When New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he intended to govern as a socialist, he meant it. And he is doing what any dedicated communist does when he rises to power: purge the kulaks, promote the apparatchiks.
On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Mamdani had eliminated all the businessmen and other various other civic leaders on the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City board of advisers.
The Mayor’s Fund is a nonprofit organization that aids public-private initiatives in the city. According to the city website the organization, “partners with 50 City agencies and offices, philanthropic organizations and community leaders to invest in the most urgent challenges facing New Yorkers.”
Bloomberg reported that Mamdani sent them an email thanking them for their service while informing them they would no longer be needed.
“I commend you for your dedication and the benefit you have brought to our City as you conclude your tenure on the Mayor’s Fund Board of Advisors,” the email read according to Bloomberg.
The New York Post noted that this move is highly unusual, as it marks “the first time in at least three mayoral administrations that all [board] members were let go.”
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The mayor’s office hasn’t announced who specifically will replace the business leaders on the board, but his selection for the first of the two Mayor’s Fund boards that he liquidated in April is a good clue.
“Under Mamdani, the Mayor’s Fund will look different from past administrations — centered not on corporate leadership, but on working New Yorkers and advocates who organized and fought for bold and progressive action on picket lines, protests, and public forums in their communities,” the mayor’s office said at the time.
So, the board will almost certainly be stacked by community organizers, union leaders, and other leftist loyalists, of course.
As many pointed out, purging all business leaders from an organization that ultimately must work with business and mobilize resources and replacing them with professional activists is bad city management.
“Mamdani is removing Job Creators from the Mayor’s Fund while still expecting private donors to help pay for city programs,” Republican Bruce Blakeman who is running to be the governor of New York, wrote on X. That is not a partnership. It is another attack on the employers, jobs, and investment New York needs.”
Critics are right that this is bad urban policy.
But it’s good politics, at least the kind of politics Mamdani and company understand.
You see, what Mamdani and his loyal supporters—who are now scrambling to overtake positions of power across the city—want is not necessarily effective management. That’s secondary.
No, what they aim to do is to secure power and authority. Mamdani is mobilizing an activist army in New York that will carry out his socialist ambitions.
They aren’t making the city work better for the “working class,” they are clearing the way for their ideological but mostly frustrated vanguard of activists to become the new ruling elite.
Mamdani is relentlessly ensuring that his people are placed in positions of power whenever he thinks he can get away with it while doing his best to avoid immediate blowback.
Hence why he’s purging a nonprofit board but being careful with the NYPD, which is not only keeping crime under control in the city but also represents a significant and powerful political bloc of its own.
Now, Mamdani is within his power to make these changes. And it’s generally a good idea for any executive administration to place like-minded people in positions of leadership. But what he’s doing here goes beyond that.
What Mamdani is doing is wholly stripping away what he thinks is the evil capitalist ruling class. He is methodically breaking the bones of what has been the financial capital of America and turning it into the plaything for socialist social and economic engineers.
In a sense, he is rigging the system, ensuring that everything the city does is bent toward socialist ends.
That’s a much better way of evaluating Mamdani’s actions. Far too many commentators fall into the trap of evaluating Mamdani’s policies as serious ideas to make the city more affordable for all or more functional for everyday New Yorkers. They look at his rent freeze and lament how it will destroy the housing market; they say his grocery stores will surely become wasteful money pits.
That’s all true, but I doubt the people running his administration really care.
The result will be that housing will end up being taken over by the city, it will be delivered into their hands. The money for the grocery stores will go to the people they choose even if the actual stores become little more than plundering troughs for scammers and hobos.
It doesn’t matter.
Mamdani will make another slick social media video to make it seem all right, his media cheerleaders will keep cheering, and the needs of the actual working people he’s supposedly fighting for will be forgotten.
This has happened before and it’s happening again. Maybe now more New Yorkers are finally getting buyer’s remorse.
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