When I was a sergeant in the United States Army Security Agency, there was no confusion about who the enemy was.

It was the communists.

Of course, that was in the 1960s, before socialist/communists like newly elected New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, and Los Angeles’s Karen Bass managed to dupe primarily naïve, low-information Democrat voters into electing them to office.

Communism is an evil, repressive, anti-democratic, anti-family, anti-religion form of governance that disdains private ownership of the means of production, land, and businesses, we were told. It must be defeated at all costs.

So what are we to make of the fact that an avowed communist now controls the global center of capitalism?

Are we to ignore the fact that Mamdani says he hates capitalism, wants to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations, create a network of government-owned grocery stores focused on “low prices, rather than profits,” and wants to raise the minimum wage in NYC to $30 by 2030? Mamdani also wants to institute rent freezes for rent-stabilized apartments.

Generations of Americans like me were taught to despise communism as something antithetical to American capitalism, the American republic, and democracy. Our service in the military was geared to fighting and defeating communism wherever we encountered it. And we did just that in places like Korea and Vietnam.

I never would have thought that the very evil we were trained to destroy could gain control of America’s biggest city, as well as #2 Los Angeles and #3 Chicago.

And it is not only communism in New York, but radical Islam and a new mayor who has refused to denounce the global intifada against Jews and Israel. I wonder how many of New York’s two million Jews blissfully voted for Mamdani, thinking that he is some progressive Muslim who has suddenly found a warm place in this heart for Judaism.

If it was more than one Jew, that is one Jew too many. Do I need to remind people of what happened on October 7, 2023, and how Mamdani responded?

After Israel went to war with Hamas, Mamdani condemned Israel’s conduct in Gaza, citing a death toll he said “now far exceeds 67,000” and describing Israel as “bombing homes, hospitals and schools into rubble.” Mamdani said he mourned Palestinian lives and families as well. His comments drew criticism from Israel’s Foreign Ministry, which accused him of echoing “Hamas’s lies.”

Jewish organizations have also criticized him for later characterizing Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocide” and for refusing to condemn the Muslim slogan “globalize the intifada,” positions they argue are dangerous or inaccurate.

Apparently, New Yorkers who voted for Mamdani see him as a political and economic messiah bearing carloads of free stuff, along with the promise of a socialist utopia.

Hmmm. Didn’t Lenin, Stalin, and Mao make similar promises?

Like those dictators, Mamdani will undoubtedly fail to keep most, if not all of these blithe, pie-in-the-sky promises.

Lenin and Stalin promised the Russian people a new and equitable world where the proletariat would share in the wealth of the Soviet state. Instead, history reveals that some 30 million Russians were executed, died in Siberian gulags, or were victims of man-made famines like the Holodomor at the hands of these two disciples of Karl Marx.

Meanwhile, Mao Zedong murdered an estimated 65 million Chinese, whom he regarded as enemies of the state, during his so-called “Great Leap Forward” and the “Cultural Revolution.” They died from famine, executions, prison-labor camps, and violent purges. Not exactly the Marxist paradise Mao promised.

I am not equating Mamdani with these soulless and homicidal dictators—at least not in terms of potential violence. However, I see very little difference between the promises made by those mendacious political malefactors and the same Marxist deceits I have heard Mamdani spout to the guileless multitudes of New York.

If I were to distill all of the bull-s**t Mamdani has regurgitated during his deceitful campaign, it would go like this:

“Elect me and I, a poor, downtrodden Muslim, will provide my brown, black, Muslim, and illegal immigrant brothers and sisters with the bounty and munificence stolen and amassed by the evil white power structure of New York City for the past 100 years. Put me in office and I will tax those rich white people and their greedy businesses out of existence and redistribute their ill-gotten wealth to you, the hard-working and oppressed masses.”

Clearly, the estimated one million New Yorkers who voted for Mamdani out of the projected 2.3-2.6 million who voted were stupid or perhaps merely naïve enough to believe the unadulterated crap New York’s new communist Muslim Mayor was spouting.

Don’t worry, New Yorkers; the same thing happened in Chicago and Los Angeles.

In a post a few months ago, I noted that Chicagoans and Angelinos exhibited similar behavior in 2023 and 2021 when they elected Brandon Johnson and Karen Bass, respectively.

