If New York City voters elect Muslim democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor, they will come to appreciate H.L. Mencken’s maxim that “democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
The latest on the far-far-far left radical goes well beyond raising taxes on whites, providing free day care and bus transportation, and, famously, “seizing the means of production.”
Last night, during the final mayoral debate against independent candidate and former Governor Andrew Cuomo and radio talker and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, Mamdani vowed again to shut down the Rikers Island prison facility in 2027, as city law requires. The problem: Other jails cannot be built before the deadline.
Result: Almost 8,000 dangerous criminals would be loosed upon the city. Not that Mamdani would care. Aside from the other communist ideas he espouses, he would also abolish jails and prisons.
Mamdani Can Do So By Default
Rikers Island is a 413-acre property with 12 facilities, almost all the city’s jails. In 2019, the city passed a law to close the facility and replace it with jails in four of the city’s five boroughs. That was a pipe dream, and now, the deadline for shuttering Rikers looms.
Answering a debate moderator’s question about it, Cuomo said “you cannot close Rikers in 2027 because there’s no place to put the people unless you’re going to release 7,000 people.” Noting that Mamdani would release them, Cuomo added that “I’m not going to release 7,000 criminals into New York.”
Releasing the criminals is the Democratic Socialists’, and therefore Mamdani’s, policy, Cuomo said. The former Empire State governor would build new jails on the island.
Replied Mamdani:
What I have said time and again, I’ll repeat it again, is that yes, we have to close Rikers Island. Rikers Island is a stain on the history of this city and that this current administration has made it nearly impossible to do so by the stipulated timeline. So, what I will do is everything in my power to try and meet that deadline knowing that Eric Adams has made it so difficult because he’s had no interest in actually following through on it.
Writing at Pirate Wires in July, the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Fain Lehman explained why the city can’t meet the deadline, and what Mamdani has in store for the city, which he repeated in last night’s debate.
“While Rikers has problems, the idea of building four massive jails on some of the most expensive real estate in the world in just eight years was always implausible,” Lehman wrote:
It only became more unrealistic as the Covid pandemic and Biden inflation drove up labor costs and wait times. Earlier this year, the city commission that first called for closing Rikers admitted there’s no way the city will hit its 2027 deadline. The Brooklyn jail is now expected to open in 2029, the Bronx jail in 2031, and Queens and Manhattan’s facilities in 2032.
In other words, New York City legally must close Rikers in August 2027 with no suitable replacements. Mayor Eric Adams has agitated for extending the timeline, but found himself at an impasse with the City Council; he’s now floating repairing, instead of closing, Rikers.
Thus, “to free 7,669 people currently held before trial — mostly charged with crimes like murder, robbery, and rape — all Mamdani will have to do is … nothing,” Lehman concluded.
Abolish the System
Mamdani’s record on the subject is clear, Lehman explained, pointing to the radical’s X feed.
“As socialists, we believe people should not have to endure the violence & coercion of a criminal-legal system that props up the exploitation of the market by surveilling, caging & killing those fighting to survive under capitalism,” Mamdani wrote in July 2020:
We can abolish that system.
With your help.
“The entire carceral system is an unreformable public health hazard,” he wrote that November. “Defund & dismantle.”
That same year during an interview, he asked, “What purpose do [jails] serve, besides making people feel good?”
“But our prison system relies on dehumanization and brutality, so the goal must be to abolish this exploitative system entirely,” he wrote on X in April, 2021.
“Violence is an artificial construction” conceived by district attorneys to put non-violent criminals such shoplifters in jail, he said the same year.
In June, The City website asked Mamdani the question to which he replied last night.
“The four new borough-based jails — meant to replace the Rikers Island complex and place incarcerated folks in areas closer to their families and courts — will have 4,160 beds,” the website asked. “As of March, 7,067 people were incarcerated at Rikers.”
Mamdani: “Stay on course with the Rikers Island shutdown, work with DAs to release more people pretrial or divert them from prosecution entirely.”
On that last note, Mamdani told the website that subway turnstile jumpers should not be prosecuted.
Mamdani’s Other Ideas
A Uganda-born Indian and an American citizen less than 10 years, Mamdani’s parents are anti-American radical Marxists.
As The New American reported in June, citing Mamdani’s campaign, Mamdani’s ideas for the city include freezing rent, “free” child care, “free” public transportation, and a minimum wage of $30 per hour. As well, he would raise property taxes on “whiter neighborhoods.” He doesn’t believe police should answer domestic violence calls.
His goal for the city is “seizing the means of production.” And while calling him a communist might sound too extreme, he is certainly a hardshell Marxist and fangirl of Karl Marx.
“Each according to their need, each according to their ability,” he wrote on X in 2020.
Wrote Marx in Critique of the Gotha Programme in 1875, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
