Mamdani apologists play the fake Islamophobia card. The liberal media and others spin attempts to call out the Democratic mayoral nominee’s hatred for Israel as hatred for Muslims.
It didn’t take long for the Democratic Party’s media cheering section to demonstrate how far the Overton Window had moved among liberals with respect to antisemitism. Centrist Democrats and the liberal Jewish establishment were genuinely shocked by Zohran Mamdani’s victory in last week’s Democratic Party mayoral primary in New York City. Within days, however, it was clear that legacy outlets reflecting mainstream opinion on the political left weren’t going to tolerate much in the way of criticism of his extremist views about Israel and the Jews.
Within days, it was clear that anyone who claimed that Mamdani should be rejected out of hand as a possible mayor of New York on the grounds of stands that were, at best, antisemitism-adjacent or, at worst, open endorsements of Jewish genocide, rather than the candidate himself, were going to be the ones under fire. Within 48 hours of Mamdani’s win, The New York Times was already using the word “Islamophobic” in headlines to describe his critics.
Legitimizing antisemitism
It is fear among Democrats about being labeled as Islamophobic that explains why so few prominent members of the party and officeholders are refusing to condemn Mamdani now that the 33-year-old New York state representative has become their party’s nominee. That’s not just smoothing his path to victory for a fellow Democrat, despite the horror that many New Yorkers feel about him. It’s also achieving something the political left has been assiduously working toward, especially since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attacks on southern Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023: the legitimization of antisemitism in the American public square.
Last week I invited readers to get a good laugh out of New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s plan to avert impending energy disaster by green-lighting one nuclear power plant that optimistically might solve 5% of the problem when it is ready to operate in the 2050s. Now this week brings an even superior farce: A video clip has emerged of our settler-colonialist Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani calling for “seizing the means of production.”
Mamdani’s victory in last week’s Democratic primary has led researchers to dredge up a treasure trove of his old tweets and video clips, each one more ridiculous than the next. An excellent roundup can be found here at Legal Insurrection . Some choice examples include: “VioIence is an artificial construct”; “Under capitalism, housing is a commodity from which landlords & developers extract huge profits while our communities suffer eviction, foreclosure & displacement.”; “We need to dramatically curtail the power & presence of the NYPD.”; and “[A] statue of Columbus remains in Astoria, in defiance of the values of humanity, empathy & justice that we stand for.”
But my favorite is a clip from a speech Mamdani gave at a Democratic Socialists of America conference in 2021. The New York Post today quotes some excerpts from the speech, among them Mamdani’s statements that issues socialists “firmly believe in,” include “boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel” and “the end goal of seizing the means of production.”
“Seizing the means of production” — now there’s a retro concept. The “means of production” was good commie talk back in the 19th century, when Karl Marx and his followers looked around and saw things like steel mills, railroad engine factories, iron foundries, coal mines, textile mills, and other such big facilities to make lots of stuff. It seemed obvious that those facilitie were where the greedy capitalists got their wealth.
But has Mamdani even looked around the New York City of today? What even exists today that you could call a “means of production”?
In New York City today, we produce almost nothing that is tangible. I wonder if Mamdani has noticed that.
In May 2016 I did a big post with lots of research titled “The Devastation Of New York City’s Economy.” The post documented the complete transformation of New York City’s economy from the 1950s to the time of the post, and in particular the almost complete disappearance of manufacturing. As noted in the post, in the aftermath of World War II, New York City’s economy had over 1 million manufacturing jobs, distributed among some 37,000 different companies. Those companies and people made a huge variety of products, most famously women’s clothing, where New York City was completely dominant and supported about 231,000 jobs. By the time of the post in 2016, the total number of manufacturing jobs in New York City in all industries was down to about 80,000. According to the most recent statistics from the New York State Department of Labor, the current number of manufacturing jobs in the City (May 2025) is only 57,700. That’s out of total private-sector employment of some 4,248,300.
Such manufacturing as continues to exist in New York City is reduced to a few specialized niches. For example, there continue to be specialized clothing manufacturers to make things like costumes for Broadway shows and samples for runway fashion shows. Are their sewing machines what Mamdani means by the “means of production”?
In the way of mass production of physical goods for human consumption, almost none of it occurs in New York City. Food? Obviously, we don’t grow that here. Clothing? Almost certainly, nothing in your wardrobe or mine was manufactured in New York City. Housing or other buildings? They are put together on site, but the materials almost all come from elsewhere (structural concrete is one exception). Automobiles? There are no assembly plants in the five boroughs; and if you know of a manufacturer of some kind of parts for the auto industry in New York City, I would like to learn of it.
