Zohran Mamdani delivered a speech on July 3 to the entire nation that has earned justifiable criticism. If anything, his critics were easy on him. Watch this video explaining the origins of the democratic socialists in the U.S. Fact-check it. Then let this reality sink in: Zohran Mamdani is a leading avatar of an alliance of communists, Islamists, and globalists that are funding groups bent on destroying Western civilization. That is not an overstatement. And their project is advancing according to plan and on schedule.
But Mamdani, if he were true to the most seductively high-minded elements of his rhetoric and promises, would renounce the movement that has propelled him to a position of great power and influence. And if Mamdani were to do this, it would be a decisive setback to a movement that to date has only grown stronger. In such a moment, perhaps one we can only dream of, here is a hypothetical transcript of what he would have said:
“Good morning, my fellow Americans. Happy Fourth of July, Happy Independence Day, and happy 250th birthday to the United States of America. I am thrilled to be the mayor of New York City, and I am thrilled and proud to be an American.
You may be wondering why I have decided to address my remarks today to a national audience. After all, while I represent the City of New York, what qualifies me to speak to everyone else in the country? I believe I can answer that question, however, in a way most of you will appreciate. Because I have become a rising star in the democratic socialist movement, and as a representative leader in that movement, I have an opportunity to speak to millions of Americans who have placed their hopes and committed their activism to advancing democratic socialism in America.
Today I had a prepared speech, some 2,500 words of carefully constructed ideas that I intended to share with you. But I’m not going to give that speech today, because my beliefs have fundamentally changed. Over the past few weeks, as I worked with my advisors to craft this speech, I began to see that the policies our movement advocates are alarmingly out of touch with our best and highest goals. And in pursuit of those goals, my responsibility must be to search for the best ways, the best policies, the best projects, to produce the best outcomes for the most people. Suddenly, many of the things I’ve said and the promises I’ve made didn’t feel as certain as they felt when I said those things and when I made those promises.
Here is the difficult truth we must accept. The democratic socialist movement has lost its way. The policies we advocate will not make New York City a better place. They will not make America a better place. They will have the opposite impact. They are destructive.
How did this happen? What changed my mind? What happened to completely transform my worldview?
When I was elected mayor by a slim majority last November, I knew that this was a great leap forward for the democratic socialist movement. But something else became increasingly apparent to me as the weight of this office has settled onto my shoulders: Almost everyone in New York City, whether or not they voted for me and agree with the policies I promote, wants the same outcomes.
We all want people to have a roof over their heads. We all want people to be able to earn a living wage. We all want public safety, less crime, and access to quality education. We all want fair and just immigration policies. We all want to respect the dignity of every individual, no matter how they choose to live their life and no matter where they came from. We want our city to be resilient, so we are safe from storms and heatwaves.
These are not controversial issues. The vast majority of New Yorkers, including everyone who did not vote for me, share these goals. These goals unite us. And as someone who has stepped onto one of the biggest political stages in America, with a responsibility to govern the biggest city in America, I have to listen to everyone’s ideas. I have an obligation, because these goals we share are bigger than the ideology that got me here, to strive for outcomes over rhetoric. To strive for results instead of scoring political points and growing a movement.
I was prepared today to express sentiments that have resonated with so many of you who voted for me. Sentiments that address your struggle and offer a familiar path forward. But I have now come to terms with a profound revelation. The way we have described America and our struggles today is not going to help us improve our lives. I was going to talk about how forces of racial supremacy and capitalist greed have left a stain on American history that endures to this day and how our movement is part of an ongoing struggle against oppression. I was going to talk about corporate landlords for whom negligence is a business model, masked agents terrorizing our streets, tax dollars being wasted on bombs and bailouts, and elections sold to the highest bidder.
All of these forces of division were written into the speech I was going to make. But I can’t do it. That is no longer a speech I can make if I am sincerely trying to produce the best outcomes for the most people. There is no small irony in my realizing that the speech I intended to give today would have been exactly what we are supposed to be fighting. Those remarks would only further turn us against one another. Those remarks would have fed the forces of division.
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So I have chosen to stand before you today stripped of that ideological certainty. Stripped of the comfort of simple answers to complex problems. I stand before you as a mayor for all New Yorkers should stand before you, dedicated to finding answers without fomenting division, without relying on the rhetoric of oppressor versus oppressed. Today I must offer you, and to all New Yorkers, and to everyone in America, a new message.
