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| Mamdani |
"Democracy,” H.L. Mencken wrote, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
The general public in New York City will not know what they have
got until Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been in office for a few years. The logical consequences of policy decisions
take some time to mature, and even then
political analysts will long after be at
loggerheads squaring circles. We are just now finding out, for instance, that U.S.
Senator Adam Schiff is a monumental but successful liar many years after he and
other prominent Democrats, hoping to sink a future presidential campaign of
Donald Trump, floated an improbable story that Trump was in cahoots with
Russian President Vladimir Putin to deny Hillary Clinton a fair shot at
becoming the nation’s first female president.
The New York Post published, two days prior to the election
on its opinion page, a piece titled “20 reasons to vote against NYC mayoral
front-runner Zohran Mamdani.” Some
political watchers who have been carefully monitoring Mamdani’s political
ascendancy, taking notes and assembling his far left pronouncements, think
Mamdani is, on account of his Marxist tendencies, uneducable. A thousand years
as mayor may not budge him from his chosen path.
Here are a few of the Post’s reasons to vote against
Mamdani:
1. He hates the police
Assemblyman Zohran
Mamdani called the NYPD “racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public
safety. His “apology” rings hollow, saying that it was for “the language that I
used” — but not the sentiment. His plan for public safety would instead send
“mental health teams” without police backup on 911 calls, because negotiation
is key when you’re about to be shoved onto the subway tracks.
2. He really hates the police
The number of officers
in the NYPD is at its lowest level in 20 years — below 34,000. Outgoing Mayor
Eric Adams wanted to increase the ranks to 40,000 by 2028. Mamdani insists on
no additions — and is noncommittal about shrinking the agency. He claims he
doesn’t want to “defund this rogue agency” as he has said in the past. But then
he suggests that’s exactly what he’d do. “It’s not a question of headcount.
It’s a question of safety,” Mamdani said recently.
3. He hates the police — with a splash of antisemitism
“We have to make clear
that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF,”
Mamdani claimed. To Mamdani, a few collaborative training exercises between the
Israel Defense Forces and the police department is (sic) a full-blown
conspiracy theory. The NYPD draws on the experience of many groups (including
for community outreach), but since Israel = Evil in Mamdani’s worldview, the
program must end. Mamdani is right that we need to help the mentally ill living
on our streets, but he doesn’t have a realistic plan. He says his outreach
teams will provide counseling, but any treatment program will be voluntary. How
can someone who is mentally ill make decisions in their best interest? We’ve
seen this movie before. Mayor Bill de Blasio spent $1 billion on his wife’s
Thrive initiative, which prioritized a phone hotline. When schizophrenics told
city workers they didn’t want to go to a shelter, they were allowed to sleep on
the floor of a subway station. Expect more of the same — and worse.
6. He’s never met a failed idea he didn’t like…
Among the failed ideas Mamdani warmly embraces is socialism
tinged with a communist imperative – to seize the means of production -- an
overweening ambition that, everywhere it has been implemented, has invariably
led to an impoverishing state managed economy, increased government control of
both culture and politics, and the withering away of democracy and republican
governance. Communists since Karl Marx have always set their faces
against tradition, history and reality.
Marx wrote in the epigrammatical notes to his Theses on Feuerbach," published by
Engels after he died, "Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in
various ways; the point, however, is to change it." The epigram is
engraved on Marx’s tomb in the Eastern cemetery of Highgate Cemetery, North
London, England.
Mamdani’s frequent mangling of his own easily produced
recent comments on politics and culture should surprise no one. His point, like
that of Marx, is not to interpret meaning but to abolish it.
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