Tag: new york

Resurfaced video shows NYC mayoral hopeful saying he wants to replace private homes with communal living

Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist candidate for New York City mayor, has come under fire from critics who label him a “communist” – a charge he dismisses as a distraction.

However, the criticisms may not be as unfounded as Mamdani claims. Videos show the NYC mayoral candidate espousing language and theories rooted in communist revolutionary language. 

In one 2021 video, Mamdani urges fellow socialists at a conference to not compromise on goals like “seizing the means of production.” In a second video, released on YouTube by progressive advocacy group The Gravel Institute that same year, Mamdani discusses the need to turn housing from a private commodity to a public one, calling for luxury condos to be replaced with communal style living that would include things like shared laundry facilities and food co-ops.

“Why do so many people end up homeless?” Mamdani asks in the video. “It’s not because there aren’t enough homes to go around, there are plenty of empty homes. No. It’s because housing people is not a primary goal of developers or landlords. Their goal, simply put, is to make a profit.”

According to Mamdani, this is a problem. He lamented in the video that housing is “a consumer product, just like clothes or cars” that private businesses sell on the market to make a profit. As a result, Mamdani complains, there is plenty of housing for “the rich” but not nearly enough opportunities for poor and working-class people.

“[It’s] not efficient or beneficial for the rest of society,” Mamdani says. “Housing doesn’t have to be seen as a market at all.”

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Identitarian socialist Zohran Mamdani declared he was ‘Black or African American’ on college applications

South Asian socialist identitarian mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani identified as “Black or African American” as well as “Asian” on his college applications, The New York Times has learned via a hack of Columbia University’s application data. Millions of records were leaked.

Mamdani, who was born to parents of Indian descent in Uganda, said he checked the box because the identity boxes on the application weren’t enough to show the breadth and scope of his ethnic and racial composition.

He admitted to the Times that as a high school senior in 2009, he filled out all his forms the same way, including on his application to Columbia University, where his father taught then and is still on the faculty. The data hack was an effort to discover if Columbia still uses a race-based admissions program as they did at the time Mamdani was considering the school.

His Hollywood film director mother Mira Nair has said her son is “a total desi,” a term for South Asians. “He is a total desi,” she said in 2013, “We are not firangs at all. He is very much us. He is not an Uhmericcan (American) at all. He was born in Uganda, raised between India and America. He is at home in many places. He thinks of himself as a Ugandan and as an Indian.”

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Behind Zohran Mamdani, an Experienced Soros-Obama Operative

Reading the New York Times coverage and Zohran Mamdani’s social media, you’d get the idea that the 33-year-old Israel-hating socialist is a new face, a breath of fresh air, and a foe of billionaires.

Now that Mamdani has won the Democratic nomination for mayor, the news has finally come out that a key figure behind his campaign was Patrick Gaspard. Gaspard, 57, is a former political aide to Barack Obama. He also served from 2017 to 2020 as president of George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Soros is 94.

Gaspard surfaced in New York Times coverage of the campaign but was identified as a neutral party. A June 10 Times article reported that Mamdani “has also quietly met with former officials for advice, including…Patrick Gaspard, an adviser to mayors and presidents,” but noted that Gaspard was “also speaking with other candidates.” A June 13 Times article quoted “Patrick Gaspard, a top adviser to Democratic mayors and presidents who has not taken sides in the race.”

Yet in a July 1 piece, “How Zohran Mamdani Stunned New York and Won the Primary for Mayor,” the Times offers a new and different account of Gaspard’s role. Now the Times says Gaspard “quietly helped guide Mr. Mamdani” and says Gaspard participated with Mamdani in a dinner with New York Comptroller Brad Lander in which the two agreed to cross-endorse in the mayoral race. The Times reports, “The day before the final debate, Mr. Lander and Mr. Mamdani sat down at Yara, a Lebanese restaurant in Midtown, with campaign aides and Mr. Gaspard. Over plates of fattoush, hummus and eggplant, the two candidates decided they would cross-endorse each other to defeat Mr. Cuomo.”

