FDNY Commissioner Robert Tucker Quits Hours After Mamdani Wins Mayoral Election
'Will ensure an orderly transition'
Zohran Mamdani becomes first openly socialist mayor of New York City
Democrat candidate Zohran Mamdani became the first openly socialist candidate to sweep the New York City mayoral race Tuesday night.
Mamdani secured 50% of the vote, while independent candidate and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo won 41.4%,according to the Associated Press. Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa, who was widely regarded as a spoiler candidate for Cuomo, won just 7.7% of the vote.
His brazen embrace of socialism raised eyebrows across the political spectrum.
Current New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) did attempt to run for re-election, but eventually dropped his bid in September.
RELATED: Is Trump meddling with Mamdani's candidacy?
Mamdani consistently campaigned on progressive policies, offering a socialist antidote to New Yorkers who struggled with affordability. Some of these policies include rent freezes, free buses, city-run grocery stores, and free child care.
Although this clearly appealed to residents of America's most expensive city, his brazen embrace of socialism raised eyebrows across the political spectrum. Despite living in Brooklyn, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D) declined to say whether he voted for the Democrat candidate.
Zohran's candidacy created a unique alliance between President Donald Trump and Cuomo. Leading up to the election, Trump urged New Yorkers to vote for Cuomo instead of Mamdani or even Sliwa, the Republican candidate.
RELATED: Zohran Mamdani’s Soviet dream for New York City
"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," Trump said in a Truth Social post Tuesday. "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!"
"We must also remember this — A vote for Curtis Sliwa (who looks much better without the beret!) is a vote for Mamdani," Trump added. "Whether you personally like Andrew Cuomo or not, you really have no choice. You must vote for him, and hope he does a fantastic job. He is capable of it, Mamdani is not!"
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
A Mamdani win could spark largest mass exodus in US history
With socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani poised to become New York City’s next mayor, BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales is sounding the alarm on what she says could be a “major catastrophe.”
“As well as the polls can tell, he is about to win as mayor in New York City. And, you know, you might think, like, ‘Well, let’s just let him run this New York City, this leftist s**thole, into the ground. Just let him do that. You get what you vote for, that’s fine,’” Gonzales says on “Sara Gonzales Unfiltered.”
“Well, the problem is that his policies could bankrupt the city, which we’ve already talked about, and he could have just another mass exodus from New York, which would really spell trouble for the state,” she continues.
And a mass exodus could definitely be in the cards if he wins, as indicated by a new Daily Mail poll that asked New Yorkers if they plan to stay or leave if Mamdani gets elected.
Nine percent of those who answered the poll said that they would “definitely leave.”
“You’re like, ‘Oh, it’s only 9% — 59% said they would stay; 25% said they would consider leaving. Only 9% said that they would definitely leave.’ But 9% of New Yorkers is 765,000 people. I mean, that would be one of the biggest mass exoduses in American history,” Gonzales says.
“Now, then you take into consideration that 25% who are considering leaving. If they left, that’s 2.12 million people leaving New York City. Now, you’re talking about an economic collapse for the city, just because Zohran Mamdani wins,” she continues.
But it gets worse, because it’s not going to be the poor that are leaving.
“His plan to tax the rich is behind this. The top 1% of earners in New York pay around half the city’s income taxes. So, who is going to pay for all of this s**t if all of the top earners are leaving?” Gonzales asks.
“We already saw this play out in places [like] California. When you rely on the top 1% of earners and the top 1% of earners actually have a whole lot of income, disposable income, to just move — if you elect a radical Muslim communist, they’re just going to do that. And then you won’t be able to tax them,” she continues.
“So, how is he going to pay for all of this free s**t — the government-run grocery stores, the free buses? I’ll use air quotes because we all know none of this is actually free. Then all the other city services are going to start circling the drain. You’re going to have fewer funds for police, for fire, for transit,” she says.
“Then comes real estate issues. You’ll have a rise in vacancies. The property values, in turn, are going to plunge. The lenders are going to get hit. More rich people are going to snap up properties across the country, which is going to cause real estate to rise everywhere else,” she adds.
And all of this will lead to “New York City becoming unrecognizable as the global powerhouse that it once was.”
“We’re talking about a major catastrophe here,” she adds.
Want more from Sara Gonzales?
To enjoy more of Sara's no-holds-barred takes on news and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
The left isn’t collapsing — it’s consolidating power
Since last November, I’ve warned Republican voters not to believe the happy talk coming from friendly media. Nothing suggests the Democratic Party is collapsing — or that Donald Trump has “killed wokeness,” as Eric Trump claimed recently. The fight against the woke left and its Democratic Party embodiment continues, and the results remain mixed.
