Your Letters for Aug. 1, 2025
Promises made: Mamdani or Marx?
Is he denying everything that he once glibly thought was cutting-edge and cool?
Did he really mean that violence against Jewish New Yorkers — the target of 44% of all hate crimes in the city? Has he discovered that their concussions and blood were all too real?
As a good soldier in the ranks of Black Lives Matter, he insists he did not trash the police and advocate defunding them. Did he mean to claim falsely he was African American when he applied to college? Was a video mocking the Jewish holiday of Hannukah a good thing to do? Was it cool to boast about defunding the police when he was an edgy, rising, left-wing community activist?
It is essential now to lie and deny it as a front runner. As a good communist, he echoed Karl Marx by bragging about his ultimate agenda: “The end goal of seizing the means of production.”
Would he seize Trump Tower, Tesla, Amazon as he says, “I don’t think that we should have billionaires, frankly?” He brags he would “globalize the intifada.” The two violent Palestinian waves of terrorism against Israel, what then does Mamdani mean by globalizing it?
The universities escalating to the old PLO or current Hamas levels? He said as mayor, he would arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he came to New York City. Was it for his trying to stop another Hamas October 7, preventing the Iranians from getting a nuclear bomb? Would he arrest a visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping for putting a million Uyghurs in labor camps? How about arresting Venezuelan communist dictator Nicolas Maduro, who has “disappeared” some 20,000 of his own people? Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, whose government executes homosexuals?
Ask who, on average, ranks as the richest ethnic group in America? Asian immigrants of Indian ancestry — like his family. Barack Obama’s father, Kamala Harris’s father, and Rep. Ilhan Omar’s parents fled the poverty, violence, and corruption of their homeland only to find prosperity, even affluence, amid the safety and the rule of law in the United States.
And now he wants to change New York to accept these changes! Promises?
He touts free bus transportation, rent control and rent stabilization freeze (currently N.Y. has 960,600 of them), a city ran, state-owned grocery stores, no-cost child care — six weeks to five years — $10 billion in new taxes reforms on businesses and the wealthy New Yorkers, economic justice, universal housing, public safety reform, inclusive governance, lower the cost of food, fund early childcare centers, regulating delivery apps, creating a “Mom and Pops” czar to promote small businesses, enact a 500% funding increase for city’s business express service teams.
How are all of these to be paid for? A tax increase and flat 2% tax on those making more than $1 million per year. Hiking corporate tax rate from 9% to 11.5%. This will bring in $5 billion annually. (Will people continue to leave?).
“We have won because New Yorkers have stood up for a city they can afford,” Mamdani said in his victory speech.
Is this a warning? “NYC has been the clearest warning yet of what happens to a society when it fails to control migration.”
I wonder what all this is going to cost them? And why would he wish to turn New York City into a social basket — case like Uganda, which his now-rich parents fled to reach America in the first place?
Next month, watch for a review of the book “Communist Manifesto.”
Ben Pecora
St. Joseph
