The brother of a man killed in the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks has a blunt message for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani: Don&#8217;t bother showing up at the Ground Zero memorial.
Dennis McGinley, whose brother Daniel Francis McGinley died on the 89th floor when terrorists struck the World Trade Center in 2001, tore into Mamdani during a fiery sit-down with NewsNation anchor Katie Pavlich, accusing the socialist mayor and his political peers of hijacking the tragedy&#8217;s legacy for their own narratives.
Daniel, then 40, was a senior vice president at Keefe, Bruyette &amp; Woods when he was murdered alongside nearly 3,000 others that morning. His brother has since become one of the most outspoken advocates for victims&#8217; families, frequently sparring with leftist politicians he believes have lost sight of who actually suffered that day.
Asked by Pavlich how to confront a younger generation that seems increasingly willing to rationalize the atrocity, McGinley didn&#8217;t pull punches. He suggested the critics in question lack real-world experience, saying, “These people, they don&#8217;t seem very bright to me. From what I&#8217;ve read, I don&#8217;t think they&#8217;ve ever had a job. They just go to like an Ivy League school for like 10 years.&#8221;
He wondered aloud whether their tune would change if someone they loved had faced the horrifying choice so many victims confronted that day.
“I do think that if one of their relatives or loved ones had shown up to work, and within an hour after arriving at work, they had to decide, do I jump from the 100th floor of this building or do I burn alive?” he added.
McGinley said he wouldn&#8217;t wish the past quarter-century of grief on anyone — but argued that anyone seeking public office, especially in New York, owes the city&#8217;s residents more compassion than he believes has been shown.
Then he tore into politicians, noting that they traditionally pose for photos behind the rope line at the annual Ground Zero ceremony before vanishing.
“Being that it&#8217;s a political season and campaign season, and that&#8217;s usually when the politicians show up down at Ground Zero for the memorial every year — you know, they&#8217;re behind their ropes and they&#8217;re laughing, smiling, taking their photo ops, and then they take off,&#8221; McGinley said. &#8220;We certainly hope that none of these politicians show up down there for their photo op. We do not want them there, and that goes for Mayor Mamdani as well.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
&quot;We certainly hope that none of these politicians show up down there for their photo op &#8211; we do not want them there &#8211; and that goes for Mayor Mamdani as well.&quot;
WATCH: Dennis McGinley &#8211; whose brother Daniel was murdered in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 &#8211; joins Katie… <a href="https://t.co/DS46Q65hvG">pic.twitter.com/DS46Q65hvG</a>
&mdash; Katie Pavlich Tonight (@KatiePavlichNN) <a href="https://x.com/KatiePavlichNN/status/2070699201827143859?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 27, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.x.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
This follows months of controversy surrounding how Mamdani discusses the terror attack. Speaking last September, he focused on Islamophobia, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/10/nyregion/mamdani-sept-11-muslim.html">saying</a>, “It became a fact of life. It was this horrific day that was also for many New Yorkers the moment at which they were marked an ‘other.’”
A month later, he invoked an aunt he said stopped riding the subway after the attacks out of fear for wearing a hijab.
Conservative commentators bitterly criticized Mamdani. CNN contributor Scott Jennings blasted the remarks online, writing, “There was one big thing missing from Zohran Mamdani&#8217;s emotional remarks about 9/11: Any mention of the VICTIMS of the worst terror attack on U.S. soil. What are we to infer from this?”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
There was one big thing missing from Zohran Mamdani&#39;s emotional remarks about 9/11:
Any mention of the VICTIMS of the worst terror attack on U.S. soil.
What are we to infer from this? <a href="https://t.co/qNXxR03a0m">pic.twitter.com/qNXxR03a0m</a>
&mdash; Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) <a href="https://x.com/ScottJenningsKY/status/1982158038388621789?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 25, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.x.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
On air, Jennings doubled down, declaring:
<blockquote>
I think if you&#8217;re going to run for mayor of New York City, have any position in New York City and you&#8217;re going to talk about 9/11 or invoke 9/11, you darn sure better start with the people who died in the Twin Towers. That&#8217;s what I think. And he didn&#8217;t do that and he made it about his experience and his aunt and all this. &#8230; That moment in our history, you cannot lose sight of what happened. People died in those Twin Towers. They did not deserve to die. We did suffer a terrorist attack and we can&#8217;t really forget the moment, making it about him and his family. There were almost 3,000 people that died there. It&#8217;s a big deal.
</blockquote>
For McGinley and other grieving relatives, the message is simple: 9/11 remembrance belongs to the dead and those who loved them, not to politicians chasing a sympathetic storyline.

