Mr. Ramirez notes that Mayor Zohran is a wannabe cop:
The mayor's whipped up his base, though. The result reported by Seth Mandel at the Dispatch: Mamdani’s New York State of Fear.
When I was growing up, the only time we saw security outside of my synagogue or outside 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.”
These comments, made on Friday by Manhattan Rabbi Yosie Levine, encapsulate the new reality for Jewish New Yorkers: how they are threatened by Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s aggressive anti-Zionism, how they are adapting in their day-to-day lives, and how they are challenging an emerging and daunting status quo.
Levine leads The Jewish Center, a synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. On Thursday, a man named Raul Morales allegedly went to the synagogue and shouted “justice for Islam” and “Allahu akbar” before stabbing a visibly Jewish worshipper with a screwdriver a few blocks away. He is also accused of stabbing an Asian man a few minutes earlier with the same screwdriver, also while yelling “Allahu akbar.”
The attacks took place shortly after Mamdani released a slickly produced video in which he railed against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal and baby killer. The following day, Mamdani exhorted the public to take to the streets to protest Netanyahu’s expected visit to New York City in September. A day later, Morales allegedly grabbed a screwdriver and went looking for his “justice.”
Unfortunately, we won't see Mayor Z try to arrest Bibi. As Jonathan Turley reports, he's realized that he doesn't actually have that power. But he has moved on to scapegoating a different despised group: the rich.
New York City socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani is back in his element. After admitting that he cannot fulfill his campaign pledge to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Mamdani returned to his class warfare narrative. This week, he taunted the city’s highest-earning taxpayers with a letter informing them of another special tax awaiting them in the Big Apple.
As wealthy citizens flee the city, Mamdani strongly suggests that those who remain are going to get burned by his promised “warmth of collectivism.” In doing so, he repeated a socialist myth about how the wealthiest taxpayers are not paying “their fair share.”
Mamdani went on X to tell those with second homes in New York City worth more than $5 million that “you’ve got mail” and a “new pied-a-terre tax.” He gleefully declared, “The best city in the world deserves the best parks, libraries, and schools in the world. That’s only possible when we all pay our fair share.”
Jonathan ably dissects that "fair share" rhetoric. It caused me to look waaay back in the Pun Salad archives for this 2008 article: Every Word They Say is a Lie, Including "And" and "The". Among the pols quoted "asking the wealthy to pay their fair share" was William Jefferson Clinton back in 1993!
"Their fair share" never means anything but "more".
And the unspoken upshot, as both William Voegeli and Viking Pundit point out is: it's "never enough".
Also of note:
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What about abolishing the FCC? The USPS? The FTC? The Federal Reserve? … Nah. As Charles C.W. Cooke points out: The DSA Wants to Abolish America.
I understand that it is considered déclassé to participate in what the self-consciously serious among us have termed the new “Red Scare.” Well, okay then: déclassé it is. There is virtue in calling things by their names, and the appropriate name for the Democratic Socialists of America is “red.” They are communists. They are Jacobins. They are wreckers and despoilers and iconoclasts, who, if left unchecked, would wipe the United States from the face of this earth. To be “scared” by such figures is not only rational, it is imperative.
Asked on television by Fox News host Shannon Bream to give a thumbs up or thumbs down to each of our civilizational building blocks, the co-chair of the DSA, Megan Romer, casually dismissed each in turn:
BREAM: Abolish the Senate?
ROMER: True.
BREAM: Okay, replace the presidency and Supreme Court as we now know them?
ROMER: Yep.
BREAM: Abolish ICE?
ROMER: Absolutely.
BREAM: Abolish borders and give amnesty to anyone currently in the U.S. illegally?
ROMER: As a long-term plan, yep.
BREAM: Defund the Pentagon?
ROMER: Absolutely.
BREAM: Abolish prisons, at least in large part?
ROMER: Yeah, again, as part of a long-term program, yeah?
BREAM: OK, so no prisons. Government or public ownership of most large corporations?
ROMER: Yeah, absolutely.
Hey, what about the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau? The Department of Education? Small Business Administration? …
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Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street, racist? The College Fix reports some (um) surprising research: Sesame Street accelerates white kids’ racism, University of Illinois professor says.
Could “Doc McStuffins” and “Dora the Explorer” be turning white kids into racists?
A professor from the University of Illinois thinks so.
“White children in the United States begin developing racial biases in early childhood that threaten the well-being of children of color and serve as the developmental roots for racial prejudices that persist into adulthood,” a new Psycnet study from Professor Michael Rizzo says.
Prof Rizzo's departmental bio is here. It informs us that "Michael's research aims to promote social equity in childhood by revealing the psychological processes and developmental mechanisms that underlie children’s developing conceptions of fairness and emerging social biases."
It's only a matter of time before the DSA adds abolishing Sesame Street to its platform.
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Kill some kids, save some jobs. Jeff Maurer points out: The Arguments Against Waymos Could Be Used Against Anti-Smoking Campaigns.
The tradeoff with driverless cars is clear: They save lives, but they cause some job displacement. Most people who take the “jobs” side of the jobs/lives tradeoff don’t advertise it; unions don’t march carrying “YOU SHOULD DIE” signs, and nobody tweets “Bring back The Terror because I FEED MY FAMILY OPERATING A GUILLOTINE!!! ✊✊✊”. But the tradeoff remains real: The latest data is that Waymos reduce accidents resulting in a serious injury or worse by 94 percent compared to human drivers in cities where they operate. More than 40,000 people die in car crashes in the US every year. Maybe Waymos results won’t scale, maybe their results are somewhat context-dependent, but the potential to save lives is obvious.
Even so, a “people should die so that I can keep my job” movement exists. Incredibly, that movement tries to claim the moral high ground by waving away safety data and emphasizing job losses. This video by More Perfect Union — a progressive media outlet — treats every job loss as a deadweight loss, though technology typically destroys some jobs and creates other. The video also makes treacly emotional appeals and leans heavily on music that was probably listed in iStock as “Ominous Progressive Media Theme 47-D”. And ironically, this video from a progressive source (it was founded by Bernie Sanders’ former campaign manager) treats Uber jobs as indispensable, though it was only last year that Uber was to Online Lefty Nutcases what The Odyssey is today to Right-Wing Rage Fetishists.
I will also quote his bottom line, because I like it:
Nobody today argues that we should bring back dangerous and or deadly practices in the name of “jobs”. Removing seat belts from cars would create jobs at hospitals; putting cocaine back in soft drinks would surely boost productivity, especially in the Terrible Screenplay industry. That doesn’t mean we should turn back the clock. And though every technology affects jobs, the solution is to help people manage the transition, not to return to the Stone Age. And when a technology saves lives, the switch should be accelerated, not stopped. People today laugh at Big Tobacco’s cynicism; they’re seen as corporate villains only slightly more cartoonish than Mr. Burns. I think that the anti-Waymo movement might look similar in the future.
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