But aren’t there some kind of “means of production” to make all the wealth that gets generated in the hundreds of big office buildings in Manhattan? I would love to see Mamdani’s plans to seize whatever this may be. When he sends in his shock troops to make the seizures, all he’s going to find are a bunch of laptops no different from what you could get at the Apple store.
How about the investment bankers and traders and hedge funders who make millions of dollars per year dealing in the capital markets? I suppose that their “means of production” mainly consists of the proprietary software that they use in their businesses. The bankers may know how to make big money using this software, but seized and distributed among the masses, it would be almost completely useless. It’s really quite funny to contemplate.
Anyway, these are the levels of ignorance and foolishness that we are dealing with.
The brilliant free market economist Ludwig von Mises said it best, nearly a century ago:
“The advocates of public control cannot do without inflation. They need it in order to finance their policy of reckless spending and of lavishly subsidizing and bribing the voters.”
“Inflation is an increase in the quantity of money without a corresponding increase in the demand for money, i.e., for cash holdings.”
“Inflation is the fiscal complement of statism and arbitrary government. It is a cog in the complex of policies and institutions which gradually lead toward totalitarianism .”
“Inflation has always been an important resource of policies of war and revolution and why we also find it in the service of socialism.”
“If one regards inflation as an evil, then one has to stop inflating. One has to balance the budget of the government.”
The issue isn’t whether to be FOR or AGAINST the “big beautiful bill.” The issue is that this bill — as with any bill the Congress passes without addressing spending — is impossible to achieve without continued inflation.
Put it this way: The government cannot tax us at 90 or 100 percent; if they did, there probably would be a revolution, and the economy would collapse overnight. Neither will the government cut spending — not even a little. So the only option left? Keep increasing the spending while increasing the supply of money via the Federal Reserve. As von Mises wrote: Inflation is a policy, not a symptom. Politicians are doing this to us on purpose, to maintain and increase their power (and personal wealth).
The Trump administration had the right idea with DOGE. But as we learned, in the end, you cannot cut government spending without Congress cutting the spending.
The Congress does not appear willing to cut spending. Not even a Republican Congress claiming to be aligned with MAGA, which (Trump has demonstrated) does support massive cuts in federal spending (and power).
Sooner or later, we’ll have to face this fact. Either inflation will get so out of control and bother people so badly, through the despair and impoverishment it brings, that government will finally cut spending (as they’re now attempting in Argentina); or our Congress and politicians will start to become more rational and cut spending without waiting for a financial calamity.
If Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei should someday soon be kicked out of Persia, it is possible he could come to New York, where he would likely be elected mayor.
The sequence of NYC mayors is astounding.
From Guliani to Bloomberg to de Blasio to Adams.
And perhaps soon to Zohran Mamdani, an avowed Marxist who has previously indicated his desire to “globalize the intifada.” (Mamdani defeated three-term ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the June 24thmayoral primary.)
How to make a sh*thole city in four easy steps!
The Chief of Police for the NYPD has already stated that, should Mamdani be elected, his pro-crime anti-cop policies would cause mass exodus from the city’s police force. The resultant effect would be catastrophic.
The Big Apple, not so long ago, was one of the safest big cities in the world. Now it is rotten to its core. “My kind of town,” “The city that never sleeps,” etc., is now no place for “infidels.” And a city that ever weeps. A sanctuary city for criminals. An asylum for the insane and outlandish.
When I set out writing this article, I did not intend to reference a musical piece. However, after reading that, should Mamdani win the general election, New York might well surrender its status as the financial hub of the U.S. to Miami, I had to include a few lines from the Billy Joel song, “Miami 2017 (Seen The Lights Go Out On Broadway)”
I’ve seen the lights go out on Broadway I saw the ruins at my feet
You can see it coming in so many ways. The Empire City is no more. And, from a future perspective:
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You know those lights were bright on Broadway That was so many years ago Before we all lived here in Florida Before the Mafia took over Mexico There are not many who remember They say a handful still survive To tell the world about The way the lights went out And keep the memory alive
I fear Billy was just off by about a decade.
What’s next for Gotham City? Today’s fun—if tragic—fact: the term “Gotham” was borrowed from the English village of “Gotham,” known for its “simple-minded fools.”
Now more than ever, the ability to speak our minds is crucial to the republic we cherish. If what you see on American Thinker resonates with you, please consider supporting our work with a donation of as much or as little as you can give. Every dollar contributed helps us pay our staff and keep our ideas heard and our voices strong.