World Trade Center Attacked

9/11 Victim’s Brother To Mamdani: Stay Away From Ground Zero

9/11

New York City

Zohran Mamdani

This is republished with permission from the author. The original, “The DSA’s big city takeover,” at The Intersection can be found <a href="https://www.patrickruffini.com/p/the-dsas-big-city-takeover">here</a>.
***
The Democratic Socialists of America’s victories in congressional primaries feel seismic because they come on the heels of a string of major victories in big cities, including a DSA-backed candidate winning the Washington, D.C. mayoral primary, a DSA candidate making it to the runoff in Los Angeles, and Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City. By the end of the year, the mayoralty of the country’s three largest cities may be in the hands of hard-left progressives.
If you’re thinking this is a workers’ revolution — not quite yet. Support for these candidates came from <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/aed48742-fe63-4697-accb-c96201b574cc?j=eyJ1IjoiY2ZvbSJ9.YJyyTVOoIwIR_L9MYp4kKM8u6Osr7CjIvM9objcYRrE">wealthier, better-educated</a> — and whiter — precincts. Even the race the DSA was not supposed to win, Darializa Avila Chevalier’s win against Adriano Espaillat, came in a Harlem-based precinct that’s seen a lot of gentrification in its Manhattan-based parts. Meanwhile, moderate Ritchie Torres saw no real challenge in a South Bronx district that’s still the poorest in the nation.
<div id="attachment_1124929" style="width: 647px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1124929" class=" wp-image-1124929" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/Ruffini1.jpg" alt="" width="637" height="491" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/Ruffini1.jpg 1440w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/Ruffini1-300x231.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/Ruffini1-747x576.jpg 747w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/Ruffini1-768x592.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 637px) 100vw, 637px" />Credit: Patrick Ruffini</div>
Another area where you did not see a comparable DSA effort was the actually-wealthy 12th district, where Upper West Side liberal Micah Lasher prevailed. According to figures compiled by Kyle Tharp, the results here were <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/4b210297-260e-42d1-bd08-807a5795110e?j=eyJ1IjoiY2ZvbSJ9.YJyyTVOoIwIR_L9MYp4kKM8u6Osr7CjIvM9objcYRrE">inversely proportional</a> to the fame (as measured by social media followings) of each candidate:
<div id="attachment_1124933" style="width: 1210px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1124933" class="size-full wp-image-1124933" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/Ruffini2.jpg" alt="" width="1200" height="667" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/Ruffini2.jpg 1200w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/Ruffini2-300x167.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/Ruffini2-1024x569.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/Ruffini2-768x427.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px" />Credit: Patrick Ruffini</div>
The sweet spot for socialism is downwardly mobile, highly educated young voters — the junior copy editor living in a studio apartment whose parents were corporate lawyers living in the suburbs. And largely missing from the party are the urban working class, who are dwindling in number.
Play this out, and it’s to see mainstream Democrats hanging on in cities anywhere, at least those that are magnets for college-educated young people. The actually rich voters, like those in the 12th, are limited in number, while the working class is increasingly priced out of their old neighborhoods and is moving to the suburbs. Who else is left? Basically, the DSA’s target voter.
<a href="https://substack.com/redirect/f5a83be8-554e-4e55-ba53-7a62357037f6?j=eyJ1IjoiY2ZvbSJ9.YJyyTVOoIwIR_L9MYp4kKM8u6Osr7CjIvM9objcYRrE">Charles Franklin</a> also breaks down DSA favorability: 20-48 nationally, but 40-20 among Democrats. But it’s not limited to big cities: all sorts of Democrats, including those who live in rural areas, view the DSA favorably.
<div id="attachment_1124935" style="width: 1416px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1124935" class="size-full wp-image-1124935" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/Ruffini3.jpg" alt="" width="1406" height="552" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/Ruffini3.jpg 1406w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/Ruffini3-300x118.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/Ruffini3-1024x402.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/Ruffini3-768x302.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1406px) 100vw, 1406px" />Credit: Patrick Ruffini</div>
Could far-left politics go national in 2028? The Michigan Senate primary will be a big test of this, as I <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/a317769a-1b5b-448d-a620-34cb1765ba69?j=eyJ1IjoiY2ZvbSJ9.YJyyTVOoIwIR_L9MYp4kKM8u6Osr7CjIvM9objcYRrE">wrote</a> on Wednesday. You also saw a progressive win in a Trump district, Maine’s 2nd, where it would have behooved Democrats to nominate a more mainstream alternative. Substantively, most Democratic primary voters appear to <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/05338231-3792-4982-860f-2680f93f0e64?j=eyJ1IjoiY2ZvbSJ9.YJyyTVOoIwIR_L9MYp4kKM8u6Osr7CjIvM9objcYRrE">want socialism.</a>
<div id="attachment_1124937" style="width: 1209px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1124937" class="size-full wp-image-1124937" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/Ruffini4.jpg" alt="" width="1199" height="616" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/Ruffini4.jpg 1199w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/Ruffini4-300x154.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/Ruffini4-1024x526.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/Ruffini4-768x395.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1199px) 100vw, 1199px" />Credit: Patrick Ruffini</div>
Meanwhile, normie liberals like Gavin Newsom appear to be walking a <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/cc87013a-6abb-4423-a9cf-35c45662f1c1?j=eyJ1IjoiY2ZvbSJ9.YJyyTVOoIwIR_L9MYp4kKM8u6Osr7CjIvM9objcYRrE">tighter line.</a> Once surging in polls and prediction markets, he has since fallen back. His comeback strategy? Tethering himself to Joe Biden and an unpopular Democratic establishment. He’s also tried to negotiate with the unions to get a state billionaire tax off California’s ballot this fall. As it’s become apparent it’ll be a hard sell for this primary electorate, he’s <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/76de6a86-61b9-4e7e-b52b-6b0a7f2f31b7?j=eyJ1IjoiY2ZvbSJ9.YJyyTVOoIwIR_L9MYp4kKM8u6Osr7CjIvM9objcYRrE">come out</a> for a national tax.
<div id="attachment_1124939" style="width: 1466px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1124939" class="size-full wp-image-1124939" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/Ruffini5.jpg" alt="" width="1456" height="1047" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/Ruffini5.jpg 1456w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/Ruffini5-300x216.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/Ruffini5-801x576.jpg 801w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/Ruffini5-768x552.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1456px) 100vw, 1456px" />Credit: Patrick Ruffini</div>
One Democrat who does seem to be making a name for himself is Jon Ossoff, whose viral rally clips have catapulted him to the top of the 2028 buzz. But something about it feels off-key, writes Kyle Tharp, a perfectly stage-managed 2012 production <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/463c76bd-3509-4dce-8a04-6af53f3923f2?j=eyJ1IjoiY2ZvbSJ9.YJyyTVOoIwIR_L9MYp4kKM8u6Osr7CjIvM9objcYRrE">out of place</a> in 2028:
<blockquote>
To play devil’s advocate, however, the problem with this strategy is that the Perfectly-Optimized, Almost-Robotic Ossoff hasn’t proven he can turn the switch off. He almost never seems like he’s speaking off the cuff, and he rarely displays any casual human banter on camera. Like Martin noted, he “speaks in paragraphs,” and every clip seemingly lands because his team engineered it to land, which is exactly the issue. When a politician’s best moments all arrive pre-planned, voters and the reporters covering them will start to wonder what he sounds like when the advance team isn’t carefully picking the camera angle. Eventually, people will get bored.
Democrats seem to care about ~authenticity~ far more in 2026 than they did during the Obama years or even when Ossoff was first elected. The politicians often breaking through in the second Trump era do so, in part, by seeming unfiltered. Trump joked and rambled for hours on Rogan, Flagrant, and Bussin’ with the Boys and his supporters loved him more for it. Zohran Mamdani built a following on selfie-cam monologues and creator collabs, many of which look like he filmed them between subway stops. Gavin Newsom is hosting his own hour-long podcast every week, and AOC has long been the master of the art of informal Instagram live streams. Younger Democrats may now spend their time watching people like Hasan Piker reacting live for six hours straight, and older Democrats are watching candidates shoot the shit with Tim Miller on the Bulwark (When Ossoff recently appeared with Miller, he seemed like The Bulwark host was giving him a root canal).
</blockquote>
That’s a perfect example of the <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/65d8f52d-38f0-4081-8dd8-ad7c147e65a6?j=eyJ1IjoiY2ZvbSJ9.YJyyTVOoIwIR_L9MYp4kKM8u6Osr7CjIvM9objcYRrE">“Joe Rogan CEO” test</a> from a16z <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/fecd50b4-efc6-4d2b-8d1c-1805a27884a5?j=eyJ1IjoiY2ZvbSJ9.YJyyTVOoIwIR_L9MYp4kKM8u6Osr7CjIvM9objcYRrE">highlighted</a> in Nathan Brand’s must-read media newsletter. Are you authentic and interesting enough to spend three hours shooting the breeze with Rogan? Kamala wasn’t — and probably knew it. Which 2028 Democrats will be?
***
Patrick Ruffini is a pollster at Echelon Insights, author of PARTY OF THE PEOPLE, and creator of <a href="https://www.patrickruffini.com/">The Intersection</a> newsletter.

