"Driving Tour of York, PA" (opens in separate window)

your american nightmare

friday, october 17th, 2024

Zohran Mamdani’s rise to prominence in New York City politics is nothing short of a cautionary tale for anyone concerned about the future of America.

[FULL tITLE: "Zohran Mamdani’s New York City is Your American Nightmare".]

Polling consistently demonstrates his advantage. A Sept. 10 Quinnipiac University survey, in a hypothetical three-way mayoral race, showed Mamdani leading with 46% support. Andrew Cuomo, running as an Independent after losing the Democratic primary, got 30%, leaving Republican Curtis Sliwa at 17%.

The New York Times/Siena poll from Sept. 9 mirrored this finding, with Mamdani at 46% in a four-way race, Cuomo at 24%, and Sliwa at 15%. Emerson College’s Sept. 18 survey placed Mamdani at 43%, Cuomo at 28%, and Sliwa at 10%.

These numbers are not mere abstractions. They reflect a coalition galvanized by the erosion of traditional New York City values, driven in part by perilous immigration policies stretching back six decades.

The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act dismantled national-origin quotas, unleashing waves of newcomers from Asia, Latin America, and Africa into the city and altering its cultural fabric.

By the 1980s, census data documented massive demographic shifts, with Caribbean and Latin American immigrants reshaping neighborhoods and straining public resources.

Throughout the 1980s, federal immigration records showed over 854,000 new arrivals in the city, driving non-Hispanic whites below majority status and creating fragmented communities struggling to maintain cohesion.

The demographic transformation accelerated in the 2010s. African immigration doubled in the United States within a decade, profoundly altering New York City’s racial and cultural landscape.

Into this milieu arrived Mamdani, born in Uganda to Indian parents. He immigrated to New York at age seven and became a U.S. citizen only after two decades. His story demonstrates the political rewards of lax naturalization and the risks of newcomers quickly gaining influence.

By 2022, over 210,000 asylum seekers poured into New York City, overwhelming shelters and services, a crisis that shaped a volatile electorate inclined toward progressive and socialist dogmatism.

Mamdani’s triumph in the June 24, 2025, Democratic mayoral primary underscores the political potency of these demographic shifts. Propelled by immigrant and minority voters in Queens and Brooklyn, he defeated the establishment to capture a pathway to citywide power.

This victory, however, is more than an isolated political upset. It is the years-long culmination of politics which incentivized out-of-state and non-local progressives to flood the city’s nonprofit sector and public agencies, shaping an electorate more concerned with leftist crusades than sustaining economic vitality.

Bill de Blasio’s era inaugurated this dynamic: His 2013 mayoral election brought an influx of social welfare programs and drew lefties from across the country into city government and nonprofits. By 2018, de Blasio’s policies like universal pre-K attracted young progressives fleeing red states, creating echo chambers that prioritized activism over entrepreneurship.

This transformation of the electorate paved the way for Mamdani’s ascent. His June 2025 Democratic primary win was turbocharged by this transplanted bloc of nonprofit warriors and public-sector employees. Their loyalty to socialist ideals outweighed concern for fiscal prudence or the lived realities of long-term residents.

The result is a candidate who openly threatens property rights, economic stability, and public safety. Mamdani has proposed shifting property taxes higher onto “richer and whiter neighborhoods,” a policy that signals antiwhite hatred while destabilizing the housing market.

He has advocated for free city buses at a cost exceeding $700 million annually, transforming public transit into de facto homeless shelters. Mamdani also supports government-run grocery stores designed to undercut private markets. These initiatives are classic socialist experiments that replace market incentives with politically driven redistribution, with consequences that ripple well beyond city limits.

Mamdani’s foreign policy positions amplify concerns. He has refused to affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, calling it an apartheid state, and later declined to denounce Hamas. He defended the slogan “globalize the intifada,” signaling alignment with movements dangerous to Jewish communities. His advisory circle includes communist activists and anti-Israel advocates, many tied to George Soros-funded networks.

In short, Mamdani embodies an anti-Western extremism. It eschews traditional parasitic, yet pragmatic blue machine politics for fringe-left objectives, each of these clearly rooted in deep personal grievances.

