New York’s socialist showdown

Mayor Zohran Mamdani is quickly learning that governing one of the world’s largest cities is a lot harder than criticizing it from the outside.

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Mamdani, nicknamed the “smiling socialist,” has moved quickly to try to implement many of his most aggressive agenda items. While saying he wants to represent all New Yorkers, on a recent New York Times podcast, he said “my party is the Democratic Party, and my organization is DSA.”

As a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, his allies include DSA co-chair Megan Romer, who over the weekend confirmed the organization’s priorities: Abolish the Senate, abolish ICE, abolish prisons and ultimately do away with American democracy as we know it.

Mamdani also allied himself with streamer Hasan Piker, an anti-Israel, self-described Marxist who said America deserved the 9/11 attacks.

Now, ahead of the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Giovanni Galante, whose wife Grace was among the nearly 3,000 killed that day, has launched a petition to bar the mayor from attending this year’ceremony at Ground Zero.

“Our objection is based on his public record — his failure to meaningfully acknowledge the horror of that day, and his employment of, support for, or association with individuals who have minimized 9/11, defended terrorists, or even suggested America ‘deserved’ the attacks,” Galante told the New York Post.

As of Tuesday evening, the petition had gathered over 36,000 signatures.

“It is not political, and it is not a platform for those connected to such views. His presence would be deeply hurtful and inappropriate — like an unwelcome guest at a deeply personal ceremony,” Galante added.

Despite the request, Mamdani said he still intends to go to the ceremony and pay his respects.

Although Mamdani continues to enjoy support among many New Yorkers, not everyone is convinced his message is resonating beyond the progressive coalition that helped elect him.

And as his administration begins implementing some of his signature campaign promises — including a rent freeze, city-owned grocery stores and new tax proposals — the criticisms are multiplying.

When campaign promises meet reality

Mamdani apparently learned for the first time last week that he doesn’t have the authority to arrest the prime minister of a U.S.-allied country just because he claims he is guilty of war crimes.

During his 2025 campaign, Mamdani pledged multiple times that, if elected mayor, he would order the NYPD to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he ever stepped foot in New York City.

After it was confirmed that Netanyahu would attend the United Nations General Assembly in September, Mamdani posted a video stating that Netanyahu is the “architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people” and that he agrees with the International Criminal Court — which the United States is not a member of — to prosecute the prime minister.

The arrest warrant was initiated by ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan, who was effectively fired last month after being accused of sexual misconduct involving a junior ICC lawyer. He denies the allegations.

Despite saying for over a year that he would arrest Netanyahu, Mamdani admitted in the video that “it is clear” his office doesn’t have the legal authority to do so, and then urged the federal government to execute the warrant. President Donald Trump quickly made clear it would not be happening.

“Attacks on Israel have been central to Mamdani’s political rise,” Douglas Murray wrote in The Free Press, specifically following Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that killed 1,200 and saw another 251 taken hostage in what was the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust.

Murray continued, “There is nothing more preposterous than the idea that what the Israel Defense Forces have done since October 7 has been a ‘genocide’ of the Palestinians. If Netanyahu had wanted to eradicate every Palestinian from Gaza he could have done so on October 8. But obviously he didn’t. If the IDF had sought to kill as many Palestinians as possible, they would have not gone to such extraordinary lengths — lengths I have seen with my own eyes — to separate civilians from combatants, even when the line between the two has been deliberately blurred by Hamas.”

Jeff Miller, chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Council, responded to Mamdani’s comments about Netanyahu by personally inviting the mayor to visit the museum so that he could “understand what genocide looks like.”

“Words matter. Especially from elected leaders. Jews in New York are being threatened and attacked, and rhetoric that demonizes Israel and the Jewish state has consequences,” he continued. “I hope you are simply ignoring the impact of your words and not purposely trying to normalize antisemitism.”

On Sunday, Netanyahu responded to Mamdani’s video in an interview with Fox News.

“He’s supposed to be the mayor of all New Yorkers, Jews, Christians, Muslims, everyone, but he’s trying to turn one group against the other, and he’s foisting hate and fear,” Netanyahu said. “I speak to Jewish Americans in New York, and they’re afraid right now. And I don’t think it’s accidental that after he made this hate speech against Israel and against me, the next day, a Jew is stabbed coming out of a synagogue.”