Zo Money, Zo Problems political sticker, Anti Zohran Mamdani mayoral campaign, Queens, New York

Red Rover, Red Rover, Send The Socialists On Over

Darializa Avila Chevalier

Democratic Socialists Of America

DW Opinion

Gavin Newsom

Socialists

New York City&#8217;s Democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani pushed ahead with his promised rent freeze on Thursday — but that could just be the setup for a far more dramatic move.
Mamdani&#8217;s new rent freeze could be setting landlords up to fail — and creating a stash of new &#8220;city&#8221; properties on which to build. In May, Mamdani alluded to resurrecting the controversial Third Party Transfer (TPT) program, which would allow the city to effectively confiscate private property under certain conditions.
“For buildings that have suffered chronic neglect, we will work to transfer ownership to responsible stewards.” If apartments are seized, Mamdani said they could be transferred to community land trusts, non-profits, or “even the tenants themselves.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-media-max-width="560">
NOW: Mamdani says his admin will transfer ownership from bad landlords to non-profits.
“For buildings that have suffered chronic neglect, we will work to transfer ownership to responsible stewards.
Stewards that include community land trusts, non-profits, or even the tenants… <a href="https://t.co/YHhzGWPgWh">pic.twitter.com/YHhzGWPgWh</a>
— Brecca Stoll (@breccastoll) <a href="https://x.com/breccastoll/status/2059289647688106237?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 26, 2026</a></blockquote>
Under New York City’s controversial TPT program, the city can foreclose on buildings whose owners owe back property taxes, water charges, or have violated New York City’s housing code. 
The TPT program was paused in 2019 after backlash from property-rights advocates and elected officials, but the New York City Council is currently considering legislation that could <a href="https://www.thecity.nyc/2026/03/09/third-party-transfer-reform-city-council-landlords-property/">restart</a> the program. In addition to rent freezes, Mamdani promised to &#8220;crack down&#8221; on landlords who were not managing maintenance requests or had other tenant complaints.
“Expense items are not proportional to the income the properties generate,” landlord Lav Bauta told the New York Post. Bauta&#8217;s firm, Zion Equities, owns about 800 New York City rent-stabilized units and manages 4,000 apartments. “Rent-stabilized properties incur the same, or greater, expenses as their fair-market counterparts: insurance, wages, supplies, elevator service, utilities, etc. There is no support or control mechanism to cap expenses while incomes have been capped.”
Former Mayor Eric Adams <a href="https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2025/06/mayor-adams-on-rent-guidelines-board-final-vote">acknowledged</a> these concerns during his tenure. “What we will never do is sell New Yorkers on an idea that would ultimately leave them in worsening housing conditions,” Adams said as mayor. “Rent may be on the rise, but so are deteriorating housing conditions — including inadequate heat and heating breakdowns, mice and rat problems, mold, and leaks — especially for New Yorkers in rent-stabilized housing.”
Worsening housing conditions are expected to emerge as landlords incur higher costs due to inflation. Mamdani&#8217;s rent freeze was voted into effect on Thursday after the Rent Guidelines Board approved rent freezes for both one and two-year apartment leases. The board approved the measure in a 7-1 vote affecting all rent-stabilized apartments. About one million apartments are affected out of New York’s <a href="https://www.nyc.gov/content/tenantprotection/pages/fast-facts-about-housing-in-nyc">2.32</a> million renter-occupied apartments.
“It may be hot outside, but the rent is freezing,” said Mayor Zohran Mamdani. “This is a historic victory for New York City tenants. I’ll continue working to deliver a more affordable city by building and preserving affordable housing, lowering building operating costs like insurance and ensuring tenants know their rights.” 
Before Mamdani’s 0% rent increase, landlords were able to raise rent by <a href="https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-03296">3%</a> for one-year lease renewals and <a href="https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-03296">4.5%</a> for two-year leases. Mamdani appointed a majority of the Rent Guidelines Board, which sets the annual rent adjustments for rent-stabilized apartments. Mamdani had previously <a href="https://time.com/7299525/zohran-mamdani-new-york-city-housing-crisis-plan/?utm_source=chatgpt.com">said</a> he would only appoint members to the board if they agreed with his “freeze the rent” vision. 
Starting October 1, landlords of rent-stabilized apartments will not be able to make that choice for themselves. The freeze is in place for two years, but in an earlier interview, Mamdani signaled he would be interested in extending the freeze. “We need to freeze rents for rent-stabilized tenants for four years,” he <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/zohran-mamdani-nyc-mayor-landlords.html">told</a> New York magazine before he became mayor.

NYC Congressional Candidate Claire Valdez Holds Primary Night Watch Party

Mamdani’s Rent Freeze Is Just One Piece Of The Socialist Puzzle

Landlord

Politics

Property Rights

Socialism

President Donald Trump took a shot at the far-Left wing of the Democratic Party on Thursday and sent a message to &#8220;communists&#8221; after radical candidates won multiple elections in New York earlier this week.
Trump suggested that he wasn&#8217;t surprised to see far-Left candidates, such as Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander, win their primaries for the U.S. House. Valdez, Chevalier, and Lander are all backed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — and Chevalier and Lander defeated Democratic incumbents.
&#8220;The Communists are finally making their move,&#8221; Trump wrote on <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116813173401388945">Truth Social</a>. &#8220;I’ve been waiting and preparing for this for a long time. It’s easy to be a Communist — All you have to do is say, &#8216;I’ll give you everything,&#8217; but that means you’re taking it away from others that have earned it. Over thousands of years, that Ideology has not worked once. The game is on. Enjoy watching!&#8221;
While the New York radicals who won their primaries identify as &#8220;democratic socialists,&#8221; they have been accused of pushing ideas that are indistinguishable from communist talking points. Chevalier was even asked recently to respond to people describing her as a communist, and she refused to address it.
&#8220;You know, I think that framing is one that I&#8217;ve been very proud to say that I don&#8217;t respond to, one in which I have been very intentional to say I won&#8217;t be reactive,&#8221; Chevalier told MS NOW anchor Ali Velshi. &#8220;We are presenting a vision of what we&#8217;re fighting for, and I think that for far too long, we have had politics that is reactive to what Republicans are doing. What we need is Democrats who are actually going to present a positive vision, one that sets the tone for what we should be talking about, which is the issue of affordability.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-media-max-width="560">
Velshi: &#8220;How do you respond to allegations that you&#8217;re a communist?&#8221;
Darializa Avila Chevalier: &#8220;For far too long, this reactive conversation of what we should be afraid of has prevented us from being able to have a politics Democrats can identify win.&#8221; <a href="https://t.co/sAKGmQcYju">pic.twitter.com/sAKGmQcYju</a>
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) <a href="https://x.com/greg_price11/status/2069995578100998577?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 25, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.x.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Along with calling for the government to seize private property, Chevalier has also <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/democrats-newest-pick-is-their-most-radical-yet">called</a> to abolish police and borders, disparaged the American flag, and refused to condemn Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack on Israel.
Valdez and Lander have also pushed leftist economic views, such as rent freezes, a policy being actively pursued by Mayor Mamdani in NYC. Valdez, meanwhile, has called for abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, expanding universal healthcare, increasing taxes on higher earners, and strengthening labor unions.
Shortly after New York democratic socialists won on Tuesday night, Trump said, “America the Beautiful will NEVER be a Communist Country!!!”

trump_Mamdani

Trump Declares ‘Game On’ As America’s Communists Make Their Move

Communism

Donald Trump

Election

New York

MamdaniPiker

New York Has Been Taken Over By The Communists. Your Town Might Be Next.