The implications extend into economic governance. As mayor, Mamdani would oversee the New York City Banking Commission, which influences Wall Street — the engine of global finance responsible for trillions in daily trades, $2 trillion in assets, and 15% of national commercial loans.

His proposals to redirect $100 billion in city deposits toward “equity-focused” subsidized lending, impose equity audits, fee caps, and a “Banking Bill of Rights” for anti-discriminatory practices, threaten to saddle banks holding 42% of U.S. deposits with crippling compliance costs. These mandates would likely drive fee hikes, credit tightening, capital flight, and jeopardize small businesses, family borrowing, retirement accounts, and community lenders nationwide.

The political architecture enabling Mamdani is inseparable from immigration-driven demographic changes. The 1970s exodus of native-born New Yorkers and influx of Asian and Latin American immigrants fractured the city’s moderate Democratic core, weakening the traditional working-class anchor. By 1982, this upheaval had left neighborhoods and schools vulnerable to discord, eroding civic cohesion.

De Blasio’s landslide victory in 2013, amplified by a wave of out-of-state idealists staffing nonprofits and city agencies, marked the onset of an aggressive leftward drift that prioritized bureaucratic virtue signaling over fiscal responsibility.

By 2020, the Democratic Socialists of America were leveraging immigrant and nonprofit networks to topple veteran incumbents and mainstream radical policy. By 2023, the continuing migrant crisis exacerbated city dysfunction, empowering nonprofit-working newcomers and public-sector zealots to push policy further into socialist territory.

The story of Mamdani is the story of a city reshaped by mass third-world immigration and a homegrown leftist influx. It is a narrative of displacement — of traditional New Yorkers pushed to the margins, of neighborhoods transformed, and of economic and cultural institutions stressed by policies favoring redistribution over productivity.

His ascent is not a mere electoral anomaly but the predictable outcome of demographic and political engineering that elevates immigrant votes, noncommercial employment, and leftist fervor above the interests of long-established families and private enterprise.

Mamdani represents the confluence of mass immigration and anti-capitalist leftism, a combination capable of altering property markets, public services, fiscal stability, and global financial influence. It is also has venomous designs for whites and Jews, even as certain of these groups cheer their own downfall.

Mamdani’s policies threaten to ripple across the nation, fueling leftist radicalism, rallying mindless prejudices, and destabilizing long-standing institutions that sustain prosperity. For Americans invested in strong borders, stable communities, and thriving private enterprise, this is more than politics. It is a wake-up call.

New Yorkers and the nation alike are witnessing the consequences of long-term experiments in open borders and leftist governance. Mamdani’s ascendancy is neither accidental nor unopposed. It is a direct product of a city’s transformation through left-lurching immigration policies and the cultivation of a grievance-driven electorate, increasingly divorced from the realities of sustaining economic and social stability.

The impending election is thus a referendum not just on a candidate but on the very future of New York City and, by extension, the health of American civic life itself.

[JS: Be sure to vsit "Mamdani's Grocery", when you're in NYC...]

A Day In The Life.

Up at 5:30a on Friday, a cold 37°F, but no frost here, 0-DARK-THIRTY, I made coffee, tried to shake the 'cobwebs' from my brain, scanned the weather and news, and tuned into the "CP Show LIVE", scanned the news headlines and weather forecast. Coffee was great, and I got ready for the day. For the 2nd day, I had the heat on for a while, at 74°, to take the chill off the condo. I tuned into the "CS Show LIVE", scanned the news and weather, and waiting for sunrise.

Dave and Ian arrived around 10, got to work on the front/back gardens, after conferring w/ me, about what two perennials (Oriental Poppy, Helleborus) I wanted left up for the Winter. The condo's gardens looked great when they finished, I tipped them each $50, and they left to finish-up Sis' maintenance and conifer installation. I had a quick lunch and Sherry arrived around 1p. We had a wonderful 4hrs+ together, before she left, and we'll talk over the weekend to plan a day together, for next week.

