Category: The American Spectator
Mamdani sells socialism — and Republicans peddle the Temu version
New York City has elected a self-professed socialist as mayor. Critics worry about Zohran Mamdani’s inexperience, his approach to law and order, and his views on Israel and Islamic radicalism. But the most urgent issue inside the walls of City Hall is his economic agenda.
Mamdani promises “free” bus transit, a freeze on rent increases, a $30 minimum wage, government-run grocery stores, free child care, and higher taxes in a city already crushed by some of the nation’s highest tax burdens. His brand of socialism isn’t subtle. It’s explicit — and guaranteed to fail.
A movement confident in free enterprise can beat socialism — first in the arena of ideas, then at the ballot box. But only if we choose clarity over imitation.
Many on the right treat Mamdani’s victory as cosmic justice for a deep-blue city that keeps moving left. Others welcome his rise, convinced that showcasing a hard-left mayor will repel voters nationwide. That might be true. It might also be fantasy.
New Yorkers didn’t elect Mamdani so conservatives could score a talking point. His win advances ideas — and conservatives must decide whether they still believe ours are better.
When the right copies the left
Mocking government-run grocery stores is easy. Yet national Republicans just embraced government ownership in Intel — a massive corporation that dwarfs any Manhattan supermarket. Some even support a federal sovereign wealth fund to buy equity across private industry, handing Washington the power to pick winners.
Mamdani demonizes Wall Street and high earners who keep the city solvent. Republicans respond by demonizing “big pharma” and pushing policies that treat major U.S. innovators as villains.
Mamdani wants to redistribute income with New York’s already-extreme tax code. Some on the right now call for $2,000 government checks to lower-income households — financed with borrowed money and paid back by business owners already hit with $350 billion in new tariff taxes this year.
Mamdani would freeze rents because, in his telling, landlords “make a killing.” His economics ignore taxes, insurance, utilities, and maintenance costs that devour margins across New York’s rental market. Yet GOP proposals on health care routinely blame insurers for “making a killing while the little guy suffers.” The overlap with left-wing rhetoric isn’t coincidence. It’s drift.
High grocery prices fuel Mamdani’s push for government-run grocery stores. He blames “capitalistic greed.” Republicans answered high beef prices by accusing meat companies of “price fixing.” Again, the same logic — just delivered with a different logo.
Resurrecting failed policies
Mamdani’s worldview mirrors the same interventionist thinking that powered the Affordable Care Act. Subsidies, mandates, and price controls promised relief. They delivered higher premiums, higher costs, and lower-quality care.
Conservatives should highlight that failure. Instead, too many mimic the left’s solutions — regulation dressed up as populism, government expansion sold as “tough on corporations,” and class warfare renamed as “standing up for workers.”
If Mamdani’s win teaches anything, it’s that conservatives must draw a bright line: free enterprise or the road to socialism. Blurring that line weakens the argument and cedes the moral ground socialism feeds on.
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Bettmann/Getty Images
The real fight
The conservative movement faces serious internal debates — debates worth having. But Mamdani’s election exposes one fight we cannot dodge: the fight for limited government and competitive markets.
We cannot counter socialism with lighter versions of the same policies. We cannot attack Mamdani’s economic program while pushing our own price controls, government takeovers, and redistribution schemes. A movement that refuses to defend free enterprise won’t defeat socialism. It won’t even understand the threat.
Mamdani comes into office with plenty of flaws. New Yorkers will feel the consequences soon enough. But conservatives face a choice: defend our own principles or mimic the left and call it “the new right.”
A movement confident in free enterprise can beat socialism — first in the arena of ideas, then at the ballot box. But only if we choose clarity over imitation.
Utah Republicans just let Democrats steal a seat they could never win
A Utah judge just turned a safe Republican congressional seat into a near-guaranteed Democrat seat — and she did it in a state controlled top to bottom by Republicans. How does that happen? A generation of weak Republicans in the elected branches handed liberals control of the judicial branch and gave them the ballot initiative system they needed to take over the state piece by piece.
Democrats can’t win statewide office in half the country, so they’ve turned ballot initiatives into their weapon of choice. Pollsters craft soothing messaging, activists gather signatures, and voters — thinking they’re supporting neutrality — unknowingly approve measures that shift power to Democrats.
