documentaries

England

Entertainment

Great Britain

Speaking at the America250 kickoff event at the Iowa State Fairgrounds on Thursday, President Donald Trump took aim at Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for New York City mayor who has made openly communist statements, declaring, “Generations of Americans before us did not shed their blood only so that we could surrender our country to Marxist lunatics on the eve of our 250th year.”
Mamdani has made openly Marxist statements such as “the end goal of seizing the means of production,” while iterating, “we have to continue to elect more socialists.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Zohran Mamdani: &quot;Our end goal, seizing the means of production&quot; HOLY F 
 <a href="https://t.co/aWfAmj8uNn">pic.twitter.com/aWfAmj8uNn</a>
&mdash; End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) <a href="https://twitter.com/EndWokeness/status/1939516740909621286?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 30, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
“As you know, recently we’ve seen some in our political system attempting to overthrow the timeless American principles and pillars of our liberty and replace them with some of the most noxious ideas in human history; ideas that have been proven false,” President Trump stated. “Members of Congress and even former presidents have been openly embracing vile creeds such as socialism, Marxism, and straight-up communism.”
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Then he turned to Mamdani: “In New York, they’re trying to elect a communist, Zohran Mamdani, the guy who wants to defund the police, take over the stores, and run the stores and have the people hand out goods. And when everything falls apart, it always does; it always works that way; it never has worked any other way, anarchy and dictatorships prevail.”
“This guy is a communist at the highest level and he wants to destroy New York,” he asserted. “I love New York and we’re not gonna let him do that. Generations of Americans before us did not shed their blood only so that we could surrender our country to Marxist lunatics on the eve of our 250th year.”
Trump then made a fateful promise, finishing with a flourish: “As President of the United States, I am proclaiming here and now that America is never going to be communist in any way, shape, or form. “
“And that includes New York City,” he concluded.
<iframe loading="lazy" title="YouTube video player" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YrrRWx0kwmQ?si=8WNRyRw2rO54n7W7&amp;start=3611" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>

Trump’s Freezing Of GOP Primary Field Underscored By Iowa Visit

Trump Tears Into ‘Marxist Lunatic’ Mamdani, Honors American Heroes In Bold Rebuke

Donald Trump

Elections

Executive

Marxism

Politics

CNN&#8217;s Bakari Sellers attempted to draw down on Republican commentator Scott Jennings during a Monday evening panel discussion, bristling when Jennings assessed New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani in the same way that President Donald Trump had: &#8220;a communist.&#8221;
Both Sellers and Jennings addressed the issue on CNN&#8217;s &#8220;NewsNight&#8221; with host Abby Phillip, discussing a recent video that showed Mamdani throwing around Marxist terms such as &#8220;seizing the means of production&#8221; and using government funds to buy up housing developments that would eventually be community-owned.
WATCH:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
🔥<a href="https://twitter.com/ScottJenningsKY?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@ScottJenningsKY</a> battles Bakari Sellers who is riled up over the idea that Mamdani is being called a &#8220;communist.&#8221;
Sellers: He’s a socialist.
Jennings: He’s using the language of the Bolsheviks, is he not?
Sellers: No, he’s not. He’s a socialist.
Jennings: Seizing the means… <a href="https://t.co/EtDWGUpiMv">pic.twitter.com/EtDWGUpiMv</a>
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) <a href="https://twitter.com/WesternLensman/status/1940372469996745060?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 2, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
&#8220;Calling him a communist is not far off base, when he talks about seizing the means of production,&#8221; former White House spokesman (under former President George W. Bush) Pete Seat said. &#8220;That is a Communist Party plank. He is talking about doing that. So I don&#8217;t have any problems with calling him what he is.&#8221;
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&#8220;And I don&#8217;t have any problem calling Donald Trump a felon,&#8221; Sellers replied. &#8220;Or charged with rape. Or the fact that he doesn&#8217;t pay his vendors. Or the fact that he&#8217;s racist because he got — he illegally [unintelligible] &#8230; and you&#8217;re right, you may have a Democratic socialist elected as mayor of New York City.&#8221;
&#8220;So you agree with Pete that he&#8217;s a communist?&#8221; Jennings asked.
&#8220;He&#8217;s not a communist,&#8221; one of the other panelists said off-camera.
&#8220;He&#8217;s a socialist,&#8221; Bakari said.
&#8220;He said &#8216;seize the means of production,'&#8221; Jennings said.
His voice rising a few pitches, Sellers repeated, &#8220;He&#8217;s a socialist! I&#8217;m not a socialist, but he calls himself —&#8221;
&#8220;He literally uses — he&#8217;s using the language of the Bolsheviks, is he not?&#8221; Jennings asked.
&#8220;No, he&#8217;s not,&#8221; Sellers tried again. &#8220;He&#8217;s a socialist, not a communist.&#8221;
&#8220;Seizing the means of production?&#8221; Jennings raised an eyebrow.
&#8220;That&#8217;s called socialism,&#8221; Sellers said. &#8220;Not communism.&#8221;
Phillip cut in then, bringing the debate to a close.
All evidence to the contrary, Mamdani has repeatedly stated that he is not a communist, but rather a &#8220;democratic socialist.&#8221;

Mayoral Candidate For New York Zohran Mamdani Holds Primary Election Night Party

‘Language Of The Bolsheviks’: CNN Panel Is All Fun And Games Until Someone Calls Mamdani ‘Communist’

