Three days before last week’s elections, the once-trenchant Saturday Night Live devoted its “Cold Opening” skit to poking fun at Zohran Mamdani, now New York mayor-elect, for “smiling so much my face hurts.” The joke was that Mamdani’s permanent grin is false, an artifice he uses to appear relatable.
Well, SNL is no longer the must-watch entertainment it was in its earlier years, but it remains a good political prognosticator. Mamdani’s face hurts no more; the metamorphosis from candidate to mayor-elect means the toothy grin is gone, and Mamdani can now bear his totalitarian fangs.
On election night, the soon-to-be “Hizzhoner” devoted his nearly 25-minute victory speech at the Brooklyn Paramount theater to laying out his politics of grievances and a worldview made up of the oppressed and their oppressors, the stock-in-trade of all good Marxists since the 1848 Communist Manifesto.
MAMDANI WON AN ELECTION, NOT A REVOLUTION
A question at this point is why the Democratic Party allowed Mamdani’s true political faction, the Democratic Socialists of America, to take it over. DSA members repeatedly make clear that they do not like the Democratic Party, but that their strategy is to become zombie-like body snatchers in a bad Halloween movie.
As for the rest of the country, what is imperative now is saving Western civilization from the likes of Mamdani. This can be done one step at a time, but with a grand strategy.
One of those steps is saving Columbus Circle and the statue of its namesake from the ravages of Mamdani, who would just as soon raze it and erect a Mosque in its place, not because he is religious, but because he understands that Islam can be used as an anti-Western symbol.
This is not hyperbole. We should understand why, once elected, Mamdani let the mask slip. He made clear not only that he believes in big government, but that he has totalitarian inclinations.
All communists do, of course. Communism can exist only if it is preoccupied with all aspects of an individual’s life, big or small, leaving them no escape from the party and the state.
Mamdani opened his speech with a reference to Eugene Debs, who founded the Socialist Party of America over a century ago. And yes, he promised us a new dawn.
“The sun may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said, ‘I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity,’” Mamdani told the crowd.
He also mentioned Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister and a man who introduced the so-called “Nehruvian socialism,” which pauperized India.
“Standing before you, I think of the words of Jawaharlal Nehru: ‘A moment comes, but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance,’” Mamdani said.
But the point in the speech that really caught my eye was when Mamdani said, “We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.”
That was the most frightening part. Not only does Mamdani believe that government alone can solve big problems, but, worse, he believes government can enter every nook and cranny of our lives — our religion, our family life, our aspirations. There is a word for that in political science: totalitarianism.
This is the strategy of the DSA, and why it has snatched the Democratic Party’s body. It wants to implement Marxism, not by fighting elections openly, but by winning poorly attended primaries in which extremists tend to do well. Then it romps to victory in blue cities.
We have a generation of 20- and 30-something-year-olds who were indoctrinated in high school and college, and their parents, exhausted after a day of work, abdicated their responsibility to deprogram them at home at night.
This left the young ripe for Mamdani’s promises of free stuff. Like Nick Fuentes, a fascist sociopath on the Right, the DSA is appealing to our young, except its strategy is much more sophisticated.
“The Democratic Party is not really our friend,” a DSA activist says in a video posted by Andy Ngo, before she tells us that “the Democratic Party is a tool that we use.”
And what happens in New York will not necessarily stay there.
“I think that the model that we used in New York is 100% replicable,” DSA activist Daniel Goulden of DSA NYC also says in the video.
Goulden’s online bio tells us that he (“they/them”) is “a writer, teacher, and climate organizer living in Brooklyn. They have an MFA from the New School and their fiction and nonfiction has been published in Jacobin, Reed Magazine, JMWW, and the Bitchin’ Kitsch.” Goulden was also “a lead organizer on a campaign that won the biggest Green New Deal legislation in U.S. history and are on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York City.”
How do we defend ourselves from this army of super-educated idiots? In the immediate, let’s act quickly to save the furniture of Western civilization from this scourge. And who better to start with than the face of Western civilization himself, Christopher Columbus, who brought its bounties to the Western Hemisphere.
THE ZOHRAN MAMDANI EFFECT WON’T GO NATIONAL
Mamdani has already called for tearing down Columbus’s statue. But New York landmarks can be saved by officially making them landmarks. Mayor Eric Adams has a month and a half to work with the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission to designate Columbus Circle and its statue so.
Later, we can think about what to do with schools, and maybe the Democrats will wake up and go back to the days of Thomas Phillip “Tip” O’Neill and Dick Gephardt. I didn’t think much of them back then, but boy, wouldn’t it be great if Democrats loved America again?
Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo senior fellow on e pluribus unum at the Heritage Foundation and the author of NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It. Heritage is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect any institutional position of Heritage or its board of trustees.