After the wide-scale apoplexy induced by reports of overpopulation, an ice age, global warming, and then climate change, the apocalypse of the season may be shifting to low birth rates and population loss. In recent months, authorities no less diverse and august than Pantsuited Demographer Hillary Clinton and Hillbilly Procreationist J.D. Vance have weighed in with their preferred remedies. I regret to report that no one has suggested any politically and culturally acceptable solutions, so it is time to grin and bear it.
Mr. Vance, a seemingly dedicated Europhobe, proposes an oddly Continental menu of transfer payments to parents to promote fertility rates. Unfortunately, most of what the Vance school has suggested — generous tax benefits and other subsidies for families – already exists in European countries that have fertility rates even lower than those in the United States. Bribing people to have babies is not likely to be more successful than were past attempts at bribing them not to have babies. Procreation is funny that way.
While Wikipedia reports that the Shakers, once 6,000 strong, are down to their last three members, Hillary Clinton’s new anti-natalist fervor may increase their rolls to four. She recently reacted to Mr. Vance by lambasting any suggestion of encouraging our existing native population to have more children because it would purportedly reduce women to the roles that bound them in the 1950s. Her answer: mass immigration from third-world cultures with high fertility rates. She apparently wants to delegate manual labor to immigrant men and the labor of labor to immigrant women.
There is nothing new to the proposal of large-scale immigration to offset low fertility, but there is an inherent fallacy that undermines this solution. Specifically, if third-world immigrants successfully assimilate, they will rapidly adopt the low fertility habits of natives, and if they do not assimilate, they will create a host of problems that outweigh any benefits that they might bring. Fertility rates in recent immigrant groups have, in fact, fallen fairly rapidly after their arrival.
The Clinton high immigration solution also simplistically and unrealistically treats people from different population groups as fungible. You cannot replace low-fertility highly skilled high tax–paying classes of people with low-skilled largely untaxed classes and expect that the result will be the same as if the former group started producing children again.
Some suggest that immigrants are essential to pay for the benefits necessary to support an aging native population. Recent unskilled immigrants, however, cannot contribute enough tax revenue to pay for the education, medical, infrastructure, social welfare and judicial-penal system costs they impose with something left over to devote to old age benefits for the native population. There would have be some very high-paying jobs for recent immigrants.
Everyone accepts that the emancipation of women from culturally imposed norms that emphasized marriage and childbearing inevitably caused a substantial reduction in fertility rates. The unfortunate truth, which borders on unmentionable, is that there is no apparent solution to low fertility in a culture that has given women opportunities that make marriage and childbearing optional. There — I didn’t want to, but I said it.
That is where the “grin and bear it” comes in. If we cannot reliably increase fertility rates without imposing unacceptable conditions, can we live with lower fertility rates, just as we have learned to live with the parade of horribles that started with the population bomb in the late 1960s and has continued through a succession of incipient dystopias, of which climate change was the most recent?
Advanced low-immigration, low-fertility cultures like Japan may not be as robust as their leaders might wish, but they are not doomed, either. The fertility problem is triggering accelerated automation in Japan. Before we allow mass immigration, we might want to ask what we are going to do with the real Juan and Maria after we name our Roombas “Juan” and “Maria.”
What if we stayed at a population of “only” 330 million, double what it was a short time ago? What if requisitioning the resources necessary to support an aging population slightly reduces the standard of living of younger folks who still live in larger homes, have better cars, eat out more, and enjoy more air travel than their predecessors did?
We can live with that, which is a good thing, because we are going to have to live with that.
Now more than ever, the ability to speak our minds is crucial to the republic we cherish. If what you see on American Thinker resonates with you, please consider supporting our work with a donation of as much or as little as you can give. Every dollar contributed helps us pay our staff and keep our ideas heard and our voices strong.
Greenland is now shifted from the US European Command area of responsibility to the US Northern Command area of responsibility. The change will strengthen the defense of the US homeland and contribute to deepening relationships with Arctic allies, according to Pentagon’s chief spokesperson.
The US Northern Command is taking over command of US military operations in and around Greenland from the US European Command. The shift was initiated after an order from US President Donald Trump, as informed by the US Department of Defense last week.
“Consistent with the President’s intent and the Interim National Defense Strategic Guidance, this change will strengthen the Joint Force’s ability to defend the U.S. homeland, contributing to a more robust defense of the western hemisphere and deepening relationships with Arctic allies and partners,” states Sean Parnell, Chief Pentagon Spokesperson.
This measure takes place in connection with a review of the US command structure and may be based on military considerations. At the same time, it sparks attention due to Trump’s repeated demands for US control over Greenland and the fact that he has not ruled out the use of military force to attain this.
In a recent congressional hearing, the US Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, was asked several questions on whether the Pentagon has plans to take Greenland and Panama with force, to which he avoided a direct reply.