I was wrong. We are wrong. We are wrong to declare socialism a solution to injustice and inequality.
Let me be clear, however. I am not saying that injustice and inequality don’t exist in America. Of course they do, because it is impossible to achieve perfect justice and perfect equality. I’m also not suggesting that we should stop fighting injustice or trying to reduce inequality. I’m saying we must recognize that most of the policies we support are going to make things worse instead of better. Let me provide some examples.
We cannot make our subway safe if we let passengers ride for free. We can’t help the homeless if we don’t compel them to accept treatment for mental health and drug addiction. We can’t expect our grocers and other retailers to lower prices if we fail to prosecute shoplifters. We can’t build more housing if we impose excessive regulations on anyone who wants to invest in a new building. And we can’t expect landlords to maintain their properties if we don’t allow them to ever raise their rent.
What we have in New York City today is a public sector that is already too big and too inefficient. We have to return our city services to prioritizing the basics: police, fire, public works, utilities, ports, parks, and libraries. We need to shrink our bureaucracy, not hire more people with soft hands to impose even more regulations. We need fewer city employees behind a desk or working remotely in front of a screen, and we need more of them on the street, enforcing the law, putting out fires, responding to emergencies, building, maintaining, and operating the physical plant of our great city.
Which brings me to the private sector. We attack private sector wealth, but, as it has taken me a long time to admit, greed isn’t restricted to the private sector. Nor are corruption and neglect. These human failings are found in every economic model known to humanity, and these failings are written across history without regard to culture, geography, or century. Of course, we want the wealthiest among us to pay their fair share in taxes. But they are already doing that; the wealthiest New Yorkers pour billions of dollars in taxes every year into our state and city coffers. We should not be demonizing people who are rich in order to take more from them. We should be getting our spending under control.
There are many reasons our city’s budget has exploded in recent years, and none of it is the fault of New York City’s wealthiest citizens. At the same time as we have imposed regulations on landlords, business owners, and builders that either convinced them to stop investing or deterred them from investing in the first place, we also imposed excessive regulations on our charities. Imagine the regulations that today stand between a wealthy person or a profitable corporation trying to charitably fund a hospital or a congregate shelter for homeless New Yorkers. By the time the codes and permits and environmental impact statements and endless redesigns have been submitted and approved by countless government agencies, there isn’t enough money left to do the work. We have demonized our wealthiest citizens. We have also taken away their ability to do cost-effective charitable work. Charities in New York, such as they are today, have themselves become engines of waste and fraud because we have made it too hard for them to do the work that is really needed.
Socialism, I have reluctantly decided, is not going to work in New York City, because it has never worked anywhere. It is not going to solve our problems. Instead, socialism will just make everything worse. The boring truth is that what works in America is capitalism. Not monopolistic capitalism, or crony capitalism, or casino capitalism. Those are natural excesses that we cannot eliminate but try to curb with reasonable regulations and oversight. That is mostly the role of the state and federal government, and we can, and must, always vigorously debate where to draw these lines. It’s not easy. It isn’t supposed to be easy. But we cannot destroy the incentives that capitalism offers humans, whether it’s a hedge fund manager making billions or a recent immigrant buying their first home.
I know that my decision to share these revelations with you shall come as a shock to many of my most ardent supporters. That is why I have decided to take this opportunity on this special day. There are no easy solutions, and socialism makes promises it can’t keep. We have to regulate capitalism, but we cannot destroy it. We have to restore merit in our schools, demanding genuine achievement in exchange for a high school degree. We have to restore accountability on our streets, punishing criminals as a deterrent to others who might stray. We have to protect the right to own property, not undermine it. We have to be practical with our environmental policies and quit punishing households and businesses by forcing them to pay higher prices for “green” energy. We have to let property developers and real estate investors build more housing, instead of driving them away with punitive regulations that destroy their incentives. And we have to stop pretending that racism and white supremacy are holding us back. There is far too much evidence to contradict that claim, far too much evidence that every group that has arrived in this great country has found a path to success if they were willing to persevere.
There is a reason America has survived and thrived for 250 years. It is because our Constitution provides a framework for continuous improvement. There have been setbacks and failures along the way, but we have emerged from every challenge with more Americans enjoying more freedom and more prosperity. That is the message I shall convey from now on. That is the unifying theme I want to bring to my office as mayor from now on. New York City is the greatest city in the world, in the greatest country in the world. I love America. All of it. And I ask you to join me. Let’s work together from now on, all of us.”
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