Zohran Mamdani’s promise to bring “the resurgent flame of hope” to “the January chill” as mayor of a literally frozen New York City during his January 1 inaugural address got the cold shoulder from conservative commentators.
Despite his vow to move the city to unity past “a tale of two cities, the rich versus the poor” and highlighting constituents “who supported President Trump a year before they voted for me,” some just aren’t buying Mamdani’s narrative. At most, reactions to lines such as the pledge to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism” in City Journal or The Wall Street Journal don’t go quite as far as National Review‘s Noah Rothman in invoking “the warmth generated by torchlit marches, book burnings, and crematoria.”
Yet those red-baiting Mamdani’s “Red Apple” could stand to scratch the surface and see how much the gilded apple of Trump Tower pokes through — and not just because he won’t be able to “deliver universal childcare for the many by taxing the wealthiest few” if those fat cats pull up stakes.
Mamdani at least acknowledges that Bill de Blasio took office via the same winning “tale of two cities” rhetoric in 2014 — and the precedents of David Dinkins and Fiorello La Guardia, both memory-holed by the subtitle of Run Zohran Run! Inside Zohran Mamdani’s Sensational Campaign to Become New York City’s First Democratic Socialist Mayor. The contrast to such predecessors as former mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and election competitor Andrew Cuomo is left unsaid.
Yet Mamdani’s assertion that subsidies for rents and rides are “not simply about the costs we make free, but the lives we fill with freedom” parallels Giuliani’s infamous line about how “freedom is about authority.” Rudy’s concomitant qualms about using such authority to “solve problems that government in America was designed not to solve” are nullified by certitude that “there is no need too small to be met” by statism — itself an echo of Cuomo’s confidence that in the New York state he then governed “there is no small solution to big problems.”
Mamdani assures us that his administration is one for which “no longer will City Hall hesitate to use its power” in the face of “those who insist that the era of big government is over.” He doesn’t specify whether their ranks include the husband of former United States Senator Hillary Clinton who originated that phrase, but it’s not that far from William Jefferson Clinton’s anti-Jeffersonian claim to find “nothing patriotic about … pretending that you can love your country but despise your Government.”
For New Yorkers who love their city despite its government, that’s not the result of what Mamdani dubs “decades of apathy” but of understanding reality.
New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.
- “OPINION: Humanitarianism is the warmest place to hide” by Joel Schlosberg, The Richmond Observer [Rockingham, North Carolina], January 6, 2026