The Irony of Zohran Mamdani’s Socialist Radicalism

Zohran Mamdani’s first months in office have confirmed his radical socialism—but his family’s experience in Africa makes this worldview very surprising.

The argument: Zohran Mamdani’s P.R. campaign surrounding the launch of his mayoral administration’s first budget for New York City reveals an unapologetic “tax the rich” strategy that always ends in disaster, and nobody should know that better than the Mamdani family.

WHY IT MATTERS

A now-viral official video released on Tax Day features Mayor Zohran Mamdani energetically announcing that he has followed through on his Orwellian campaign promise to “tax the rich.” The video, filmed outside a penthouse owned by Ken Griffin, CEO of Citadel Advisors, specifically references him as a target of the new tax scheme. Understandably, the targeted threat in the video sparked a response. Griffin soon announced that he was exploring shifting his company’s primary presence to Florida, a state that “embraces personal freedom and liberty…and the opportunity for people to live the American dream…of earned success.”

Zohran Mamdani’s father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a radical leftist academic who was born in India and raised in Uganda as part of a small, yet wealthy and powerful South Asian minority. This community traced its presence in Africa to the 1890s and controlled 90% of the nation’s wealth by the time Idi Amin seized power via a military coup in 1971. The next year Amin expelled Ugandans of South Asian descent. He gave them 90 days to leave the country and forced them to leave their wealth behind.

The future mayor of New York City was born in Uganda after his father was able to return for several years to teach at a university. The family ultimately settled in New York City. By this time, it was clear that the anti-elite policies of Amin had wreaked economic and social destruction. The expelled families left behind everything:homes, cars, bank accounts, businesses, and farms. The economy collapsed, inflation soared, and Uganda became an international pariah. The elder Mamdani spent several months living in a refugee camp in the United Kingdom.

Zohran Mamdani’s economic policies may be more polite and refined than the brutish and shocking forced expulsion commanded by Amin. But at the heart of each policy is a fundamental similarity. Both leaders targeted the wealthy as a class that is thriving off the oppression of ordinary people. Mamdani has promised that “global elites” who “store their wealth in New York City real estate” are now going to “pay their fare share.” Amin, meanwhile, announced a “deliberate policy…to transfer the economic control of Uganda into the hands of Ugandans.”

The mainstream media is praising Mamdani for “solving the New York City’s budget crisis.” And it may be that the patchwork of a New York state infusion of cash along with exorbitant tax penalties for New York’s wealthy have bridged a $12 billion deficit for a budget that allocates more than $80,000 annually for each homeless person in the city. But Mamdani’s extremist policies will only make New York less hospitable to those seeking economic opportunities that can and do benefit all New Yorkers without the need to fan the flames of class warfare and envy.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Zohran Mamdani’s family experienced firsthand the results of government policies that deliberately target the very people and companies creating jobs, expanding a city’s tax base, and philanthropically contributing to civic life. How ironic and tragic that he failed to learn the lesson that these policies always lead to disaster—and will for New York, too.