Well, they say you should never trust a politician, and it seems I’ve been duped.
As an avid reader of the New York Post, the New York Post’s X feed, and transcripts of several-minute-long voice memos from my relatives who have never lived in New York and will never live in New York, I was promised one thing from a Zohran Mamdani mayoralty: chaos.
Campus chaos. Anti-ICE chaos. Chaos in our parks, sidewalks, and public spaces.
And as an anarcho-communist-accelerationist-antifascist-nihilist-transplant-gentrifier-crisis actor living in a rent-controlled penthouse bodega paid for by some combination of my mommy and George Soros, that’s exactly why I wanted Zohran to win.
A city in collapse? A desperate citizenry? The demise of hope? I can’t think of any better conditions for my punk band / musical improv team / woke clowning syndicate to thrive.
But here we are, in Mamdani’s New York, and in a sick and destabilizing twist, there has yet to be a sick and destabilizing twist.
I was assured that a Mamdani administration would mean an exodus of New York City business leaders. But I showed up to work this morning, and my boss was still here. And worse: He made me do stuff. He’s supposed to be halfway to Florida by now. I didn’t put in all of this hard work just for my tax dollars to go toward the continued collection of massive corporations’ tax dollars.
“Go ahead, vote for Zohran,” they said. “The NYPD is going to abandon the city,” they said. Tell that to the officers who blasted their sirens at me this morning so they could run a red light before promptly turning off their sirens once they were past that red light. Unless they were conducting an emergency self-deportation to Long Island, it’s business as usual. Mamdani’s opponents swore that the next time a New Yorker was in danger and called the police, none of them would be there to help. But it’s just the opposite: All of them are still here to not help.
The way everyone was talking, I thought the streets would look like Mad Max. But the only similarity is that there’s a healthy amount of space between cars, thanks to the success of congestion pricing. And there’s always one guy blasting some absolute bangers from his custom sound system.
And speaking of custom sound systems: When can I expect my free stuff? Not childcare and buses—they’re actually hard at work on that. No, I’m talking about the $10 billion in socialist freebies that I kept seeing mentioned in the paper. I only saw the headline—I don’t have time for any more long-form reading once I’m finished with Bill Ackman’s tweets—so I could only assume based on the tone that a massive dump truck full of communist goodies would be rolled up to my building by now. But there’s nothing. No hammers. No sickles. No guillotines. Not even the free juice Zohran promised when running for high school president, a fact that it was absolutely in the public interest for me to know.
By the way: Where is the Islamic cultural revolution that I was promised I was being promised? My own senator made me believe we were on the verge of “global jihad.” I understand that in government, change happens incrementally, and the mayor just got started. But despite having five years in the State Assembly, Zohran Mamdani was unable to deliver even a single act of jihad for his local district. That’s his whole political project in a nutshell: all talk, no jihad.
Oh. Also. The other movie I thought it was gonna be like was The Purge.
It’s almost as if Mamdani was being widely mischaracterized as a dangerous extremist by overlapping political and media empires in a no-holds-barred campaign to scare New Yorkers away from electing a candidate whose most unorthodox idea was putting their interests above those of the elites.
But I hope not. Because if the wealthiest New Yorkers, cops, and Islamophobes aren’t leaving, then I might have to. Unless Staten Island does first.
