Mocking Jesus and the Virgin Mary? Scandal strikes again for Maine Democrat Senate candidate who may have had a Nazi tattoo

Graham Platner, a middle-aged oyster farmer and Marine veteran, is running as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate in Maine, hoping to beat Democratic Gov. Janet Mills in the June 9 primary and to ultimately unseat the Republican incumbent, Sen. Susan Collins, in the general election.

Platner — who says he's "running against the billionaire class that owns [Susan Collins] and all of Washington" — has not only survived but thrived in the face of numerous scandals of his own making.

Now it appears that critics have found yet another damning social media post from the candidate.

'The left will love him more.'

An apparent screenshot of a 2012 Reddit post now making the rounds on X shows the following commentary from user P-Hustle, Platner's old handle:

I've spent 8 years in the infantry, Marine Corps and Army, and I've been about as crudely atheist as one can be the entire time (zombie jesus jokes and Mary sucking at covering up being a skank, as examples). Promotion came like normal, and most of my fellow grunts had a similarly cynical attitude towards religion. Sure, there have been a few bible thumpers I've run into, but it was certainly never systemic.

The comment appears to be in response to the case of Jeremy Hall, an atheist who accused the military of becoming a Christian organization.

Blaze News reached out to Platner's campaign for confirmation and comment but did not receive a response by deadline.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee said in response to Platner's alleged mockery of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, "Just when you think Graham Platner can't get any worse."

The Maine Republican Party said in response to the post attributed to Platner, "This SHOULD be disqualifying but Maine's leftist base has given Platner a pass on literally everything."

Sofia Aldinio/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Last year, numerous other inflammatory Reddit posts came to light, including posts in which Platner apparently identified as a communist, branded rural white Americans as racists, suggested service members worried about being raped should buy "Kevlar underwear," and smeared all police officers as "bastards."

Within days of Platner apologizing for his past posts and blaming them on a state of "disillusionment" following his return from Afghanistan, the Democratic candidate was outed for having an apparent "totenkopf" tattoo on his chest — a skull image popularized by Adolf Hitler's Schutzstaffel elite guard and adopted as the symbol of the SS-Totenkopfverbande, the branch that guarded the concentration camps.

Although Platner appears to have had the tattoo covered up, members of his campaign still jumped ship. Leftist lawmakers such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich (N.M.) continued, however, to support Platner's campaign.

Nazi tattoo and rape jokes notwithstanding, he even picked up a few endorsements. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), for instance, endorsed Platner late last month, noting in a video statement, "Graham Platner has the grit to go against the grain and to fight for what is right."

"Nazi tattoo; blaming rape victims; voters are dumb and racist; fake oyster biz financed by an Epstein associate; says black people don't tip; former mercenary; etc etc etc," wrote the Maine GOP. "Now this. But the left will love him more."

Justin Davis, director of public affairs for the National Rifle Association, tweeted, "Maine by the numbers: 22% of voting Mainers are Catholic. Roughly 50% are Republican[.] Roughly 50% are Democrats[.] 100% of them will not take kindly to @grahamformaine calling the blessed Mother Mary a 'skank.'"

Prior to the resurfacing of his alleged anti-Christian remarks, polling indicated that Platner was poised to clean up in the Democratic primary.

An Emerson College poll conducted last week found that Platner led Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) by 27 percentage points, 55% to 28%. A recent poll conducted by Impact Research put the left-leaning populist even further ahead, leading Mills 66% to 28%.

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Cubans torch communist headquarters in protest of blackouts and food shortages

Burning and ransacking of a local communist party building in Cuba was captured on video Friday night, with Cuban officials saying the violence "threatens citizen tranquility."

The city of Morón was the focal point of the outrage, which local outlets said was in response to the current energy crisis and lack of access to food.

'There will be no impunity for vandalism and violence.'

A small group of people reportedly began protesting peacefully on Friday night, but later turned to vandalism after an exchange with territorial authorities. Eventually, cameras captured a group of protesters surrounding a large fire outside the communist party building.

