You’ve probably heard about Zohran Kwame Mamdani, the 33-year-old who will soon be New York City’s mayor. The majority of what you’ve heard is either absurd or defamatory because we live in the Florida Reich. Prior to Obama and any of his Husseins being more American than John McCain (or Hillary Clinton), his name elicits reactions to Barack Hussein Obama.
With the exception of the fact that Mamdani is actually Muslim and was born to Indian parents in Africa. Mamdani cannot, therefore, be president. He can be anything else, though. While standard-issue Democrats aren’t doing any better and Republicans are labeling him a Marxist-Lenninist-Islamist terrorist, an angry majority of New Yorkers believe he can be. They worry that he would radicalize the party and ruin its chances of winning the presidency again. Apart from Sharia and the October Revolution, what else does Mamdani represent?
FDR may yawn: He wants to tax people making $1 million or more at a rate of 2 percent. In 1969, the federal business tax rate was 52 percent. He wants to boost the city’s corporate tax to match New Jersey’s. Now, it stands at 21 percent.) Like the majority of civilized nations that value children beyond bumper-sticker morality, he wants to make bus rides free and provide free childcare for children up to age five. He is in favor of congestion pricing, which is effective and already in place.
Like the city did after World War II, he will construct 200,000 units of affordable housing and freeze rents for a million New Yorkers for just a year.OneHe would provide legal help for migrants under ICE’s auspices and prevent ICE agents from city buildings in a city that could not run without migrants. He has been accused of being anti-Semitic by Israel’s American Inquisition because he feels that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and imposing an apartheid government on Palestinians.
Minor proposals include the establishment of five city-owned grocery stores on a wholesale, tax-free model, one in each municipality.There is nothing groundbreaking about that. Although they are in Madison, you can see them in deep-red Kansas and reddish Wisconsin. However, his method is being compared to Das Kapital because it is being proposed by a Muslim liberal in New York City.
If we ever have leadership smart enough to suggest it, Sheriff Rick Staly should embrace his proposal to establish a Department of Community Safety so that trained mental health professionals, not police officers, respond to mental health crises that fill police blotters. His troops are unnecessarily forced to act as social workers and psychiatrists due to a lack of appropriate services.
Despite this, Republican U.S. Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee demanded that Mamdani be deported. He was seconded by the insane man in the White House, who likewise referred to Mamdani as a communist. The leader of the contemporary Know-Nothing party, Marjorie Taylor Greene, posted a picture of the Statue of Liberty wearing a burqa on social media. Greene is a candidate who is more accepting of the LGBTQ community than Ed Koch, who was gay.
Randy Fine, our own congressman in Free Florida, believes Mamdani would establish a caliphate on the city and is divided between allowing Palestinians to starve to death and nuking them. Over the beaches of New York, our cadaverous Senator Rick Scott floated a banner urging people who despise socialism to relocate to Florida. Senator, please. There are already enough haters in our small area of blood-red Florida.
You expect all of this from Republicans who, as Howard Zinn put it, have fetishized the Southern Strategy—an ancient American practice of using working-class complaints for aristocratic political gain—to great effect since Nixon.2.
This was an opportunity for Democrats to take Saul Bellow’s counsel, take on their responsibilities, and seize the day.
Rather, Congresswoman Laura Gillen of New York referred to Mamdani as a menace to my constituents. She was talking about his economic plans, but nobody was unaware of the threat posed by a dark-skinned Muslim in New York named Willie Horton on the Hudson. She claimed that he is not the ideal spokesperson for the Democratic Party as an extra racist tactic. Much to how unscrupulous Time Magazine made O.J. Simpson appear blacker, the desperate Andrew Cuomo campaign darkened Mamdani’s skin and muslemified his beard. Along with many other prominent Democrats (Obama has been more outspoken in his support), Corey Booker, whose 25-hour speech on the Senate floor last spring echoed much of Mamdani’s platform, has refused to endorse him. Instead, he has rallied to support Cuomo, who was disgraced out of office on a Niagara of scandals and predatory smut. Indeed, HimToo.
By battling Waterloos over DEI, trans, and even migrant rights as a dogma when they should be offering workable solutions, Democrats are supporting that group while falling into the GOP’s culture-war trap. (To be fair, Biden tried with migrants, but Trump’s Republicans rejected the plan because they thought it would make it harder for them to utilize their most effective race-baiting tactic to win back the White House.) Democrats further debase themselves into irrelevance and turn off the few liberals they still have by fighting on Republican terms and clinging to outdated orthopdoxies.
The Mamdani craze will end because he is only going to be elected mayor of New York. However, his response has been like an MRI of the malignant pessimism that both of us have.
In their wilderness, Democrats ought to support vibrant countercurrents that could halt the decline and bring the party’s attention to common problems like expensive housing. unaffordable medical care, particularly for governments and businesses. school resegregation based on religion and class distinctions. As our infrastructure deteriorates and the research institutions that drove the last American Century are kneecapped, the tax law is being changed to provide permanent welfare benefits for the wealthy.
Democrats are vying with Republicans in a race to the bottom and demonstrating why their party is a dying group of elitists that don’t care about the people in their own neighborhood, rather than leveraging a fresh voice that speaks up for the disenfranchised. They either feed it with doctrinaire wokism or they remain silent in the face of the suppression of political, academic, and personal liberties.
The suffocating orthodoxies of the founding fathers, patriotism, variety, and free market—all of which associate dissenters with treason—have been adopted by Democrats. For fear of being labeled as being lenient toward crime, they applaud the militaristic police state. We are the most unequal Western civilization in the world because of their complicity in the deadly economics of governance through tax cuts, debt, and tulips. When China, one of our greatest debtors, rises to become the largest economy in the world in a few years, we will unavoidably find ourselves in a large, beautiful meeting with the British Empire.
However, free child care, city-owned supermarkets, and a 2 percent corporate tax rate hike spell disaster for American society.
It would be inaccurate to label today’s Democrats liberal, just as it would be to label Republicans conservative. Among the two parties, reactionary illiberalism is the most powerful force. They deserve one another, in my opinion. However, we don’t deserve either. And Mamdani is winning because of this.
FlaglerLive’s editor is Pierre Tristam. This article is broadcast on WNZF.
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