'Language Of The Bolsheviks': CNN Panel Is All Fun And Games Until Someone Calls Mamdani 'Communist'

baka

Media

Scott Jennings

Socialism

The Scavengers are on the move. 
Scavengers are people who wish to tear down the society in which they live. They have very little in common with one another other than that simple fact. They simply want to tear down everything. That explains the bizarre agglomeration of radicals from across the political spectrum, who seem to gather together to rally against our civilization.
We saw a lot of that this past weekend. There was a march that took place to end Pride Month in Ireland, including a drag queen with a Palestinian flag. 
How do you put all that together? There are no openly gay people among Palestinians.
At the Toronto Pride parade, they flew Iranian flags. Remember, Iran is a place that hangs gay people from cranes. And yet there were people running around with flags reading “Freedom for Iran.”
And now there is the Omnicause flag. You remember the “rainbow pride” flag? Then we got the “pride progress flag” which had side arrows coming in and added white, pink, and blue. Then they added black and brown, because, of course, there are trans people who are black and brown. And then you had intersex people who were added as a yellow.
And now they&#8217;ve added on top of that a heart containing the Palestinian flag, because all the causes are one.
The Omnicause has finally come together. And that Omnicause is the Scavenger mentality. It&#8217;s all the people from the Jean-Paul-Sartre-Hatred-Of-Western-Civilization Left to the Queer Pride Left, who have decided that they are going to band together to destroy the civilization that we all share.
You could see that in action a little bit earlier over the weekend during the so-called Glastonbury Festival, when a member of the British rap punk duo Bob Vylan got up and started chanting “Death to the IDF” and suggesting that if you were a white Briton and you wanted your country back, “F***  off. You don&#8217;t get to get your country back.”
All of which brings us to Zohran Mamdani. 
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-ep-2229-member-exclusive?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=The+Ben+Shapiro+Show&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Carousel">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
So for all of those who keep pretending that Mamdani is a normal Democrat who just has some progressive leanings, the hell he is.
He&#8217;s the Apex Predator of the Intersectional Scavenger Coalition. He is a person who&#8217;s perfectly comfortable talking about spending $65 million in New York City to trans the kids and also talking about “Free, free Palestine” and “Globalize the Intifada” and also how it is deeply important and deeply necessary to seize the means of production.
He&#8217;s not hiding the ball at all. He is a representative of a Left that has lost touch with reality and is now running specifically and solely in order to denigrate and destroy the civilization in which it lives. That is their goal. 
None of these pieces fit together unless you understand that they are all directed toward destroying everything, not building anything.
Over the weekend, Mamdani joined NBC’s Kristen Welker. He was asked about the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which he continues to seize upon and use.
<div id="attachment_941993" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-941993" class="size-large wp-image-941993" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/GettyImages-2222185391-864x576.jpg" alt="MEET THE PRESS -- Pictured: (l-r) Kristen Welker, Moderator; Zohran Mamdani, New York City Mayoral Candidate appear on &quot;Meet The Press&quot; in New York, NY, Sunday, June 29, 2025 -- (Photo by: Peter Kramer/NBC via Getty Images)" width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/GettyImages-2222185391-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/GettyImages-2222185391-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/GettyImages-2222185391-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/GettyImages-2222185391.jpg 1024w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />Peter Kramer/NBC via Getty Images</div>
Understand that the term “intifada” means a violent uprising. That is how the term was coined. It is a term for a violent uprising, particularly against Israel. “Globalizing the intifada” means that you want an extension of a violent uprising all across the West.
The retconning that you&#8217;re seeing now, where people say “intifada” just means a nice, gentle struggle, is the same con pulled in the early 2000s, when some Westerners said “jihad” only meant internal struggle.
Mamdani was asked why he won’t stop saying “globalize the intifada.” He then cited free speech.
He can do whatever he wants. It&#8217;s a free country. But the question is not whether he ought to be allowed to say “globalize the intifada” as an American citizen. He is. The question really is: Is it a good or moral thing to say? 
One of the last refuges of cowards these days is to pretend that your free speech is being violated when you are criticized for saying something bad.
Mamdani’s father, a professor at Columbia University, said in 2021, “The resistance this time began in Jerusalem and spread to Gaza, now the West Bank and Palestinian communities beyond. This is not a conflict between Israel and Hamas. We are witnessing something far more meaningful, the birth of the third Intifada against settler colonialism.” 
You can see exactly where Zohran Mamdani came from. He is a merger of pro-jihadi leftism, a sort of cultural Maoism, a communist vision of economics, and an anti-traditional-virtue version of social politics. All of those things are combined together in a witch&#8217;s brew of nastiness, designed against the civilization that has made him now a famous person and made his parents very wealthy, famous left-wingers.
He&#8217;s embracing Islam, socialism, “free, free Palestine,” and marching in Pride parades in the same way that Ilhan Omar has. You think that Ilhan Omar is very fond of Pride parades or Mamdani — if he really is a religious Muslim in any serious way— is?
What it really is about in the end, as always, is Scavengers who seek to tear things down.
That is what they want to do. 
In the most colloquial sense, the highly-educated, intelligent Democrats are being cuckolded by Mamdani because they&#8217;re watching their party being stolen from them by Zoran Mamdani and cheering it.
They&#8217;re sitting there and they&#8217;re watching and cheering it because, God forbid, they should have to stand up against Zoran Mamdani and his vicious agenda for even a smidgen of a moment and lose the support of the hard Left.
It’s all disgusting and repellent.

