Voters loved the socialist slogans. Now comes the fine print.



Zohran Mamdani’s surprise victory over Andrew Cuomo in last week’s New York City Democratic mayoral primary catapulted a full-bodied Democratic Socialist program onto the national marquee. In his midnight speech, he claimed, “A life of dignity should not be reserved for a fortunate few.” His win marks Gotham’s sharpest left turn in a generation — and that’s saying something.

The recipients of his promise are slated to receive an economic makeover that treats prices as political failures. His platform freezes rents on more than 1 million apartments, builds 200,000 publicly financed “social housing” units, rolls out city-owned grocery stores, makes buses fare-free, and lifts the minimum wage to $30 by 2030, all bankrolled by roughly $10 billion in new corporate and millionaire taxes.

If Mamdani’s program collapses under its own weight, the case for limited government will write itself in boarded-up windows and outbound moving vans.

A week later, reality is beginning to set in.

Mamdani means what he says. On his watch, public safety would become a piggy bank. During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, Mamdani posted, “No, we want to defund the police.” He wasn’t being metaphorical. His current blueprint would shift billions from the NYPD into a new “Department of Community Safety” — even as felony assaults on seniors have doubled since 2019.

Mamdani’s program may feel aspirational to affluent progressives, yet to many New Yorkers it lands like an ultimatum.

Forty-two percent of renter households already spend more than 30% of their income on shelter; now they are told higher business taxes and a slimmer police presence are the price of utopia, which helps explain why tens of thousands of households making between $32,000 and $65,000 — the city’s economic backbone — have left for other states in just the past few years.

Picture a deli cashier in the Bronx. She’s not reading City Hall memos, but she feels the squeeze when rent rises and her boss mutters about new taxes. She doesn’t frame her frustration as a debate about “big government” — but she knows when it’s harder to get by and when it’s less safe walking home. The politics of the city aren’t abstract to her. They’re personal.

Adding insult to injury, the job Mamdani wants comes with a salary of roughly $258,750 a year — more than three times the median city household income — plus the chauffeurs, security details, and gilt-edged benefits package that accompany the office. Telling overtaxed commuters that their groceries will now be “public options” while banking a quarter-million dollars in guaranteed pay is the policy equivalent of riding past them in a limousine and rolling down the window just long enough to raise their rent.

Layer onto that record a set of statements many Jewish New Yorkers regard as outright hostility. Mamdani is one of the loudest champions of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement; last year he pushed a bill to bar certain New York charities from sending money to Israeli causes and defended the chant “globalize the intifada,” drawing sharp rebukes from city rabbis. The day after Hamas massacred 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023, he blamed the bloodshed on “apartheid” and “occupation.”

All this lands in a metropolis with the world’s largest Jewish community outside Israel — about 1.4 million residents — whose synagogues, schools, and small businesses have weathered a steady rise in hate crimes. For them, a would-be mayor who treats Israel as a pariah and shrugs at chants of intifada isn’t dabbling in foreign policy; he’s telegraphing contempt for their safety and identity at home.

Republicans see an inadvertent gift. Mamdani’s New York will soon be measured against the lower-tax, police-friendly model many red states — especially my home, Florida — have advertised for years.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Law Enforcement Recruitment Bonus Program has mailed more than 7,800 after-tax checks of $5,000 to officers relocating from 49 states, including hundreds from New York precincts, while Florida touts a 50-year low in index-crime reports and unemployment below the national average. IRS data shows Florida netted 33,019 New York households in the latest year, with average adjusted gross income near $185,000.

Project those trend lines a few years and Mamdani’s New York grows grim: a shrunken police force responding to more 911 calls; fare-free buses draining MTA dollars and stranding riders; municipal groceries undercutting bodegas until subsidies vanish; office-tower vacancies sapping property tax receipts just as social housing bills come due. The skyline still gleams, but plywood fronts and “For Lease” placards scar street level. Meanwhile states that fund cops, respect paychecks, and let entrepreneurs stock the shelves siphon away residents and revenue.

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  Terraxplorer via iStock/Getty Images

Republicans running in 2026 scarcely need to draft the attack ads, yet they must pair fiscal sobriety with moral urgency — protecting the vulnerable, rewarding work, and defending faith. Mamdani’s primary victory shows romantic egalitarianism still electrifies young voters; statistics alone won’t counter a pledge of universal child care and rent freezes. This indeed won’t be a case of “promises made, promises kept.”

If his program collapses under its own weight, the case for limited government will write itself in boarded-up windows and outbound moving vans.

Should the city somehow thrive — safer streets, balanced books, real wage gains — progressives will demand that Congress replicate Mamdani’s policies nationwide. That is federalism at its most honest: two competing philosophies running side by side under the same national sky, with citizens free to relocate from one laboratory to the other.

For now, the lab results favor the model that backs the blue, protects the paycheck, and keeps the ladder of opportunity in good repair. Voters — and U-Hauls — are already keeping score. By decade’s end, the scoreboard will show which vision truly loved New York’s working families and which merely loved the sound of its own ideals.

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America First antitrust isn’t ‘socialism’ — it’s self-defense



In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Robert Bork Jr. attacked Gail Slater, President Trump’s new assistant attorney general for antitrust.

I remember watching with sadness and dismay in 1987 as Mr. Bork’s father, the late Judge Robert Bork, endured a malicious and unfair confirmation process that ended with the Senate rejecting his nomination to the Supreme Court. Now, to my regret, his son has “borked” Slater in much the same way.

The heart of Trump’s America First antitrust agenda: Protect markets before they grow too big to regulate. Break up monopolies so Washington doesn’t have to control them.

Rather than engaging with Slater’s actual record, Bork resorted to baseless claims. He suggested her antitrust philosophy boils down to a simplistic belief that “big is bad, little is good.” That isn’t her philosophy, she’s never said that, and it’s dishonest to imply otherwise.

The Trump administration’s antitrust team isn’t capitulating to monopolies. It’s doing the opposite — charting a course that breaks from the status quo of the last four years of Joe Biden and eight years under President Obama.

Monopolies rightly understood

Bork claims that Gail Slater and Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson “discarded the consumer welfare standard,” the long-standing antitrust principle that limits government action to cases where consumers suffer harm. But Bork sets up a straw man. Slater never said anything of the sort — not in her speech, not even by implication.

In fact, Slater made her position clear: She supports “respecting the original public meaning of the statutory text and the binding nature of Supreme Court and other relevant precedent.” That’s not a rejection of the consumer welfare standard.

Bork also misrepresented Slater’s concern over monopolistic control by tech platforms. He mocked her for saying these companies “control not just the prices of their services, but the flow of our nation’s commerce and communication.” Bork scoffed: “What prices? Facebook, Instagram, Google, LinkedIn, and YouTube don’t charge consumers a penny.”

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 Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Image

Slater might have spelled out more clearly how these platforms profit through exploitative practices and suppress conservative voices through debanking, shadow-banning, and viewpoint discrimination. But her time was limited. Bork’s refusal to acknowledge the damage done to conservatives by monopolies that dominate the flow of information is not just blind — it’s disgraceful.

I, for one, applaud a Justice Department finally willing to confront monopolies not just over dollars, but over speech. Americans deserve protection whether the cost of control impinges upon their wallets or their freedom.

This isn’t Biden 2.0

Calling Slater a continuation of Biden’s antitrust policy is the coup de grâce of Bork Jr.’s “borking” campaign. The claim doesn’t hold up. From day one, Slater made clear her intention to restore objectivity and restraint to antitrust enforcement — anchored in law, not ideology. Biden’s FTC and Justice Department had weaponized antitrust, targeting deals that posed no real threat to consumers, often on laughably flimsy grounds.

Bork, in another op-ed, pointed to the Biden administration’s lawsuit against Visa over razor-thin fees as an example of legitimate enforcement. But Visa wasn’t harming consumers. The lawsuit looked more like an effort to strong-arm a private firm into acting as another weapon in the administration’s anti-conservative arsenal — just as it had done with major banks and social media platforms.