Trump has made real progress in removing DEI programs from the federal government and institutions that take federal funds. Yet schools, corporations, and other major organizations continue to find new ways to keep the ideology alive.
The Democratic Party is not collapsing. Its radicals are thriving. Black voters are not abandoning it. Conservatives need to stop pretending otherwise.
In blue and purple states, even the most extreme woke policies — like letting biological males compete in women’s sports or enter girls’ locker rooms — barely move voters. More than half the electorate in places like Virginia, New York, Illinois, California, and Oregon appear comfortable with positions that conservatives describe as “80-20 moral issues.” The electoral evidence for such optimism doesn’t exist.
Polls show Democrats holding barely a 30% approval rating — but Republicans don’t fare much better. A recent Gallup survey found the GOP only three points higher in popularity, while Democrats lead by 20 points on “acceptable philosophical positions.”
Democrats also hold a massive financial advantage and dominate the institutions that shape culture and opinion: public-sector unions, schools, universities, corporate media, and Hollywood. Their radical wing isn’t dragging them down; it’s defining them. Just ask Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, or the other progressive Democrats who keep winning elections.
As Ben Domenech recently noted, Democrats’ “bloodthirsty rage” keeps them united — even behind candidates like Jay Jones, the Virginia attorney general hopeful who once texted that he wanted to shoot a Republican lawmaker in the head and hoped the man’s children would die. Strategically, the Democrats may be right to stand by him. On the eve of Election Day, Jones was running neck-and-neck with incumbent Republican Jason Miyares, a capable and articulate attorney general trying to survive in an increasingly blue state.
Jones, who is black, will likely dominate the black vote — a reality Republicans must face. Black voters have come to view hostility toward the mostly white GOP as an expression of group identity. The small gains Trump made with black voters in 2020 haven’t changed that dynamic in a meaningful way.
Republicans should stop pretending they can transform black voting habits and instead focus on persuadable groups: white Christian men, Orthodox Jews, and Hispanics. Some subgroups, such as African immigrants and West Indian evangelicals, remain open to outreach — but the broader trend is clear.
The left’s cultural dominance was driven home for me recently when I learned that local elementary school students came home singing about “Daddy’s new boyfriend.” Teachers in our district overwhelmingly belong to the hard-left American Federation of Teachers and have no hesitation promoting its ideology. Even when warned against it, they keep injecting political dogma into the classroom.
RELATED: Pity equals power for the progressive class
Our borough’s school board still has a Christian majority, but it faces relentless pressure from activist feminists determined to take control of local education. The county newspaper, once a reliable conservative voice, now reads like an MSNBC transcript. And for the first time, our state representative is a progressive Democrat.
These are not isolated anecdotes. I live in a community that once voted Republican by habit — a borough in Pennsylvania’s traditionally red 11th Congressional District. Yet the signs of political drift are unmistakable. The left controls the institutions that shape belief, and that control gives it momentum. As a result, this place is turning purple.
Conservatives need to stop pretending otherwise. We are the weaker side in a long struggle against a relentless opponent. The Democratic Party is not collapsing. Its radicals are thriving. Black voters are not abandoning it. And wokeness, far from being “dead,” continues to define American life — from boardrooms to classrooms to city hall.
The first step toward winning any war is admitting you’re losing one.
The left’s new religion has no logic — and AOC is its perfect preacher
As New York City heads into its next mayoral election, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is doing few favors for the campaign of Zohran Mamdani — at least not for those who value coherence. Her remarks at a recent rally could serve as a Logic 101 case study in contradiction.
The problem isn’t limited to her message. The Democratic platform itself, and Mamdani’s campaign in particular, now rests on foundations so incoherent that one almost blushes to analyze them.
The modern left doesn’t appeal to reason. Instead, it appeals to envy, resentment, lust, and the eternal promise of something for nothing.
Behind AOC, a man waved a sign that read: “Free Buses.” A perfect summary. She may imagine the crowds came to hear her and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) thunder against injustice, but the truth is simpler: Promise free things to people indifferent to truth, and you can fill any arena.
As a logic professor, allow me to walk through the highlights of her address. Think of it as a guided tour through the labyrinth of leftist reasoning — or rather, unreasoning.
The new party of contradiction
AOC’s positions directly contradict what Democrats like Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi said 30 years ago about immigration and public safety. The irony? In attacking Donald Trump, she’s also attacking them.