Multiple people were seen having scaled the building, running in and out of the second floor window, throwing building contents out into the streets.

Cuban outlet Invasor said that protesters destroyed the entrance, started a fire inside the building, and damaged a nearby pharmacy and retail outlet. As a result, five people were arrested.

On Saturday, outlets began reporting claims that a man had been shot outside the building by authorities.

Fox News reported on a man's apparent collapse caught on video, which followed the sound of a gunshot. Protesters reportedly said, "They shot him! They're shooting!" before the man was carried away by other protesters.

However, state outlet Vanguardia claimed in an X post that "there were no gunshot wounds" and that the "shots were fired into the air to disperse the riot."

"The young man they're trying to portray as a victim was one of those responsible for the riots. While trying to tear off the Party ID, he suffered a fall. His own comrades transported him on a motorbike, and he is currently receiving medical attention in the hospital," the outlet wrote, per X's translation.

Vanguardia also noted that "tranquility" remains predominant in the province. The same verbiage was echoed by Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel.

The president wrote that while it was "understandable" for blackouts to cause distress, he blamed an increasingly cruel and intensified "U.S. energy blockade" for the unrest.

"And complaints and claims are legitimate, as long as they are made with civility and respect for public order," Diaz-Canel went on. "What will never be understandable, justified, or acceptable is violence and vandalism that threatens public tranquility and the security of our institutions. There will be no impunity for vandalism and violence."

Morón is in the province of Ciego de Avila and is located about 250 miles east of Havana, with a population of around 70,000.

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Another CCP bio bust? Hazmat and SWAT teams raid Las Vegas house linked to COVID, Ebola lab.

Following the discovery that Chinese communist agents were coordinating intimidation, espionage, and coercion campaigns out of illegal police stations in the United States, officials found something potentially more threatening in Reedley, California: a Chinese biolab containing deadly pathogens including Ebola.

The secret Chinese lab apparently was not one of a kind.

'These items, importantly, were consistent in appearance to the items found and described in the Reedley, California, lab investigation.'

SWAT officers with the Las Vegas Metro Police Department raided a home in the city's northeast end on Jan. 31, discovering a suspected illegal biolab apparently linked to the Chinese national who owned the Reedley site.

Footage shows local and federal agents massing outside a Sugar Springs Drive residence near Washington Avenue and Hollywood early Saturday morning while drones patrolled overhead.

A tactical robot dog explored the interior and conducted air sampling before members of the LVMPD's All-Hazard Regional Multi-agency Operations and Response team made entry.

The main house was home to three renters who were safely removed and are apparently not targets of the investigation. The locked garage was home to "refrigerators, a freezer, laboratory-type equipment, and numerous containers holding unknown liquid substances," according to police.

The apparent biological materials, which were carefully collected over the course of the weekend along with other evidence, were initially transported to a Southern Nevada Health District facility for safe storage, then taken to an FBI lab for testing.

LVMPD Sheriff Kevin McMahill indicated on Monday that "these items, importantly, were consistent in appearance to the items found and described in the Reedley, California, lab investigation."

Photo by ARUN SANKAR/AFP via Getty Images

McMahill noted further that "the home was owned by the same individual connected to a prior, illegal bio-lab investigation in Reedley, California, that occurred in 2023."

That individual is Jia Bei Zhu.

The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party noted in its report on the Reedley biolab that the California lab operated under the direction and control of Zhu, a Chinese citizen associated with communist regime-linked companies as well with Chinese military-civil fusion entities.

'This can't keep happening.'

Zhu, a wanted fugitive from Canada, where he is the subject of a $330 million judgment for stealing American intellectual property, illegally entered the United States under the false identity of "David He," said the report.

While unlawfully in the U.S., Zhu set up a network of companies and accumulated a vast supply of potential pathogens including including Ebola, COVID-19, HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis, which he is accused of keeping and poorly storing at one or more unlicensed and unregistered labs.