Democratic Party

Hasan Piker

Western Civilization

This piece is part of MI x DW, a collaboration that brings Daily Wire readers exclusive commentary and research from the Manhattan Institute’s world-class team of scholars. Today, Manhattan Institute Director of Research Judge Glock explains why a tidal wave of tax hikes are coming to blue cities, and warns lawmakers to prepare for the fight.
***
Chicago homeowners have long faced high property taxes, but even by the city’s standards recent tax increases are shocking.
According to a <a href="https://www.cookcountytreasurer.com/newsarticle.aspx?articleid=2158" target="_blank" rel="noopener">report</a> from the Cook County Treasurer, the median residential tax bill increased 17% last year, the largest increase in 30 years. In some poor areas of the city, homeowners’ taxes doubled, increasing by around $2,000. The Treasurer said the main reason for these hikes is a “dramatic” decline in commercial property values and taxes in Chicago’s downtown, the Loop.
Chicago is not alone. For decades, America’s central cities have relied on a cornucopia of tax dollars from downtown office buildings to subsidize generous services. But the work-from-home revolution devastated the downtown office market. While some have worried the office decline will cause an urban “doom loop” of ever-more stretched budgets, it appears cities are just shifting the tax burden onto homeowners. Cities should consider how much more their residents can take.
In the largest American cities, commercial property taxes <a href="https://taxpolicycenter.org/sites/default/files/publication/165853/the-future-of-commercial-real-estate_2024-05-01.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">constitute</a> about a third of all property taxes, which overall remain the largest source of city revenue. In some places, like Boston, commercial property can bring in about half of all property taxes.
Unfortunately, commercial property tax assessments have been dropping fast, most especially for downtown office buildings. In Minneapolis, assessed commercial values are down <a href="https://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/news/2026/03/24/minneapolis-assessor-2026-commercial-properties.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">nearly</a> $1 billion since last year. The drop was driven by downtown offices, whose assessments are now 45% <a href="https://kstp.com/kstp-news/top-news/downtown-minneapolis-building-values-dropping-homeowners-could-pay-the-price/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">lower</a> than before the pandemic. Washington, D.C.’s total commercial assessments, in which downtown offices are particularly prominent, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/real-estate/commercial/the-office-markets-budding-recovery-is-leaving-most-cities-behind-ef648ff6" target="_blank" rel="noopener">dropped</a> by $8 billion, or about 8%, last year.
City tax assessments are probably lagging the real decline in office values. Tax assessors tend to smooth values year-to-year to prevent sudden jumps or drops, but they are especially slow to <a href="https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w33238/w33238.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">adjust</a> to drops in value. Sometimes assessors <a href="https://www.aptcnet.com/property-tax-resources/dc-in-denial-on-office-property-valuations" target="_blank" rel="noopener">exclude</a> “distressed” or foreclosure sales when trying to measure comparable properties. After the pandemic, these distressed sales have become far more common. In some places tax reassessments only occur every 3 years. As late as 2022, most <a href="https://taxpolicycenter.org/sites/default/files/publication/165853/the-future-of-commercial-real-estate_2024-05-01.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">cities</a>’ assessors claimed that commercial property values were increasing.
Some argue that office vacancy rates don’t show such a bad situation for downtown offices, but vacancy is a lagging indicator too. Office vacancy, meaning available office space that is not leased, <a href="https://www.axios.com/2026/04/02/office-vacancies-moodys-real-estate" target="_blank" rel="noopener">was</a> 17% before the coronavirus pandemic and since then has only ticked up to 21%. But many technically leased offices are ghostly silent. The keycard company Kastle finds the proportion of workers actually in the office is <a href="https://www.kastle.com/the-data-science-behind-theback-to-work-barometer/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">about</a> 55% the rate before the pandemic. When more leases come due, companies will shrink their footprint and vacancies will rise.
Market sales of downtown offices show clear evidence of distress. Some downtown buildings are <a href="https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2025/08/portlands-downtown-real-estate-fire-sales-will-hasten-millions-in-property-tax-losses.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">selling</a> for a tenth of their pre-pandemic level, while others sell for as little as a <a href="https://www.startribune.com/lumber-exchange-building-sold-downtown-minneapolis-varde-partners-space-unlimited-kickernick/601588537" target="_blank" rel="noopener">dollar</a>. A recent American Economic Review paper estimated that the pandemic and the work-from-home trend destroyed <a href="https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20231619" target="_blank" rel="noopener">more</a> than $550 billion in office value just up to 2023. For perspective, the whole U.S. office market is only worth about $1.8 trillion.
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Once assessed values, vacancies, and tax rates fully reflect changes in the office market, the effects on urban homeowners could be disastrous. Boston’s rates for a typical single-family home <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/12/10/metro/boston-city-council-property-tax-rates-2026/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">went</a> up 13% this year, or $780, after a 10% <a href="https://www.boston.gov/news/mayor-michelle-wu-refiles-residential-tax-relief-legislation" target="_blank" rel="noopener">increase</a> the previous year. The Boston Policy Institute <a href="https://bostonpolicyinstitute.org/projects/fiscal-fallout/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">expects</a> a $1.7 billion property tax shortfall that would likely shift to residents over five years. In Minneapolis, commercial property taxes have already <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-owu0x7Rqc" target="_blank" rel="noopener">dropped</a> from 30% of taxes in 2023 to 25% this year, with homeowners bearing almost all the difference.
While property tax revolts are generally associated with red states and conservative voters, the coming tax hit to left-leaning cities could inspire its own revolt.
America saw a comparable urban tax revolt after a shift in the tax burden from commercial properties to homeowners in the 1960s and ‘70s. In those years, many states and cities began tax “modernization” campaigns, which tried to make tax assessments match the market value of different types of property. It turned out that homeowners had been getting breaks from their assessors. After modernization, their rates exploded, leading to a wave of tax resistance.
Most <a href="https://go.lincolninst.edu/Chernick_WP25HC2.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">research</a> indicates that cities’ budgets can survive a big drop in downtown property values. If cities engaged in a reasonable amount of spending restraint, they could come out of the work-from-home revolution in a stronger fiscal position than before. But it appears cities just want to shift ever more of the tax burden onto their residents. They should instead consider whether homeowners can survive that shift, and for how long they will put up with it.
Judge Glock is the director of research at the Manhattan Institute and the author of &#8220;The Dead Pledge: The Origins of the Mortgage Market and Federal Bailouts, 1913-1939.&#8221;

