Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York City, is (despite his denials) quite clearly a Marxist, dreaming of the day when he can seize the means of production. He is also a Twelver Shi’ite Muslim — you know, the good folks who rule the Islamic Republic of Iran and scream “Death to America” on a routine basis. And so it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that Mamdani’s plans for New York are not exactly going to transform the Big Apple into a hub for business and opportunity.
If Mamdani gets his way, the city will become even more expensive, crime-ridden, inefficient, squalid, dirty, and dangerous as it is now. And New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-Planned Parenthood), despite previously being decidedly lukewarm about Mamdani’s socialist schemes, has just given the earnest young leftist mayor-to-be a massive boost, stopping an attempt to limit his powers.
Proponents of the measure were not trying to place illegitimate restraints upon Mamdani just because they disagreed with him. They were actually trying to remove an odd element of the city statutes that allows the mayor to run roughshod over the will of the City Council and to, in short, behave like a dictator. This is a power that the mayor never should have had in the first place, and now it’s going to be in the hands of a mayor who has made it abundantly clear that he would like nothing better than to transform the nation’s largest city into a third-world hellhole. Or into even more of a third-world hellhole than it already is.
The New York Post reported Monday that Hochul had given a “gift” to Mamdani by vetoing legislation that “would have undone a quirk in which council-approved amendments to the city charter can effectively be ‘bumped’ by the mayor.” Hochul did Mamdani this favor despite endorsing him only a week before the mayoral election, and after publicly opposing his bleed-the-rich plans last June, saying: “I’m not raising taxes at a time where affordability is the big issue. I don’t want to lose any more people to Palm Beach. We’ve lost enough.”