“Our job at the Defense Department is to have plans for any contingency,” said Hegseth.
Could lead to increased investments
Greenland is geographically a central part of the North American Arctic and crucial to the US homeland defense. The transfer of the island to the US reflects these circumstances and enables organizational clarity on homeland defense, former US DoD Deputy Assistant Secretary Iris Ferguson comments on Linkedin.
The US has the space base Pituffik (formerly known as Thule Air Station) at Greenland’s northwestern coast. It serves a significant role within missile warning, missile defense, and space surveillance operations.
“This reassignment could elevate Greenland’s visibility in US defense planning, potentially bringing stronger investment and support for trilateral cooperation with Denmark and Greenland,” Ferguson writes.
Warns against sable rattling
At the same time, Ferguson is clear on what she believes the shift concerning Greenland should not entail:
“The US and Denmark (which includes Greenland) are all members of NATO. Article 1 of the NATO charter commits us to refraining from the threat or use of force. As Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH) said recently, “I sure as hell hope it’s not” a signal of anything more aggressive. That’s a sentiment we should all share,” she emphasizes, referring to the aforementioned congressional hearing with Hegseth.
Secondly, the measure should not entail marginalization of Denmark, underlines Ferguson.
“Denmark remains a key Arctic and NATO ally. Strategic cohesion in the region has been hard-won, and must be preserved. Reassigning Greenland should not come at the expense of trusted partnership,” she states and continues:
“Shifts like this require more than internal reorganization. They require clear communication and sustained diplomacy, with Denmark, with Greenland, and with our NATO partners. Transparency and intent matter.”
In a troubling revelation from Vienna, a concerned grandparent, Bernhard K., has exposed a growing crisis in Austria’s kindergartens. Speaking to the Austrian news outlet Heute, he described the stark reality at his grandson’s school, where only three of 25 classmates are fluent German speakers.
During breaks and after-school activities, the children revert to Arabic, leaving his grandson isolated. When asked how the boy copes, Bernhard’s response was shocking: “He’s trying to learn Arabic! How else is he supposed to communicate with his schoolmates?”
This is not an isolated incident but a symptom of a broader demographic shift. According to the Institute for Family Research, one in five children under 18 in Austria, roughly 340,000, lacks an Austrian passport.
Meanwhile, the number of native Austrian youths has plummeted from 1.6 million to 1.2 million. The rapid transformation is reshaping the nation’s schools and threatening the cultural fabric of its communities.
As The Gateway Pundit has previously reported, Muslims have now become the largest religious group in Vienna’s compulsory schools, comprising a striking 41.2% of all students across primary, secondary, and vocational education levels.
Meanwhile, just 34.5% of students now identify as Christian (17.5% Catholic and 14.5% Orthodox), more than 23% have no religious affiliation, and the remaining minority includes Buddhists (0.2%), Jews (0.1%), and others (0.9%).
“This is no longer immigration. This is displacement,” said Maximilian Weinzierl, national council member and leader of the FPÖ’s youth wing. “41.2% of Muslim students—that’s no longer a minority, that’s the new majority. What we as the FPÖ have been warning about for decades, but which was always dismissed as right-wing scaremongering, is now reality: Immigration has completely overrun our country.”
The situation in Vienna’s kindergartens is likely widespread. Professor Bernhard Koch of the Pedagogical University of Tirol is awaiting a critical report from Statistics Austria, expected to reveal how many kindergarten groups now have more than 33% or 50% non-native German speakers.
Koch suspects the data will confirm his fears that German-speaking children are becoming such a minority that “integration” has become a hollow buzzword.
In an interview with Heute, Koch outlined the troubling dynamic driving this shift. “Immigrants settle in areas where other people from the same country of origin have already settled,” he explained. “Long-established residents withdraw from these rooms.
Kindergartens do not become more diverse with regard to the educational background of the parents, but more homogeneous—often in a foreign language”. This pattern, he warns, is eroding the educational environment for native Austrians.
The consequences of an uncontrolled influx of newcomers have led to worsening educational outcomes for native children and a growing sense of alienation in their own communities.
The upcoming Statistics Austria report could serve as a wake-up call for lawmakers, who must act quickly to address this crisis before Austria’s cultural and educational heritage is irreparably lost.
I notice a lot of people saying, “I don’t have the motivation” to do such-and-such. Egged on by the psychiatric industry and our ridiculous culture, they look at motivation as something given to them. That’s not motivation. You can’t skip your way to the Wizard of Oz and then ask the Wizard, “Will you give me some motivation, please?” Motivation happens only when you (1) define a purpose for yourself, and (2) make a commitment to sticking to your purpose, even when you don’t feel like it. If you don’t do these things at a minimum, then nothing else is going to save you.
