OF COURSE: Mamdani Linked Anti-Rent Activist Grew Up as a Child of Wealth and Privilege

An anti-rent activist named Tracy Rosenthal, who has direct connections to the Zohran Mamdani campaign and administration, grew up in a million dollar apartment in Manhattan with her father, a Grammy winning recording artist.

Rosenthal now lives in a $2,300 dollar a month apartment in Brooklyn, but has not paid rent for years. Her previous landlord was foreclosed on, and now the bank is trying to remover her and other tenants for living in the building as squatters.

Meanwhile, Rosenthal makes videos and public appearances where she teaches people how to screw their landlords out of rent.

She is another communist nepo-baby who has lived a life of total wealth and privilege, while pretending to be a working class hero.

The New York Post reports:

A rent-striking, rising-star radical orchestrating the Mamdani administration’s socialist housing agenda is the daughter of a famed music studio owner who recorded rock legends like David Bowie, the Ramones, Blondie, Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, the Foo Fighters and Coldplay, The Post has learned.

While framing herself as a champion of the proletariat, Tracy Rosenthal grew up in a trendy $1.7 million NoMad pad with elite access to the music industry — attending the Grammys at least twice with her dad, four-time winner Steven Rosenthal.

Her father recorded hit albums by some of the world’s biggest artists at the Magic Shop, the SoHo studio he founded in 1988, including Coldplay’s 2008 “Viva la Vida,” which sold more than 10 million copies worldwide; the Foo Fighters’ 2014 “Sonic Highways,” for which he was interviewed in the band’s HBO docuseries; and Bowie’s final album, 2016’s “Blackstar.”

Yet despite her first-class upbringing, she’s been on a four-year “rent strike” since moving back to New York City after a stint in Los Angeles — because the Bolshevik bugged out after spotting a cockroach in her hip $2,300 a month Bed-Stuy apartment…

She said the landlord refused to hire an exterminator, and after finding out the building had more rental units than were legally approved and was facing foreclosure, she organized with the other tenants to eventually stop paying rent, stiffing the owner of at least $108,000 on her unit alone.

In the video below from Stu Smith, Rosenthal talks to an audience about methods for not paying rent:

Tracy Rosenthal’s Strategy: Build Toward a “General Rent Strike” and Create a Crisis Big Enough to Force Concessions

This is one of the more revealing Tracy Rosenthal clips because she is explaining how she thinks the movement can force systemic change.

Asked what mass rent nonpayment would actually look like, Rosenthal describes a “long term strategy” of building enough scale to create the kind of “crisis” necessary to extract major political concessions.

“One way of thinking about abolishing rent is a permanent and general rent strike.”

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Defunding police and prisons: Radical DSA platform grabs spotlight as candidates surge in primaries

s they experience newfound success across the United States in Democratic primaries, the Democratic Socialists of America have gone on a media blitz to share their vision for America. That vision includes radical changes to the American political system, like abolishing the senate, heavily restricting private markets, and abolishing police and prisons. 

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) rode a wave of dissatisfaction with the status quo to unprecedented electoral success this year. DSA affiliated candidates and fellow travelers lead New York City and are poised to dominate its congressional delegation. In other areas of the country, DSA candidates are campaigning on a radical platform once unthinkable.

Beyond New York, DSA candidates have won in Colorado, Michigan, and in down-ballot races in Oregon, California, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Utah and Maryland. 

Dismantling the entire American system of government

On Tuesday, a DSA member is leading in the polls for the Democratic Party nomination for governor in Wisconsin, testing the viability of the far-left political and economic messaging in a state that President Donald Trump won in 2024. Controversy has followed Francesca Hong. Like many other DSA affiliates, her past social media posts, including arguing to defund the police and calling to cancel Thanksgiving, are at the center of it. 

In an interview last month on Fox News, DSA’s national co-chair, Megan Romer, answered that, “yes,” the DSA’s platform includes “abolishing the Senate,” “[replacing] the presidency and Supreme Court as we now know them,” and “absolutely” abolishing immigration enforcement, defunding the military, and, eventually, abolishing police and prisons. 

“Yes,” “true,” and “yep,” said Romer in response to the host’s questions. 

The relentless media tour by senior DSA leaders focused scrutiny on the organization’s official platform. Republicans sensed an opening and traditional Democrats are worried the group’s radical proposals might sink the party’s midterm chances

Indeed, many of the Democratic Socialist leaders are self-professed communists, Just the News previously reported. Many of the DSA’s leaders belong to internal party caucuses that explicitly define themselves as Marxist and advocate for achieving communism. This includes Romer, who is a member of the Red Star caucus of the DSA, which explicitly pronounces its ultimate aim: the overthrow of capitalism in the U.S. and, eventually, communism. 