American Bald Eagle

I had dinner, watched the 6p evening news, switched to History's "Ancient Aliens", MotorTrend's "Roadworthy Rescues" and the 11p news update. Rain coming from an unnamed Tropical Storm Nor'easter moving up the East Coast. Fine and dandy, IMO. Lights out at 12.

Awake and up at 8a on Saturday, a cloudy, ready-to-rain, breezy, 47° morning. I made coffee, had an onion bagel, scanned the news and weather, and listened to a Podcast of the "CP Show" from the past week. Sis and a friend were nearby at the wonderful restaurant & saloon, First Post, here in East York, called and will bring some take-out for me, so I waited until 2p, and then went on my errand run. Traffic was the usual heavy for a Saturday, and I got home at 3:45, unloaded bags of Rxs, more food than I'd planned and other stuff. I re-scanned the news and finished-up some minor condo chores.

Heck, I forgot to mention yesterday: I was outside on the front lawn, and as Dave and Ian were finishing-up my landscape maintenance, 4 American Bald Eagles were circling overhead, probably looking for a meal on the ground, and screeching in their very unique way. They were circling at 500-700ft, but would drop down to `150-200ft, and we could see a lot of detail and hear very distinctly. A truly amazing, perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime sight.

I checked and rechecked the AccuWeather.com's radar maps, all day, as the unnamed Nor'easter was being tracked coming up the East Coast. Shore and coastal areas are taking it in the face, but inland is only getting showers and passing storm cells, as it slowly moves north. We had some nice rain by late afternoon, and into the night. I switched to NEWSMAX for TV news, but always relied on Mr HP, the desktop. After crabcakes and fries for dinner, I switched to Discovery's "Expedition X", and MotorTrend's "Garage Squad", until 12:30a, and unplugged.

Sleeping-in until 10a on Sunday, a cloudy, cool 54°, I made coffee, fired-up the Ol' HP Desktop, made Biscuits & Sausage Gravy for breakfast, and scanned the news and weather on the PC. After finally waking-up with a carafe of Kenya AA Coffee, I started the 2 loads of laundry, and some other usual Sunday chores.

No F1 GP race today; the US GP is next Sunday. Sherry called to say she'd be by after 4p. The big, unnamed storm -- L95 as the weather folks call it -- is still working it's way up the East Coast. If it had been a snowstorm in Winter, we'd all be buried. Sherry arrived around 4:30, and we had a nice time together. After she left around 6, I took out the recycle bin, watched the FNC's pathetic excuse for weekend news, had dinner and switched to History's "American Pickers" until 12 midnight, and bagged it for the day.

Awake at 6a when the garbage truck went thru, I rolled over and slept until 9a, on Monday, a rainy, cold 48° morning. After starting coffee, I tuned into the "CP Show LIVE" from 9-12, got ready for the day, and the usual Monday trip down south... today's a holiday, so I called DeVono's Cleaners to see if they were open. They are -- no rest for the weary. I know that feeling, for the 23yrs I was in business. I left at 12:30p to get 3 errands done, and traffic was heavy, as usual. Happy Columbus Day

. F*ck that "Indigenous Peoples Day" Crap!

Back by 1:15, I unloaded, had Crab Soup, a Lobster Roll and French Fries for lunch. The rain continued, as I tuned into the "RC Show LIVE", and I began eyeing the LR couch, for later. Nope, not today. Chad stopped by to install a new garbage disposal, and that ate-up much of the mid and late afternoon, so I decided to get to sleep early, and since my cleaning lady's in at 8:30a, I'll be getting up at 0-DARK-THIRTY, again.

I watched the evening news, had dinner, and switched to History's "Ancient Aliens" and NotorTrend's "Iron Resurrection", until 11:30. Lights out.

Frost warnings are in effect.

Up at 6a with the alarm, on Tuesday, a cold and damp 53°, I fired-up the furnace for 20mins, made coffee, had some smokes in the garage, and tuned into the "CS Show LIVE" while scanning the news and weather. JoAnne arrived at 8:30 and got to work. I tuned into the "CP Show LIVE" until 10, and left for my 10:40a Dr's app't, knowing that construction choke point delays might hamper the 15-20min drive.

