On Nov. 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell.
A scant 36 years later, on Nov. 4, 2025, America’s most populous city welcomed a “democratic socialist” with open arms.
These two things aren’t unrelated.
Zohran Mamdani’s election is the rotten fruit of the rotten tree. Good old American capitalism beat the dastardly commies in the 1980s and 1990s. That’s what our schoolbooks told us, at least. But reality is much more nuanced, and much more upsetting.
Surely, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact fell apart in the twilight decades of the 20th century. But long before that happened, communism, socialism, and Marxism had already taken root in America—in our institutions and, most importantly, in our colleges.
This wasn’t some accidental occurrence. It wasn’t even the result of Marxism being, to those unversed in economics, an appealing worldview.
It wasn’t an outgrowth of cultural nihilism and its departure from traditional religion, or the sexual revolution, or anti-war sentiment brought on by the Vietnam conflict.
Of course, all those things aided in communism’s spread through our institutions, but they’re organic, chaotic, and unplanned.
The communist infiltration of our institutions and colleges was anything but.
Herbert Marcuse, a German-born American professor, Freudo-Marxist thinker, and prominent socialist leader, details the attacks on our institutions quite clearly in his 1972 book “Counterrevolution and Revolt”:
To extend the base of the student movement, Rudi Dutschke has proposed the strategy of the long march through the institutions: working against the established institutions while working within them, but not simply by “boring from within,” rather by “doing the job,” learning (how to program and read computers, how to teach at all levels of education, how to use the mass media, how to organize production, how to recognize and eschew planned obsolescence, how to design, et cetera), and at the same time preserving one’s own consciousness in working with others.
That’s right—decades before the Soviet Union fell, socialists, communists, and Marxists had already cemented their place in our institutions, universities, and even now, in our K-12 schools.
That’s why so many young people are unversed in economics, because the serious study of economics is an antidote to socialist and communist propaganda. One of my colleagues recently quipped, “The Venn diagram of folks who are socialists and folks who just don’t understand economics is almost just a circle.”
And that’s why so many young people don’t know their history very well, because the serious study of history is an antidote to socialist and communist propaganda. We can see time and time again the failure of socialist and communist regimes throughout time and across the continents.
The decline in American education is in part unintentional laziness, but also in part an intentional decision to not teach those things which are inconvenient truths—and in doing so, water down curriculum to match. An uninformed populace is far easier to manipulate.
Socialists understand this. The Italian fascists of the early 20th Century understood this—and fascists are socialists—so they seized on education almost immediately when Mussolini came to power.
The Soviets understood this, too. My grandmother lived through the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, and the saviors they once welcomed with open arms—the Soviet army—quickly turned into an occupying force that, once they took over the government and the military, immediately went into the schools and threw out all the history and literature books so that they could be replaced with the “correct” history and literature.
How does all of this bear on the election of the “democratic socialist” in New York?
The Marxists realized that they could not beat the spirit of America in open combat. They could not bring about a communist revolt, so they turned their sights on the children.
They preyed upon, first, the college students of the ‘60s, who turned into the school teachers and parents of the ‘70s and ‘80s, who turned into the administrators and professors of the ‘90s and 2000s, and so on and so forth until today, where almost all of academia and almost all of education, kindergarten through doctoral, is blanketed in low expectations, woke social pressures, and flat-out socialist tendencies.
Mamdani had the overwhelming support of young people in New York City—kids who spent 16 or more years of their life in a socialist loving education system and who yearned for someone who would bring about all the promises that socialism makes.
This is the rotten fruit of the rotten tree. Or, as the Russians put it: От осинки не родятся апельсинки. Oranges don’t grow on a willow tree. Bad comes from bad.
Low expectations, a poor understanding of economics, and a completely anti-American historical education: Mamdani shouldn’t be a surprise. Conservatives have been asleep at the wheel and allowed our entire education system to slip away.
What else did we expect?
However, all is not lost, and while the Marxists have been winning the battle for the past few decades, there is still time and methods to reverse course.
The same week as Mamdani celebrates his election, Texas observes, on Nov. 7, Victims of Communism Day. Texas recently passed a law, SB 24, which ensures that Texas students learn the true costs of communism in K-12 education by mandating that the horrors of communism—Soviet gulags, Pol Pot’s Killing Fields, and Mao’s Great Leap Forward—are taught in an age-appropriate manner to our kids.
Additionally, the Texas State Board of Education just passed a new framework which dramatically improves history education in Texas.
There is still much to do, but these victories show us that the war is far from over, and we can start winning battles soon.
Meanwhile, socialist policies will drag NYC further into decline, and, hopefully, we’ll be able to point to them as an example.
And they, of course, will tell us that it “wasn’t real socialism” and that “true socialism has never been tried.”
But our kids will have the education to see that for the lie it is.
