Editors at National Review Online compare the New York City mayor’s rhetoric to reality.
“This new age will be one of relentless improvement,” New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani promised last November as voters handed him the keys to the city. But that was before the temperatures truly dropped.
In his inaugural address, the incoming mayor said, in one particularly tortured passage, “For too long, those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty.” Together, he added, New Yorkers are “warmed against the January chill by the resurgent flame of hope.” Through communalism, “we will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”
Unfortunately for mentally ill and addicted New Yorkers wandering the streets this winter, all the “warmth” that Mamdani said would flow from the city that’s being subjected to his socialistic experiment was entirely metaphorical.
So far, the prolonged cold snap that has settled over much of the eastern half of the United States has claimed the lives of no fewer than 13 homeless people on the streets of New York, according to the mayor’s office. In its own defense, a Mamdani administration spokesperson claimed that it had secured over “800 placements” for the homeless, but too many people continue to resist public services despite the risk of deadly exposure.
When pressed to explain why the city simply allows the noncompliant homeless to expire on the sidewalks, Mamdani explained that the city uses a variety of metrics to gauge an individual’s level of risk to themselves. “I think we can find some of this criteria also in how an individual is clothed,” he said, “whether they are deemed to actually be warmed in those settings.” Their “behavior” is also key to judging whether an individual is fit for street life.