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Mamdani’s Socialist Utopia Collides With Reality As Manhattan Rents Hit Record

Socialist NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani built his political campaign by relentlessly attacking America and, most importantly, portraying capitalism as the root cause of nearly every social problem, from affordability pressures to soaring rents.

Voters were sold the idea that his administration could deliver an instant utopian transformation built on free bus rides, government-run grocery stores, and cheap housing.

However, like every Marxist before him, Mamdani’s vision of utopia is not grounded in economic reality. The dream pitched to millions across the metropolitan area is now colliding with market reality: a continuing nightmare for renters. Even with Mamdani’s rent freeze and threat of a pied-à-terre tax, rents are still rising.

Delving into the granular data, a report from the New York Post, citing data from Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group, shows that Manhattan’s average monthly rent jumped to a record $6,655 in July, up 10% from a year earlier.

The median rent reached $5,295, a 6% increase from the same month one year ago, according to the data. Average rents rose across every apartment category, including 8% for studios to $4,088, 7% for one-bedroom apartments to $5,486 and 13% for two-bedroom apartments to $8,054. Three-bedroom apartments averaged $12,228, up 12%.

NYC’s rental vacancy rate has fallen to 1.49%, the lowest since 1968 and well below the 5% threshold typically associated with a landlord’s market. Separately, state data show that roughly 57,000 rent-stabilized apartments sat vacant in 2025

A severe housing shortage, elevated mortgage rates, and new rental regulations have intensified competition for available apartments. Let’s not forget that a recent Center for Migration Studies report showed that more than 500,000 illegal aliens live in NYC.

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Socialists’ Demands To Abolish Police And Prisons Will Mean More Dead Americans

Democrats insist that “Black Lives Matter,” yet many increasingly embrace policies that protect violent criminals at the expense of black victims. 

What these Democrats ignore is that criminals overwhelmingly prey on people like themselves. About 90 percent of black homicide victims are killed by other black people, and 70 percent of black violent crime victims are victimized by a black offender.

Abdul El-Sayed, the projected Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, has argued that systemic racism shapes the criminal justice system and has advocated defunding the police and reducing imprisonment. In tweets and interviews in 2020 and 2021, he made comments such as, “I believe that we do need to defund the police,” and “The police have become standing armies we deploy against our own people.”

Darializa Avila Chevalier, who won the Democratic nomination for Congress in New York City and appears likely to win the general election, campaigns on abolishing prisons and would not even say that murderers belong in prison. When asked why he supported Chevalier, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani replied that she represented the “politics of life.”

State Rep. Francesca Hong, the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor of Wisconsin, declared, “I support defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police” and “Police exist to uphold white supremacy. Defund then abolish. Reform can’t be an option.” On July 22, 2026, Hong added: “We no longer can have a system that protects a power and a privilege that puts the pain and lives of armed officers over black people. We cannot protect a system that continues to rain harm and terror.”

These politicians are far from isolated. In 2024, 61 House Democrats voted against a resolution condemning calls to defund the police and expressing support for law enforcement. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., stated her position plainly: “No more policing, incarceration, and militarization. It can’t be reformed.”

The number of politicians embracing those positions has continued to grow. “It’s not just a few people anymore,” as Bill Maher recently observed on ABC News. “I read every day about a new person in Colorado or Wisconsin saying some variation of: not defund the police — abolish the police, no prisons, no police.”

Because violent crime is heavily concentrated in minority neighborhoods, reducing the likelihood that violent offenders are arrested, incarcerated, or deterred inevitably increases the risks faced by law-abiding black residents. Fifty-four percent of murders in the U.S. occur in just 2 percent of the counties. Within those counties, on average about two-thirds of their murders occur within 10-block areas. The harm in those areas goes well beyond the direct victims of the crime. 

Despite claims that these policies speak for blacks, surveys consistently find that black Americans overwhelmingly want at least the same or greater police presence in neighborhoods with high crime. Even at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in August 2020, a Gallup survey found that 81 percent of black Americans wanted police to spend the same amount of time (61 percent) or more time (20 percent) in their neighborhoods. Gallup noted that “Only 22% of black Americans favor abolishing police departments.”

