If Muslim communist Zohran Mamdani wins New York City’s mayoral election in November, it will mean that for the first time in history, America’s three biggest cities (New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles) will be governed by communist mayors.
The other two communist mayors are Brandon Johnson of Chicago and Karen Bass of Los Angeles.
Before we get to them, let’s look first at the man President Trump has called a “left-wing lunatic.”
Mamdani, 33, who describes himself as a “Democratic Socialist,” but whose stated policies align more with Communism, won the Democratic primary over Andrew Cuomo last week.
To say it was a shocking result is an understatement, especially in the five boroughs of New York City, which, according to the United Jewish Appeal, has a Jewish population of 2.1 million—the largest outside of Tel Aviv.
Why do I say that? Well, for one thing, Mamdani, a self-avowed anti-Semite, has called for a global intifada against all Jews and Israel, and is not backing down in his request.
When pressed during a CNN interview this past weekend on his ambition to wage a global war of annihilation against Jews and Israel, Mamdani refused three times to recant, adding that he doesn’t think the role of New York mayor “is to police speech.”
That attitude alone should be enough of a red flag for Jews who live in New York City to shun Mamdani.
However, if that isn’t enough to keep Mamdani from occupying Gracie Mansion, there are a host of other lunatic schemes that he has proposed, which should persuade voters not to put him in the mayor’s office.
Among other misguided ideas espoused by Mamdani are free city bus service, free childcare, government-run grocery stores, a rent freeze for people living in rent-regulated apartments, and new affordable housing — all to be funded by raising taxes on the wealthy, who he says should not exist in America.
But Mamdani doesn’t stop there. He also wants to defund the police, abolish the prison system, provide universal health care for all, including illegal migrants, ban all guns, decriminalize sex workers, end cash bail, decriminalize drug possession, and end all cooperation with ICE, Homeland Security, the ATF, and other federal agencies.
All I can say is God help New Yorkers if this Leninist extremist gains control of the Big Apple. New Yorkers who vote for him will deserve what they get.
He won’t just take a bite of the Big Apple, he will eviscerate it to the core.
That Toddlin’ Town
And that takes us to Chicago, a city where I spent much of my journalistic career when it was run by a well-oiled Democratic machine manned by 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 Westsiders 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 some 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.”
The number of homicides in Chicago hit a 25-year high in 2021, with more than 800, according to the Chicago Police Department, and crimes, including carjackings and robberies, have also increased in recent years.
In 2023, the number of violent crimes grew to its highest level in a decade, but the arrest rate dropped, according to a new analysis from the Illinois Policy Institute.
Violent crime in 2023 was 11.5% higher than in 2022. Two of the largest factors contributing to the rise in crime came from a decade-high 30,501 instances of vehicle thefts and carjackings, and 22,569 cases of assault.
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.
Westward Ho
Continuing west, we arrive at Los Angeles. 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, who have since May removed some 2,000 criminal aliens and other illegal migrants from Los Angeles.
Her anti-deportation stance came to a head earlier this month when a leaked report revealed she had ordered the LAPD to stand down during violent riots, leaving federal officers vulnerable and without critical backup as the violence on L.A. streets spiraled out of control.
In a viral post by the Citizen Watch Group on Instagram, X, and Facebook accounts, a whistleblower using the name ‘defendthelapd’ wrote:
“Last night, when DHS, ICE, and FBI requested assistance because they were overwhelmed by rioters, LAPD sat idle waiting for direction. Instead of allowing the Incident Commander to act, Mayor Karen Bass bypassed established protocol – she called the IC for a briefing, then called the Chief of Police to tell him what to do.”
The result of Bass assuming command was that it took the Los Angeles Police Department more than two hours to respond to federal agents’ call for help.
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. Monday, the U.S. Department of Justice 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 2,000 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 next November, New York City may discover the calamities and afflictions that come with allowing yet another communist to run things.
We can only hope that voters in the Big Apple will wake up before that happens.
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