The Nor'easter finally cleared our area, and moved-up the East Coast into New England, but not before doing damage to a lot of coastal communities and beaches. That's to be expected for anyone living along coastal area. I recorded almost 2" of rain.

The Dr's app't went well, and I was back home by noon. After lunch, I had a small pile of paperwork on my desk, to get to. I took a nice 2hr nap, and got back to the paperwork, until the evening news came on FNC. I watched Discovery's "Homestead Rescue" and History's "Ancient Aliens" until midnight, and unplugged.

Up at 9:30a on Wednesday, a bright, sunny 57°, breezy morning, soon to cloud over for the day. I fired-up the furnace, made coffee, tuned into the "CP Show LIVE" and relaxed. I had some stuff to do: PA Driver's License Renewal, PA CCW (Concealed Carry) Permit Renewal, and AAA PA Membership Renewal. I got the DL Renewal done, spent almost 2hrs of the CCW Renewal (had to upload [pics of several documents) and *tried* to grab a nap, mid-afternoon. But that didn't work; too many incoming phone calls. 2 financial calls coming tomorrow from my W-F Brokers.

Up at 9:15a on Thursday, a sunny, windy, cold 46° morning, I upped the heat, made coffee and tuned into the ongoing "CP Show LIVE". I have a W-F call at 11a, from the Brokerage side, and another at 1p, from the Banking side of W-F, to set the path set for my 2026 Investments and Tax Strategy. Good call, with Jay. I had lunch, did 2 errands, parked the Jeep back in the garage, and worked on a little paperwork. By 3, I'd had enough -- my eyes were crossed -- so I took a 2hr snooze on the LR couch, had the rest of the morning's coffee, and watched the evening news.

TV offerings tonite: choices between MT's "Roadworthy Rescues", History's "Ancient Aliens" and the usual FMC Crap. "Nothing to write home about". Soon, it was 11:30, and I bagged it for the night.

Tomorrow starts a new week, here in the "Journal" and, with the exception of taking Sis to and from the Dr's exam, I have a clear week. But not for lohg, as they always fill-up over the prior weekend. Natch.

Democrats Are Giving Up On Democracy.

Tectonic plates are shifting in the American polity. A new dynamic is emerging, and a big part of that new dynamic is a Democratic Party and a political left that is no longer concerned with persuasion or negotiation, no longer willing to chase after popular legitimacy or win over public opinion, but is so convinced in the righteousness and urgency of its cause that it believes it must resort to force. It doesn’t matter how unpopular Democrats’ policies are, they are not going to negotiate, they are not going to compromise.

I’m not just referring to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, or the two assassination attempts against President Trump, or the weaponization of the federal government under Biden, or the ongoing Antifa riots in Portland, or the violent rhetoric embraced by the mainstream Democrats who still support Jay Jones for attorney general in Virginia even after he fantasized about killing Republican Todd Gilbert.

I don’t just mean that left-wing influencers like Hasan Piker and Destiny regularly call for violence against the right, or that media darlings like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ezra Klein publicly muse about whether it would be better to negotiate with conservatives, lie to them, or force policies on them against their will.

And I’m not merely thinking of rogue federal judges, like the one who gave Nicholas Roske — who now identifies as a trans woman named “Sophie” — a light sentence for attempting to assassinate U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, or the parade of liberal judges who have tried to shut down the Trump administration’s agenda through a deluge of nationwide injunctions and temporary restraining orders, many of which have been overturned by higher courts.

It’s all of these things, but it’s also the recent pattern of behavior by the Democratic Party establishment, which seems totally uninterested in winning anyone over or engaging in democratic politics at all.

Consider the government shutdown, now nearly two weeks old. Unless you consume some form of increasingly irrelevant corporate news product, where the shutdown is being covered merely as a means of attacking President Trump, you might not even know about it. In an earlier time — before Covid, before mass immigration, before the normalization of political assassinations and violent political rhetoric — a government shutdown would have dominated the news cycle and the broader discourse.

This shutdown, by contrast, is practically a non-event. To the extent it is even registering with Americans, they oppose the shutdown. A Harvard CAPS-Harris poll this week found 70 percent of respondents are against the shutdown, and 65 percent think Senate Democrats should end it by accepting the spending bill already passed by the House, which simply carries forward Biden-era spending levels. But because the bill in question doesn’t include health care subsidies for certain classes of illegal immigrants, Democrats have decided to shut down the government.