2025 New York City Pride March

The Scavengers Are On The Move

Ben Shapiro

Leftists

Pride Month

New York City is on the verge of electing an actual communist mayor of the city, and this requires us to ask a question.
Why?
What is happening with the Left that they&#8217;ve decided to opt for Bernie Sanders over anything like a mainstream Democratic Party candidate?
Of course, this has been coming for a long time. Bernie Sanders ran an incredibly strong race against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Bernie Sanders then ran an incredibly strong race against Joe Biden in 2020.
Thus, there is something happening inside the Democratic Party — and it&#8217;s growing —and it&#8217;s growing — and it&#8217;s growing. That doesn&#8217;t mean the Democratic Party is growing and growing. In fact, the Democratic Party is shrinking even as this movement is growing.
It&#8217;s essentially a tumor destroying the health of the Democratic Party from the inside. But something is happening.
Zohran Mamdani, the former no-name, 33-year-old trust fund kid who’s a socialist and anti-Semite, who has worked for all of three combined years, I believe, in his entire adult life (and that includes him rapping), is now on the verge of becoming the mayor of the most important city in the West.
I think reasonable people look at this and think he is winning in spite of those things. I think that&#8217;s missing the point. He&#8217;s winning because of those things.
That’s because there&#8217;s an Omnicause on the Left; the Scavenger cause, which is to tear down all the systems. Inchoate rage at the system channeled into socialist economics, Howard Zinn-inspired foreign policy, and destructive hatred of traditional institutions.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-ep-2226-member-exclusive?elementPosition=6&amp;row=2&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
That Scavenger philosophy has gained tremendous credence with the dissatisfied Left, a Left that achieved many of its victories and now has plunged itself directly into nihilism.
The problem with the Left over the course of the last several decades has been that they caught the car. In the 1960s, the Left in the United States began to catch the car with everything from the sexual revolution to the overturning of the constitutional order. In doing so, they then had to construct a system.
The problem is that when you construct a system and then the system fails and fails and fails again, and then the backlash happens in the form of a Donald Trump, you start to lose your mind, you start to become insane.
Thus, instead of them wanting to capture the commanding heights of the system and change the system from within incrementally, “make it better,” which used to be the Democratic way, now they just want to burn everything down.
That is not a particularly attractive message to a broader American public that does not want to burn everything down. The secret about President Trump is that when President Trump ran in 2016, pledging that he was going to burn everything down, the reality is that people realistically believed that he was going to burn some things down, but he was certainly not going to burn everything down.
They actually thought he would be a lot more moderate than he said he would be. It turned out in many ways that he was significantly more institutionalist in his approach from 2016 to 2020 than people expected him to be. Even today, all the crazy people who are yelling about him challenging democracy, won’t recognize that democracy is not under threat, that the courts are not under threat. This idea that Donald Trump is simply running roughshod over our most cherished institutions is a lie.
But Democrats have always used revolutionary language in order to push forward evolutionary ends. Interestingly, Donald Trump did the same thing inside the Republican Party. He used revolutionary language to achieve evolutionary ends. All of that is normal politics in the United States.
That’s what&#8217;s currently happening to the Left. Bernie Sanders and his entire wing of the party are using revolutionary language because they want an actual revolution. This is why you have seen the Left nodding at riots over the course of the last decade, at actual attempts at revolution in the streets.
It&#8217;s why so much of the Left was fine with Luigi Mangione shooting the United Healthcare CEO, because revolution requires a few broken eggs, and it is why Bernie Sanders now has the whip hand in the Democratic Party.
Zohran Mamdani is simply channeling Bernie Sanders at this point, with a few added features. He&#8217;s ethnically diverse, he&#8217;s not originally born in America, his father is a postcolonial studies professor at Columbia University of Shia Muslim descent, and his mother is an Indian-American filmmaker of Punjabi Hindu descent.
All these things add a smattering of exoticism to Zohran Mamdani. The fact that he is a rabid anti-Semite obviously sprinkles a lot of pizazz atop the Omnicause stew. He&#8217;s Greta Thunberg with a beard, with a more ethnically exotic background, and with a lot more charisma.
He is the face of the international Left in a nutshell. In his victory speech, he said:
<blockquote>Let me close with this. In these dark times, I know that it is harder than ever to keep faith in our democracy. It has been attacked by billionaires and their big spending by elected officials who care more about self-enrichment than the public trust, and by authoritarian leaders who rule through fear. But above all, our democracy has been attacked from within. For too long, New Yorkers have strained to find a leader who represents us, who puts us first, and we have been betrayed time and again after so many disappointments. 
The heart hardens, belief becomes elusive, and when we no longer believe in our democracy, it only becomes easier for people like Donald Trump to convince us of his worth, for billionaires to convince us that they must always lead. And I pledge to you that we will remake this great city not in my image, but in the image of every New Yorker who has only known struggle.</blockquote>
“Known struggle?” Are you kidding me? Mamdani has experienced a shocking lack of struggle in his young and non-achievement-oriented life. 
According to <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/kylemullins/2025/06/24/heres-how-much-new-york-city-mayoral-candidate-zohran-mamdani-is-worth/">Forbes</a>:
<blockquote>At a panel in Harlem in February, New York state assembly member Zohran Mamdani discussed a piece of proposed legislation that would strip Columbia University of various tax breaks and redirect the revenue to fund the City’s university system. Mamdani’s no stranger to Columbia—his father is a Harvard-educated, renowned professor there, and he grew up in university-owned housing. “Columbia was our first landlord,” he told the crowd, according to an account in the student newspaper. &#8230; Forbes estimates Mamdani to be worth around $200,000. &#8230; Mamdani attended Bank Street, a prestigious Manhattan private school that now costs as much as $66,000 a year for elementary school students, before graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, one of the city’s best public schools. &#8230; he studied Africana Studies at Bowdoin College, a private liberal arts school in Maine.
After graduating, he worked on his mom&#8217;s sets. He tried his hand at a rap career using the monikers Young Cardamom and Mr. Cardamom, and “took jobs working on several political campaigns and community organizing efforts.”</blockquote>
That is legitimately his entire work history. This is a person who is campaigning for those who “have only known struggle.”
What is he actually saying?
What he is saying is that if you are unsuccessful in life, what is required is a revolution: a revolution led by someone like Zohran Mamdani, a trust-fund kid.
That&#8217;s what he is. And yet he is treated as though he is a revolutionary.
By the way, a dirty little secret about revolutions: They are very rarely led by true members of the low-income classes. They are usually led by upper-middle-income people who feel upset that they didn&#8217;t get their “fair worth.”
That’s Mamdani. And so he is taking Bernie Sanders’ economics and slapping on top of that all of the spicy peppers that makes so many liberals go absolutely gaga, particularly white, highly-educated, rich, elite liberals.
All the things that normal people see in Mamdani as problems are nectar to the Left.
When I say that Bernie Sanders is taking over the Democratic party, this is what I mean. AOC is Bernie Sanders wearing AOC’s face. Mamdani is Bernie Sanders wearing Mamdani’s face.
There’s a reason that leftists are marching with a queer flag and a Palestinian flag and an Iran flag and also voting for Zohran Mamdani: because they are about destroying the things that work — in the name of nothing.
It is not as though they want to build a better system. They do not have the capacity to build a better system.
This is about a shout and a cry at the “establishment,” screaming at the moon in the name of revolution.
That is Bernie Sanders.
Bernie has never been on a major piece of legislation. Bernie is a lifelong loser. He&#8217;s a loser.
But that doesn&#8217;t mean he’s not dangerous.
Losers can absolutely be dangerous.