As I wrote at the time:

Chicago, a city where I spent much of my journalistic career when it was run by a well-oiled Democratic machine manned by tough mayors like Richard J. Daley, Jane Byrne, Harold Washington, and Richard M. Daley. But Chicago’s mayor since 2023 is not of that mayoral ilk.

He is yet another communist named Brandon Johnson. I wasn’t totally surprised when the far-left zealot Johnson beat a moderate Democrat named Paul Vallas in the mayoral race. After all, Chicago is the city where the Communist Party of America was founded in 1919 by members of the Socialist Party who were inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

Like Mamdani, Johnson despises the police. He has gutted the Chicago Police Department and opened the city to thousands of illegal migrants—both policies that have been roundly condemned by a majority of the city’s minority (primarily black) population.

Southsiders and West-siders alike have called for Johnson to be recalled, saying he cares more for those in the nation illegally than American citizens who live in the Windy City.

Since taking office, Johnson has driven hundreds of businesses out of the city with an inventory of taxes that includes a 3.5% city income tax on Chicagoans and suburbanites earning more than $100,000 a year; a financial transaction tax; a 66% increase in the city’s hotel tax, which is already the highest in the country; a revived employee head tax; a new tax on aviation fuel at the city’s airports; and a hike in the real estate transfer tax on high-end home sales.

Johnson insists that more money for policing and incarceration isn’t the answer to safer streets and that more should be invested in mental health care, schools, and affordable housing. He has also supported the use of social workers and EMTs to respond to 911 calls instead of police officers. He adds that the current system of policing isn’t working and that he wants to make sure Chicago has “smart police.”

Meanwhile, since February of this year, Johnson’s approval rate has dropped to just 6 percent, as crime and soaring taxes persist. That 6 percent is the lowest of any mayor in American history, according to M3 Strategies, a political think tank.

The city ended 2024 with a $161 million budget deficit—an indication that Johnson is not a good steward of the city’s strained finances.

Johnson is also dealing with a scandal and multiple complaints of racism, sexual harassment, intimidation, and misogyny involving his former communications director, Ronnie Reese, who was fired last November. The mayor also regularly invokes racism to avoid answering questions about his administration.

In one instance, Mayor Johnson bizarrely compared those who disagreed with him about school spending to slavery, saying, “When our people wanted to be liberated and emancipated in this country, the argument was, ‘you can’t free Black people because it would be too expensive.”

If there’s one thing Johnson understands, it’s how to spend taxpayers’ money — especially when sending millions of dollars into Chicago’s failing schools is akin to shoveling it into a bottomless garbage dump.

Is it any wonder that just two years into his first term, Johnson is already viewed as an ineffective, lame-duck mayor, and the numbers and lack of positive accomplishments prove it.

Today’s Chicago is definitely no longer my kind of town.

And what of Los Angeles—the last in the trio of the nation’s biggest communist-controlled cities?

As I wrote:

I don’t live directly in Los Angeles, but I live close enough to it to know that it is not my kind of town either.

Since 2022, Los Angeles has been commanded by comrade Mayor Karen Bass—also a rabid socialist/communist who has strong ties to Cuba and the Venceremos Brigade, a group linked to Cuba’s communist regime.

In the 1970s, Bass participated in the Venceremos Brigade, traveling to Cuba as a young communist political activist. She was described as a leader of the group in a 1975 communist publication,  according to Politico, although her office has denied she ever had that role.

In fact, according to a report published by Tablet Magazine, Bass led the movement’s operations in Southern California. An October 1975 edition of the communist Daily World newspaper described Bass as the “leader of the Venceremos Brigade in southern California.”

Another report called her “a ‘brigadista’ and organizer for the Venceremos Brigades,” saying “Karen visited Cuba every 6 months.”

Ahem. Perhaps it was for the rum or those delicious Cuban sandwiches. Tsk, tsk. It certainly couldn’t have been for her solidarity with Fidel Castro and his cadre of communist grovellers who reigned over the impoverished Cuban people, could it?

Nah.

Fast forward to today. Bass is an unapologetic opponent of the Trump administration’s mass deportation of criminal aliens and the millions of people who illegally invaded the United States during the Biden administration.

She supports keeping both criminal and illegal aliens in Los Angeles. She has vociferously opposed ICE, DHS, ATF, and other federal agencies, which have, since May, removed some 4,000 criminal aliens and other illegal migrants from Los Angeles.

