What A Mamdani Victory Really Means (Hint: It's About More Than His Policies)

Zohran Mamdani, the socialist and pectorally-challenged politician, recently won the race to be New York City's next mayor.

Native New Yorkers are already threatening to abandon ship in the Big Apple, which, as I wrote earlier this year, would be a nightmare for places like Florida, which would turn into a refugee camp for those fleeing Mamdani's socialist policies.

Some of those policies include things like rent freezes and city-run grocery stores, turning NYC into a socialist "utopia" for all the 30-something hipsters living in a broom closet in Bed-Stuy.

But, if you want my honest opinion, and I think several people would agree with this, I doubt a lot of his more "Marxist" based ideas will ever come to fruition (at least not anytime soon).

What is frightening, however, is that the majority of people living in New York City actually voted for these policies.

Zohran Mamdani and socialism is now the "will of the people" in the financial capital of the country, and that has me feeling pretty depressed.

Less than a quarter-century ago, the people of New York had Rudy Giuliani as their mayor, a tough-on-crime conservative who helped steward the city through the most devastating terrorist attacks in U.S. history on September 11.

I'm not going to sit here and make the claim that New Yorkers electing Mamdani means they "forgot" about 9/11. That wouldn't be a fair leap to make.

I do find it disturbing, however, that New York City went from a Republican mayor to a Muslim socialist from Uganda in less than 25 years.

It's the Platonic ideal of liberals everywhere who turned the Five Burroughs into a cultural melting pot.

New York City used to be the symbol of America's economic and cultural might.

Now, it's virtually unrecognizable from the New York that even I, a 32-year-old man, grew up knowing from afar.

I often find myself getting into arguments with my dad, a right-of-center, "Reagan Era" libertarian, about cultural vs. economic issues.

He and I are both, for the most part, fiscally conservative, but I find myself aligning far more to the right of him on a bevy of social issues.

And it's not just that I fall to the right of him socially; it's that I actually believe the socio-political issues of our current day (i.e. The Culture War) are far more important and often times even upstream from economic issues.

I respect the Hell out of my dad; he is legitimately one of the smartest people I know, but I feel like we differ in the belief that our culture affects our economic policies in this country.

Mamdani wasn't born here in America.

He spent his childhood outside our borders and was seven years old by the time he immigrated to the U.S.

He was likely taught from a very young age that America was a flawed nation that didn't cater to his type, so he grew up wanting to change things "for the better."

Thousands of New Yorkers are also in a similar boat to Mamdani, being first-generation Americans who grew up hating the current set up of our country, and voted for Mamdani because he represented them, both culturally and otherwise.

It's happening in Michigan, too, where cities like Dearborn and Hamtrack are either run by a Muslim city council or are majority Muslim in population.

It almost happened in Minneapolis, where incumbent Jacob Frey had to hold off a surge from Somali-American Muslim Omar Fateh in this year's mayoral election.

How bad have things gotten to where we have to pray that deep blue Democrats like Frey or, in New York's case, Andrew Cuomo, can win so that we can continue to maintain our identity as Americans?

If you ever needed an example that socio-cultural issues are upstream from economics, look no further than our former "Greatest City On Earth."

Mamdani, the first-generation American with socialist leanings, will now attempt to mold New York into his image.

It probably won't work, but there are hundreds of thousands who want him (and voted for him) to succeed.

That number will only continue to grow if we can't get our border and immigration policies under control, meaning there will be more Zohran Mamdani's and Omar Fateh's to come, and millions more who think and vote just like them.

Then the will of the people will be in favor of mind-bendingly stupid economic policies that "fiscal conservatives" couldn't even fathom being in their country just a decade earlier.

We are careening towards the very DNA of America being rewritten, and New York City is just the latest test subject.