Supermajority states serve as a control group. The problem isn’t power; the problem is the GOP’s refusal to wield it.
The “nonpartisan redistricting commission” scam remains their most effective tool. These commissions always promise fairness, and they always produce more Democratic seats.
Utah proved the point in 2018, when 66% of voters approved Proposition 4, even though most Utahns don’t want Democrats running the state. The same tactic produced Medicaid expansion and marijuana legalization. None of these measures would have survived the legislature — but they passed once voters encountered them in isolation.
James Madison warned against pure democracy for this exact reason. A republic draws authority from the “great body of the society,” not from a small faction or self-appointed elite. Ballot-initiative commissions flip that logic on its head. They let unelected actors redraw power for themselves.
Here comes the judge
After the 2020 census, Utah’s legislature drew a fourth Republican congressional seat, as the state constitution requires. Democrats and their allies at the League of Women Voters sued to nullify the map and force a Salt Lake-centered Democrat seat.
In August, Third District Judge Dianna Gibson obliged. She declared the legislature’s map unconstitutional because, in her view, it ignored Prop. 4 — even though the constitution explicitly vests redistricting power in the legislature. She ordered a new process for 2026 and told both sides to submit maps.
The GOP-controlled legislature complied, proposing a compromise map and passing SB 1011 to impose “partisan fairness” tests on future redistricting so the commission couldn’t hand Democrats a permanent advantage.
Gibson ignored all of it. On Nov. 10, she tossed the legislative map, sidelined SB 1011, and adopted the map drawn by the very activist groups suing the state — the same groups that engineered Prop. 4.
Plainly unconstitutional
Nothing in Utah’s constitution supports what Gibson did. Article IX, Section 1 states that the legislature “shall divide the state” into congressional districts. A commission cannot do it. A judge cannot do it. Activists certainly cannot do it.
Yet Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson signed off on Gibson’s map, even though state law required her to certify only lawful maps. That decision reflects a deeper problem: Too many Utah Republicans treat constitutional violations as minor inconveniences and concede ground to Democrats who never reciprocate.
Democrats defend Gibson’s ruling by citing Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission (2015), when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg reinterpreted the word “legislature” to include ballot initiatives. Even if you grant that tortured reading of the U.S. Constitution, Utah’s constitution is far more explicit. Only the legislature draws maps.
RELATED: Democrats crown judges while crying about kings
Eric Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Make impeachment great again
At the federal level, impeachment has become an empty threat. Senate math makes convictions nearly impossible. But red states with Republican supermajorities don’t face that obstacle.
Utah’s legislature holds a 61-14 majority in the House and a 22-6 majority in the Senate. Rep. Trevor Lee (R-Utah) on my show last week called for the impeachment of both Judge Gibson and Lt. Gov. Henderson for violating the state constitution. Republicans have the votes to do it — and the constitutional duty to rein in judicial usurpation.
Other states have shown it can be done. In 2018, West Virginia impeached all five members of its Supreme Court for corruption and removed them. Red states such as Oklahoma, Montana, Missouri, and South Carolina face the same problem Utah now faces: liberal judges empowered by timid Republicans.
A perilous path
Utah proves a point conservatives hate to admit. Republicans in Washington often claim they can’t implement the party’s agenda because they lack power. But in Utah, Republicans hold all the power — and still refuse to use it. They allow commissions to override them, courts to embarrass them, and Democrats to seize ground they could never win through elections.
Supermajority states serve as a control group. The problem isn’t power; the problem is the GOP’s refusal to wield it.
Unless Republicans act with conviction, Utah will follow Colorado’s path. Democrats chipped away at Colorado one institution at a time while Republicans shrugged. Now Colorado is a Democratic Party fortress.
Utah is heading down the same trail — unless Republicans use the constitutional tools they still possess.
Mamdani Adviser Used ‘Jew’ as a Slur and Praised Iran’s President for Calling Israel a ‘Cancer’
A top adviser on New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s (D.) transition team slurred Jews, praised vilely anti-Semitic former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for saying Israel is a “cancer which will be eliminated very soon,” and called Israel a “bloody country,” according to social media posts uncovered Sunday.
The post Mamdani Adviser Used ‘Jew’ as a Slur and Praised Iran’s President for Calling Israel a ‘Cancer’ appeared first on .