New York City Mayoral Candidates Campaign Ahead Of Primary Election

Greta Thunberg With A Beard

Bernie Sanders

Democrats

Liberals

You finally did it, you maniacs! You blew it up.
We are now living at the very end of “Planet of the Apes,” when stunned Americans wander the beaches of New York City and find the Statue of Liberty half-buried in the sand. That’s because Zohran Mamdani, a communist pro-Jihadi insane person who seems to have been bred in the laboratory at Columbia University just to be a leftist pastiche, is now the mayoral frontrunner in New York City because he won the Democratic primary last night in stunning fashion over the disgraced former governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo.
According to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/nyregion/cuomo-mamdani-mayor-primary-nyc.html">The New York Times</a>:
<blockquote>Zohran Mamdani, a little-known state lawmaker whose progressive platform and campaign trail charisma electrified younger voters, stunned former Governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York on Tuesday night, building leads so commanding that Cuomo actually conceded.</blockquote>
Cuomo said, 
<blockquote>I&#8217;m very proud of the campaign that we ran, and I&#8217;m proud of the effort that we put forth, and I&#8217;m proud of the issues that we discussed. But tonight was not our night. Tonight was Assemblyman Mondani’s night, and he put together a great campaign, and he touched young people and inspired them and moved them and got them to come out and vote. And he really ran a highly impactful campaign. I called him; I congratulated him. I applaud him sincerely for his effort and let&#8217;s give him a round of applause.</blockquote>
So, Sad Sack Cuomo now wants to run as an Independent. We will find out whether that is real or whether that is not real, because after he registers as an independent — and now the mayoral race becomes Eric Adams, who’s running as an independent, and Cuomo running as independent, against Mamdani, who will be the Democratic nominee — Mamdani is pretty clearly the front-runner.
The Times continued: “Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist from Queens, tapped into a current and current of anxiety around New York City&#8217;s growing affordability crisis and his joyful campaign” — it&#8217;s always joyful for The New York Times. When you are a socialist nutjob, that means that you are filled with “joy,” so much “joy,” and anybody who accurately characterizes the state of New York City as not particularly good, that person is filled with rage.
They did the same routine about Kamala Harris. You remember she was so “filled with joy” and Donald Trump was so “filled with rage.”
It turns out that Trump&#8217;s perspective on reality was significantly more linked to reality than Kamala’s perspective.
Apparently, Cuomo was filled with “rage” and “despair,” but Mamdani was filled with joy.
There&#8217;ll be so much “joy” at these state-run supermarkets. I&#8217;m not kidding when I say that. That was one of the Mamdani proposals: he wants the city to run supermarkets because he believes that the profit motive is creating bad grocery choices in New York City, which is psychotic. Socialists have never been good at the distribution of food. That&#8217;s why they have bread lines in socialist countries. And Mamdani is not just a left-leaning Norwegian type. Mamdani is someone who believes in full-scale nationalization, the government running the means of production.
When we say he&#8217;s a communist, he&#8217;s an actual, honest-to-God communist.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-ep-2225?contentProgram=The%20Ben%20Shapiro%20Show&amp;contentType=ShowEpisode&amp;elementPosition=2&amp;location=Home%20Tab&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Home%20Featured%20Carousel">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
I think the most important thing here to remember is that young Democrats are basically sixth-grade voters in your middle-school election.
If you ever ran for student body president in middle school, you will remember that if you ran a normal campaign pledging, for example, that you were going to clean up the gym better, and then some kid came in and said, “I pledge free ice cream and no homework for everyone,” all the kids voted for that idiot.
That&#8217;s New York City when it comes to all of the Gen X, millennial, and Gen Z voters, particularly white people.
If you look at the voting map of New York City from Tuesday night, you will notice something very funny. Everyone who actually has to live in the parts of the city that are not the richest parts of the city voted against him. 
Mamdani is simply an essential boiling down of every luxury belief that upper-class, college-educated white people hold, and those beliefs are insane.
You wonder why I&#8217;m very much in favor of President Trump effectively wrecking the universities?
This is why. They have become indoctrination centers for Zohran Mamdani and his voters.
Blame this on the upper-class, college-educated white people. That&#8217;s who did this. It shows you that college makes people stupid.
As a resident of Florida since 2020, let me say this to all the high-net-worth individuals in New York City, all the people who pay taxes, all the productive people in New York City with investment firms and financial investments: We&#8217;re here for you, down here in Florida. We&#8217;re here.
But leave your values at the border because your stupid values bought you this. So don&#8217;t come down to my state and wreck my state. We&#8217;ll be checking ID as you come down into my state. We&#8217;ll be deporting all the New York illegal immigrants who come into the state of Florida if you come down here and you bring your Democratic crap politics to my state.
But if you&#8217;re coming down here as an act of contrition and repentance, noticing that your city has completely destroyed itself, noticing that your city is now trending toward full-scale socialism, wrecking all of the things that made New York City great, all of the investment, all of the creativity, all of the innovation, in favor of redistributionist nonsense — if you&#8217;re coming down here and you are simply bringing your productivity and your innovation and yes, your wealth, down to Florida from New York, come on down. We&#8217;re here for you. We&#8217;ll be here for you in your time of need.
And yes, the real estate prices may be a little bit higher since that&#8217;s your penalty for not having seen what was coming in the city that you helped to wreck over a period of time.