New York Knicks Championship Parade & Ceremony

Tax Hikes Are Coming To Left-Leaning Cities

American Cities

Chicago

Remote Work

Taxes

This week, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) won the Democratic nominations for three New York congressional seats. These deep blue seats are now poised to be held by three individuals who not only hold terrible policy positions but also actively despise the nation they seek to represent.
Take “Democratic” nominee Darializa Avila Chevalier, who looks less like a candidate than a conservative&#8217;s parody of one. A Columbia University graduate and PhD candidate, Chevalier narrowly won her race for Congress while accusing her Dominican immigrant opponent of being a racist. She was one of the founders of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), and led the illegal occupation of the college campus.
Chevalier’s open disdain for the United States did not stop her from securing the Democratic nomination. A few years ago in a now-deleted Twitter account she said she “just wiped my hand on the American flag.” Her disdain isn&#8217;t reserved for America. She also turns it on the country her parents came from, the Dominican Republic, branding it a racist nation and calling for it to merge with Haiti into a single “black” country.
Another winner, Claire Valdez, campaigned and rallied — like Chevalier — alongside socialist streamer Hasan Piker. Piker is now under Treasury investigation for allegedly violating U.S. sanctions on the Cuban regime. He has said America deserved the 9/11 attacks, and has praised and dressed as tyrants like China’s Mao Zedong, whose policies killed an estimated 60 million people, more than any ruler in history. Valdez hasn&#8217;t merely kept odd company; she has made a “free Palestine” one of her most important issues, rather than the issues that concern people who live in her district. Like Chevalier, Valdez is a downwardly mobile overeducated liberal arts graduate who worked at Columbia University and was a “union organizer” after graduating with a Fine Arts degree in Chicago.
The final DSA congressional winner is the least publicized in part because it seems as if many other DSA members dislike him, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander. Lander ticks every socialist box: abolishing ICE, taxing the rich, redistributing income, cracking down on corporations, and attacking Israel. But unlike Chevalier and Valdez, Lander is Jewish and thus influencers like Hasan Piker and even Mayor Zohran Mamdani&#8217;s wife, who backed the other two, withheld the same endorsement for Lander.
Antisemitism was so prevalent during this Democratic primary that Congressman Dan Goldman, who is Jewish and was running against Brad Lander for the nomination in New York’s 10th congressional district, was asked not to come back to a coffee shop by the store owner on social media and refunded his payment.
The DSA didn’t just win congressional races this week; they also nominated over a dozen state legislators in New York, and their ranks are poised to grow from <a href="https://nysfocus.com/2026/06/24/ny-primary-election-results-dsa-state-legislature-2026">six to 15</a> state legislators.
Like many of you, I watch unfolding events with deep concern. My homeland was ruined by socialists who came to power not by coup but by ballot, carrying the same ideas I now see on the rise in America. When Venezuelans voted for Hugo Chavez, he too promised to take from the rich, he too hated America and “imperialism,” and he was also a furious antisemite who condemned Israel. His socialist policies were the same: free housing, government grocery stores, price controls, and the seizure of private property. The result was shortages, blackouts, extreme poverty, an exodus of millions, and hyperinflation.
What separates American socialism from Venezuela&#8217;s isn&#8217;t ideology but who votes for it. America’s socialists are mostly young, white, and college-educated. When they had support, Venezuela&#8217;s socialists were older, poorer, less educated, and mostly not of European descent.
While Darializa Avila Chevalier carried New York’s 13th congressional district by <a href="https://votehub.com/2026_ny13dem_primary">winning</a> white college-educated and young voters, Espaillat ran up double-digit margins in the poorest, most Hispanic parts of the district and carried majority-Black precincts. Valdez, who took NY-7, did <a href="https://votehub.com/2026_ny07dem_primary">best</a> in the highest-income, youngest areas and lost Orthodox Jewish precincts badly.
There has never been a nation so rich and so free like America, where the most well-off and educated members of society vote for their own destruction.
***
Daniel Di Martino is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. All views expressed are those of the author and not the Manhattan Institute.

I’ve Seen What Socialism Did To Venezuela And NYC Is Next

2026 elections

Grab your popcorn. Pull up a chair. Because New York just nominated a slate of Islamic socialists so radical, so proudly anti-American, that Osama bin Laden is rolling around in his watery grave like it&#8217;s Christmas morning.
Zohran Mamdani, the Ugandan-born Muslim socialist mayor of New York City, endorsed three congressional candidates in their Democrat primaries. All three won. Two of them knocked out sitting incumbents. 
The man&#8217;s three for three, and he&#8217;s just getting started. 

After Mamdani’s candidates secured their November spots, the kingmaker took to X to thank <a href="https://x.com/RNCResearch/status/2069780014665478431/video/1">Allah</a>. His comrade Ilhan Omar chimed in with &#8220;<a href="https://x.com/IlhanMN/status/2069614828683939898">Alhamdulillah</a>.&#8221; And Hakeem Jeffries, the biggest loser of the night? He was sent home with his tail between his legs, mumbling that &#8220;a handful of primaries aren&#8217;t going to reshape who we are as House Democrats.&#8221;
Sure, bud.
Establishment Dems are getting <a href="https://x.com/katie_honan/status/2069594271225659590/video/1">booed</a> out of their own backyards. When Jeffries appeared on screen at one of the victory rallies, the crowd jeered, then chanted “You&#8217;re next” to his face.
So the NRCC sent him flowers and a condolence card, which is hilarious. I&#8217;d have sent a one-way ticket out of relevance.
Here&#8217;s the thing, friends. Socialism is <a href="https://x.com/AdamSinger/status/2069735948464664661">winning</a>. It&#8217;s swallowing the Democratic Party whole, and riding inside that socialist Trojan horse is radical Islam. It&#8217;s not coming. It&#8217;s here. We let it happen. And now we either fight to keep it at bay, or we let the scavengers pick America clean until she&#8217;s hollowed out.
Before we talk about how this happened, let&#8217;s understand who we&#8217;re actually dealing with. Because these are not your grandfather&#8217;s liberals. These are full-throated, flag-burning, Hamas-sympathizing, capitalism-hating radicals. And New York just handed them the keys.
First up: Darializa Avila Chevalier, who won the NY-13 primary and knocked out five-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat. She is a founder of CUAD — Columbia University Apartheid Divest — whose stated goal <a href="https://x.com/EYakoby/status/2069646072465559913">includes</a> “undermining and eradicating America,” through the use of “violence.”