The Biden administration even blocked the merger of Spirit and JetBlue, smaller carriers that offered real competition to the Big Four airlines. The move led to bankruptcy, obviously hurting consumers. Had Democrats won last November, the Big Four likely would have been expected to repay the favor politically.

But those were Biden’s decisions — not Slater’s. She has already made clear she intends to reverse course. She’s not in office to weaponize antitrust law. Her aim is to enforce the law and uphold precedent.

In an April interview with Sohrab Ahmari, Slater didn’t mince words: “If you’re doing a merger that’s benign, we’ll just get out of the way.” In her first public address on April 21, she pledged to give economists a stronger role in enforcement and criticized regulation that “saps economic opportunity by stifling rather than promoting competition.”

That doesn’t sound like central planning. It sounds like a welcome return to sanity.

Deregulation by prevention

So why is Bork trying to paint her as Chairman Mao? Probably because Slater understands what many in D.C.’s think-tank class still miss: Big Business isn’t always Big Government’s victim. More often, they work together. Corporate giants gain dominance, then lobby for regulations that kneecap smaller competitors.

Bureaucrats play along because it’s easier to deal with one entrenched firm than a dozen fast-moving upstarts. That’s not capitalism — it’s cartel economics. And for once, a president is pushing back.

Slater has made it clear that monopolies don’t just crush competition — they endanger core American freedoms. She watched Big Tech silence dissent during the 2020 election. Her response? Use antitrust to reduce the need for government, not expand it.

That’s the heart of Trump’s America First antitrust agenda: Protect markets before they grow too big to regulate. Break up monopolies so Washington doesn’t have to control them. Call it what it is — deregulation by prevention. It’s the opposite of socialism. In truth, restoring power to the people, not the government, is exactly what the founders envisioned. Just read the 10th Amendment.

A seismic shift

FTC Commissioner Mark Meador, a Trump appointee, points out that “consumer welfare” doesn’t just mean cheap products. It also means protecting Americans from economic overlords who silence dissent, distort democracy, and punish disfavored speech. Sound familiar?

Meador rightly rejects the progressive notion that “bigness” is always bad. But he also rejects Bork-style libertarianism that shrugs at monopolies unless they raise prices. That view ignores what consumer welfare really demands — fair markets, not just cheap goods.

The 2024 election wasn’t just a political win for Trump. It marked a seismic shift in what the Republican Party stands for.

Democrats now serve Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and multinational conglomerates. Trump’s GOP champions the working American — the factory worker, the tradesman, the small business owner.

Too often, well-meaning but outdated Republicans cry “socialism” when anyone dares challenge corporate power. But they’re not defending capitalism. They’re defending a rigged system. And voters finally noticed.

Trump wasn’t sent back to Washington to coddle monopolies or rubber-stamp mergers. He was sent to drain the swamp — including the one where corporate lobbyists and bureaucrats make backroom deals to preserve their government-aided monopoly grip. If that makes the old guard nervous, they can always file a complaint — with one of their apps.

Trump’s downsizing isn’t cruelty — it’s the last hope for solvency



For more than a century, one trend has defined American politics: the relentless expansion of federal power. The Founders built a limited framework of law and order to protect liberty and promote a flourishing society. That framework has morphed into a sprawling leviathan that reaches into nearly every aspect of American life. Each crisis, often of the government’s own making, brings the same answer: more bureaucracy, more spending, more control.

Generations of Americans have paid the price to support a self-described “problem-solving” class that fails to solve anything — and demands even more to fix the failures it created. Under President Trump, however, the country finally has a leader who sees bureaucracy not as the solution but as the root of the problem.

The choice is clear: a government that serves the people — or an unaccountable leviathan that consumes them.

In the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal exploited economic collapse to justify a sweeping expansion of federal agencies. Lawmakers used the crisis to transform the relationship between government and the free market.

By the 1960s, Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society pushed federal overreach farther, binding millions of Americans to Washington through government handouts. Decades later, after 9/11, George W. Bush signed the Patriot Act, giving federal agencies unprecedented access to Americans’ private lives — all in the name of national security.

Today, the federal government reaches into your doctor’s office, your child’s classroom, and even your kitchen appliances — often without a single vote in Congress.

This unchecked sprawl, always justified by its own failures, has saddled taxpayers with $37 trillion in debt, a crushing weight that future generations must carry.

Enter Donald Trump.

In fewer than 100 days, Trump removed 126,000 federal workers and targeted another 100,000 positions for elimination. He gutted USAID — a bloated redistribution agency infamous for funding “Sesame Street” in Iraq — cutting more than 99% of its workforce. The IRS shed 3,600 auditors, directly rejecting President Biden’s plan to hire 87,000 new agents through the Inflation Reduction Act.

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 Sarah Rice/Bloomberg via Getty Images

For the first time in years, an American president has moved decisively to dismantle the administrative state — rejecting Washington’s bipartisan instinct to grow government and funnel more power to unelected bureaucrats.

No one should be surprised that Trump’s efforts to downsize the federal government have sparked outrage from Democrats, who now portray federal workers as the new victim class. Their narrative paints Trump and Republicans as “cruel” and “heartless.”

But here’s the truth.

While more than 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, Washington’s bureaucratic elite dominate six of the 10 richest counties in the country — all clustered around the nation’s capital.

During the 2008 financial crisis, 8.6 million Americans lost their jobs — 5.5% of the national workforce. Yet Washington barely flinched, shedding just 1.1% of its taxpayer-funded positions. While global economies collapsed, the D.C. bureaucracy grew, kept afloat by billion-dollar federal contracts. Politicians demanded more money for “problem solvers” to solve the problems they created. After all the “assistance” and bailouts, average Americans were left with just one thing: nearly $1 trillion in new debt.

Trump’s war on the administrative state doesn’t stem from cruelty — it reflects a long-overdue reckoning with bloated federal power. His success represents a win for working Americans. While Trump has made historic gains against the bureaucracy, many of his reforms remain tied up in court, blocked by forces determined to preserve the status quo.

If real change is the goal, Congress must do more than applaud. Lawmakers must codify Trump’s actions and pass his proposed spending cuts. The choice is clear: a government that serves the people — or an unaccountable leviathan that consumes them.

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AI is coming for your job, your voice ... and your worldview



Suddenly, artificial intelligence is everywhere — generating art, writing essays, analyzing medical data. It’s flooding newsfeeds, powering apps, and slipping into everyday life. And yet, despite all the buzz, far too many Americans — especially conservatives — still treat AI like a novelty, a passing tech fad, or a toy for Silicon Valley elites.

Treating AI like the latest pet rock tech trend is not only naïve — it’s dangerous.

The AI shift is happening now, and it’s coming for white-collar jobs that once seemed untouchable.

AI isn’t just another innovation like email, smartphones, or social media. It has the potential to restructure society itself — including how we work, what we believe, and even who gets to speak — and it’s doing it at a speed we’ve never seen before.

The stakes are enormous. The pace is breakneck. And still, far too many people are asleep at the wheel.

AI isn’t just ‘another tool’

We’ve heard it a hundred times: “Every generation freaks out about new technology.” The Luddites smashed looms. People said cars would ruin cities. Parents panicked over television and video games. These remarks are intended to dismiss genuine concerns of emerging technology as irrational fears.

But AI is not just a faster loom or a fancier phone — it’s something entirely different. It’s not just doing tasks faster; it’s replacing the need for human thought in critical areas. AI systems can now write news articles, craft legal briefs, diagnose medical issues, and generate code — simultaneously, at scale, around the clock.

And unlike past tech milestones, AI is advancing at an exponential speed. Just compare ChatGPT’s leap from version 3 to 4 in less than a year — or how DeepSeek and Claude now outperform humans on elite exams. The regulatory, cultural, and ethical guardrails simply can’t keep up. We’re not riding the wave of progress — we’re getting swept underneath it.

