Well, that didn’t take long. One of the biggest reasons Zohran Mamdani pulled off his win is because he peddled a fantasy — the classic socialist sales pitch of “free buses and frozen rents.” He convinced struggling New Yorkers that he could magically fix the city’s affordability crisis by bleeding the rich and redistributing the spoils.
It’s the same tired con every leftist runs: promise utopia, punish success, and pretend the laws of economics don’t exist.
Now, let’s be real — Mamdani isn’t going to deliver even half of what he promised. If he somehow manages to make buses “free,” they’ll quickly turn into rolling homeless shelters that no sane person would want to ride. And that whole “rent freeze” idea? It’s economic suicide.
Freezing rents doesn’t make housing affordable; it destroys it. Landlords won’t be able to maintain their properties, buildings will rot, and the very people Mamdani claims to be helping will end up living in crumbling, unsafe apartments.
But setting aside the fact that Mamdani’s promises are pure economic fiction, the irony of what happened next is almost too rich. This guy sold voters on a utopian future where “the rich” would foot the bill for everything — free housing, free transit, free whatever — and then, literally the day after his win, he turned around and started begging the working people for money.
He launched a fundraising drive for his transition team, asking for donations from the very New Yorkers he just promised wouldn’t have to pay for anything. You can’t make this up.
He actually had the nerve to claim he’d told supporters to stop donating a few months back — as if that somehow made his new plea more noble. But now, suddenly, the “people’s champion” is right back to rattling the tin cup, asking those same “working people” to cough up cash because, shocker, his transition team “costs money.”
Mamdani explained with a straight face that the transition “will require staff, it will require research, it will require infrastructure.” In other words, the guy who promised everything would be free is now discovering that reality — unlike his campaign rhetoric — comes with a price tag:
“Those are things we will have to provide. I’m excited for the fact that it will be funded by the very people who brought us to this point, the working people who have been left behind by the politics of this city.”
Pay up, folks! You really thought all that “free stuff” was actually free? Welcome to Socialist Economics 101 — nothing’s free, especially when the people promising it get into power. Now Mamdani and his crew have their hands out, asking the very same “working people” he claimed he was fighting for to bankroll his transition.
They need your money, they say, for “research” and “infrastructure.” Research for what, exactly — how to figure out new ways to give away things you already paid for?
And here’s a question no one in the press will ask: what happened to all those deep-pocketed NGOs that backed Mamdani’s campaign? What about the Soros network that helped prop him up? Why isn’t he passing the hat their way instead of shaking down middle-class New Yorkers?
As we’ve pointed out before, it was the college-educated crowd — the latte liberals and campus idealists — who flocked to Mamdani. The folks without the degrees, the ones who actually work for a living, knew better.
Unfortunately for New Yorkers, reality’s about to hit hard. They’re going to learn very quickly that nothing is free — not the buses, not the housing, not the fantasy Mamdani sold them. And the price they’ll pay for that lesson? Sky-high taxes, crumbling infrastructure, and a city circling the drain. In short: they voted for socialism, and now they’re about to get the bill.