In addition to thousands of samples of potentially dangerous diseases and hundreds of boxes of medical devices subject to a U.S. Food and Drug embargo, the Reedley lab was home to roughly 1,000 mice that were genetically engineered to mimic the human immune system.

One lab worker reportedly told local officials that the transgenic mice were altered "to catch and carry the COVID-19 virus." Dead mice were apparently disposed of "without the use of a licensed medical waste hauler."

According to the congressional report, the Reedley biolab received millions of dollars in unexplained payments from Chinese communist banks.

Zhu was arrested by federal agents on Oct. 19, 2023, and indicted the following month for allegedly distributing adulterated and misbranded COVID-19 test kits and making false statements to authorities about his identity. He was slapped with additional charges in 2024 for alleged conspiracy and wire fraud.

Zhaoyan Wang, Zhu's supposed lover and business partner, was charged with helping facilitate the alleged fraud through Universal Meditech Inc. and Prestige Biotech Inc. — biolabs she operated in Reedley and Fresno. Wang is also a Chinese national.

McMahill indicated that Zhu, who has a trial hearing scheduled for Feb. 23, remains in federal custody.

The LVMPD also arrested the property manager of the Vegas residence, 55-year-old Ori Solomon, on a charge of disposing and discharging hazardous waste. Solomon was booked into the Clark County Detention Center.

On Saturday, the FBI searched a second Vegas home on Temple View Drive but found no threat at the location. The FBI also revisited the Reedley lab on Sunday, reported KFSN-TV.

Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.) said in response to the latest lab discovery, "This can't keep happening."

"The federal government must do more to stop illegal labs from operating in our communities," added Kiley.

Kiley and fellow California Reps. Jim Costa (D) and David Valadao (R) have called for a hearing on their Preventing Illegal Laboratories and Protecting Public Health Act of 2025.

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Cuba next? Trump admin eying possible regime change after Maduro arrest: Report

The Trump administration indicated in its National Security Strategy that "after years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere."

Making abundantly clear to all that this was not empty rhetoric, the U.S. kicked off 2026 by militarily deposing Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.

Maduro was the first leftist dictator removed from power this year, but he may not be the last.

Sources familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal that now with a blueprint for surgical governmental restructures in the region, the Trump administration is searching for well-placed insiders in Cuba who could help oust the island nation's communist regime by the end of the year.

'I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.'

That strategy appears, after all, to have worked in Caracas, Venezuela, where an asset within Maduro's inner circle furnished American intelligence personnel with critical information about the leftist leader's habits, travels, and whereabouts, according to administration officials.

It's unclear if that asset was Maduro's vice president, now acting President Delcy Rodríguez, whom four sources familiar with the discussions told the Guardian signaled a willingness to cooperate with the Trump administration ahead of the military extraction.

Photo by Horacio Villalobos#Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images

One U.S. official told the Journal that in recent meetings with Cuban exiles and civic groups, Trump administration officials have brainstormed possible individuals within the current Cuban regime who have an appetite for change and might want to make a deal.

The sense is that the time is ripe for a shakeup in the Stalinist island nation in light of its economic instability and loss of a key ally in Caracas.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, said earlier this month, "I think Cuba is going to be something we'll end up talking about, because Cuba is a failing nation right now, a very badly failing nation, and we want to help the people."

"If I lived in Havana, and I was in the government, I’d be concerned," added Rubio.

Cuba — which has suffered rolling blackouts in recent months and years — has long relied on Venezuela for subsidized oil, which has made up around 70% of its total oil imports.

In the wake of Maduro's removal, Pavel Vidal, a former Cuban central bank economist who teaches at Javeriana University, told NBC News, "If oil supply were to cease entirely, the Cuban economy would grind to a halt."

Senior U.S. officials told the Journal that the U.S. plans to further undermine the Cuban regime by restricting its access to Venezuelan oil.

"Cuba lived, for many years, on large amounts of OIL and MONEY from Venezuela," Trump noted in a Truth Social post on Jan. 11. "THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA — ZERO! I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE."