You Finally Did It, You Maniacs

Mayor

President Donald Trump laid into New York City Democrats in a Wednesday afternoon post to Truth Social, saying they&#8217;d finally &#8220;crossed the line&#8221; when Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani pulled out a Democratic primary win in the New York City mayoral election.
&#8220;It’s finally happened, the Democrats have crossed the line,&#8221; Trump began in the first of two posts. &#8220;Zohran Mamdani, a 100% Communist Lunatic, has just won the Dem Primary, and is on his way to becoming Mayor. We’ve had Radical Lefties before, but this is getting a little ridiculous.&#8221;
&#8220;He looks TERRIBLE, his voice is grating, he’s not very smart, he’s got AOC+3, Dummies ALL, backing him, and even our Great Palestinian Senator, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, is groveling over him,&#8221; Trump continued. &#8220;Yes, this is a big moment in the History of our Country!&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
President Trump on Zohran Mamdani. <a href="https://t.co/0vcKDkLH9E">pic.twitter.com/0vcKDkLH9E</a>
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) <a href="https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1937953398630060430?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 25, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
In the second post, Trump offered some advice to the Democratic Party moving forward, suggesting they should go all in and nominate Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) for the presidency in 2028. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), he said, should be her vice presidential candidate.
&#8220;I have an idea for the Democrats to bring them back into &#8216;play.&#8217; After years of being left out in the cold, including suffering one of the Greatest Losses in History, the 2024 Presidential Election, the Democrats should nominate Low IQ Candidate, Jasmine Crockett, for President, and AOC+3 should be, respectively, Vice President, and three High Level Members of the Cabinet,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Added together with our future Communist Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, and our Country is really SCREWED!&#8221;
Mamdani edged out disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) for the nomination, but may still face him again in the general election as Cuomo has not ruled out the possibility of a third-party run.
Based on his campaign website, Mamdani would <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/new-york-mayoral-hopeful-would-go-all-in-on-transing-the-kids-to-the-tune-of-65-million">dump millions of dollars</a> of city funding into transgender procedures and treatments — for adults and children — and challenge the Trump administration&#8217;s efforts to restrict such procedures for minors.

Trump

Trump Labels NYC’s Mamdani A ‘100% Communist Lunatic’

Trump Torches New York Democrats Over Democratic Primary Winner, '100% Communist Lunatic' Mamdani

Andrew Cuomo

Eric Adams

In May, U.S. energy officials <a href="https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/ghost-machine-rogue-communication-devices-found-chinese-inverters-2025-05-14/">released</a> bombshell findings about China’s ability to turn out the lights across America. Rogue communications devices were found inside Chinese solar power inverters. In addition, undisclosed cellular radios were found inside Chinese batteries. These Chinese Communist Party sabotage efforts are reminiscent of CCP-tied Huawei’s infiltration of our communications network, which gave Beijing the ability to <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/23/politics/fbi-investigation-huawei-china-defense-department-communications-nuclear/index.html">disrupt our nuclear arsenal communications</a>.
Beijing seeks the ability to remotely access and destroy the systems upon which Americans depend for everyday life and upon which our military depends to project power across the globe. The U.S. rightly began to remove Huawei technologies from our market <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/ghost-machine-rogue-communication-devices-050547906.html?guccounter=1">in 2019</a> because of security risks. Since then, ironically, we’ve allowed China to flood our market with network-connected technologies such as routers, drones, cranes, healthcare devices, cameras, green tech, and more, which collectively constitute a deeper penetration of our vital systems. This trend must be reversed through new laws and better law enforcement to block and remove all Chinese network-connected technologies. 
American tax dollars should not fund technologies that facilitate Chinese espionage and sabotage efforts. At the federal level, Congress should ban federal procurement of Chinese network-connected technologies. Congress should also codify President Trump’s Information and Communications Technology <a href="https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/05/17/2019-10538/securing-the-information-and-communications-technology-and-services-supply-chain">executive order</a> from 2019 and fund ICT programs to block CCP tech. During March 2025 testimony, former Biden Administration official Dr. Rush Doshi <a href="https://www.youtube.com/live/oS_aZXE6W0k">argued</a> that codifying Trump’s order “would let us prohibit certain [Chinese] goods,” especially power converters and network-connected technologies, “from being in the U.S. market.”
States must excise CCP network-connected technologies from their critical infrastructure and government systems. For example, Texas’ 2021 <a href="https://www.jw.com/news/insights-texas-lone-star-infrastructure-protection-act/">Lone Star Infrastructure Protection Act (LIPA)</a> forbids Texas businesses and government from contracting with China, Russia, North Korea and Iran on critical infrastructure, especially if foreign parties would gain remote access or control of the infrastructure. A 2023 Nebraska law <a href="https://flood.house.gov/media/press-releases/congressman-flood-applauds-bipartisan-work-ban-state-funds-huawei-equipment">prohibits</a> the state from providing public funds to telecommunications providers that have not yet removed Huawei 5G hardware from their cell towers. Utah passed a 2024 law to end procurement of Chinese technologies such as computers and routers. All states should adopt these measures.
Furthermore, the U.S. must enforce the rule-of-law. The Chinese Communist Party has made tremendous gains at the expense of the U.S. in part because the U.S. and its allies have failed to enforce their own laws upon malicious CCP agents and entities. At a fundamental level, the two legal systems are incompatible because <a href="https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/statement-national-security-advisor-robert-c-obrien-011521-2/">China’s laws require businesses to engage in espionage for the party-state</a>, while America’s laws require data privacy. America must pivot and crush CCP lawlessness. Consumer fraud and data privacy laws must be tightened, and robust enforcement actions must be taken by both federal agencies and state attorneys general. 
In March 2025, the FCC’s Council on National Security <a href="https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/fcc-investigating-china-companies-national-security/743316/">opened an investigation</a> into several telecommunications companies, including Huawei, for engaging in unfair, deceptive, and fraudulent business practices such as selling banned equipment in the United States. The FCC can go further by revoking telecom licenses from corrupt entities. Meanwhile, other federal agencies must get in the fight.
State AGs must enforce the law against Chinese manufacturers that embed hidden backdoors in products, and American companies that “white-label” such products must also be held accountable. For example, according to the federal <a href="https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/resources/contec-cms8000-contains-backdoor">Cybersecurity &amp; Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)</a> the Chinese company Contec sells healthcare monitors with embedded backdoors that provide Beijing with access to patient data along with the ability to manipulate readings of a patient’s vitals. AGs should investigate Contec for potential violations of consumer and medical data protections. As a recent FDA Safety Communication states, <a href="https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/safety-communications/cybersecurity-vulnerabilities-certain-patient-monitors-contec-and-epsimed-fda-safety-communication">Florida-based Epsimed</a>, which sells Contec products in the U.S., should also be investigated.
These security concerns are amplified by ethical concerns. Chinese green energy technologies are not only riddled with backdoors, they often <a href="http://www.cecc.gov/events/hearings/from-cobalt-to-cars-how-china-exploits-child-and-forced-labor-in-the-congo">rely on slave labor</a>. Too many environmental activists have been hoodwinked into promoting cheap CCP hardware to “save the planet,” all while supporting slave labor and compromising our energy grid.
The United States <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/ghost-machine-rogue-communication-devices-050547906.html?guccounter=1">2019 actions against Huawei</a> were a strong step, but since then we’ve lost ground. Rapid and concerted action is needed to protect our way of life against Chinese Communist Party sabotage, and to build an economic system based upon rule-of-law rather than communist infiltration and subversion.
* * *
Michael Lucci is the Founder and CEO of State Armor, a 501(c)(3) non-profit advocating for state solutions to the global threats posed by the CCP. 
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

