BY MOSHE HILL OPINION COLUMNS JUNE 11 2025
(Author’s note: At the end of the article there will be strategies on how to rank your ballot to ensure that socialists get as few votes as possible in the Ranked Choice Voting system.)
With only a few weeks until the Democratic primary in the New York City mayoral election, the competition for who will be in charge of the largest city in the country is reaching a boiling point. The two frontrunners are Andrew Cuomo, former New York State governor who resigned in disgrace after multiple scandals, and Zohran Mamdani, a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America who will burn the city to the ground to become king of the ashes.
Andrew Cuomo was a horrific governor of New York State. He pushed radical far-left agendas on a variety of issues from gun control to abortion to climate change, he raised taxes, he demonized (and prosecuted) his political opponents, and oversaw a mass exodus from the state. That being said, he is the best chance New York has against something far, far worse.
Zohran Mamdani is the epitome of an ignorant, spoiled millennial who read the Wikipedia entry on Karl Marx and has never looked back. If he were white, his hair would be blue and he’d have a half dozen facial piercings to assert his identity, but he was born in Uganda to Indian parents, so he can trade on that. He is a silver-spooned socialist who hates capitalism, hates the West, and is pushing policies that will destroy New York City and the surrounding areas. (Oh, and he hates Jews, but more on that later.)
Looking at Mamdani’s policy platform on his campaign website, it reads like a 6th grader running for class president promising free pizza for lunch and unlimited recess for all. He wants to freeze rent and build affordable housing, which is a mutually exclusive proposition. If landlords cannot make money on their properties, then investment in new properties dries up. If new property development dries up on Class 2 buildings (like apartments), then a significant portion of tax revenue to the city disappears, leaving no money for the city to invest in “affordable” housing. Rent control has failed everywhere it’s been tried because people don’t leave their apartments, then all other apartments skyrocket to make up for the shortfalls. Mamdani sees $5,000, 200-square-foot studio apartments and wants to double down.
Mamdani wants to build a “Department of Community Safety,” which is socialist lingo for defunding the police. He wants to pull money from the police budget to send in social workers who will be ill-equipped to deal with the problems. So the issues that arise from this are twofold. First, you have fewer police, which means that the police who are left need to use more aggressive tactics to ensure order, leading to more confrontations with the community, which leads to more unrest and crime. The second issue is you have unqualified civilians dealing with severe issues in the worst parts of the city. When they find themselves in over their heads—and they will—they will slow their work down to focus on the few cases they can handle and ignore the rest, leaving mentally unstable people on the streets for the general public to worry about.
Mamdani wants city-owned grocery stores, which is straight out of the communist playbook. He says that grocery stores are too expensive while simultaneously increasing the overhead costs of grocery stores via property costs, congestion pricing adding to delivery costs, and Green New Deal policies that increase the costs of electricity and maintenance. He’s going to undercut the pricing until other stores can’t compete and will close, leaving only city-owned grocery stores to remain. Then the stores themselves will either have to skyrocket the prices, have little to no inventory, or be massively subsidized by taxpayer dollars, creating another redistribution scheme.
He also supports free busing across the city – giving up $1.2 billion in MTA revenue. Other, saner people would actually talk about prosecuting fare evasion, which costs $350-700 million per year and forces the rest of the public to pick up the monetary slack, but Mamdani actually wants to reward the criminals and say that everyone gets free busing. Of course, he also claims that this means that buses will be safer and cleaner to ride and everyone will love them, when in reality this means that they will become mobile homeless shelters or overcrowded nightmares.
The gaslighting by Mamdani is shockingly brazen. Recently, he touted his free busing proposal while riding the Staten Island Ferry. He claimed on social media that since the ferry is free, why can’t busing be free? He is either too stupid to know that the ferry costs $150 million per year while the bus costs $4.5 billion per year, or is assuming that his audience is too dumb to put that together. Either way, it doesn’t matter to Mamdani, because everything to a socialist can be paid for just because they say it can.