A 2025 survey of Chicago residents by M3 Strategies indicated that 59 percent of blacks strongly supported hiring more police officers and another 27 percent somewhat supported that. Only 11 percent opposed the idea. Still another late July 2026 survey by Rasmussen Reports shows that likely black voters oppose proposals to abolish police 58 to 33.

These Democrats at least have a consistent philosophy. They demand eliminating prisons, abolishing or defunding police, weakening immigration enforcement, and restricting law-abiding citizens’ ability to defend themselves. Mamdani has declared, “We need to ban all guns.” Hong earned the endorsements of Michael Bloomberg’s gun-control organizations. Abdul El-Sayed complains, “Too many elected officials are scared of a corporate gun lobby … I will never take a dime from the gun lobby.” Sayed supports virtually every major gun-control proposal now under debate.

The same pattern extends to immigration. The Chicago Sun-Times reported that “an increasing number of established Democrats are calling for a dissolution of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.” More than 40 House Democrats support legislation to abolish ICE. During the Biden administration, at least 12.8 million illegal aliens either surrendered at the border, were apprehended after crossing illegally, or became known gotaways, and no one knows how many additional migrants entered without being detected. 

Recent data for New York shows that illegal aliens are overrepresented in the incarcerated population in the state compared to their overall share of the state population by at least 3.4 times. Of course, illegals harm minorities in other ways. Increasing the supply of low-skilled workers also intensifies competition for the same jobs and puts downward pressure on wages for the poorest, least-skilled Americans whom these Democrats claim to champion.

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Not Winning? Just Change The Rules…

What binds the new Democratic Party to the new Democratic Socialists is a set of shared issues and values. That is, the radicalism of the Democrats in the age of Trump Derangement Syndrome – lawfare, de-balloting, the Mar-a-Lago raid, and calls to destroy the Electoral College, the nine-justice Supreme Court, and the filibuster – helped give birth to the socialists.

But the overriding commonality among those on the new Left is that if they do not get their way, they blame the “system.” Then they seek to change the rules, no matter how hallowed those laws and conventions may have been or how much they themselves benefited from them in the past.

When the Left lost the White House, Congress, and, for the most part, the Supreme Court, it began clamoring to change the system. For left-wing Democrats, that angst also translated into calls to bring in two new blue states, weaponize the FBI and DOJ, ally with social media to suppress the news, and spy on congressional representatives. All the socialists and communists did was up the ante in destroying norms by calling for the end of the presidency, the Senate, the border, the police, and the Pentagon.

By 2021, it was time to destroy the southern border and welcome in some 10 million illegal immigrants – without audits, English proficiency, health checks, or the ability to support themselves.

Had Kamala Harris been elected in 2024, we would have had another four years and another five million illegal aliens. And perhaps America would have gone from 50 million foreign-born residents to 60 million, or about 18 percent of the population.

In this regard, the Left sees California as our most liberal – and most ideal – state and perhaps concludes that the reason is that 28 percent of its resident population is now foreign-born, with the majority arriving with vast needs for health, education, housing, and food subsidies.

Today, 50 percent of all births in California are paid for by Medi-Cal, which serves 40 percent of the population. When second-generation immigrants are added to the foreign-born population, the two groups together comprise roughly 45 percent of California’s current population. This demographic transformation is one of the most profound in American history and came at a time when traditional civic education stressing assimilation, acculturation, integration, and knowledge of American traditions, history, and values was nearly nonexistent in California public schools.

So one way of achieving radical change was to alter the demography and welcome as many immigrants as possible who, in the first or second generation, might follow the examples of Reps. Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, or Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. They represent an entirely new sort of immigrant who arrives – or is born to immigrant parents – with both complaints against and dependence on their host country. They can see only the sins of America, never the catastrophes of their homeland that drove them or their parents here. This strange demand to change the rules whenever they do not bode well for angry and aggrieved parties permeates every possible manifestation of the Left, but is especially egregious when demanded by immigrants who came originally as uninvited guests but almost immediately damned their magnanimous host.

It is strange for so many new immigrants to act on an elemental desire to reach America – only on arrival to profess that it is full of toxic, sinful people, living and dead. Yet the damned hosts have inexplicably welcomed total strangers like themselves, and have allowed them to share in the freedom, security, and prosperity created by the dead whom the newcomers nonetheless endlessly slander and smear.

If particular minorities statistically did not do as well on the SAT as Asians and whites did on average, the solution was certainly not SAT tutorials in the inner city or K-12 SAT outreach, demands for tougher classes in grammar, math, and analytics, or a return to the melting pot rather than the current salad-bowl tribalist model.

Instead, after the George Floyd riots, the call went out to abolish the SAT entirely – as if there had never been a purpose behind its creation. In fact, merit-based SAT exams were designed in the 1920s and 1930s to allow anyone, regardless of race, gender, region, or class, to enter college through meritorious performance on the tests – and, in particular, to overcome old-boy insider preferences and regional and ethnic prejudices.

Yet when the SAT was mostly abolished for four or five years, higher education thought it had solved the problem of minority underrepresentation.

In fact, its racialist war on standards only magnified its dilemmas. The SAT had once informed admissions officers not only about applicants’ qualifications but also whether admitted students could do the work once enrolled.

But soon liberal professors learned that many of the newly admitted cohorts lacked the K-12 training necessary to do customary university coursework. Yet if professors maintained their regular courses, requirements, and grading, they might soon be labeled racists once particular minorities were shown to do less well than Asians and whites.

So universities inflated grades. They introduced new remedial and gut courses. And they reduced the required coursework. But again, racialism is never a solution to problems. Instead, it is a catalyst that fuels them – as we have seen with the new notion that plagiarism is not an actionable offense when the culprit can plead victim status, whether a former president of Harvard or a current professor at Cambridge. But there are ancient laws and norms that insist intellectual theft is a crime and should be punished, not rewarded or ignored.

Soon employers noticed that the reading, writing, and analytical skills of graduates from prestigious schools were proving dismal. Alumni complained both that the reputations of their almae matres were in decline and resting on the fumes of the past and that their own children, who had prepared diligently to ensure suitably competitive grades and SAT scores for admission, were being rejected solely on the basis of their race.

The Left likewise pushed for lower physical standards for the military’s ground-combat brigades so that women, on average far less strong than their male counterparts, could join elite units. Again, the same ignorance and arrogance were evident. Physical standards were based on a century of combat experience in which morale, group discipline, and unit success rested on ensuring that all soldiers achieved a common level of physical strength and endurance.

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SHOCKER: DSA Co-Chair Says She Began Her Journey to Socialism by Getting All of Her News From Jon Stewart

DSA Co-Chair Megan Romer, who was recently in the news for not being able to articulate the DSA’s stance on open borders, is back in the spotlight tonight for another set of comments she made during the same interview.

When asked to describe what brought her to the DSA, Romer said that she began her journey to the radical left by getting all of her news from Jon Stewart. What huge non-surprise.

Jon Stewart has been working to discredit and vilify conservatives on TV since George W. Bush was still the president.

DSA Co-Chair Megan Romer describes her political journey to the DSA:

She was first a “Jon Stewart liberal.”

“Got most of my news from Jon Stewart. That was my primary news source.”

After Hillary lost, she was “horrified and baffled.”

She then got invited by a folk singer to a DSA meeting.

And now speaks in bumper sticker slogans for the DSA and can’t answer basic questions about the organization’s positions and platform.

All of this explains so much.

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Ex-DSA Member Blows Whistle Over “Mob Tactics” Used On Dissenters, Debates Over Levels-of-Leninism

Former Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) organizer Jake Altman argues that over the past 10-15 years, the organization has transformed from a relatively pragmatic working-class social-democratic group into a much more radical movement driven by younger activists and open to more extreme ideas.

He describes internal pressure against dissenters, increasing openness to communism, and a demographic shift toward younger and more affluent, less experienced, and more radical members during an interview with The Free Press.

“When I joined in 2013, it was much more social democratic. It was very old, very white. In 2015 in Boston, it was a few older men and I who were the core of the old DSA chapter,” Altman explained. “It is night and day between DSA in even 2015 and now. It went from this, like you say, pretty moderate social-political group to a cultural juggernaut that it is today.”

“By 2014, a group called the Left Caucus was formed that advanced a lot of extreme views.”

“There were debates at the time about how much Leninism do we want to let into DSA. And these people, they eroded any resistance and any core of anti-communism that remained within DSA. Anti-communism became forbidden, right? This is a big evil thing, to be an anti-communist.”

“And you can’t hold this view without running all the old people who experienced the 20th century out of the organization. And I think that had to have been part of the calculus, that they didn’t want any internal resistance,” he said. “And so there were instances where people were – I think efforts were made to silence people who dissented.”

“I can speak from personal experience that if you dissent, there will be efforts to silence you. They use mob tactics, basically,” he said. “So if you speak out, they will coordinate and a bunch of people will jump on you and denounce you, smear you behind your back, do whatever it takes to try to discredit you if you speak out against them.”