They even think that their position is somehow getting stronger as the shutdown drags on. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declared on Thursday: “Each day our case to fix health care and end the shutdown gets better and better.”

Setting aside that no one really believes Democrats have a case, much less a plan or even a desire, to fix health care, it’s a strange hill Democrats have chosen to die on, politically. As my colleague Brianna Lyman explained last week, the foreign nationals Democrats want to include in federally subsidized health care are people who under normal circumstances would have been detained and deported. The only reason they’re in the U.S. right now is because the Biden administration applied an unprecedented and legally dubious reading to a section of federal immigration law that allowed for the “parole” of certain illegal aliens only on a case-by-case basis. Under Biden, millions of illegal immigrants were “paroled” under this provision.

Not only do Democrats oppose the deportation of these people, they want to give them federal health care subsidies while they live and work in the U.S. for years on end waiting for the outcome of asylum cases that 90 percent of them will lose. Democrats, incredibly, decided to shut down the government over these subsidies — and then expected ordinary Americans to care.

This follows a curious recent pattern of Democrats getting on the wrong side of the American public on issue after issue. Another Harvard CAPS-Harris poll, released last week, shows a whopping 78 percent of respondents support deporting illegal immigrants who have committed crimes. This includes 69 percent of Democrats and 87 percent of Republicans. Criminal illegal aliens are of course the very people Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are out there arresting. They are doing so amid protests and threats and sometimes rioting from Antifa activists, whose views on this issue seem to be shared by Democrat officer-holders — and almost no one else.

It’s actually worse than that for Democrats. The same poll found 56 percent of respondents support the deportation of all illegal immigrants, criminal or not, including 36 percent of Democrats and 76 percent of Republicans. Sixty-eight percent, including a majority of Democrats, support closing the border entirely and enacting policies that deter illegal immigration. Fifty-five percent support using the U.S. military to stop illegal immigration. A majority support using the National Guard and active-duty military to police America’s large cities and reduce crime.

These popular policies — strict immigration enforcement, closing the border, imposing law and order in crime-ridden cities — are precisely the policies Democrats cite when they accuse President Trump of imposing fascist or authoritarian rule. They don’t seem to care that most Americans want these policies and voted for Trump so he would enact them. Instead of trying to persuade Americans that they have a better plan to accomplish the things voters say they want, Democrats are rallying against those things. Their argument, to the extend they have one, is that they know better than the American people. They will tell you what you want.

This isn’t merely abstract or rhetorical. The Democratic mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, signed an executive order Monday establishing ICE-free zones. The Democratic governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, is suing the Trump administration over the deployment of the National Guard to enforce federal immigration laws in that state. No amount of polling data, or actual election results, will deter Democrats like these from resisting broadly popular policies if they conflict with their party’s left-wing orthodoxy.

The same goes for issues like transgender ideology and medical care, or unrestricted abortion-on-demand. It doesn’t matter how unpopular the Democrat position is with actual Americans, their ideological priors prevent them from reconsidering or even negotiating with the other side — even when the other side outnumbers them seven to one. This week Katie Porter, a former Democratic congresswomen who is (or was) the frontrunner in the California governor’s race, scoffed at a CBS News reporter who asked how she planned to win over Trump voters. The idea that she needed to win those votes, and that a reporter would dare to ask her about it, was ridiculous and offensive to Porter. When the reporter pushed back, Porter threatened to walk out of the interview.

Democrats, in other words, are giving up on democracy. Maybe they were never interested in it to begin with. In the same way the corporate news media has given up on reporting in favor of propaganda, Democrats have given up on persuasion in favor of coercion. Public opinion, after all, can be a great obstacle to revolution, which is what today’s Democrats are after. Back in 2008 when Obama said just days before his victory that he meant to “fundamentally transform” the United States of America, he might have been forgiven for thinking the people were on his side, that his was a popular revolution.

No one would make that mistake now. The people are not on Democrats’ side, but the Democrats don’t care. If you disagree with their revolution, you’d better watch out. They are done talking.

