Mamdani, a Ugandan-born Muslim democratic socialist, secured the party’s nomination for mayor on Tuesday. For Emmons, a former New Yorker who has since relocated to Appalachia, the result was an existential crisis for the Big Apple.
“I’m absolutely horrified that the people of New York would go so far to elect a communist who plans to completely destroy the city by depleting the tax base and getting rid of the things that make the city worthwhile,” Emmons said. “It’s absolutely crazy to me. The working class, people who make under $50,000, they voted for Cuomo, and the people who can afford to sit on their laptops and have everything delivered to them and don’t take the subways voted for Mamdani.”
The conversation followed the publication of Posobiec’s Wednesday op-ed in Human Events, where he wrote that Mamdani’s victory “was engineered by decades of unchecked mass immigration” and represented a tipping point in what he called “New New York.”
Posobiec described the Mamdani campaign as one built around “queer liberation, defund the police, free food, free stuff everywhere,” and said the election results broke down sharply along ethnic and class lines.
“You had 80/20 in terms of South Asian immigrants, the South Asian community voting for Mamdani,” he said, “but you also saw Hispanics and blacks voting against Mamdani, as well as working-class whites. So suddenly, people are realizing this is an ethnic shift playing out in a class shift.”
Emmons agreed. “100%, yes,” she said. “I lived in Bay Ridge for about 10 years, which is historically an immigrant community. It was Norwegian, Greek, Italian, Chinese—now it’s primarily Arab. The biggest difference, I think, between the previous groups and the current groups is that the previous groups were interested in assimilating.”
“When my great-grandparents came here from Naples and Sicily and from Norway, they were interested in becoming American. You could not say a word against America to them... My great-grandmother taught herself to read by reading the New York Times in the 1920s, not being on TikTok and hearing about how Osama bin Laden is the greatest guy ever. It’s a totally different type of cultural submersion that they’re getting now.”
“What you have here,” she added, “is a situation where the laptop class—the wealthiest, the people who get delivery and can afford to take taxis, primarily Asians and Whites—they were voting for Mamdani. Meanwhile, you have blacks, Hispanics, and people who have been in this city for a long time and are working-class people saying, ‘No, please don’t make the city worse.’”
Emmons warned that voters were underestimating the long-term consequences of electing radical communists.
“What everyone forgets is that once you start voting in communist politics, you can’t vote them out,” she said. “Look at the policies that came in the US, like the ACA. There’s no way to get Obamacare out at this point, despite how poorly it’s really done—or the welfare state, or any of these things.”
“He went to a liberal arts college, his dad teaches anti-colonialism at Columbia University,” she said. “He does not represent the people of New York. He’s representative of luxury values that have absolutely no place in reality.”
Mamdani’s agenda is clear—and destructive, Emmons said. “The things that he wants to do to this city, he plans to do as you said before: free buses, free childcare, city-run grocery stores. He wants to replace the subway patrols with community policing. He wants all of this healthcare stuff for illegal immigrants. He also wants to take over vacant commercial spaces and turn them into health clinics.”
“He is opposed to the Trump administration entirely,” she continued. “He wants to create a legal fund a la California and Gavin Newsom, to fight Trump, to fight ICE, and all of this other stuff. How does he plan to do it? He wants to take a page from Biden’s book and tax the one percent, to tax the millionaires and corporations.”
“There are 346,000 millionaires in the city of New York,” she said. “That might seem like a lot, but the population is something like 8.5 million. And during COVID, 400,000 people left the city. Does he really think that 345,000 people aren’t capable of picking up and taking their money bags and leaving? Then what happens? The whole thing collapses.”
Posobiec, closing out the conversation, agreed: “It is complete and utter destruction of one of the greatest cities—probably the greatest city in American history. New York City. I say this as a guy from the Philly area, so it pains me.”