The State Department said in a statement that it is in America's national security interests for Cuba "to be competently run by a democratic government and to refuse to host our adversaries’ military and intelligence services."

Rubio made a point of noting last week that the Cuban regime was "illegitimate."

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Mamdani tells 'The View' hosts Renee Good was 'murdered' by ICE: 'Look at that video'

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani says Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids strike fear into the immigrant population.

The newly inaugurated leader was given the celebrity treatment during a recent interview on "The View," where the program's left-wing hosts heralded him as a possible savior for not only NYC, but the entire United States.

'We are being asked to not believe our own eyes.'

Looking for Mamdani's direction on ICE raids, host Sunny Hostin (real name Asunción Cummings Hostin) asked the mayor if he thinks the federal government will "target New York" or him as well.

Mamdani started by reiterating his stance that Renee Good — the woman who was shot and killed by the ICE agent she was driving into — was actually murdered.

"People ask me, why did I say the word 'murder'? I ask them to look at that video and tell me what they would call it. We are being asked to not believe our own eyes," he argued.

Instead, Mamdani proposed, "It's time to be truthful with people."

This led to one of several instances in which the Ugandan-born politician claimed he stood his ground on his principles when he met with President Donald Trump in November.

"I've said this directly to the president: that these ICE raids, they are cruel. They are inhumane. They do nothing to deliver that public safety."

- YouTube

The 34-year-old then pivoted to his city, where he said such raids strike fear into his city's immigrant population. He noted that 26 Federal Plaza, the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building that has a federal immigration court, was once an inspirational location that was associated with "the American dream."

"Now it's the sign of the American nightmare," Mamdani decreed. "It's where people go there for what should be a routine immigration check-in, [and] they don't know if they're going to get detained or deported."

The New York location is where many illegal immigrants are given their final deportation orders and are routinely detained by immigration enforcement outside the courtroom.

Photo by Kerem YUCEL/AFP via Getty Images

Mamdani was pressed by Hostin about what he would do to stop ICE raids in NYC. The mayor said he would use "every tool" at the city's disposal to "ensure that what we're seeing elsewhere is not what we see in this city."

Sanctuary cities "keep New Yorkers safe," Mamdani said, specifically referring to people he described as committing only the crime of "being in New York City."

Mamdani was able to sidestep responding to host Joy Behar's remarks that legal battles against ICE raids have been unsuccessful in Minnesota, but only because another host brought up ICE agents wearing masks during operations. This gave the mayor a chance to discuss what he believes is another element of "fear" coming from the federal government.

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‘Seize private property’: NYC’s socialist mayor taps communist sympathizer to lead office to ‘Protect Tenants’

New York City's newly sworn-in Democratic Socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has already started taking steps to advance his radical agenda by selecting an anti-private-property extremist to lead the Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants.

Mamdani announced on January 2 that Cea Weaver would join his team, noting that she had previously led Housing Justice for All, a coalition of groups representing tenants and homeless New Yorkers, and its sister organization, the New York State Tenant Bloc.

'Private property including any kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy.'

Mamdani credited Weaver for helping to pass "landmark legislation that closed loopholes landlords used to raise rents and push apartments out of stabilization."

"Now she'll work with us to hold landlords accountable and ensure New York City tenants are living in safe, clean homes," Mamdani wrote.

Following Weaver's appointment, an undated video resurfaced on social media of the activist discussing her goal to eliminate private property ownership.

"I think the reality is, is that for centuries we've really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good," Weaver stated in the video. "And transitioning to treating it as a collective good and towards a model of shared equity will require that we think about it differently. And it will mean that families, especially white families but some [people of color] families who are homeowners as well, are going to have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have."

Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon reacted to the resurfaced video of Weaver.

“I don’t think so,” Dhillon wrote. “We have federal housing laws that trump any collective Marxist fantasies.”

Weaver once urged Americans to "elect more communists" in a 2017 post on her now-deactivated X account, the New York Post reported.

She also called to "seize private property."

"Private property including any kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy," Weaver reportedly wrote in 2019.