TOPSHOT-CHINA-TECHNOLOGY-AI

CCP In The Machine: How China’s Tech Continues To Infiltrate American Hardware

Attorney General

China

Espionage

Foreign Policy

Spying

Technology

Earlier this month, we celebrated the 80th anniversary of V-E Day, “Victory in Europe,” which marked the end of the European Theater’s part in the Second World War. It is a date certainly worth commemorating as it closed one of the darkest chapters in European history, which was the rise and fall of Hitler’s Third Reich.
For the countries in what today we call Western Europe that languished for years under the jackboot of Nazi oppression — France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Greece — the Allied victory truly represented liberation.
<div id="attachment_925633" style="width: 875px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-925633" class="size-large wp-image-925633" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-3093644-865x576.jpg" alt="Ecstatic crowds celebrating VE Day in London's Piccadilly, at the end of World War II, 8th May 1945. Original Publication: Picture Post - 1991 - This Was VE Day in London - pub. 1945 (Photo by Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" width="865" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-3093644-865x576.jpg 865w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-3093644-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-3093644-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-3093644.jpg 1024w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 865px) 100vw, 865px" />Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images</div>
But there was another side to V-E Day that seems to get glossed over. And that is the less happy fate of the Eastern European nations who were not liberated by the Anglo-Americans rolling in from the west, but rather the Red Army coming in from the east. And for those nations — Poland, Hungary, then-Czechoslovakia, the Baltic states — V-E Day merely meant trading one brutal oppressor for another. Indeed, as the Allies were closing in from both sides, the dark joke in Germany was “Optimists are learning English, pessimists are learning Russian.”
We have been conditioned for over 80 years to viscerally recoil at the very mention of the Führer’s name. Just say “Hitler” and the mind conjures up images of the Holocaust and mass murder of millions of innocents carried out by robotic, goose-stepping stormtroopers wearing their signature coal scuttle helmets.
Yet, when we utter the name “Stalin,” no such dark imagery materializes in the collective mind. And yet, in terms of pure numbers, it can be argued that the Soviet “Man of Steel” had more blood on his hands than even Hitler. Why the indifferent reaction?
It could perhaps be attributed to a curious media/academic tendency of apologetics towards communism. As polls consistently show, both of these institutions lean very much to the left. And Stalinism is the ultimate expression of their collective leftist ideology come to fruition in all its destructive inevitability. During the 1930s, for example, dispatches from Moscow-based New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty were shamefully obsequious towards Stalin, offering up for his readers images of a prosperous, happy communist USSR workers’ paradise.
No matter that the Soviet dictator was coldly stripping Ukraine of food and inducing a famine in 1932-1933 (called the “Holodomor”) during which anywhere from 3.5 to 5 million Ukrainians died of starvation — atrocities Duranty labeled as a “big scare” and “exaggeration.”
Then there was Stalin’s 1929-1933 genocide against the Kulaks (wealthy peasants who resisted his policies) to facilitate the expropriation of farmland. In one directive, the Soviet leader declared, “We must smash the Kulaks, liquidate them as a class.” Millions died.
And what of the estimated 700,000 to 6 million who died in Stalin’s Gulag, the far-flung network of concentration camps where he sent his enemies, whom the hyper-paranoid dictator saw all around him. (Figures vary widely; the latter number comes from dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was imprisoned for eight years.)
Starting in 1936, Stalin wiped out his political and military adversaries in a series of show trials called “The Great Purge.” Stalin’s biographer Oleg V. Khlevniuk estimates that 1.6 million were arrested, with 700,000 shot; no one knows how many died of torture.
<div id="attachment_925699" style="width: 883px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-925699" class="size-large wp-image-925699" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-104408516-873x576.jpg" alt="RUSSIA - JANUARY 01: Joseph STALIN, the supreme ruler of the USSR, working in his garden around 1935 to 1936 while Lavrenti BERIA, the chief of the Soviet secret police, poses with STALIN'S daughter, SVETLANA, on his knees. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)" width="873" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-104408516-873x576.jpg 873w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-104408516-300x198.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-104408516-768x507.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-104408516.jpg 1024w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 873px) 100vw, 873px" />Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images</div>
During the Second World War on the Eastern Front, Stalin was so profligate with the lives of his people that by the time the red banner of the USSR was flying over the Reichstag in the conquered Berlin, some 27 million Soviets lay dead. Many as a result of combat and German atrocities, of course, but also due to Stalin’s unimaginative strategies that callously offered up both his soldiers and civilians before the guns of the Wehrmacht as fodder.
Whereas Hitler’s policies were driven by twisted racial hatred, delusions of grandeur, a sense of grievance on behalf of a nation he felt was ill-treated at Versailles, and, by the end, drug-addled bona fide madness, Stalin in some ways is even more disturbing as there was a cold, calculating, and ruthless nature to his machinations.
Stalin will also go down as one of the most treacherous characters in history. It should be remembered that until Hitler turned on him and attacked Russia in June 1941, Stalin and the German dictator were allies. Hitler only felt secure enough to invade Poland and trigger the Second World War because Berlin and Moscow had just entered into a non-aggression pact the month before. In fact, people often forget that in September 1939, Poland was not just invaded by the Wehrmacht but also by the Red Army. After which, Stalin’s NKVD promptly rounded up 22,000 members of Poland’s military and intelligentsia, marched them to the Katyn Forest, and shot them all dead.
<div id="attachment_925683" style="width: 949px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-925683" class="size-large wp-image-925683" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-875641680-939x576.jpg" alt="9/28/39: Russo -German Pact Molotov signing pact directly behind is J. Von Ribbentrop on the right is Josef Stalin. (Photo by Bettmann/Corbis/Getty Images)" width="939" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-875641680-939x576.jpg 939w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-875641680-300x184.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-875641680-768x471.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-875641680.jpg 1024w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 939px) 100vw, 939px" />Bettmann/Corbis/Getty Images</div>
Says historian Victor Davis Hanson: “Of the six major belligerents of World War II, on the Axis side, Italy, Japan, and Germany, and the United States, Russia, and Britain, Stalin made a deal with every one of them at one time or another, and he honored the ones with the Axis better than he did us.”
But, unlike Hitler, Stalin’s image during the war was softened by the Roosevelt administration and pliant media due to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. FDR, especially, was hopelessly naïve about the duplicitous nature of the man whose military he was now supplying through Lend-Lease. As far as he saw it, the Russians were now our allies after all. And, frankly, we needed the Red Army to kill as many Germans as possible before we invaded France. The mass murderer of Moscow was thus re-christened “Uncle Joe” Stalin. And as it was his Red Army more than any other that destroyed the Wehrmacht, what he did to his own people and those in Eastern Europe were swept under the rug until the Cold War commenced in the late 1940s. After all, as the saying goes, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
<div id="attachment_925619" style="width: 762px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-925619" class="size-large wp-image-925619" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-186649926-752x576.jpg" alt="Russian leader Marshal Josef Stalin and President Franklin Roosevelt confer in the Soviet Embassy during the Tehran Conference, Tehran, Iran, December 7, 1943. (Photo by Underwood Archives/Getty Images)" width="752" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-186649926-752x576.jpg 752w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-186649926-300x230.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-186649926-768x588.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-186649926.jpg 1024w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 752px) 100vw, 752px" />Underwood Archives/Getty Images</div>
80 years after the war in Europe ended, modern Germany is still horrified by, and ashamed of, their Nazi past. But to this day, even in a post-Cold War Russia in which information regarding the horrific crimes carried out by the Bolsheviks is now widely accessible, Stalin is revered by the Russian people. A 2021 poll by the Levada Center found that 70% of Russians held a mostly or very favorable view of Stalin.
And that same lack of revulsion over Stalin’s decades-long reign of terror carries over into the West today as a misguided affinity for Marxism slithers its insidious way through the halls of so-called higher education. A poll by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that millennials, particularly younger ones, displayed a dreadful ignorance of communism and even support for it. Almost half of Americans between the ages of 16 and 20 “said they would vote for a socialist, while 21% would go so far as to back a Communist.” Even more shocking was that a “third of millennials say they believe more people were killed under George W. Bush than Joseph Stalin.” This is criminal negligence on the part of academia — and dangerous.
I have a shirt that reads “Communism killed 100 million people and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.” Though gallows humor, the message is also a searing indictment of a left-leaning academic and media establishment that are utterly dismissive of the crimes perpetrated by the founding fathers of their own defunct and cruel ideologies. The verdict of history should have condemned Soviet communism to the ashbin of history decades ago. But a fatal attraction for this defunct ideology that invariably leads to mass murder is alive and well in the West today. This is a tragedy — and dangerous.
* * *
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities fund manager, author, and columnist whose articles have appeared on the pages of The Daily Wire, The Wall Street Journal, NY Post, NY Daily News, National Review, The Hill, The Federalist, Zerohedge, and other outlets. He is the author of three <a href="https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07MQJBJSD?ccs_id=55112527-86f6-4c89-b82e-a96d6869abed" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07MQJBJSD?ccs_id%3D55112527-86f6-4c89-b82e-a96d6869abed&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1736518135479000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3K_WhJtiUZw7LF1PwSIHtH">books</a>. Follow him on <a href="https://x.com/bschaeffer123" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://x.com/bschaeffer123&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1736518135479000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0P6pRoAqcBhUQ1W0qwN5rH">X/Twitter</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
This article originally appeared on the author&#8217;s <a href="https://bradschaeffer.substack.com/p/for-eastern-europe-v-e-day-commemorates">Substack.</a>

