Out of the mouth of socialist sucker-fish will the truth often out itself. Even if they’re too thick to realise what they’ve accidentally said.
In a hilarious own-goal, Muslim socialist Mayor of New York Zohran Mamdani declared that the African National Congress and post-apartheid South Africa would be the role model for his governance. To damn him with faint praise, he actually told the truth for once.
If you ever wanted a working definition of civic suicide, look no further than the Rainbow Nation. Under three decades of African National Congress rule, that once-prosperous nation has been systematically hollowed out into a tribal kleptocracy. In Johannesburg, the country’s commercial heart, residents endure constant, rolling blackouts and dry taps because the copper wiring and municipal water pipes have literally been stripped out of the ground and sold off for scrap. Meanwhile, in the rural heartlands, the world turns a blind eye to the horrific reality of farm attacks, where marauding gangs wage campaigns of slaughter and rape against white farmers. That this dystopian wasteland should serve as an aspirational blueprint for the financial capital of the West is a proposition that belongs in an asylum, not City Hall.
Yet, here we are. Mamdani, having graduated from an obscure rap career as ‘Young Cardamom’ to leading man of the Democratic Socialists of America, has laid out his vision with terrifying candour.
As in South Africa, the enemy in Mamdani’s New York is often white people. He has already vowed to target “whiter neighborhoods” for higher taxes. In his inaugural speech he zoned in on another set of unprosecuted criminals: billionaires.
Naturally, the classic Marxist playbook requires a demon, and Mamdani’s racialised rhetoric goes at it with the zero subtlety of Lenin railing against the kulaks. In his inauguration address, he made it abundantly clear that the middle class will pay for the utopia. While the Marxist stage-puppets scream ‘tax the rich’, it is the working burghers in the outer boroughs who will bear the brunt of his overhauled property tax regime.
The consequences of this ideological madness have not taken long to manifest. Capital, which is notoriously allergic to being fleeced by self-styled revolutionaries, is fleeing the five boroughs in droves. Wall Street traders and productive businesses are voting with their feet. Advertisements for ‘NoFlo’, a luxury enclave in sun-drenched, low-tax northern Florida, now mock commuters from the grime of the New York subway cars.
When you threaten to strip the wealth of the top one per cent who fund 40 per cent of the city’s coffers, they do not queue up to be shorn: they call the movers. Because they can. The proles have no such luxury.
Mamdani promised at the start of his speech that he had grand ambitions for New York and perhaps nowhere was that clearer than when he claimed that under his leadership society in the city would be remade to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”
How is that collectivist warmth translating into daily life? Just six months into this disastrous administration, the reality is biting with savage speed. Street-level order has evaporated. Assaults across the city have seen an alarming explosion, with ordinary New Yorkers left to navigate subways and pavements that feel increasingly feral.
At the same time, the demographic transformation of Gotham has reached its cultural milestone. Mamdani, sworn in on a Koran and delivering speeches peppered with Urdu, made sure to cater to the nearly one million Muslim residents who delivered him power. The fruits of that courtship were laid bare when Times Square, once the glittering neon symbol of American commercial vitality, was effectively shut down for a mass Islamic prayer demonstration, echoing with the familiar war-cry of Allahu Akbar.
In just half a year, the former pearl of the Hudson is hurtling down the same well-trodden path of institutional rot that destroyed Johannesburg. With productive taxpayers packing their bags, violent thugs ruling the asphalt and an activist cadre running City Hall on grievance politics, the curtain is coming down on New York’s greatness.
They wanted South Africa and they’re getting it: good and hard.