Zohran Mamdani. Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images

Weaver has previously expressed support for freezing rent, writing in a January 2025 post on Bluesky, "There are lots of things the mayor CANT [sic] do on housing, but freezing the rent is one of the only things they can unilaterally do for 2.4 million New York renters. Policy plans are great, so is a rent freeze."

According to New York City's Tenant Protection Cabinet, 65% of the city's residents are renters.

Democrat Governor Kathy Hochul's office did not respond to a request for comment.

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'JEW HATER': Trump unleashes multiple attacks on Zohran Mamdani, backs Cuomo as NYC mayoral election looms

In the lead-up to Election Day in New York City on Tuesday, President Donald Trump posted several attacks on Democrat mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who is expected to win despite his socialist views.

On Tuesday morning, Trump posted: "Any Jewish person that votes for Zohran Mamdani, a proven and self professed JEW HATER, is a stupid person!!!"

Mamdani, whom Trump called a "100% Communist Lunatic" back in June, is considered to be the front-runner heading into the election, particularly after he gained the endorsement of New York Governor Kathy Hochul and other Democrat leaders.

Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images

On Monday afternoon, Trump threatened to withhold all extra federal funds in the event that Mamdani wins the election "because of the fact that, as a Communist, this once great City has ZERO chance of success, or even survival! It can only get worse with a Communist at the helm, and I don’t want to send, as President, good money after bad."

The post continued: "His principles have been tested for over a thousand years, and never once have they been successful. I would much rather see a Democrat, who has had a Record of Success, WIN, than a Communist with no experience and a Record of COMPLETE AND TOTAL FAILURE. He was nothing as an Assemblyman, ranked at the bottom of the class and, as Mayor of potentially, again, the Greatest City in the World, HE HAS NO CHANCE to bring it back to its former Glory!"

Trump also told voters that they "have no choice" but to vote for former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, since "a vote for Curtis Sliwa [R] is a vote for Mamdani."

Trump's criticisms of Mamdani, which date back at least to late June, ramped up in the last week. On October 29, Trump said, "The more people learn about Mamdani, the less they like him!"

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Radicals decry demise of Teen Vogue — the propaganda rag that pushed anal sex and Marx on minors

Teen Vogue was originally launched in 2003 as a teenage girl-targeting print counterpart to publisher Condé Nast's fashion magazine Vogue. Since its quarterly print run was brought to an end in 2017, the leftist propaganda mill continued independently online — until now.

Radicals are clutching pearls as it is clear that the publication will survive in name but not in spirit.

'19 Best Anal Lubes for Slick and Pain-Free Insertion.'

Teen Vogue's leftist editor in chief Versha Sharma is leaving the company, and Teen Vogue is being absorbed into Vogue.com.

According to Vogue, "the title will remain a distinct editorial property, with its own identity and mission"; however, it will now "focus its content on career development, cultural leadership, and other issues that matter most to young people."

The union representing the propagandists at Teen Vogue condemned the decision to park the blog under the broader Vogue.com umbrella, complaining that the shake-up was "disproportionately impacting marginalized employees," as the majority of those now allegedly facing termination are "BIPOC women or trans."

Lex McMenamin, the plural-pronoun-providing radical who served as the blog's news and politics editor since 2021, confirmed that she was laid off along with multiple other staffers on Monday, noting, "To my knowledge, after today, there will be no politics staffers at Teen Vogue."

Condé United, the union representing writers at the blog, suggested that the move was "clearly designed to blunt the award-winning magazine's insightful journalism at a time when it is needed the most."

Some of the usual suspects have echoed this suggestion that the content published on the blog under Sharma's leadership was of journalistic value.

Alejandra Caraballo, a transvestite activist and Harvard Law School clinical instructor, for instance, wrote, "They just gutted Teen Vogue which had top notch political journalism. The media is continuing to purge any sort of political dissent to Trump and the oligarchs."

Caraballo added, "It's resegregation in real time."

