Editors at National Review Online question one of the new New York City mayor’s high-profile hires.
Venture aloud that the new mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, might just have a touch of the communist about him, and you will run immediately into a wall of indignant pedantry. “He’s not a communist,” his apologists will insist. He’s a “communitarian.” Other preferred substitutions include “collectivist,” “Fabian,” “democratic socialist,” and, in the less intellectually inclined depths of the well, “just, like, someone who cares about other people.”
Whatever. A commie by any other name still smells as foul. Besides, far more important than whether Mamdani wishes to be more closely associated with the Judean People’s Front or the People’s Front of Judea is what he is actually doing with his power — and, alas, what Mamdani is actually doing with his power is appointing lunatics such as Cea Weaver to run the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. Given that New York City has more people living in rented housing than any other American city has residents, this is a position from which a great deal of mischief can be made.
If Cea Weaver did not exist, one would be hard-pressed to invent her. Weaver seems to have been designed in a laboratory to work in the Ideological Compliance Department of the East German Kommunale Wohnungsverwaltung, but, as the result of an unfortunate accident with a time machine, ended up overseeing housing policy in the most important city in the United States. She believes that “rent control is a perfect solution to everything” — not least because it is an “effective way to shrink the value of real estate.” She considers that “private property is a weapon of white supremacy,” she believes that “homeownership is racist,” and she holds that the highest aim of government ought to be to “impoverish the *white* middle class.” And they say that ambition is dead in America!