Her first contradiction concerns ownership. AOC claimed that New York City “belongs to the people of this country” but moments later insisted it “belongs to immigrants.” Well, which is it? Either she contradicted herself within two sentences, or she truly believes the city belongs to citizens of other nations. That would make sense only if you’re an international socialist calling on the “workers of the world” to unite.
She also called herself “a fascist’s worst nightmare” because she defends immigrants. Yet the fascists of the 1940s didn’t allow people to leave their countries. Republicans are merely asking migrants to follow the law. No fascist ever demanded less government power. Conservatives do. Fascists didn’t defend free speech; yet Elon Musk — whom AOC routinely attacks — is now a hero of speech and open debate.
Lessons for the willfully ignorant
Next came her invocation of the Confederacy and Jim Crow. Someone should tell her: The Confederates were Democrats. The segregationists were Democrats. The architects of slavery, redlining, and resistance to civil rights — all Democrats. Why should anyone believe the same party now represents moral progress? The left ruins the cities it governs and then blames everyone else. It’s the political version of DARVO: deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender.
Then came her favorite populist line — that her opponents are “funded by billionaires.” Public records tell a different story. Plenty of billionaires bankroll her and her fellow radicals. How does she say it with a straight face? Remember our friend with the “Free Buses” sign: He’s not there for philosophy — he’s there for freebies.
The left’s new theology
AOC then delivered a sermon on intersectionality, the academic creed of Kimberlé Crenshaw: all “oppressed” groups united by one great villain — the white, Christian, heterosexual male.
Picture a wheel: The hub is the white Protestant man, the spokes are every “marginalized” group on earth. AOC’s list was textbook: “This city was built by the Irish escaping famine, Italians fleeing fascism, Jews escaping the Holocaust, black Americans fleeing Jim Crow, Latinos seeking a better life, Native people standing for themselves, Asian Americans coming together.”
For AOC and the radical left, grievance is the very air they breathe. Humanity divides neatly into identity blocs, locked in eternal conflict — and at the center of every injustice stands the Christian West. She closed the circle by declaring that American history is defined by “class struggle,” the dialectic Marx demanded.
AOC contradicts herself, defines ‘the American people’ as everyone but American citizens, and divides humanity into tribes of grievance.
Her introduction of Bernie Sanders confirmed it. “Senator Sanders,” she said, “is the foremost leader and advocate for labor and class struggle in the United States.” At least she’s honest. Sanders is an international socialist — otherwise known as a communist — and AOC’s crowd now wears that label proudly.
But a 1990s-era Hillary Clinton would instantly see the contradiction: You can’t be both pro-American worker and pro-open borders. Clinton was a national socialist (minus the genocidal agenda); Sanders and AOC are international socialists. The alternative to both isn’t fascism — which is also a species of national socialism — but the American republic: constitutional rule, checks and balances, a Bill of Rights, and a government that protects its citizens from threats foreign and domestic.
‘Acceptance’ without love
For those wondering whether any theology slipped into AOC’s secular revival meeting — it did, but only in parody.
In older times, an evil spirit could be tested by whether it could quote scripture correctly. By that standard, AOC’s spirit fails. She told the crowd we must “accept our neighbor as ourselves.” Not love — accept. The difference is enormous.
To love your neighbor is to will his good. To “accept” your neighbor, in AOC’s lexicon, is to affirm whatever destructive path he chooses. When a neighbor wants to mutilate his body for a sexual fetish, love warns him against harm. AOC’s “acceptance” cheers him on. Her mercy kills.
The Christian calls sinners to repentance and faith in Christ. The radical left calls that “hate speech.”
RELATED: Why Gen Z is rebelling against leftist lies — and turning to Jesus
The logic of the new faith
By now, any logic student would have learned the lesson: AOC contradicts herself, defines “the American people” as everyone but American citizens, and divides humanity into tribes of grievance. Her creed depends on intersectionality — a doctrine that scapegoats not just white men, but all Christians who refuse to bow before the new secular orthodoxy.
If that student left disappointed by the quality of public rhetoric, he’d still leave wiser. Over the gates of hell, Dante wrote: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Over the platform of the radical left, one might inscribe a similar warning: Let none who expect coherence enter here.
The modern left doesn’t appeal to reason. It despises reason as a tool of “European colonialism.” Instead, it appeals to envy, resentment, lust, and the eternal promise of something for nothing — free buses for all.
The American republic will not survive if its citizens trade reason for rage. To preserve it, we must expose the incoherence at the heart of the left’s new religion. Free buses to a ruined city are no substitute for freedom itself.
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.”
RELATED:Why Zohran Mamdani will be ‘one of the most catastrophic mayors ever’
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.