“There was a local union in Ann Arbor who said it’s too far to vandalize and intimidate public officials, vandalize their homes and intimidate them. That is too far,” Altman said

“Immediately they received a swarm of people online responding to that statement, essentially saying, ‘You’re supporting genocide. Shame on you.’ Trying to turn their members against them and stir up animosity towards them with the effort of silencing them.”

“DSA itself makes a distinction – an important distinction – between paper members, who are people who give the organization their credit card and never come to a meeting, and cadre, who are hardcore activist members who show up to all the meetings and do all the work,” he said. “The cadre are incredibly radical. The paper members might be, you know, think AOC and Bernie Sanders are great and let’s get Medicare for All.”

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DSA Member Has No Answer When Asked What We Will Do With Rapists After Prisons Are Abolished

A DSA member who recently appeared on a news show was asked a very basic question about what society does with criminals like rapists when all of the prisons have been abolished. She had no answer and tried to veer into talking points.

The reason she had no answer is because there is no answer. People who commit crimes like rape and murder need to be locked away from society, plain and simple.

What a lot of people get wrong about these DSA members and their wacky ideas is that they’re just dumb people. Their policies were cooked up in a dorm on some liberal college campus and they’ve never even been challenged.

FOX News reports:

In an interview with NBC 4 Los Angeles, anchor Conan Nolan posed pointed questions to Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) National Political Committee Member Frances Gill on the topics of law enforcement, immigration and the movement’s other far-left proposals.

After a brief back-and-forth over what defunding the police means and how that would be applied in practice, Gill resorted to deflecting by refusing to engage in ‘hypotheticals.’

“What we really want to see is a horizon where folks are not reliant on armed enforcement to meet our public safety needs,” Gill conceded.

“Right, but it says ‘defund police’ on your website — that’s your goal — and also to get rid of prisons and jails, correct?” he pressed, to which Gill answered affirmatively.

“So if my daughter is assaulted and raped, is there any agency that would seek to find her assailant and bring him to justice?” asked Nolan.

“Of course, yeah of course—” said Gill before the host jumped back in with a follow-up question.

“What would it be if not police and where would he be if not a jail?” asked Nolan.

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Ocasio-Cortez: Democratic Socialists Are Fundamentally Pro-Democracy

Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said that the Democratic Socialists of America were “fundamentally pro-democracy.”

After playing a montage of Republicans discussing communism, host Jon Karl asked, “You kind of get a sense of the theme, and obviously the president has said the same thing. What in your mind is the difference between socialism and communism?”

Ocasio-Cortez said, “I think to me, the fundamental differences, I mean, there’s many. One prevailing one is democracy. And I believe that Democratic Socialists are fundamentally pro-democracy. And we believe in the ballot box. We believe in respecting the outcomes of elections and governing democratically and ensuring that the ideas and policies that are implemented are won through popular vote and popular opinion. And so that I think that’s why so much of what we focus on at the New York City chapter.”

Karl said, “The New York City chapter, not the national one. And what’s the difference?”

Ocasio-Cortez said, “So every DSA chapter is formed locally. And so the New York City DSA chapter, those are folks that you know. It’s my, it’s kind of like your local union chapter.”

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‘Privileged Idiot’ DSA Co-Chair Has Absolute Porridge For Brains

The Democrat party has been freaking out about the Democratic Socialists of late – despite striking similarities between their policies – because while Democrats are happy to sweet talk voters into socialist ideas that signal maximum virtue, they don’t actually want to enact policies that would make blue-city budgets even more dire than they are

In short, the party is panicking because the voters they radicalized are electing radicals… 

So what better way to let progressives see what they’re voting for? Trot out a co-chair of the DSA with maybe two brain cells to rub together, ask her simple questions, and watch her implode

To wit: co-chair Megan Romer was given a softball interview by New Yorker editor David Remnick, in which he asked Romer “What does ‘taxing the hell out of them’ mean?” in regards to a core DSA position of ‘taxing the rich.’

Romer stumbled hard… 

Romer: Uh, yeah, you know, again, I don’t have like a solid…

Remnick: But shouldn’t you? If you’re the co-chair of the DSA, shouldn’t you be more specific than ‘taxing the hell’ out of something? What exactly do you mean?

Romer: Um, that’s a good question. “So again, it’s democracy, right? And we have to look at what we have to spend and what we need. We don’t want to depend on the existence of millionaires because that means people are still getting exploited.”

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