The Times describes Gaspard as “adviser to mayors and presidents,” but the more relevant information is that he is a Soros person. Don’t just take it from me: his bio on X says, “Forever @OpenSociety.” Open Society’s tax filings indicate the $5.9 billion foundation paid Gaspard, identified as its former president, $2.2 million in 2021.

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Revealed: Communist Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani Made an Embarrassing Mistake While Devising Scheme to Fund City-Owned Grocery Stores in New York City

Communist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has struck fear in the hearts of New Yorkers with his radical plans to ruin the most famous city in America. Fortunately, the residents may be spared thanks to his incredible ineptitude.

A report has revealed that Mamdani made an embarrassing mistake while devising a plan to pay for one of his signature policies.

As TGP readers know, Mamdani has said he wants the Big Apple to have five government-owned grocery stores. He sees this as a solution to lowering the cost of food despite the fact that the idea has been tried before and failed miserably .

Mamdani, though, says that because the city is already subsidizing private grocery stores with $140 million, he can take just under half of the money ($60 million) and fulfill his dream.

“We will redirect city funds from corporate supermarkets to city-owned grocery stores whose mission is lower prices, not price-gouging,” Mamdani claims in one video.

But as the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney explains, Mamdani has no clue what he is talking about. The money he plans to use to pay for his city-owned grocery stores does not exist.

Carney shared information from The city’s Economic Development Corporation webpage to make his point. The site notes grocery stores have invested $140 million of their own money thanks to a city program called FRESH (Food Retail Expansion to Support Health).

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NYC driving school rigged driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants — even if they couldn’t drive: DA

A Big Apple driving school paid off DMV examiners to fraudulently fast-track driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants — even if they had no clue how to drive, Staten Island prosecutors said Tuesday.

T&E Driving School in Queens took cash from Chinese immigrants — many of whom didn’t even speak English — and paid off a crew of Department of Motor Vehicles employees on Staten Island to illegally obtain driver’s licenses, District Attorney Michael McMahon said at a press conference.

The crackdown, dubbed Operation Road Test, took down the ring in a joint investigation with state investigators and the US Department of Homeland Security, prosecutors said.

“Our investigation found that T&E Driving School blatantly flouted the laws and procedures that are necessary to ensure the public safety on the road,” George Ioannidis, assistant special agent in charge for Homeland Security Investigations in New York said Tuesday.

“As alleged T&E utilized social media and strategic advertising to Target exploited members of the Chinese community and guaranteed individual driver’s licenses regardless of their immigration status, language, and even their ability to operate a vehicle,” he said.

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Socialists Don’t Understand Motherhood

Self-proclaimed democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani just won New York City’s mayoral primary, and, in a city crawling with Democrats who like free stuff, he’s the favorite to win November’s general election, replacing Eric Adams.

Mamdani—a 33-year-old Bowdoin graduate, with a multimillionaire filmmaker mother and a Columbia-professor father—styles himself a champion for the working class, someone who really understands what they need. 

As such, he advocates for universal child care. “After rent, the biggest cost for New York’s working families is childcare. It’s literally driving them out of the city: New Yorkers with children under six are leaving at double the rate of all others,” reads his platform. “The burden falls heaviest on mothers, who are giving up paying jobs to do unpaid childcare.” He promises to implement free child care for all babies and children aged 6 weeks and above, until they start school at age 5. He wants child care workers to have wage parity with public school teachers

This program could take the form of an expansion of the city’s existing 3K program, or could be an entirely new state-run day care program. It’s not totally clear what he intends. His platform is characteristically heavy on the graphic design, light on the details. 

But Mamdani, and all others who advocate universal publicly-funded child care, mistake the needs that mothers actually have—the things they say they want, the types of child care arrangements they favor—assuming all parents want the state to sublimate their roles. Socialists pretend they want to support mothers and motherhood. But they don’t understand what type of help mothers need at all.