Cross-dressing Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr (D) stated, "The loss of the politics staff at Teen Vogue is an absolute travesty. In a media marketplace that has been decimated by billionaires, tepid takes, and AI slop, Teen Vogue often stood out as a bastion of principled, purposeful journalism."

Here are a few examples of the supposed "principled, purposeful journalism" Teen Vogue has been churning out in recent years:

"How to Finger Someone (Including Yourself), According to Sexperts" — Oct. 31, 2025;
"Anal Sex: Safety, How tos, Tips, and More" — Nov. 12, 2019;
"The Polyamory Workbook: How I Discovered Nonmonogamy" — Nov. 15, 2022;
"6 Intersex People on Why Gender-Affirming Care Bans Are Bad for Everyone" — June 13, 2025; and
"19 Best Anal Lubes for Slick and Pain-Free Insertion" — June 3, 2023.

The publication has, in fairness, not limited itself to giving minors advice on sodomy and the latest in sex-toy technology.

It has also often promoted gender ideology and abortion — see the Jan. 23, 2025, piece titled "The Sex Lives of College Girls Needs an Abortion Storyline" — and pushed a significant amount of leftist agitprop.

Photo by Phillip Faraone/Getty Images

For instance, in a piece published last month titled "Trump and Republicans Want to 'Un-Cancel' Columbus Day, Erasing Indigenous Peoples Day," the blog suggested that Christopher Columbus was little more than an Italian "who brought disease, colonization, and enslavement" to the Americas.

Amid the deadly Black Lives Matter riots in 2020, Teen Vogue published a list of bail funds to which readers could contribute in order to spring rioters from jail.

In a politics article explaining how teens can "learn the legacy of Marx's ideas and how they're relevant to the current political climate," the author emphasized to teens that they should think like pinkos even if they aren't card-carrying communists: "While you may not necessarily identify as a Marxist, socialist, or communist, you can still use Karl Marx’s ideas to use history and class struggles to better understand how the current sociopolitical climate in America came to be."

Teen Vogue made clear that thinking like Marx was acceptable but that conservative thought and lifestyles were beyond the pale.

A December Teen Vogue op-ed warned about the threat posed to America's "progressive new future" by those young women who would dare embrace traditional gender roles and stay home to tend children.

"With clearly defined gender roles and responsibilities, trad wife and traditional masculine content in the manopshere works to convince a new generation of would-be population breeders and workers to embrace fundamentalist values," said the piece. "This is not a new trend but an old belief system with worn methods that perform until people who know better, choose better.'

While happy to characterize conservatives as extremists, Teen Vogue routinely painted leftist radicals and thugs as saints, printing, for instance, a hagiography for convicted cop-killer and Marxist fugitive Assata Shakur.

Shakur was a member of a terrorist militant group, the Black Liberation Army. She was convicted in 1977 of the first-degree murder of New Jersey Trooper Werner Foerster. Although she was supposed to spend her life in prison, she escaped in 1979 to communist Cuba.

Teen Vogue's obituary for the cop-killer, titled "Assata Shakur Was a Black Revolutionary Who Fought for Freedom Even in Exile," cast doubt on her guilt and concluded, "To many, including those posting in honor of her after her death, Shakur will be remembered as a revolutionary who fought for her freedom and won."

Chloe Malle, Vogue's head of editorial content, said in a statement, "I remember when Teen Vogue launched. I read every page on the bus home from cross-country practice. I loved it then, and I love and respect it now and am committed to continuing and supporting its point of view and sensibility."

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Zohran Mamdani’s Soviet dream for New York City

At a packed rally in Queens on Sunday, New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani reinforced his far-left vision for remaking America’s largest city.

Among his proposals: government-run grocery stores, free public transportation, 200,000 government-built apartments, universal childcare, and a rent freeze for the city’s one million rent-stabilized apartments.

Only a socialist could argue that taking away people’s property rights and centralizing power enhances individual freedom.

The price tag for Mamdani’s most ambitious ideas comes to nearly $7 billion a year — more than the city’s entire police budget.

Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, shared the stage with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), two of the country’s best-known socialist stars. Both praised Mamdani as the future of progressive politics.

Like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, Mamdani claims he can fund his agenda by taxing the rich and targeting corporations. He wants to raise the top corporate tax rate from 7.25% to 11.5% and increase the city’s income tax by two percentage points for anyone earning $1 million or more.

Those ideas have energized his base and helped him surge in the polls. Yet his lead is not secure. Critics from both parties warn that Mamdani’s high-tax, high-spending platform would drive wealthy residents and businesses out of New York, worsening the city’s economic and fiscal problems.

But Mamdani’s biggest obstacle isn’t fiscal — it’s philosophical.

Even in deep-blue New York, voters hesitate to hand power to a democratic socialist. Socialism’s record is clear: It limits freedom, crushes economies, and breeds instability.

To ease those fears, Mamdani’s campaign has begun to reframe socialism as a path to freedom rather than its enemy. At his rally over the weekend, he told the crowd: “No New Yorker should ever be priced out of anything they need to survive. ... It is government’s job to deliver that dignity.” Then he added, “Dignity, my friends, is another way of saying freedom.”

In Mamdani’s view, freedom comes from the state guaranteeing life’s essentials — food, housing, transportation, childcare. To provide those things, government must seize and redistribute private wealth. Mamdani calls this process “delivering dignity,” which he equates with liberty itself.

That logic turns freedom on its head. Only a socialist could argue that taking away people’s property rights and centralizing power enhances individual freedom.

This rhetorical sleight of hand is not new. It’s straight from the socialist and communist propaganda of the 20th century.

Article 39 of the 1936 Soviet Constitution claimed that socialism “ensures enlargement of the rights and freedoms of citizens.” Fidel Castro’s 1976 Cuban Constitution promised “the freedom and full dignity of man” through a state guarantee of social services.

Even Joseph Stalin cloaked authoritarianism in the language of freedom. In a 1936 interview, he insisted that socialism was built “for the sake of real personal liberty,” arguing that “real liberty can exist only where there is no unemployment and poverty.”

Intentionally or not, Mamdani’s speeches echo those same lines. And he’s far from the first democratic socialist to do so. Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, Olof Palme in Sweden, and Aneurin Bevan in Britain all used similar arguments to justify state expansion in the name of “freedom.”

Photo by Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images via Getty Images

That’s no coincidence. Mamdani is a student of socialist history, and his rhetoric mirrors the Marxist premise that true liberty requires the abolition of private property. In his 1844 essay “Private Property and Communism,” Karl Marx wrote, “The abolition of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities.”

Every socialist movement since has repeated that creed, always promising “real freedom” while consolidating control over wealth, work, and speech.

History shows what those promises yield: less freedom, not more. The more government collectivizes decision-making, the less room individuals have to think, speak, or prosper.

New York City has enormous problems, but reviving the century’s old, failed ideas of socialism won’t solve them. If anything, they’ll accelerate decline.

The city’s revival depends on the principles that built it into a global capital in the first place — limited government, free markets, low taxes, and the liberty to rise through one’s own effort.

If Mamdani truly wants to bring dignity and freedom to New Yorkers, he should reject the hollow slogans of socialism and embrace the real promise of liberty that made America — and New York — great.

Mocking Jesus and the Virgin Mary? Scandal strikes again for Maine Democrat Senate candidate who may have had a Nazi tattoo

Cubans torch communist headquarters in protest of blackouts and food shortages

Another CCP bio bust? Hazmat and SWAT teams raid Las Vegas house linked to COVID, Ebola lab.

Cuba next? Trump admin eying possible regime change after Maduro arrest: Report

Mamdani tells 'The View' hosts Renee Good was 'murdered' by ICE: 'Look at that video'

‘Seize private property’: NYC’s socialist mayor taps communist sympathizer to lead office to ‘Protect Tenants’

Radicals decry demise of Teen Vogue — the propaganda rag that pushed anal sex and Marx on minors

Zohran Mamdani’s Soviet dream for New York City

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