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The early social media reviews of Cruz’s 2028 POTUS trial balloon are in
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R) dropped out of the 2016 presidential race after his crushing defeat in the Indiana Republican primary by then-candidate Donald Trump. It seems that Cruz did not, however, drop his aspirations of one day taking the White House.
Cruz kept his powder dry during the 2020 presidential election and, in 2024, successfully ran for a third term in the U.S. Senate. Now, the 54-year-old Calgary-born senator appears to be preparing for a 2028 presidential bid.
Unfortunately for Cruz, MAGA influencers do not appear too impressed by his recent attacks on Tucker Carlson, which some regard as proxy attacks on Vice President JD Vance, who is far and away the 2028 Republican front-runner, by even Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s admission.
‘Cruz is gonna have a tough time.’
On Monday, Axios highlighted a number of signs that Cruz is indeed “laying the groundwork” for a 2028 bid, such as hitting the speaker circuit, endorsing midterm candidates, and securing a date to host a big donor retreat next year.
The liberal publication suggested further that it’s clear from his recent salvo against Tucker Carlson that Cruz is simultaneously courting powerful pro-Israel donors, some of whom aligned themselves with Nikki Haley in her humiliating 2024 GOP primary run against Trump; “staking out turf as a traditional, pro-interventionist Republican”; and setting the stage for a battle with Vance, who is not only a Carlson ally but unmistakably at odds with the tack taken by the George W. Bush-era GOP.
RELATED: Vance, Banks come out swinging against reporter attacking Tucker Carlson’s son
Photo by Al Drago-Pool/Getty Images
Axios stated that “by poking at Carlson’s isolationist foreign policy views, accusing him of anti-Semitism and more, Cruz is putting himself on a collision course with Vice President Vance.”
Vance, like Carlson, has criticized the protraction of the war in Ukraine; cautioned against new regime-change wars; emphasized that the U.S. is “not at war with Iran”; and noted that American and Israeli foreign policy are not always aligned.
Cruz has indicated that similar foreign policy views expressed by Carlson are “bat-crap crazy” and “off the rails.”
Cruz, who is reportedly set this week to address the Jewish Federations of North America’s General Assembly, has also blasted Carlson for his October interview with Nick Fuentes, whom he labeled a “little goose-stepping Nazi,” suggesting that Carlson was wrong and “complicit in evil,” not for platforming Fuentes but for failing to adequately cross-examine him.
“We have a responsibility to speak out even when it’s uncomfortable,” Cruz said in a statement to Axios. “When voices in our own movement push dangerous and misguided ideas, we can’t look the other way. I won’t hesitate to call out those who peddle destructive, vile rhetoric and threaten our principles and our future. Silence in the face of recklessness is not an option.”
While Vance — whom Fuentes routinely attacks for having a wife of Indian descent — has made expressly clear that he thinks Fuentes is a “total loser” who does not belong in the MAGA movement, others have attempted in recent days to smear Carlson and Vance with a single stroke.
Cruz’s office did not respond to Blaze News’ request for comment.
A number of MAGA influencers criticized Cruz on Monday over the poor timing of the Axios piece and/or his apparent punches in Vance’s direction.
Human Events senior editor Jack Posobiec highlighted that Cruz’s latest dig at Carlson came just hours after President Donald Trump signaled continued support for Carlson, claiming reporters “can’t tell him who to interview” and that “ultimately, people have to decide.”
Political strategist and commentator Alex Lorusso wrote, “Right after President Trump says you can’t tell Tucker Carlson who to interview, Ted Cruz says we have a ‘responsibility’ to speak out against him. He has a rude awakening coming if he wants to run for president in 2028 by positioning himself against DJT.”
Normalcy advocate Robby Starbuck wrote, “Breaking: Ted Cruz will lose the 2028 primary. He has absolutely no chance against JD Vance.”
“It’s all about principle you see,” tweeted BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre, “and that principle is power.”
The popular X user Swig noted, “Ted Cruz’s bizarre attacks on Tucker Carlson are simply a proxy attack on JD Vance. Extremely transparent game he is engaging in.”
“Judging by top MAGA influencers, Cruz is gonna have a tough time,” concluded Axios’ Marc Caputo.
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