In 2022, the think tank Institute for Family Studies asked mothers of children under 18 what their “ideal situation” would be, in terms of time spent with kids vs. working. They found that 42 percent of mothers wanted to work full-time; 32 percent had an ideal of part-time work; and 22 percent would ideally choose no paid work at all. A Pew Research Center survey from three years prior found much the same: Half of moms said it would be “best for them” to work full-time, with 30 percent choosing part-time work and 19 percent choosing none at all. As of 2018, the majority of mothers with kids under 18—55 percent—are engaged in full-time work, up from 34 percent in 1968. And the share of mothers with little kids—those who have not yet entered school—in the work force went from 8 percent in 1940 to over 60 percent by 2000. It has only risen since. 

Of course, “in the work force” isn’t necessarily the same as “not engaged in the daily labor of childrearing.” The advent of remote work has enabled more creative arrangements than ever before, with parents increasingly using the shift system and staggering work hours. Socialists don’t give much credit to the many ways companies accommodate working parents—whether corporate overlords mean to or not—when they allow greater flexibility in the workday and for different people to work at different paces and in different shifts. What can benefit the company can also benefit the family.

“An ideal childcare system,” writes Ivana Greco, a writer/homeschooler/lawyer-by-training with four kids, “takes into account the full range of ‘childcare,’ including parents, extended family, friends, and neighbors.” It “considers and respects the wishes and needs of individual families, which will be different both from family to family and from time period to time period.” It should allow for flexibility, which means it should provide “access to drop-in, part-time, or irregular hours” child care. It’s “mindful of cost, broadly speaking, including second-order effects and non-economic costs.” 

Mamdani’s proposal meets zero out of four of Greco’s criteria. Socialists, in general, don’t tailor to such criteria—or even necessarily understand it or wish to honor it—when crafting plans for universal child care.

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Zohran Mamdani: End Goal Is ‘Seizing the Means of Production’

Self-proclaimed socialist and Democrat nominee for mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, said in 2021 that his “end goal” is “seizing the means of production,” despite recently claims that he is not a communist.

Mamdani, a New York state assemblyman and member of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), shared his method to “win socialism” while appearing virtually at a DSA conference to mobilize young people in February 2021:

What the purpose is about this entire project — it’s not simply to raise class consciousness, but to win socialism. And obviously, raising class consciousness is a critical part of that, but making sure that we have candidates that both understand that and are willing to put that forward at every which moment that they have … We have to continue to elect more socialists, and we have to ensure that we are unapologetic about our socialism.

Naming other issues that socialists “firmly believe in,” Mamdani went on to highlight the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and the “end goal of seizing the means of production, where we do not have the same level of support at this very moment.”

“Organize for what is correct and for what is right, and to ensure that over time, we can bring people to that issue,” the mayoral candidate continued. “The ramifications of victory here is the difference between life and death for so many of our brothers and sisters and family beyond the binary across this borough of Queens.”

He added that socialism will bring policies like “sex work being decriminalized.”

Advocating for “seizing the means of production” is a cornerstone of Marxist and communist thought, as it was popularized by philosopher Karl Marx.

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The Absurdity of Government Grocery Stores Exposes the Flaws of Public Schools

Zohran Mamdani won New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary partly on his plan to open five city-owned grocery stores—one in each of New York’s boroughs. The idea is as absurd as it sounds, but it’s a useful lens through which to view another government-run institution we’ve accepted for far too long: the public school system.

The case against government grocery stores is straightforward. Government providers have no incentive to spend money wisely or respond to customers’ needs. Unlike private businesses, which must compete for customers by offering quality goods at reasonable prices, government entities get paid regardless of performance. Tax dollars flow into the system whether the shelves are stocked or empty, whether the service is stellar or abysmal.

This lack of accountability breeds inefficiency and waste. Government employees, shielded by bureaucratic inertia and powerful unions, often see more tax dollars as the solution to every problem, rather than innovation or better management.

In the early days of the Soviet Union, state-controlled grocery stores and food distribution systems led to catastrophic mismanagement, with millions dying during the Russian famine of 1921 to 1922. Those weren’t just government-run, of course; unlike Mamdani’s proposed shops, they were government monopolies. But Venezuela’s recent experiment with government-controlled grocery stores has been a disaster, even with a degree of private competition allowed: Chronic shortages have left shelves empty and citizens queuing for hours for basic goods like bread and milk.