Bass has been unapologetic about her opposition to the mass deportations, saying she  will do whatever she can to impede federal agents from “sowing terror.” Additionally, she promised to work with community immigrant rights organizers to coordinate a response and warning system for illegals, adding that “we will not stand for this” deportation of migrants.

The Trump administration is not taking Bass’s obstruction lightly.  The U.S. Department of Justice has sued the city of Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass, and City Council members, calling L.A.’s sanctuary city law “illegal” and asking that it be blocked from being enforced.

The lawsuit, filed by the Trump administration in California’s Central District federal court, said the country is “facing a crisis of illegal immigration” and that its efforts to address it “are hindered by Sanctuary Cities such as the City of Los Angeles, which refuse to cooperate or share information, even when requested, with federal immigration authorities.”

Federal prosecutors said in their filing that Trump campaigned and won the 2024 presidential election on a platform of deporting “millions of illegal immigrants.” By enacting a sanctuary city ordinance, the City Council sought to “thwart the will of the American people regarding deportations,” the lawsuit states.

During the last month, immigration agents have descended on Southern California, arresting more than 4,000 illegal immigrants and prompting furious protests in downtown Los Angeles, the city of Paramount, and other Southern California communities. According to the lawsuit, L.A.’s refusal to cooperate with federal immigration authorities since June 6 has resulted in “lawlessness, rioting, looting, and vandalism.”

The DOJ lawsuit is just one of Bass’s problems. She faced intense criticism in January after wildfires erupted in Los Angeles while she was abroad in Africa. The blazes quickly escalated into widespread devastation across the region, with thousands of homes and businesses destroyed and at least 10 people killed.

Bass had traveled to Ghana for the swearing-in ceremony of the nation’s president in January at a time when Southern California was at high risk of fires. The Palisades Fires began on Jan. 7, with Bass not returning to California until the following day.

Bass’s problems did not end there, however. Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley told local media during the raging fires that she believed the City of Los Angeles and Bass, specifically, had failed residents. The fire chief added that the department had long been plagued by staffing issues and a lack of resources, which she had previously detailed in a series of memos to the city.

“Since day one, we’ve identified huge gaps concerning our service delivery and the ability of our firefighters’ boots on the ground to do their jobs,” Crowley said at the time. “This is my third budget as we’re going into 2025-2026, and what I can tell you is we are still understaffed, we’re still under-resourced, and we’re still underfunded. Any budget cut is going to impact our ability to provide service,” she said.

Bass fired Crowley in February, citing the former fire chief’s handling of the wildfires. Nothing like placing blame for the wildfires on the outspoken lesbian fire chief.

In a post back in 2023 following Brandon Johnson’s victory in Chicago, I wrote:

“It’s a recurring story in most of America’s big cities today. Cities like New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Denver, Los Angeles, Detroit, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Chicago are being mismanaged by leftist and socialist Mayors and George Soros soft-on-crime district attorneys. The result? Cities that were once the envy of the world are now garbage dumps replete with homeless tents and hovels, junkies smoking crack and fentanyl on the streets, carjackings, rape, muggings, theft, and murder.”

It doesn’t look like much has changed since that post, and now New York City is about to discover the calamities and afflictions that come with allowing yet another communist to run things.

New Yorkers who voted for Mamdani have only themselves to blame once the “city that never sleeps” begins its inevitable nosedive into corruption, lawlessness, and gross mismanagement at the hands of a wealthy 34-year-old anti-white racist communist Muslim who has never held a job and never managed anything, let alone America’s biggest city.

All he has are empty promises that he will never be able to keep and a s**t-eating grin that seems etched permanently onto his bewhiskered mug.

Good luck, New York. Las Vegas oddsmakers aren’t yet quoting lines on New York’s economic or crime trajectory under Mamdani, nor are they predicting anything resembling success.

My advice: Don’t bet your SNAP or welfare disbursements on New York’s success as long as a communist Muslim is at the controls of your city.

Frank Sinatra must be singing the blues, because he couldn’t possibly be singing “New York, New York,” the quintessential NYC standard associated with ambition and Broadway swagger.

In Mamdani’s New York, ambition will be crushed, and the only people swaggering will be the communist mayor’s sycophantic minions.

–30–

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