By Selwyn Duke
“Suppression is necessary because the bourgeoisie [middle class] will always furiously resist being expropriated.” So wrote Russian Revolution author Vladimir Lenin in 1918. Fast-forward exactly a century and this spirit not only lives on, but with a racial (and racist) spin.
Just consider New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s “tenant advocate” appointee Cea Weaver. “Impoverish the ‘white’ middle class,” she wrote on X in 2018. “Homeownership [sic] is racist,” she continued — “failed public policy.”
Weaver isn’t alone. Mamdani’s ex-director of appointments, Catherine Almonte Da Costa, wrote in 2016, “It’s important that white people feel defeated” (tweet below).
(Does this help explain the war on whites — especially white men — in which they’re systematically denied jobs? It certainly does align with it.)
Da Costa was still banging this drum four years later, too. “For so long power has been in the hands of men and/or white people,” she complained in 2020. “It has brought us to ruin.”
Da Costa is an ex-director, by the way, because she was forced to resign on December 18. This wasn’t because of her anti-white sentiments, though, but because of anti-Jewish social media posts she’d disgorged.
There’s every reason to believe this is not a Mamdani-administration bug but a feature, too. After all, his own platform called for raising taxes on “richer and whiter neighborhoods.”
“Seize Private Property!”
In his Second Treatise of Government, British philosopher John Locke expressed that governments exist to protect “life, liberty, and property.” This not only might have inspired Thomas Jefferson’s “Life, liberty…” Declaration of Independence line, but became a quintessential American idea.
It’s not at all a socialist one, though. In fact, stated Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their Communist Manifesto (1848), “The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”
It’s also not a Mamdani administration idea, apparently. As Breitbart wrote Monday about appointee Weaver:
“We’ll transition from treating property as an individual good to a collective good,” she promises. “Whites especially will be impacted.”
It gets worse.
Weaver, who is officially Mamdani’s Director of the City Office to Protect Tenants, called to “Seize private property!” back in 2018.
The following year, she said, “Private property, including any kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership, is a weapon of white supremacy.”
She has since deleted the X account where these fascist and racist comments were made, but the Internet is forever.
Regardless, unless she publicly backs off these comments, deleting them can only mean she has not changed her views but is looking to hide her true beliefs.
In 2017, Weaver wrote on X, “Elect more communists,” and in Mamdani, she has her man. After being sworn in as mayor, Mamdani quickly laid the groundwork to seize private property.
Breitbart then linked to the explanatory tweet below.
Deadly Marxism — Updated for the Third Millennium
This Marxism with a racial twist isn’t surprising. And its introduction is largely explained by the wealth market economics provides — and the diversity countries embracing it may develop. (I.e., they attract people from the world over seeking to share in the prosperity.)
That is to say, early-1900s Russia was relatively poor but also relatively homogeneous. The latter made racial divide-and-conquer politics impossible while the former made class-oriented divide-and-conquer politics plausible.
It’s the opposite in the United States today: We’re far richer, but also quite balkanized. So, sure, class-oriented appeals (“No one should be a billionaire!”) can and do still work, given fallen man’s inherent envy. At the same time, racial appeals also work, with demagogues casting whites as the wealthy, oppressor class.
Put simply, demonized in 1917 Russia was the bourgeoisie. In 2026 America it’s whites — or as Weaver essentially puts it, the white bourgeoisie.
(Never mind that Asian-descent Americans earn more than whites. Demagogues conveniently ignore this truth.)
Vis-à-vis housing, the tragedy here is that the socialists would resurrect the very standard they rail against. Marx complained that property was in the hands of one-tenth of the population. He wasn’t all wrong, either. Yet his solution, in practice, was to transfer the property from that 10 percent to less than one percent of the population — the people in government.
The real remedy is what’s called the “American dream,” a big part of which is home ownership. It’s a reality, too: A whopping 65.6 percent of American households, approximately, own their primary residence.
Solutions, Not Worn-out Socialism
Now, it is true that attaining this American-dream prerequisite has become more difficult in recent decades. The price of housing has, after all, increased at a rate greatly surpassing that of inflation. But the solution to high housing costs is twofold. First, build more housing to increase supply.
Second, facilitate this — and lower housing’s price tag — by cutting regulation. As I’ve pointed out recently, post-1980 regulations have increased housing’s costs in highly regulated markets by up to 60 percent.
This is not Mayor Mamdani’s prescription, however. In fact, he’s actually echoed the communist dogma that the “abolition of private property” is “preferable” to the status quo.
Don’t be surprised, either. The foreign-born mayor is a man who said in his recent inaugural address that he’s going to replace “rugged individualism” with “the warmth of collectivism.” (Video below. Relevant portion begins at 1:00.)
More striking still, Mamdani stated while addressing supporters in 2021 that their ultimate goal was “seizing the means of production.” (Video below.) This, of course, is the central communist dogma.
Note how after quickly uttering the “seizing” line, Mamdani broke into a big Cheshire Cat smile.
But, hey, don’t go sayin’ he’s a commie or anything, you partisan. He’s a “democratic socialist.”
Of course, “socialist” is what communists have always called themselves. Why, the USSR stood for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
So what can we conclude about the fortunes of a Big Apple ridden with Mamdani worms? Well, Escape From New York was a 1981 film. Now, perhaps, it may become a reality.
This article was originally published at The New American.
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