Yesterday, New York City voters chose radical socialist Zohran Mamdani to be their next mayor. In a fiery victory speech last night, Mamdani pledged to fulfill his pie-in-the-sky campaign promises of freezing rent for 2 million New Yorkers, making city buses free, providing free universal child care, and launching a department to take over mental health calls from the nypd.

Voters who chose this have short memories:

• Just four years after the “defund the police” movement and crime spike, voters chose a man who, in 2023, characterized the “racist, anti-queer” New York Police Department as “a major threat to public safety.” He previously called for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and prisons; now he says he wants to replace ice with a “welcoming” agency and to end mass incarceration.
• Just 24 years after Muslim terrorists perpetrated 9/11, voters elected their first Muslim mayor, a Twelver Shiite. In his victory address, Mamdani shouted, “New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants, and as of tonight, led by an immigrant!”
• Just 34 years after the collapse of the Communist Soviet Union, voters elected a democratic socialist who wants to create publicly owned grocery stores in every zip code. Last night, Mamdani promised, “We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve and no problem too small for government to care about.”

The sweeping and costly government programs Mamdani promises will be hard to find funds and political support for, and to whatever degree they are implemented, they are certain to fail—just as rent controls, wage guarantees and government-run businesses always do.

• Expect him to blame these failures not on the policies themselves but on “the rich.” To the left, failure is always proof that they need more power. Communism has only been unsuccessful, they say, because it hasn’t really been tried.

In a democracy, people get what they ask for. God said through the Prophet Hosea, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge,” and, “They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” The whirlwind is coming, and we have only ourselves to blame.