For all his smiling charms, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is the willing tool of a movement running a very old and ugly playbook — radicals not only determined to take over the Democratic Party, but to wield state power, in this case the government of New York City, as a Democratic Socialist tool.
Start with his Office of Community Engagement — which, the city learned last week, is already costing taxpayers $53 million, a full 10 times the advertised level.
The OCE is a DSA agitprop shop, pure and simple, devoted to campaigning for political issues the radicals deem important, such as producing an illusion of massive public support for the Rent Guidelines Board final rent-freeze vote at month’s end.
The fix is in at the RGB, as the mayor has named most of its members, including the supposed landlord representatives, yet the OCE is recruiting an audience to stage on a play of “the people demanding justice” and getting it, thanks to the Democratic Socialist mayor.
And the public at large is paying for the DSA show.
Mind you, the DSA’s not limiting itself to the Soviet playbook: It’s training up its own paramilitary wing, the Red Rabbits — a street-fighting force strongly reminiscent of the Sturmabteilung, the “brownshirts” of the 1920s Nazi party.
But most of its efforts in the city are more Soviet-style, as witness Mamdani’s housing plan, which quite literally aims to expropriate the property of his class enemies — in this case, mom-and-pop property owners — and hand their buildings over to nonprofits run by the politically connected.
The result, as City Councilwoman Vickie Paladino quite rightly points out, would be a real-estate portfolio potentially worth billions concentrated in the hands of DSA allies.
Assets that will remain in the movement’s hands even if it loses the next election.
No matter that nonprofit-run housing has failed for decades to deliver for tenants; it’s a success for the nonprofits themselves, and those who run them.
Heck, the DSA under Mamdani is taking over day care, too.
His push for “free” 2K seats for NYC toddlers, spinning up even now, is spending $73 million for 2,000 seats — $36,500 per kid, 50% higher than what a private day care would cost.
Why not simply give those big bucks to parents as vouchers for private day care?
Because they’re not run by members of the politically connected nonprofit-industrial complex, ready allies of the socialists’ agenda, and they don’t employ unionized UFT workers — an element the DSA wants brought into its coalition by handing them your money under the guise of lifting up the downtrodden.
Plus, by jacking up wages in the sector, the plan will squeeze private providers out, leaving all but the wealthiest parents dependent on the city and social-services socialism.
As Lenin observed, the whole question of revolutionary socialism lies in the phrase “Who-whom?” — who triumphs and who faces defeat.
It’s easy to laugh at the mayor’s more ham-handed efforts to reward the DSA cadre, but the movement is relentlessly exploiting his mayoralty to grow its power base at everyone else’s expense.
Traditional Democrats need to wake up and fight back just as ruthlessly before it’s too late.