These disasters highlight how government control stifles competition, kills innovation, and leaves citizens with fewer alternatives when the system fails.

Now consider the public school system. It operates under the same flawed principles. Like Mamdani’s hypothetical grocery stores, public schools are funded by tax dollars regardless of their outcomes. In New York City, for example, public schools spend about $40,000 per student annually, yet the 2024 Nation’s Report Card shows less than a quarter of their 8th graders are proficient in math.

They face little pressure to improve because families are trapped by residential assignment, forced to send their children to the school dictated by their ZIP code. This setup gives government schools more monopoly power than a state-run grocery store would have. At least with grocery stores, you could drive to another one. With public schools, families without the means to relocate or afford private alternatives are left with limited options.

Mamdani’s campaign website calls for “public money” for “public” grocery stores, echoing the tired mantra of teachers’ unions, who argue that “public money” should fund only “public schools.” This rhetoric is a deliberate tactic to protect their monopoly, blocking school choice reforms that would allow parents to direct education funds to better options. The unions’ stance, like Mamdani’s, prioritizes government control over outcomes, ignoring the reality that too many public schools fail to deliver.

Teachers’ unions, like the grocery store unions Mamdani might envision, prioritize their members’ interests over those of students or families. They fight for higher salaries, better benefits, and less work, consistently resisting reforms such as merit pay or school choice that would introduce more competition or accountability. The National Education Association spent $66 million on political activities in 2021, largely to protect the status quo. This entrenched power structure ensures that the system serves adults, not children.

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Muslim Communist Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani Says Illegal Aliens Have ‘Kept New York Safe For Decades’

Democratic New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has claimed that the policy of protecting illegal aliens from deportation has “kept New York safe for decades.”

In an interview with NBC’s Meet The Press, Mamdani also pledged to “fight back” against ICE should he win election in November.

Here is a transcript of the exchange:

WELKER: Let’s talk about immigration and deportation. Are you committed to keeping New York as a sanctuary city?

MAMDANI: Absolutely. Because ultimately, we’ve seen that this is a policy that has kept New Yorkers safe for decades. It’s a policy that had previously been defended by Democrats and Republicans alike until the fear-mongering of this current mayor.

It’s a policy that we’ve seen ensures that New Yorkers can get out of the shadows and into the full life of the city that they belong to. And it’s one that I will be proud to stand up for.”

WELKER: Well, you know, the borders are. Tom Homan has said that he is planning to deploy ICE agents to New York worksite enforcement to essentially increase and enhance the number of ICE agents here.

If that happens on your watch, how do you plan to handle it

MAMDANI:  We have to stand up and fight back, and we haven’t seen that from our current mayor, who has instead been working with the Trump administration to assist in their goal of building the single largest deportation force in American history.

I mean, we saw ICE agents arrest a migrant at Federal Plaza. We saw NYPD officers arresting a pastor who was peacefully observing that arrest.

Those days are going to come to an end when I’m the mayor. The NYPD’s job is to create public safety in the city, not to assist ICE agents in their mission to attack the very fabric of this city.

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Blue states with net-zero emissions goals consider nuclear as hopes for 100% wind and solar fade

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D), Monday directed the New York Power Authority (NYPA) to develop and construct a nuclear power plant of not less than one gigawatt. The new plant was needed, Hochul said in her announcement, in order “to support a reliable and affordable electric grid, while providing the necessary zero-emission electricity to achieve a clean energy economy.” 

It was a surprising announcement for a state that closed and dismantled the Indian Point nuclear power plant only five years ago. The consideration of nuclear in the energy mix is part of a pattern seen in other blue states committed to eliminating electricity generated from fossil fuels. California has now delayed the closure of its only nuclear power plant, and Michigan is looking to restart a previously shuttered nuclear power plant. 

In all three cases, it appears that the states are coming to grips with the reality that intermittent wind and solar backed up by short-duration, expensive grid-scale batteries won’t be enough to supply the power needs of the state, especially as AI places more demands on the grid. Still clinging to the hope of a fossil fuel-free grid, these states are looking to nuclear as a more politically tenable option. 

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