Cute.
She&#8217;s a Dominican-Venezuelan immigrant who converted to Islam but, in her own words, operates <a href="https://x.com/BreitbartNews/status/2069791610359910636/video/1">through</a> &#8220;a black queer feminist lens.&#8221; She wants to <a href="https://x.com/greg_price11/status/2069612181281198135">seize</a> the means of production, abolish the police, abolish the border, and she&#8217;s on record saying that deportation is wrong <a href="https://x.com/AaronBlake/status/2069620095773557214">because</a>, “We&#8217;re all on stolen land!”
She refuses to <a href="https://x.com/guypbenson/status/2069602970702856369">say</a> murderers should go to prison. Refuses to support deporting illegal immigrants convicted of rape. <a href="https://x.com/guypbenson/status/2069602970702856369">Refuses</a> to condemn Hamas or October 7th.
I’d surmise she also refuses to shave her pits and use deodorant.
Next: Aber Kawas, who won the Democratic primary for New York State Senate District 12. A child of <a href="https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/2069625851587576024">illegal</a> immigrants, she wants to abolish ICE completely, campaigned under a <a href="https://x.com/nycDSA/status/2069599449190395941">Palestinian</a>, not American, banner, and <a href="https://x.com/bennyjohnson/status/2069636443828359564">blamed</a> September 11th on America&#8217;s &#8220;system of capitalism, racism, white supremacy, and Islamophobia.&#8221;
She&#8217;s also been photographed at protests <a href="https://x.com/EYakoby/status/2069614841325588744">wearing</a> a Hamas headband. Charming.
Then there&#8217;s <a href="https://x.com/BillMelugin_/status/2069610243093385250">Claire Valdez (NY-7)</a>, who cruised to victory promising to grant citizenship and voting rights to illegal aliens, use your tax dollars for all transgender medical treatments, eliminate private health insurance, and abolish ICE.
Her father, notably, runs a firm that secures the Texas border. Pause for the irony there.
And <a href="https://x.com/BillMelugin_/status/2069610243093385250">Brad Lander</a> (NY-10), who ran on forgiving all student loans and expanding the Supreme Court. He&#8217;s a progressive plant, backed by Mamdani and Bernie Sanders, which tells you everything you need to know.
Mamdani and his fixers walk into a bar. The bar is now a commune.
How did this happen? Three things: foreign voters, DSA zealots, and a city #2cool2care.
In Mamdani&#8217;s own mayoral race, over 62% of foreign-born New York voters chose him compared to 31% of American-born voters. Last night, that pattern continued. The DSA knocked on doors. Their volunteers showed up. And the city&#8217;s apathetic native-born population  (the &#8220;New York or nowhere&#8221; crowd) sat on their couch and watched Netflix while socialists rewrote their political future.
Look at the Avila Chevalier numbers. She <a href="https://x.com/bungarsargon/status/2069774401340322295">lost</a> the Bronx portion of her own district by 30 points. She lost majority-black and hispanic neighborhoods. She lost lower-income areas by 10 points. The people she claims to fight for rejected her. So who voted for her? Young voters. High-income voters. College-indoctrinated voters.
Yes, the silver-spoon guilty-white-liberal demographic, voting communist because it makes them feel less bad about their lack of melanin.
Meanwhile, the <a href="https://x.com/billybinion/status/2069785317092086179">DSA</a>  (the organization putting forward all these madhatters) is roughly 85% white. Progressive elitists speaking for the little people who, in the end, didn&#8217;t actually vote for them.
And then there&#8217;s the third group. Not the ones who love this agenda. Not the ones who hate it. The ones who don&#8217;t care. The &#8220;it&#8217;s New York, who cares who runs it&#8221; crowd.
L<a href="https://x.com/liel/status/2069619625956974816">ess than 10%</a> of New York City residents voted in these primaries. The other 90% were sitting it out. And the indifference of these<a href="https://www.instagram.com/reels/DZle1d2PCDv/"> lacrosse-segway-finance-pipeline</a> party animals just nominated a nutjob who cheers for Hamas and a radical who wipes with the American flag.
Apathy is a vote. You just didn&#8217;t know who you were voting for.
And into that vacuum, something very organized, very dangerous, and very un-American walked right in.
It&#8217;s called third worldism. And Ronald Reagan, God bless him, saw this coming decades ago. In 1964, he warned that Democrats were dragging their party &#8220;down the road under the banners of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.&#8221;
He said then what we&#8217;re living now: freedom isn&#8217;t the natural state of things. It has to be defended. Constantly. Or it gets eaten.
Third worldism is the fusion of Islamist ideology with anti-Western, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist grievance politics. It frames Islam and Muslim societies as the authentic, oppressed &#8220;periphery&#8221; locked in a civilizational struggle against the West, and places Islamic unity as the better alternative to liberal democracy, individual rights, and Enlightenment values. It rejects secular law and individual liberty in favor of religious authority and grievance-based solidarity.
In plain English: It’s the end of America as we know it.
It doesn&#8217;t build. It tears down. It doesn&#8217;t innovate. It colonizes grievance. It doesn&#8217;t uplift women — it explains why honor violence is someone else&#8217;s fault. And when brought to America through migration and activism, it imports parallel societies, demands sharia accommodation, and directly conflicts with core Western principles: free speech, equality under the law, and secular governance.
We’re watching this horror film in England. Where alarming percentages of the Muslim community support wife-<a href="https://x.com/NateFriedman97/status/2069446382444810240/video/1">beating</a>. Where city centers are <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2069470976136360205">unrecognizable</a> to the people who built them. Where hundreds of thousands of young girls are raped, trafficked, and tortured for being white.
Not all cultures are equal. Not all cultures are good. America isn’t perfect, but she is overwhelmingly good. We had the tools, the values, and the moral framework to confront our failures and grow.
Don’t invite the past, whose sole mission is to disrupt our future.
New York — snap out of it. You’re not doing anyone any favors by letting suicidal empathy and performative tolerance dictate your policy and actions.
The little things you take for granted — walking safely into a subway, wearing what you want, eating a $1.50 hot dog in Times Square without a prayer call interrupting your afternoon — are not accidents. They are the product of a civilization built on values these candidates have explicitly rejected.
New York or nowhere? That used to be a love letter to a city. Now it sounds like a dare.
I&#8217;m choosing not there. But for those who are staying? Fight for it. Because the third world didn&#8217;t just knock on the door. New York opened it, handed over the keys, and went back to brunch.

New NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani Makes An Announcement In Brooklyn

Osama Won

Democrats

The communist, America-hating revolution isn&#8217;t coming.
It&#8217;s already here.
Last night, the New York congressional primaries turned third-worldist America-hating New York mayor Zohran Mamdani into an electoral kingmaker. A series of his endorsed candidates defeated very liberal Democrats and replaced them with outright communist terrorist endorsers, fans of criminality, and America-haters.
According to these victorious candidates, America is a settler-colonial, genocidal, racist, fundamentally evil country that is now the moral litmus test for the new Democratic Party.
You must despise America. You must hate everything America stands for. These candidates make Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi look like Right-wing American patriots.
You might think that because this is all happening in New York, it doesn&#8217;t really affect you.
Wrong.
The Democratic Party of your parents is gone. Heck, the Democratic Party of 10 years ago is gone. It is being eaten alive by people who openly hate America.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/the-ben-shapiro-show-episode-2452?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
These are not people who are hiding the ball. These revolutionaries openly advocated for abolishing all prisons.
Yes, all prisons, as well as abolishing ICE and abolishing our entire Department of War.
They want limitless taxation for the kids. Limitless immigration. Taxpayer-funded abortion for all.
They see America as fundamentally evil and our allies as genocidal, while seeing our enemies, people who wish to kill Americans, as heroic.
I wish I were exaggerating. But last night in New York City, people who believe all of these things and say them openly swept very left-wing Democrats out of office in the primaries.
I can hear you saying it: “It&#8217;s just New York. Let New York be New York. Why should we care?”
But here&#8217;s the thing. This is all part of a very clever and concerted strategy by the far-Left, the Democratic Socialists of America, to take over the Democratic Party, to eat it, and then take over the country.
This is a multi-step process. This is a revolutionary process that has been carried out before in countries that are not the United States.
Step one: Eat the “normie” party, eat the Mensheviks. The Communist Party in pre-Soviet Russia was comprised of the communists, the Bolsheviks and other communists called Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks were run by Vladimir Lenin.
When you are running a revolution, the goal is to take over very, very blue areas with insane radicals and then purge the people who are from the regular far-Left.
Thus, the Bolsheviks had to purge the Mensheviks. The founder of Soviet communism, Vladimir Lenin — an idol for Hasan Piker and Zohran Mamdani — said, “The party must be purged of rascals of bureaucratic, dishonest or wavering communists, of Mensheviks who have repainted their facade, but who have remained Mensheviks at heart.”
The idea here is that typical Democrats are bad and the chief target. Understand: The radicals hate the traditional-Left folks more than they hate the Right, because they see them as obstacles to power. If they can purge those people, if they can get rid of the very, very Left- wing Democrats in Congress and replace them with people who are even more Left-wing, then they have a beachhead.
You start with a very, very blue area. You start with an area like Brooklyn. You start with areas that are located inside Manhattan, the Commie-core. You get rid of the people who are very, very far-Left, and you replace them with actual America-hating communists.
Now you have your beachhead. You can use this as a starting point to expand.
Step two: Claim victory. You treat the takeover of these areas as indicative of a sort of broad national upsurge in radical Left-wing sentiments. You claim that you&#8217;ve taken over the whole party, and then you threaten the normal leftists in your coalition. This is the sort of thing that Lenin would do.
Lenin famously labeled his opponents Mensheviks in Russian. That meant the minority faction, and he claimed that his faction was the Bolsheviks, meaning the majority faction, even though his faction was actually less popular in Russia than the Mensheviks.
Again, the idea is to create a false sense of popularity.
It’s the same here. The Democratic Socialists of America is taking over extremely blue districts with low vote totals, and then they are claiming that they have the run of the place and the momentum is with them.
You repeat it over and over and over. You let social media run with it, and young people who live online actually start to believe it. Because if you are online all day long, you see clips over and over and over of Zohran Mamdani, people cheering Zohran Mamdani, people cheering Brad Lander, and people cheering various psychotic candidates like Darializa Avila Chevalier.
You see that over and over: “This is the wave of the future. This is where we are going.”
If your life is online, you start to believe that the radical Left is the wave of the future — and this stuff is aimed at the kids, the 12 to 30-year-olds.
It&#8217;s a TikTok indoctrination campaign. This is not a political game for this election cycle alone. It&#8217;s how you turn a minority part of the Democratic Party, the Bernie Sanders psychotic wing, into the controlling faction of the Democratic Party.
You start by saying there is a silent majority that supports you, then you get very loud online, turn up the volume, win a couple of primaries, claim that you have the momentum — and momentum is the name of the game.
These folks are playing for a full-scale revolution among people too young to know better, and too impressionable to understand that reality exists offline.
Step three is to threaten everybody who&#8217;s a normal leftist that you&#8217;ll come for them, too. Then you let them cave to you. You make them feel insufficiently committed to the cause.
Dostoyevsky predicted this in a book called “The Demons” or “The Possessed.” Revolutionary characters in that book, who are supposed to be precursors to the communists, are amused about the possibility of cutting off 100 million heads, and one of the radicals says that it wouldn&#8217;t be hard to convince normal liberals to go along with them. He says I could make them go through fire. They&#8217;re not advanced enough.
The idea is that Mamdani is a thought leader; Sanders is a thought leader; Duvalier is a thought leader. The real problem with them is that they&#8217;re too committed. They just love truth and decency and justice too much. Sure, they&#8217;re not practical enough, but their principles are right; their hearts are in the right place.
Thus it&#8217;s not hard for the radicals to get Hakeem Jeffries or Nancy Pelosi or all the rest to say that it&#8217;s important to side with the DSA.
All you have to do is say, “What are you going to do? Cave to the evil Trump Republicans?”
If you force the normal Left to choose between Trump voters and the DSA, they will choose the DSA.
Step four: Rinse and repeat.
We&#8217;re all sitting here thinking, “Okay, fine. Let them try it. Let them try to run AOC on a national level. She’ll lose because the vast majority of Americans don&#8217;t believe this crap.”
But that&#8217;s not the point. If you lose, you just repeat steps one through three.
Again, the chief target here is not the Right — yet. The chief target right now is the normie Left. If you can attack the so-called normie Left here and you can destroy them, then you will take over one of the major parties. If you have a stranglehold on a major party, you have at least a 40% shot of winning national power, and then all you have to do is wait for your opponent to fall over face-first.
You can stroll into power no matter how much people write you off. Take over any party, and you are one step away from taking over the country. In other words, President AOC is not some sort of remote possibility. It is becoming quite possible.
And that&#8217;s why what happened last night in New York City is so important.
It affects you. It affects your kids and the country. If you&#8217;re not concerned, if you are not actually terrified by what&#8217;s going on in New York and the media&#8217;s willingness to play into it, the momentum is all with the DSA and the Democratic Party.
If you&#8217;re not terrified by that, it&#8217;s because you don&#8217;t understand the game.

GettyImages-2222802585

The Most Terrifying Political Takeover In America Just Accelerated

Ben Shapiro

Bernie Sanders

Leftists

Opinion

The news of a Zohran Mamdani-backed slate of Socialist candidates — Darializa Avila Chevalier, Brad Lander, and Claire Valdez — scoring big wins last night in New York City’s congressional primaries should send a shudder down the spine of America as we behold the transformation in the gilded city of Gotham. New York City’s heavy Democratic base all but assures that last night’s victors will take seats as members of Congress come January.
Something tectonic is shifting across America’s most elite sectors as candidates find receptive audiences among a voting bloc that explicitly disavows core pillars of the American experiment. What we should lament is not only political — the disavowal of the free market and self-government — but spiritual.
Post-Christian societies, which New York City has sadly become, are enacting post-Christian political economies wherein officials become czar-like, citizens become clients, and cultures deteriorate into ugliness and grievance.
Political economies are downstream of assumptions about the human person and human societies. Where Christianity and conservatism champion a constrained view of the human person and the need for government to balance competing interests under systems of law and liberty, socialism offers a rival vision deeply embedded within the progressive worldview — one that begins not with the depravity of man, but with man’s continued uplift and boundless progress through the power of an omnicompetent and omnibenevolent state. In this paradigm, people who no longer believe in the power of self-government exchange personal virtue for increased bureaucratic control. If humanity cannot govern itself from within through the “mediating institutions” that teach the virtues of self-control, thrift, and personal responsibility, it will necessarily look outside to czar-like apparatchiks who fill the vacuum left by self-government. The middle between the individual and the state thus vanishes.
In this light, citizens become clients of the state, looking to the government to deliver what was once the province of private industry, family, and voluntary associations. The Socialist agenda — rent freezes, free transportation, city-run grocery stores, and universal childcare, all funded by soaking the wealthy — is a grand act of displacement. Whatever one may think of any single plank in the Socialist agenda, the result is a paradigm shift toward a provider-client relationship between the state and the individual. Here, the client cannot stand on his own and operates not within spheres or structures of civil society but as a dependent. What’s left is the residue of resentment and grievance among a people who look upon the fortunes of others, believing them theirs by right of simple lack.
What’s more, whatever progressivism touches, it <a href="https://wng.org/opinions/why-progressivism-destroys-everything-1723630996">eventually destroys</a>. Consider the deleterious effect of progressivism on a city’s aesthetics. Where everything is “owned” by everyone, no one sees it as their responsibility to steward their surroundings. No surprise, then, that progressive Socialism produces debauched city centers — crime-ridden, dirty, and bedecked with ugliness. Where the transcendentals of truth, beauty, and goodness are cast off, public ugliness follows: in a desacralized world, the prurient is upheld as the cost of “liberty.” Even if one were to point to the relative successes of state-sponsored socialism in Scandinavia, we must respond that the population differences between America and Scandinavia are stark and that Scandinavia&#8217;s cultural homogeneity makes for an apples-and-oranges comparison.
We should name Tuesday night’s results for what they are — the casting off of personal responsibility and entrepreneurial ambition for a faux solidarity delivered by government diktat.
But lament is not enough. In the same way that Jesus wept over Jerusalem for its refusal of the offer of what would bring lasting peace, so too must we look at what is unfolding in New York City and answer with superior counterarguments. We need not look far for superior alternatives — states like Florida, Texas, and Tennessee, where citizens are flocking to escape the onslaught of bigger government and higher taxes.
To be sure, Mamdani’s voters are reacting to perceived distresses — housing costs, fraying social services, and a growing sense that American capitalism is rigged against them. It is not enough for the Christian to dismiss the real or perceived plights of others — genuine remedies grounded in personal responsibility and a bottom-up conception of the common good must be on offer. We must advance a mediating position between increased government control and atomized libertarianism, a position that the Christian tradition refers to as “ordered liberty,” a conception of political order grounded in the reality that human beings are made in God’s image, oriented to real, concrete, and objective human goods, and ordered under the banner of law. That vision requires a total repudiation of the vision winning the day in New York City.
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Andrew T. Walker is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics and Public Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Managing Editor of WORLD Opinions. He is a Fellow at The Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Bernie Sanders And Zohran Mamdani Join Local Candidates For Campaign Rally Ahead Of Primary Election In New York

Socialists Sweep, Will New York City Weep?