Cuomo 2.0: The corrupt comeback nobody asked for
Not long ago, nearly everyone — Democrats included — agreed that Andrew Cuomo was finished, a despicable scoundrel unfit for public office. As governor of New York, he presided over the deaths of thousands of seniors by forcing nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients. He pushed bail “reform” laws that unleashed violent criminals on the public. And after years of lecturing others about sexism, he resigned in disgrace for allegedly groping female subordinates.
That should have been the end of his political career. It wasn’t.
The conservative establishment’s embrace of Andrew Cuomo exposes what it has become: a protection racket for failed elites.
Now Cuomo is back, running for mayor of New York City, and astonishingly, he’s doing so with the blessing of the so-called conservative establishment. The Murdoch media, Republican megadonor John Catsimatidis, and a parade of Fox News personalities are all urging New Yorkers to cast their ballot for him on Nov. 4. Their justification: Cuomo’s opponent, Zohran Mamdani, is a hundred times worse.
The establishment’s favorite ‘lesser evil’
Mamdani, a self-described socialist and Hamas sympathizer, is undeniably radical. But the hysteria surrounding him has become an all-purpose excuse for elites to rehabilitate Cuomo. We’re told by pundits that electing this pro-Hamas, pro-LGBTQ Marxist from Uganda would unleash terrorists on the city’s Jewish population.
On Fox News this week, Democrat donor Bill Acker and Manhattan rabbi Elliot Cosgrove — who still insists, falsely, that Donald Trump praised Nazis — pleaded with viewers to vote for Cuomo. Moments later, Catsimatidis commanded Republicans to follow Trump’s “endorsement” and support the disgraced ex-governor.
The spectacle would be farcical if it weren’t so cynical: lifelong Democrats and media barons treating Cuomo as the savior of civilization because the alternative offends them more.
The New York Post’s moral collapse
The lowest point came with a New York Post editorial on October 20, which offered Cuomo a backhanded endorsement while smearing his rival Curtis Sliwa, the Guardian Angels founder who has spent decades fighting crime in New York’s subways.
The Post dismissed Sliwa as an “oddball with a sometimes-shady past and zero experience relevant to running the behemoth that is city government.” The same editorial mocked his animal-welfare activism as proof of eccentricity.
Contemptible doesn’t begin to describe the awfulness of the Post’s inept editorial. What “shady past” is the Post’s editorial board talking about? The editorial didn’t say — perhaps because nothing in Sliwa’s record compares to Cuomo’s documented abuses of office. The paper that once condemned Cuomo as unfit for power now cheers his comeback, pretending that the only alternatives are socialism or sleaze.
Rejecting the real alternative
The irony is that New York had a credible choice all along. Sliwa, a Reagan Republican with a populist streak, ran close behind Cuomo in the primary. He could have united voters across party lines, much as Fiorello La Guardia did in the 1930s, by campaigning on a single theme: restoring safety to a city in decline.
Instead, the city’s plutocrats and media elite sided with the insider they knew. Cuomo belonged to their cocktail circuit; the “oddball” Sliwa didn’t. He talked about crime too much. He didn’t chant “anti-Semite” often enough for their tastes. He simply refused to play their game.
Now, with Mamdani leading in the polls, the same establishment that once excoriated Cuomo has gone into panic mode, insisting that he’s the only bulwark against chaos. The New York Post, in particular, has worked overtime to rebrand him as the city’s last line of defense — conveniently forgetting its own editorials from two years ago calling him corrupt and dangerous.
RELATED: Why Zohran Mamdani will be ‘one of the most catastrophic mayors ever’
What the election reveals
Mamdani’s rhetoric on Israel is reckless, and his support for Hamas is morally obscene. But none of that would give him the power to conduct foreign policy. His real danger lies in domestic policy: dismantling what remains of New York’s police protection, completing the work Cuomo started when he ended cash bail.
If Mamdani wins, the result will be anarchy. But if Cuomo wins, it will be something worse — vindication for a ruling class that believes corruption is preferable to conviction, provided it keeps the right people in power.
The conservative establishment’s embrace of Andrew Cuomo exposes what it has become: a protection racket for failed elites. In the name of “stopping the left,” it now rewards the very figures who wrecked the state in the first place.
New Yorkers don’t have to choose between a Marxist and a predator. They could have chosen the man who actually rides the subway and fights for the normal people who live in the city. They chose not to. And the city will keep getting what its establishment demands — chaos, decay, and the return of the despicable scoundrel they once swore they’d never defend.
Today's top stories
www.theblaze.com