Nobody is coming to rescue you. Only YOU can rescue you. Granted, someone can, if they choose, rescue you from a fire or a car accident. But nobody can or will give you a reason for getting up in the morning. You will have to find — and choose — a purpose for yourself.
If you struggle with finding a purpose, read Viktor Frankel’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” and Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.” Two inspiring and provocative books that will leave you in a different mindset from where you started.
President Donald Trump said Monday he was not speaking to Iran and was not offering the country “anything,” and he reiterated his assertion the United States had “totally obliterated” Tehran’s nuclear facilities.
“Tell phony Democrat Senator Chris Coons that I am not offering Iran anything, unlike Obama, who paid them $Billions under the stupid ‘road to a Nuclear Weapon’ JCPOA (which would now be expired!), nor am I even talking to them since we totally obliterated their nuclear facilities,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.
Trump on Friday dismissed media reports that said his administration had discussed possibly helping Iran access as much as $30 billion to build a civilian-energy-producing nuclear program.
The criticism of Coons might have been targeted at his comments Sunday in a televised interview where Coons claimed Trump was offering Iran a deal akin to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action signed during former President Barack Obama’s administration and decertified in the first Trump administration because of evidence Iran was enriching uranium outside of the JCPOA’s permitted limits.
Trump was “moving toward negotiation offering around a deal that looks somewhat similar to the Iran deal” offered Obama, Coons claimed, drawing the Trump rebuke above.rump: Not Offering Iran ‘Anything,’ Not Speaking to Tehran.
Only 36% of Democrats say they’re “extremely” or “very” proud to be American, according to a new Gallup poll, reflecting a dramatic decline in national pride that’s also clear among young people.
The findings are a stark illustration of how many — but not all — Americans have felt less of a sense of pride in their country over the past decade. The split between Democrats and Republicans, at 56 percentage points, is at its widest since 2001. That includes all four years of Republican President Donald Trump’s first term.
Only about 4 in 10 U.S. adults who are part of Generation Z, which is defined as those born from 1997 to 2012, expressed a high level of pride in being American in Gallup surveys conducted in the past five years, on average. That’s compared with about 6 in 10 Millennials — those born between 1980 and 1996 — and at least 7 in 10 U.S. adults in older generations.
“Each generation is less patriotic than the prior generation, and Gen Z is definitely much lower than anybody else,” said Jeffrey Jones, a senior editor at Gallup. “But even among the older generations, we see that they’re less patriotic than the ones before them, and they’ve become less patriotic over time. That’s primarily driven by Democrats within those generations.”
America’s decline in national pride has been a slow erosion, with a steady downtick in Gallup’s data since January 2001, when the question was first asked.
Even during the tumultuous early years of the Iraq War, the vast majority of U.S. adults, whether Republican or Democrat, said they were “extremely” or “very” proud to be American. At that point, about 9 in 10 were “extremely” or “very” proud to be American. That remained high in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but the consensus around American pride slipped in the years that followed, dropping to about 8 in 10 in 2006 and continuing a gradual decline.
Now, 58% of U.S. adults say that, in a downward shift that’s been driven almost entirely by Democrats and independents. The vast majority of Republicans continue to say they’re proud to be American.
Independents’ pride in their national identity hit a new low in the most recent survey, at 53%, largely following that pattern of gradual decline.
Democrats’ diminished pride in being American is more clearly linked to Trump’s time in office. When Trump first entered the White House, in 2017, about two-thirds of Democrats said they were proud to be American. That had fallen to 42% by 2020, just before Trump lost reelection to Democrat Joe Biden.
But while Democrats’ sense of national pride rebounded when Biden took office, it didn’t go back to its pre-Trump
“It’s not just a Trump story,” Jones said. “Something else is going on, and I think it’s just younger generations coming in and not being as patriotic as older people.”
Other recent polling shows that Democrats and independents are less likely than Republicans to say that expressing patriotism is important or to feel a sense of pride in their national leaders.
Nearly 9 in 10 Republicans in a 2024 SSRS poll said they believed patriotism has a positive impact on the United States, with Democrats more divided: 45% said patriotism had a positive impact on the country, while 37% said it was negative.
But a more general sense of discontent was clear on both sides of the aisle earlier this year, when a CNN/SSRS poll found that fewer than 1 in 10 Democrats and Republicans said “proud” described the way they felt about politics in America today.
In that survey, most Americans across the political spectrum said they were “disappointed” or “frustrated” with the country’s politics.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 