Zohran Mamdani, a thirty-three-year-old avowed socialist, recently shocked the political world by becoming the leading candidate in the race to become New York City’s next mayor.
He has become the focus of national attention for his far-left views — such as abolishing private property — and for his radical opposition to the State of Israel. Moreover, Mamdani appears to represent the next wave of candidates in the Democratic Party — which is why he provokes national headlines that scream: “Socialism is coming! Socialism is coming!”
Mandami has not even been elected yet.
But here’s the thing. Socialism is already here.
Just look at Los Angeles.
This month has seen the emergence of a plan by some Democrats in California to use the Palisades Fire as an opportunity to achieve utopian dreams of redistribution and climate change intervention.
Governor Gavin Newsom allocated $101 million to low-income housing projects in the upscale neighborhood of Pacific Palisades — long before many residents who lost their homes have been able to obtain their insurance money or the promised permits for rebuilding.
Evidently the prospect of redistribution was more urgent to Newsom than helping residents — including some who lived in a trailer park by the beach — rebuild their lives.
Then the state legislature considered a proposal to create a new local authority with taxation powers to manage the rebuilding process. This is actually something some residents want, because — if done right — it would allow them to control the process, rather than being subjected to the whims of state and local authorities. But it was tainted by Newsom’s announcement — as well as by a decision by the “blue ribbon commission” that promoted the idea to frame it in terms of climate change. (Full disclosure: I attended a meeting of the commission and warned that placing “climate action” first in the title of its report, before “recovery,” would provoke suspicion and trigger opposition.) Residents — including Democrats — felt blindsided and wondered whether there was a concerted effort to push them off their burned-out land.
It seemed a continuation of the same pattern of governance that led the fire to become such a catastrophe. While the 100-mile-per-hour winds overnight on January 7 were a natural event, the fact is that many homes burned the next day because there was not enough water pressure in the fire hydrants, and a dry 117-million-gallon reservoir that the local utility company decided to empty, in compliance with an obscure regulation.
The City of Los Angeles had failed to “pre-deploy” firefighters, despite several days’ advance notice about the “extreme” wind event that was coming. And the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) failed to arrive and direct traffic during the massive evacuation of the town. The LAPD is understaffed in the Palisades, anyway, with no local station to provide support: the city would prefer to focus on neighborhoods further east.
Part of the problem is a lack of leadership. L.A. Mayor Karen bass was, infamously, overseas for Ghana’s presidential inauguration when the fire broke out. When she wants to lead, she can: she decamped to L.A.’s MacArthur Park last weekend to personally oppose Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. And the city, short on cash for fighting fires, manages to spend more on Bass’s homeless policies than firefighting.
Bass has denied accusations that she is a socialist or communist, but she has links to communist Cuba, whose dictatorial regime she has admired in the past. In New York, at least, Mamdani is open about his ideological beliefs and prejudices. But nothing he proposes doing will work — and nervous New Yorkers who want to know what to expect need look no further than L.A. and California, a socialist experiment going very badly.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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