Stalin In Moscow

From Reich To Red: Why Stalin Still Haunts Us 80 Years After V-E Day

Adolf Hitler

Europe

Germany

History

Josef Stalin

Leftism

Russia

World War II

David Horowitz died on Tuesday at the age of 86.
I knew David really, really well. I used to work at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Truth Revolt, which was a precursor to The Daily Wire, began at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
I knew David for more than a decade before that. He was truly a formative person in the modern conservative movement, a person who spoke the truth no matter the cost.
David started off as a radical communist. He wrote a book in 1996 titled “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/dp/0684840057?ref_=ast_author_dp&amp;th=1&amp;psc=1#" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey</a>.” In it, he talks about how his parents were communists and that he was a “Red Diaper Baby.”
He began his career as a far-Left writer for Ramparts magazine. He turned to the Right when his friend was allegedly killed by the Black Panthers. Then, basically all of his old friends disowned him and decided he was “untouchable.”
David then turned into one of the most effective conservative activists of his generation. He used to call the David Horowitz Freedom Center a “battle tank” rather than a think tank. Pretty much everybody who&#8217;s anybody in modern conservatism had some initial connection with David Horowitz. I met Charlie Kirk, for example, at a David Horowitz Freedom Center event back when Charlie was maybe 18- or 19- years old and was first getting started with TPUSA.
And that remains true for a huge number of people who got their start in the conservative movement in the 1990s and 2000s. His books are worth reading. He was really an amazing writer, a terrific speaker, and a strong voice.
There are many videos of him online that are really worth watching. Here is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuqTKXZjffE">just one</a>, for example:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="WILL YOU CONDEMN HAMAS: David Horowitz Goes Toe-to-Toe With Terrorism Apologist" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JuqTKXZjffE?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
&nbsp;
<blockquote>Horowitz: Will you condemn Hamas here and now? 
Radical Student: I&#8217;m sorry, what? 
Horowitz: Will you condemn Hamas? Will you condemn Hamas as a terrorist and genocidal organization? 
Radical Student: Are you asking me to put myself on a cross?
Horowitz: So you won&#8217;t. I actually have had this experience many times. You didn&#8217;t read the pamphlet because the pamphlet is chapter and verse. The main connection is that the MSA is part of the Muslim Brotherhood network, as revealed in the document.
Radical Student: I don&#8217;t think you understood what I meant by that. I meant if I say something, I&#8217;m sure that I will be arrested for reasons of Homeland Security. So if you could please just answer my question.
Horowitz: If you condemn Hamas, Homeland Security will arrest you?
Radical Student: If I support Hamas — because your question forces me to condemn Hamas — if I support Hamas, I look really bad.
Horowitz: Well, if you don&#8217;t condemn Hamas, obviously you support it. Case closed. I&#8217;ve had this experience at UC Santa Barbara, where there were 50 members of the Muslim Students Association sitting right in the rows there. And throughout my hour talk, I kept asking them, “Will you condemn Hezbollah and Hamas?” And none of them would. And then when the question period came, the president of the Muslim Students Association was the first person to ask questions. I said, “You know, before you start, will you condemn Hezbollah?” And he said, “Well, that question is too complicated for a yes or no answer.” So I said, “Okay, I&#8217;ll put it to you this way. I&#8217;m a Jew. The head of Hezbollah has said that he hopes that we will gather in Israel so he doesn&#8217;t have to hunt us down globally — for it or against it?
Radical Student: For it.
Horowitz: Thank you. Thank you for coming and showing everybody what&#8217;s here.</blockquote>
David was extremely clear in his approach to the world. He understood the morality of many of our foreign adversaries. He was an advocate for Americanism and American strength and security. And he will very much be missed.

