Zohran Mamdani’s student politics

Zohran Mamdani, the incoming mayor of New York City, promised to make his city more affordable. Rent controls, free buses and even state-run supermarkets, he claims, will radically reduce the cost of living. But will his brand of ‘Millenial socialism’ really work as advertised?

Heather Mac Donald – political commentator and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute – warns that New Yorkers’ living standards are about to take a nosedive. She returned to The Brendan O’Neill Show to discuss the folly of Mamdani’s plans, the rise of anti-Semitism and the idiocy of ‘Millenial socialism’. What follows is an edited version of that conversation. You can watch the full episode here.

Brendan O’Neill: What does Zohran Mamdani’s election mean for the city?

Heather Mac Donald: We are about to be governed by the Columbia University student body. This is a group that embodies the undergraduate mindset: entitled, ignorant, performative and parasitic. It holds our civilisation in contempt while being completely ignorant of the very foundations that undergird its capacities, strengths, entitlements and luxuries. Its ‘revolutionary’ encampments are just play-acting, entirely dependent on the larger infrastructure of public order and capitalism.

It makes me sick that anyone takes student protests seriously or pretends these are heroic rebels risking their lives. I went up to the Columbia encampment the day they stormed an administration building. It was hilarious. Brightly coloured North Face tents on a quad surrounded by grand Beaux-Arts buildings built by New York City’s leading figures, shielding them from Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue. Security kept everyone out while the students pretended to be revolutionaries ‘sacrificing’ their nice beds, with faculty delivering protein bars, pizza and so on. It’s all fake. It’s all performative.

It’s the same with Mamdani. He ran on four proposals, all ludicrous. I’ll mention just one: he wants a government-run supermarket in each of the five boroughs to address a supposed food-affordability crisis. Yet our food is so affordable that the greatest problem facing the poor here is obesity. We’re supposed to believe that removing profit from grocery stores will yield a cornucopia of Edenic produce. In reality, everything in those stores would still come from the for-profit industry, whose entrepreneurship, risk-taking and supply-chain mastery are what make so much food available. If he really wanted to show what a government enterprise in food supply can do, he should import only goods produced in Cuba and North Korea.

As for affordability more broadly, even the right insists it’s a grave problem, but I just don’t buy it. And I absolutely don’t buy Mamdani’s prescriptions. I’m jaundiced. I don’t see young people in New York walking around without a $7 Starbucks Frappuccino. I don’t see them drinking the city’s fabulous tap water brought down from upstate aquifers – they insist on bottled water. Absent extravagant spending habits and absent a willingness to defer gratification, I don’t think life is that terrible for young people today.

Mamdani has it backwards. He claims government is the solution to the affordability crisis, when in fact it’s the cause. Cities in the US vary widely in cost of living, and the correlation is simple: the more regulation, taxation and burdens on business, the more expensive the city. There is nowhere in the country more expensive to build a 15-story apartment building than New York City, because we regulate and tax everything to support a gargantuan $111 billion city budget. Then it’s all frittered away on useless welfare programmes that attempt to substitute for personal responsibility: ‘We’ll just write a check, or send a barely literate social worker, because parents aren’t important.’

Whether he’s socialist or communist doesn’t really matter. What matters is that he displays a hatred for for-profit entrepreneurs – and more importantly, an utter ignorance of what they do.

O’Neill: What kind of voters did Mamdani win over?

Mac Donald: When I went to the Columbia encampment, what struck me immediately was that the students marching for hours around the quad were overwhelmingly female. We’ve seen the same thing at almost every pro-jihadist protest on American and British campuses (except on the explicitly Islamist demonstrations, where the male presence is stronger). Among the more native student population, it is overwhelmingly young women who are on the fringes of sensible politics and who are helping to undermine long-standing institutions built on risk-taking, free speech and openness to the development of knowledge – institutions that did not hide behind specious concepts like ‘hate speech’ and ‘harm’.

The numbers bear this out. Among voters under 30, 84 per cent of women voted for Mamdani; the overall under-30 percentage was 78 per cent. He is clearly pulling in younger voters who, though they should bear some responsibility for their own education, have been failed by the American K-12 and college systems. These institutions have not conveyed even the basic rudiments of how precious Western civilisation’s institutions are, nor have they taught elementary economic truths.

Mamdani also drew strong minority support. After Trump’s election, there was a rather poignant hope that Republicans had made lasting gains among black and Hispanic voters, but that proved short-lived. Mamdani received 61 per cent of the black vote, 57 per cent of the Hispanic vote, and 47 per cent of the Asian vote. Demography continues to be destiny. He almost certainly won most of the South Asian vote. And toward the end of the campaign, he leaned heavily into demagoguery around Muslim identity, making statements as fanciful as the claim that Israel is committing genocide. He implied that being Muslim in New York is uniquely dangerous, the only identity against which one can incite violence with impunity. That is ludicrous. As you’ve all seen, Jews are the primary victims of today’s ethnic hostilities.

O’Neill: Mamdani infamously refused to condemn slogans like ‘globalise the intifada’. Is that significant? How concerned should Jews in New York be about Mamdani’s rise to power?

Mac Donald: Very concerned. I think it’s naive to rest on this idea that the mayoralty of New York doesn’t have foreign-policy powers. Famously, he vowed to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if he comes to the city. I wouldn’t put it past him to try. But it’s the tone he sets that matters – if we have more outbreaks of fanatical anti-Israel protests, his presence in the mayor’s office could seriously affect how they’re policed.

There’s a broader issue here that goes beyond Jews in particular. It is another reminder that Mamdani is ignorant about the West and about the fragility of order, constitutional government and the unbelievable conquest over ignorance that was the scientific revolution. Israel is the Western Enlightenment country par excellence. Despite its religious particularism, it embraces science; it has some socialist tendencies, but it has also been very entrepreneurial in the tech sector. So it’s all of a piece.

We’re living in a time where there’s a new catastrophe every day. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the Middle East. But Mamdani has been very clear. The Palestinian cause has been ‘the constant’ in his intellectual firmament. It’s the thing he’s most committed to. I don’t think that’s something he’s going to put behind him now.

Heather Mac Donald was talking to Brendan O’Neill. Watch the full conversation below: