Guess Who Zohran Mamdani Reminds Me Of

I mean besides Fidel Castro.

For a while now, I’ve been trying to figure out who Zohran Mamdani reminds me of.

Mamdani, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, just won the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City — running on a platform that would make Karl Marx beam with pride.

Was it Fidel Castro he brought to mind? The socialist-turned-communist who transformed Cuba’s once-bustling economy into a cautionary tale? Or maybe Hugo Chávez — the man whose brand of socialism sent Venezuela’s economy off a cliff?

Even Marx himself briefly crossed my mind. In a 2021 address to the Young Democratic Socialists of America, Mamdani actually said that “seizing the means of production” was a worthy “end goal.” Sound familiar? It should. Marx literally wrote the book on that.

But now that he’s gunning to be mayor of New York City, Mamdani has conveniently backed off the revolutionary rhetoric — realizing, perhaps, that talk like that can be a tough sell, even in the People’s Republic of New York.

Mamdani wants to pour money that the city doesn’t have into a laundry list of socialist pet projects — free bus rides, subsidized food from government-run grocery stores, rent control covering nearly half the city’s apartments. You know, the usual suspects in the progressive wish book.