His proposal on childcare is, of course, free childcare and then ship the kids off to public school. Get the kids early and keep them forever—that’s the socialist motto. Once again, no plans on how to pay for this or how this would work: if existing child cares just go out of business, or if they will exist under the purview of City Hall. Obviously he doesn’t mean to cut checks to parents, because that would imply that parents have a choice on where they keep their children for most of the day—and Mamdani wouldn’t like that. He gets to decide where your kids go, what they are taught, and who is watching them.
Don’t worry, Mamdani includes on the Platform page of his campaign site how he’s going to pay for everything. He’s going to—you guessed it—raise taxes! Of course, he says he’s only going to raise taxes on corporations and anyone making more than a million dollars per year. There are two major problems with that. First, even his projections claim that the corporate tax raise will bring in $5 billion. That won’t even cover the free childcare he’s proposing (Universal Pre-K costs the city $1.2 billion per year and he wants to quadruple that). Second, best estimates put the people who are making over a million a year at maybe less than half of a percent of NYC residents. Third, these corporations and people could easily leave if they are pushed out. Like all socialist programs, however, once they are in, they aren’t going anywhere, which means that the spending will remain but the revenue will disappear—forcing massive tax increases on everyone else.
This is all from Mamdani’s website, not even touching his history and his opinions, which is a nightmare in and of itself. Mamdani is, for want of a better term, a Jew-hater. Of course, his defenders will claim that he doesn’t hate Jews and anti-Zionist leftist Jews from IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace will line up around the block to take pictures with him to prove that he’s not antisemitic—but that’s all a sham.
Mamdani was the sponsor of the “Not On Our Dime” act in Albany; it was one of the first bills he proposed. That would empower the Attorney General to shut down any not-for-profit (which includes any synagogue) that gave charity to anything in the “Occupied Palestinian Territories.” Now, he would claim that he means Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, but everyone knows that the pro-Hamasniks believe that all of Israel is truly Occupied Palestinian Territory. They literally wear T-shirts and have chants that say exactly that.
Mamdani also does not think that Israel should exist as a Jewish state, a standard he does not apply to the 27 Muslim, 13 Christian, or 2 Buddhist countries—just the Jewish one. During the debate, when asked specifically if Israel should exist as a Jewish state, he smarmily replied that “I believe Israel can exist as a state with equal rights,” ignoring the fact that Israel literally has equal rights for all its citizens, that Arabs serve in government, on courts, and in any other setting they wish to. Israel has far more equality than Mamdani’s birth country of Uganda, but that is irrelevant to him.
So Mamdani wants to shut down every Jewish nonprofit, synagogue, thinks the Jewish state should be eradicated, and we aren’t supposed to think he’s a Jew-hater?
This couldn’t come at a more important time. Last week, Molotov cocktails were thrown at Jews in Boulder, Colorado for the crime of wanting to free Jewish hostages. Two weeks ago, two people were shot in Washington, D.C. for the crime of attending an Israeli event. Students in New York City can’t get to classes, the streets have been blocked, and lives have been ruined. Does a Mayor Mamdani have the interest in directing what remains of his police force to protect the Jews who live in his city? Or will he publish a trite statement on social media and turn a blind eye?
Now we’re seeing riots in Los Angeles as deranged leftists take on immigration agents. The president activated the National Guard to prevent a return to the summer of 2020. Will a Mayor Mamdani stoke these fires as Democrats in California have, calling it a “mostly peaceful protest” while the fires burn? Or will Mamdani throw fuel on those fires?
This could be a breaking point in the direction of New York City and the surrounding suburbs. Everything that can be done to prevent this from taking place must be done right now. When filling out your ballot, rank Andrew Cuomo as number 1, Whitney Tilson (who is actually a decent person but doesn’t stand a chance at winning) as number 2, and leave 3, 4, and 5 blank.
The future of New York is in the hands of the voters, and if you sit this one out, you only have yourselves to blame.