Mamdani’s Commie Housing Official Is a Lunatic

Venture aloud that the new mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, might just have a touch of communism about him, and you will run immediately into a wall of indignant pedantry. “He’s not a communist,” his apologists will insist. He’s a “communitarian.” Other preferred substitutions include “collectivist,” “Fabian,” “democratic socialist,” and, in the less intellectually inclined depths of the well, “just, like, someone who cares about other people.”

Whatever. A commie by any other name still smells as foul. Besides, far more important than whether Mamdani wishes to be more closely associated with the Judean People’s Front or the People’s Front of Judea is what he is actually doing with his power — and, alas, what Mamdani is actually doing with his power is appointing lunatics such as Cea Weaver to run the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. Given that New York City has more people living in rented housing than any other American city has residents, this is a position from which a great deal of mischief can be made.

If Cea Weaver did not exist, one would be hard-pressed to invent her. Weaver seems to have been designed in a laboratory to work in the Ideological Compliance Department of the East German Kommunale Wohnungsverwaltung, but, as the result of an unfortunate accident with a time machine, ended up overseeing housing policy in the most important city in the United States. She believes that “rent control is a perfect solution to everything” — not least because it is an “effective way to shrink the value of real estate.” She considers that “private property is a weapon of white supremacy,” she believes that “homeownership is racist,” and she holds that the highest aim of government ought to be to “impoverish the *white* middle class.” And they say that ambition is dead in America!

In Weaver’s estimation, the United States “built wealth for white people through genocide, slavery, stolen land & labor,” “white supremacy built the north and the south,” and the most reasonable response to these presuppositions is to “endorse a no more white men in office platform.” Unwilling to limit her racism to the temporal realm, she also enjoys fantasizing about her enemies roasting in the afterlife. “I wish I believed in god,” she declared in 2019, “so I could believe that all men who take credit for women’s work and all white men who take credit for the work of women of color would one day burn.” Perhaps this was what Mayor Mamdani was referring to when, in his inaugural address, he promised “the warmth of collectivism”?

Naturally, Cea Weaver’s approach to housing will not work. But, then, Cea Weaver’s approach to housing is not supposed to work so much as it is supposed to collapse the system completely. A year ago, Weaver told Sam Seder that, once she and her friends had won power, the government would be able to say to landlords in New York City, “Hey, um — you know — you are not maintaining this building, and we are the City of New York, we have an interest in making sure that housing is well maintained, and — and we’re gonna take this building away from you.” This, of course, is a classic two-step trap of the type that has been beloved by communists for more than a century. First, by capping rents at unsustainable levels, the authorities render it impossible for property owners to repair and maintain their buildings. Then, when those repairs and maintenance don’t get done, the city takes the building on the grounds that the landlords are derelict. The result is what Weaver has openly wanted all along: namely, “massive government interventions” and “public housing for everyone.”

Or, as anyone who has ever cracked a history book would put it: catastrophe. Whatever excuses the early communists might have had for their failures can under no circumstances be proffered today. The record of those who have declared that “property is theft” is, without exception, one of wrecked societies and immiserated lives. Cea Weaver is not an intelligent, lettered, or accomplished person, and the zeal with which she compensates for those shortcomings will not help her overcome the inevitable. If her preposterous ideas are put into action, the usual consequences will ensue.

Hopefully, things will never get that far. Communism — however enthusiastically it has been rebranded — is not how the United States works or, indeed, how the United States can work. There are many policy options available to the voters of this country, but communism and racial separation are not among them. This is not a communist country, and our system is not compatible with communism’s demands. At the government level, communism empowers the state in ways that are forbidden by our Constitution; at the individual level, communism makes claims on the rights of the citizen that have been foreclosed by our most fundamental laws. Cea Weaver may long for a parade of kulaks to liquidate, but this is the United States, dammit, and there is no obligation on anyone to provide them to her, or her ridiculous Bolshevist boss.

The Editors comprise the senior editorial staff of the National Review magazine and website.

Reprinted with Permission from The National Review – By The Editors

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.