Following the stabbings of a Jewish man and an Asian man on Friday, Mamdani said his office would do everything it could to root out antisemitism. But a Rabbi for the Jewish Center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan recently said that Mamdani’s comments inflict fear on the Jewish community.

According to witness statements, 51-year-old suspect Raul Morales yelled “Allahu Akbar” during the two separate stabbings.

“When I was growing up, the only time we saw security outside of my synagogue or my Jewish day school was when the mayor came to speak. The police were there to protect him. Today every time the mayor speaks we need the police to protect us,” Rabbi Yosie Levine said on Saturday at a press conference regarding the stabbing that took place outside his synagogue.

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Is Mamdani facing an economic reality check?

If Mamdani’s foreign policy rhetoric has dominated headlines, his economic agenda has fueled equally contentious debate.

His latest affordability initiative is the creation of city-owned grocery stores in each of the five boroughs that would offer essential food items at roughly 30% below market prices.

During a press conference on Monday where he announced the stores, Mamdani argued they would lower grocery costs for families without directly competing with neighborhood bodegas.

His reassurances failed to ease people’s worries.

An immigrant-led business group is already suing the mayor’s office, arguing that taxpayer-funded stores will disrupt the market and unfairly compete with established grocers.

The Multicultural Business Coalition had been preparing for the announcement and is working to raise $1 million to bring litigation against Mamdani and bring “awareness about the plight of its mom-and-pop shop members, many of whom struggle to secure capital, fend off shoplifters and keep up with rising costs including rent and taxes,” per The New York Post.

Daniel Di Martino, an economist and research fellow at the Manhattan Institute, said Mamdani’s proposed city-owned grocery stores are the strongest example of the mayor embracing socialist economics.

Drawing on his experience growing up in Venezuela, Di Martino said his initial worry when Mamdani was running for office was that he would “change the Democratic Party and make it much more likely that it would become a communist party.”

He told the Deseret News the stores will likely be costly, suffer from shortages and fail.

“Nobody before Mamdani was speaking about government grocery stores in this country, and he’s now bringing that into the conversation as if the government had a legitimate role to play in that sector, which it does not,” Di Martino said. “It’s outrageous.”

For Di Martino, the grocery stores are less about groceries than about changing expectations. He argued the proposal opens the door to a larger debate over whether government should directly operate businesses that have historically been left to the private market.

The cost of a rent freeze

Though he said government grocers are the clearest manifestation of socialist economic policy, Di Martino said he finds the mayor’s rent freeze policy the “most concerning.”

In what Mamdani called a “historic victory” for the city’s tenants, the mayor’s rent freeze policy prevents rent increases on roughly one million rent-stabilized apartments for one- and two-year lease renewals.

Di Martino argued the rent freeze would ultimately lead to deteriorating rent-stabilized buildings, make being a property owner less attractive, and discourage the construction of new rental housing.

He explained that it would decrease the city’s housing supply over time, making it harder for lower-income and young people to find homes, which could lead to a population decline in New York and, as a result, reduce tax revenue for the city.

Will the wealthy leave?

Some experts, including Di Martino, believe that Mamdani’s tax policy could lead to an exodus of Manhattan’s upper class. Mamdani says his policy is designed to ensure that wealthier residents and luxury property owners contribute a larger portion of the city’s costs.

The mayor recently announced the city’s first Pied-à-Terre Tax, which “targets ultra-wealthy out-of-city residents and global elites who use New York City real estate as a vehicle for wealth storage rather than as homes,” per the press release.

It’s an annual surcharge on second homes valued over $5 million when the owner’s primary residence is outside the city.

While the measure represents Mamdani’s first major tax policy to become law, Di Martino contends that singling out wealthy taxpayers risks doing more harm than good.

“He’s framing it in a way to attack the wealthy for being wealthy. He thinks being wealthy is bad,” Di Martino said. “That’s just going to cause more wealth flight from the city. And I think it’s moving America in a really just concerning economic direction.”

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