2David_Horowitz_(5450881229) copy

David Horowitz: The Most Effective Conservative Of His Generation

Conservatives

David Horowitz

Obituaries

Republicans

As we all know, in last November’s presidential election, Donald Trump defeated what’s-her-name and left Democrats trailing Republicans in popularity by a margin of approximately everybody to nothing. Now, Democrats are trying to find a new way forward that does not involve finding a new way forward. Democrat National Committee Chairman Mao Tse Muhammed Jihad Vladimir Muhammed Allahu Akbar Stalin Jihad Mohammed recently addressed the subject in a speech entitled “How Can They Hate Us When We’re So Hep?” The Speech was delivered to the annual meeting of the Future Illegal Alien Terrorists Who Hate America of America, or the FIATWHA – and then another A. Mr. Jihad, who goes by the name of Miss Jihad and uses the pronouns He and Be, as in the sentence “He be giving me the heebee geebees,” told the gathering, “It’s time to face up to the truth. We Democrats instigated fatal riots and then pretended they weren’t happening, we opened our borders to criminals and terrorists and pretended that wasn’t happening, we sexually mutilated children in the name of a perverted fantasy, we censored anyone who disagreed with us and tried to put our political opponents in jail, and we acted with such weakness and incompetence overseas that it inspired our enemies to begin wars in both Europe and the Middle East. Now we must ask ourselves, since we’re doing everything perfectly according to plan, why the hell doesn’t the public love us like they should?”
In an attempt to refresh the party’s image, the Democrats have turned to 83-year-old Senator Bernie Sanders, a man who lived through the Communist gulags of Russia, the Communist enslavement of Eastern Europe, the Communist slaughter in China, and the Communist genocide in Cambodia without once changing his opinion that Communism works great, especially in Norway, where they don’t have it. Sanders has been declared the new face of the Democrat party and has been teamed up with Alexandria Ocasio Cortez who has been declared the new rack of the Democrat party. Asked about this arrangement, Sheldon Whitehouse, the Junior Senator from the State of Unbelievable Corruption, said “With Bernie Sanders as our new face and AOC as our new rack we will have a hideous old face with a great rack and that’s a winning combination because when you have a great rack, no one looks at your face.”
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1223-stuck-in-the-story">WATCH: The Andrew Klavan Show</a></h3>
Sanders and AOC have been traveling the country staging what they call the “Rally in Favor of a Failed Economic System that has led to Enslavement and Mass Murder Wherever it’s Been Tried but For Some Reason we still Think Is Great.”
The rallies generally open with a ringing speech from Sanders who tells the crowd, “I happen to believe that billionaires should pay their fair share of utterly useless programs that nonetheless convince poor people to vote for us even as their states and cities descend into apocalyptic dysfunction because of those same programs. I happen to believe that socialism has worked really great, especially in Norway. And I happen to believe that what I happen to believe should happen to matter to every person who happens to care what an octogenarian Communist just happens to believe. And by the way, here’s AOC and, golly, will you look at the rack on that woman.”
When Sanders finishes his speech, he turns the microphone over to AOC who says, “I’ve come here today to say completely nonsensical things in a loud shrill voice full of make-believe sincerity. All across this country, I see people left behind by capitalism for no other reason than that they don’t work or contribute to society in any way. It isn’t fair. Well, okay, it actually is kind of fair, but it isn’t right. And even if it is right, I think there are enough total wastrels who feel entitled to a portion of the wealth created by other people that we might have enough votes to turn this country around. And hey, my eyes are up here. Why aren’t you looking in my eyes?”
So far the rallies have been filled with thousands of cheering people, most of them Republicans who feel they’ll never lose an election again.
* * *
This excerpt is taken from the opening satirical monologue of “<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/the-andrew-klavan-show" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Andrew Klavan Show</a>.”
The views expressed in this satirical article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Andrew Klavan is the host of “The Andrew Klavan Show” at The Daily Wire. Follow him on X: @andrewklavan
Klavan is the bestselling author of numerous books, including the Cameron Winter Mystery series. The fourth installment, “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1613165536?ref_=dbs_m_mng_rwt_calw_thcv_3&amp;storeType=ebooks" target="_blank" rel="noopener">A Woman Underground.</a>” His most recent nonfiction release is “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Kingdom-Cain-Finding-Literature-Darkness/dp/0310368340/?_encoding=UTF8&amp;pd_rd_w=nMYjR&amp;content-id=amzn1.sym.bc3ba8d1-5076-4ab7-9ba8-a5c6211e002d&amp;pf_rd_p=bc3ba8d1-5076-4ab7-9ba8-a5c6211e002d&amp;pf_rd_r=133-8344803-2786917&amp;pd_rd_wg=7a8J3&amp;pd_rd_r=5791ea0f-6d96-4732-9d6a-3a4e6b348bb5&amp;ref_=aufs_ap_sc_dsk" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness.</a>” (May 2025, Zondervan/HarperCollins).

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