New York Democrats nominated a leftist activist for a state Senate seat who once said 9/11 was the manifestation of “white supremacy” and Western colonialism. 
Aber Kawas, a democratic socialist backed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, won the nomination for New York’s 12th Senate District with 60% of the vote on Tuesday. Kawas, who has a degree in &#8220;Islamic Liberation Theology,&#8221; previously <a href="https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/socialists-unite-mamdani-throws-support-behind-behind-state-assembly-candidate-who-blamed-9-11-on-america/">faced criticism</a> for her comments on 9/11 that appeared to downplay the terrorist attack and blame it on the policies of the United States. 
&#8220;Finding that the system of capitalism and racism, and white supremacy, etc, have all, and Islamophobia, have all been used, you know, to colonize lands, right, to take resources from other people, and so this is, like, a long trajectory. And we&#8217;re just seeing the manifestations of that continuation, right, with 9/11,” she <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URdAAEwyI_Q">said</a> in 2017 at an Asian American Writers’ Workshop. 
Kawas is expected to win in November to represent the heavily Democratic district located in Queens.
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Mamdani-endorsed Aber Kwas won the Democrat Primary tonight for a State Senate seat in New York.
Here she is saying that 9-11 was America&#8217;s fault because of our &#8220;system of capitalism, racism, white supremacy and islamophobia.&#8221; <a href="https://t.co/ouSUB44nz3">pic.twitter.com/ouSUB44nz3</a>
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) <a href="https://x.com/greg_price11/status/2069615344956612991?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 24, 2026</a></blockquote>
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She added during the workshop that she did not appreciate people &#8220;asking us to respond about, you know, an attack” because “historically, right, you know, a lot of us come from lands that were colonized, lands where wars are being waged, right, and a lot of times because of U.S. policy or the policies in Europe.”
“The idea that we have to apologize for, like, a terror attack that, like, a couple people did, and then there is no apologies or reparations for genocides and for slavery, etc., is something that I kind of find like reprehensible,” she said. 
Kawas describes herself as the “daughter of Palestinian refugees” and says that her father was deported by ICE. Her <a href="https://aberforsenate.com/platform/">platform</a> includes “free” healthcare for illegal immigrants, funding legal services for illegal immigrants, and ending any cooperation between New York law enforcement and ICE.
It was previously <a href="https://x.com/DrewPavlou/status/1990759743640777030">reported</a> that she wrote in a now-deleted Tumblr account that a man <a href="https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/newyork/press-releases/2010/nyfo042710b.htm">convicted</a> of providing material support to al Qaeda named Fahad Hashmi was one of her “imprisoned heroes.” 
&#8220;Therefore each day they are locked up is a day that our hearts cannot be at ease. We cannot rest until each and everyone is free,&#8221; she wrote, according to posts saved by Drew Pavlou. &#8220;Their lives are a sources of inspiration to us for they are living martyrs, teaching us lessons in patience, sacrifice, and integrity. We must strive to keep them in our remembrance and work for their sake, continuing on with the freedom we have, that has unjustly been taken awat [sic] from them.&#8221;
Mamdani-backed democratic socialists swept their primary elections on Tuesday, defeating candidates backed by the Democrat Party establishment.

New Yorkers demonstrate for a rent freeze

Democrats Chose Candidate Who Links 9/11 To ‘White Supremacy’

Radical Islamic Terror

She couldn&#8217;t handle the heat, so she got out of the studio — and then won anyway.
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Darializa Avila Chevalier, the democratic socialist who just knocked off five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat in New York&#8217;s 13th Congressional District, appeared live on Spanish-language station La Mega, where she found herself cornered by hosts pressing her on a trove of deleted social media posts and radical past statements.
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Her response? <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/mamdani-backed-socialist-candidate-storms-live-interview-confronted-old-social-media-posts">Rip off the headphones and walk</a>.
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&#8220;I am not going to sit here and be yelled at by various people,&#8221; she declared. &#8220;Have a beautiful day.&#8221; Exit stage left.
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La arrogante de Darializa Ávila Chevalier fue al programa EL VACILÓN DE LA MAÑANA EN NEW YORK 🗽 y se molestó con el Pacha, Excarlet y Guebín porque le dijeron que se disculpe por ofender a los dominicanos y la bandera.
Darializa se molestó y se retiró del programa. <a href="https://t.co/5TBuokta7L">pic.twitter.com/5TBuokta7L</a>
— Jaime Rincón (@JaimeRinconRD) <a href="https://x.com/JaimeRinconRD/status/2069421246228365454?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 23, 2026</a></blockquote>
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Hours later, she was a congresswoman-in-waiting.
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The district — stretching across upper Manhattan and the Bronx, with a Cook PVI of D+32 — is about as safe a Democratic seat as exists in America. In 2024, Espaillat won it 83-16. The Republican nominee this fall, Army enlistee Manual Williams, ran unopposed for the GOP slot only because no one else bothered to file.
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Avila Chevalier hasn&#8217;t won a seat in Congress yet — but she likely will cruise to victory in the general election.
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That means voters are about to send to Washington one of the most radical figures to emerge from this cycle&#8217;s leftist wave. The 32-year-old community organizer <a href="https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2026/06/avila-chevalier-attended-oct-8-pro-palestinian-rally-lander-condemned/413981/">showed up</a> at a Times Square rally on October 8, 2023 — the morning after Hamas slaughtered 1,200 Israelis — and later refused to condemn the attacks at a candidate forum, <a href="https://link.cityandstateny.com/view/632c947b3b44fbac1e0cd1a0qlnpf.8ju/3e1f7bdb">telling</a> moderators to consider &#8220;75 years of occupation&#8221; instead. She has called Israel an &#8220;apartheid state&#8221; committing &#8220;genocide&#8221; and helped lead protests at Columbia University alongside a campus group that subsequently chanted &#8220;Death to America.&#8221;
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Her deleted social media archive reads like a greatest-hits of the hard Left: abolish prisons, abolish police, no deportations ever. When asked about the last point, she was unambiguous: &#8220;All deportations are wrong.&#8221; She also torched Democratic Party leadership in posts she has since scrubbed and apologized for — selectively.
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Then there&#8217;s the Dominican flag flap. In a district where Dominican-Americans make up a major voting bloc, Avila Chevalier once wrote that she refused to display the flag on her profile because nationalism is &#8220;violent.&#8221; On La Mega, when hosts offered her a chance to clear the air with that same community before polls closed, she shut it down twice — then walked out on the third try.
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Backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the full machinery of NYC Democratic Socialists of America, she beat a sitting Congressional Hispanic Caucus chairman anyway.
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Come November, barring a miracle, Congress gets her too.
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WATCH: Socialist Flees Interview — Then Goes On To Win Primary

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