What is Power For?

Now, try to imagine Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (Jabba the Pritzker) as a Confederate general, his juddering bulk astride a panting war-horse, as he gallops into battle against federal positions in Millennium Park, Chicago... Yeah, in the immortal words of Homey D. Clown, I don’t think so. Yet these seem to be the fantasies typically entertained in our times by the Big Dawgs of the Democratic Party: a confederacy of dweebs. Ordinary judicial proceedings become impracticable when the people paid to execute federal law coordinate to prevent its execution.

While Mr. Trump uses presidential power to bring the Gaza War to resolution, officials in the Party of Chaos, distributed through the federal bureaucracy, and down into the state and city ranks, maneuver to ignite Civil War 2.0 in our country. They seem to be mighty pissed-off about something, but what could it really be? Surely not just the removal by deportation of countless border jumpers they ushered in during the baleful term of “Joe Biden” to beef-up their voter rolls.

No, what galls them is the sheer hemorrhaging of their power. The people of this land increasingly reject them and their insane claims and are walking away from the party, at the same time that Mr. Trump seeks to methodically disassemble the scaffold of all their roguery because it is bent on wrecking the republic.

What was their power for? I will tell you: nothing more than maintaining that scaffold, which was a colossal racketeering operation, a matrix of money-flows at every level from the cash payments to their sniveling nose-ring foot-soldiers marshaled outside the ICE buildings, to the many thousands employed by Woke foundations, think tanks, and NGOs, to the grifters of the teachers’ union, to the mayors, governors, and bureaucratic myrmidons of “sanctuary” cities and states, to the federal agency goldbricks and “Trump resisters,” to the zillion-dollar stock portfolios of their avatars such as Nancy Pelosi, AOC, Ilhan Omar, Sheldon Whitehouse, and Adam Schiff, to the accounts receivable of the Lawfare firms run by Norm Eisen and Marc Elias, to the bonuses of worker bees in foundering news orgs such as The New York Times (Michael Schmidt) and MSNBC (Nicolle Wallace).

That is the beginning and end of their power-seeking: one big moneygrubbing racket. The Party existed solely for the sustenance of the Party, a political tautology in living color. Everything else — their idiotic “policies,” their gender madness, their race hustles, even the mutual admiration of Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel — was noise, sturm and drang, gaslight, pretend. . . finally vectoring toward treason. The sedition it underwrote had a single purpose: to destroy the one figure seeking to end the rackets, the duly-elected Mr. Trump. Their great frustration in failing to accomplish that, and his terrifying return to the Oval Office in 2025 after monumental efforts to banish, ruin, imprison, and kill him, has driven them bats[**]t crazy. So, now they’re all-in for Civil War 2.0.

The Democratic Party grift machine was kind of the modern reincarnation of the old “Spoils System” of government from the late 19th century (“To the victor go the spoils”). But back then, it was strictly government jobs for the connected. There was no giant asteroid belt of subversive service orgs, no NGOs or think tanks that flourish today around Washington. Of course, the Spoils System blossomed after the terrible ordeal of Civil War 1.0, and the last thing the grifters aimed to do was undermine the golden goose of government. They just wanted them golden eggs. Anyway, the whole wicked business got the kibosh when Congress passed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883.

But as things will in history — which rhymes, as you know — the Spoils System was reincarnated in a new-and-improved guise by the Democratic Party under Barack Obama and finally burgeoned into a gigantic, demonic, criminal enterprise under Mr. Obama’s stand-in, “Joe B,” himself a connoisseur of bribery and money-laundering.

So, the Democratic Party appears now to be moving into overt insurrection, for the very purpose of goading Mr. Trump into declaring insurrection, in order to put down the insurrection they are ginning up around the country. And that way, they get to label him “a tyrant” so as to persuade the voters to keep the party of Chaos in office to “fight for our democracy” — meaning, to keep all their rackets going.

I doubt that Mr. Trump will shrink from the challenge, certainly not because a gang of sycophant federal judges issue injunctions against his exercise of constitutional power — that is, the power to preserve, protect, and defend the reasons for our existence as a nation.