AI is shockingly intelligent already

Skeptics like to say AI is just a glorified autocomplete engine — a chatbot guessing the next word in a sentence. But that’s like calling a rocket “just a fuel tank with fire.” It misses the point.

The truth is, modern AI already rivals — and often exceeds — human performance in several specific domains. Systems like OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic's Claude, and Google's Gemini demonstrate IQs that place them well above average human intelligence, according to ongoing tests from organizations like Tracking AI. And these systems improve with every iteration, often learning faster than we can predict or regulate.

Even if AI never becomes “sentient,” it doesn’t have to. Its current form is already capable of replacing jobs, overseeing supply chain logistics, and even shaping culture.

AI will disrupt society — fast

Some compare the unfolding age of AI as just another society-improving invention and innovation: Jobs will be lost, others will be created — and we’ll all adapt. But those previous transformations took decades to unfold. The car took nearly 50 years to become ubiquitous. The internet needed about 25 years to transform communication and commerce. These shifts, though massive, were gradual enough to give society time to adapt and respond.

AI is not affording us that luxury. The AI shift is happening now, and it’s coming for white-collar jobs that once seemed untouchable.

Reports published by the World Economic Forum and Goldman Sachs suggest job disruption to hundreds of millions globally in the next several years. Not factory jobs — rather, knowledge work. AI already edits videos, writes advertising copy, designs graphics, and manages customer service.

This isn’t about horses and buggies. This is about entire industries shedding their human workforces in months, not years. Journalism, education, finance, and law are all in the crosshairs. And if we don’t confront this disruption now, we’ll be left scrambling when the disruption hits our own communities.

AI will become inescapable

You may think AI doesn’t affect you. Maybe you never plan on using it to write emails or generate art. But you won’t stay disconnected from it for long. AI will soon be baked into everything.

Your phone, your bank, your doctor, your child’s education — all will rely on AI. Personal AI assistants will become standard, just like Google Maps and Siri. Policymakers will use AI to draft and analyze legislation. Doctors will use AI to diagnose ailments and prescribe treatment. Teachers will use AI to develop lesson plans (if all these examples aren't happening already). Algorithms will increasingly dictate what media you consume, what news stories you see, even what products you buy.

We went from dial-up to internet dependency in less than 15 years. We’ll be just as dependent on AI in less than half that time. And once that dependency sets in, turning back becomes nearly impossible.

AI will be manipulated

Some still think of AI as a neutral calculator. Just give it the data, and it’ll give you the truth. But AI doesn’t run on math alone — it runs on values, and programmers, corporations, and governments set those values.

Google’s Gemini model was caught rewriting history to fit progressive narratives — generating images of black Nazis and erasing white historical figures in an overcorrection for the sake of “diversity.” China’s DeepSeek AI refuses to acknowledge the Tiananmen Square massacre or the Uyghur genocide, parroting Chinese Communist Party talking points by design.

Imagine AI tools with political bias embedded in your child’s tutor, your news aggregator, or your doctor’s medical assistant. Imagine relying on a system that subtly steers you toward certain beliefs — not by banning ideas but by never letting you see them in the first place.

We’ve seen what happened when environmental social governance and diversity, equity, and inclusion transformed how corporations operated — prioritizing subjective political agendas over the demands of consumers. Now, imagine those same ideological filters hardcoded into the very infrastructure that powers our society of the near future. Our society could become dependent on a system designed to coerce each of us without knowing it’s happening.

Our liberty problem

AI is not just a technological challenge. It’s a cultural, economic, and moral one. It’s about who controls what you see, what you’re allowed to say, and how you live your life. If conservatives don’t get serious about AI now — before it becomes genuinely ubiquitous — we may lose the ability to shape the future at all.

This is not about banning AI or halting progress. It’s about ensuring that as this technology transforms the world, it doesn’t quietly erase our freedom along the way. Conservatives cannot afford to sit back and dismiss these technological developments. We need to be active participants in shaping AI’s ethical and political boundaries, ensuring that liberty, transparency, and individual autonomy are protected at every stage of this transformation.

The stakes are clear. The timeline is short. And the time to make our voices heard is right now.