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.

1. “OPINION: Humanitarianism is the warmest place to hide” by Joel Schlosberg, The Richmond Observer [Rockingham, North Carolina], January 6, 2026
2. “New York’s ‘socialist’ mayor is selling hope — but it still looks like old statism” by Joel Schlosberg, The Wilson, North Carolina Times, October 4, 2024
3. “New York’s ‘socialist’ mayor is selling hope — but it still looks like old statism” by Joel Schlosberg, The Enterprise [Williamston, North Carolina], October 4, 2024
4. “New York’s ‘socialist’ mayor is selling hope — but it still looks like old statism” by Joel Schlosberg, The Johnstonian News [Smithfield, North Carolina], October 4, 2024
5. “New York’s ‘socialist’ mayor is selling hope — but it still looks like old statism” by Joel Schlosberg, The Ledger News [Oxford,
   North Carolina], October 4, 2024
6. “New York’s ‘socialist’ mayor is selling hope — but it still looks like old statism” by Joel Schlosberg, The Wake Weekly [Wake Forest, North Carolina], October 4, 2024
7. “Humanitarianism is the warmest place to hide” by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska], January 7, 2026
8. “Humanitarianism is the Warmest Place to Hide” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, January 8, 2026

“Some of those who believe tech lost its way are finding explanations in a book published a quarter century ago,” according to David Streitfeld’s full-page profile of Cyberselfish author Paulina Borsook in The New York Times (“A Book That Criticized Silicon Valley Gets Dusted Off,” November 30). To those who recall the turn-of-the-millennium Internet, Borsook’s is the exemplar of what Star Wars sage Obi-Wan Kenobi called “a name I’ve not heard in a long time.”

The 2000 tome warned readers for whom “it’s easy to sit at your computer and imagine yourself the Han Solo captain of your destiny” that “the era of the solo programmer making an impact is mostly long over” (the year that one created the formative video game Counter-Strike, as noted in a Times retrospective on  December 1).  Earthbound free spirits would have to settle for something sounding more like a real-life version of a Family Ties rerun, the spirit of the Sixties generation confined to “more comfort with a broader range of psychoactive substance use” alongside Eighties enthusiasms entrenched: “Deregulate this! Phooey on government!”

For all their reliance on corporate welfare, according to Borsook, “technolibertarians typically can’t be bothered to engage in conventional political maneuvers.”  The 2001 paperback edition envisioned such an ideology dominating the computer industry “long after high tech has retreated to being just one industrial sector among many.”

If the year 2025’s nationalist, protectionist industrial policy differs markedly from the road ahead suggested in Cyberselfish, perhaps it wasn’t all that perceptive about the twentieth century. Crediting heavy state funding with virtually all economic progress and social stability, and conflating the government with social cooperation, it’s hundreds of pages with all the depth of the bumper sticker proclaiming “IF YOU HATE SOCIALISM GET OFF MY PUBLIC ROAD.” (Although Borsook insists that she’d never “know how to tell other people how to live their lives,” let alone run them off the road of public life.) Murray Rothbard rates a mention in Cyberselfish as exemplifying libertarianism at its most uncompromising, but he looked to the history of the American economy not as a model for a “cruelly meritocratic world-to-come” but for evidence that its productive potential had been persistently prevented.

It wasn’t even the first published book to highlight the underbelly of the dot-com boom (Streitfeld mentions Clifford Stoll’s Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, which as that its subtitle suggests, saw the Net more as a road to nowhere than to dystopia). Bill Lessard and Steve Baldwin’s NetSlaves: True Tales of Working the Web was dubbed “the ultimate corrective to Internet IPO mania” by Entertainment Weekly the same year that Douglas Rushkoff rued in Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say that he could have ever “really believed the Internet could put an end to coercion”: 1999.

It may seem impossible to put an end to coercion on the Internet in 2026 and beyond, let alone use it to free the offline world.  Disentangling the World Wide Web from political logrolling is a good place to start.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “OPINION: No virtue in ‘Cyberselfish’-ness” by Joel Schlosberg, The Richmond Observer [Rockingham, North Carolina], December 2, 2025
2. “No Virtue in ‘Cyberselfish’-ness” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, December 4, 2025
3. “CONTRIBUTOR’S VIEW – Thomas Knapp [sic]: No Virtue in ‘Cyberselfish’-ness” by Thomas Knapp [sic], Valley, Alabama Times-News, December 5, 2025

If New York Times guest essayist Finn Brunton is to be believed, the Federal Reserve Board Building is haunted by the ghosts of crackpots past. Trump’s cozying up to corporate cryptocurrency coiners during his second term, reinforcing “his thirst for money and power, has … embraced the corruption at the heart of digital currencies — a corruption inherited from the libertarian ideals that created them” (“Cryptocurrency Promised Us Freedom — and Brought Tyranny,” October 26).

Brunton’s gloomy portrait of a new-Gilded-Age Grand Old Party recasts it in the image of the Libertarian Party that might have “languished for decades as a clown show” but whose resemblance to the Gathering of the Juggalos conceals something less like the Insane Clown Posse fanbase’s dedication to social self-support and freewheeling fun than a real-life manifestation of their Dark Carnival mythology.  At their most innocent, “quirky, high-minded libertarian intellectuals” or “civil liberties activists [who] wanted anonymous payments for political donations and for financially vulnerable industries” are, like Martin Short’s Stubbs the Clown in We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story, unwitting tools of far more nefarious and exploitative hucksters who employ and envelop them (like the literal dark carnival where Stubbs works).

From the invocation of Ron Paul and Murray Rothbard with their most unsavory alliances implied to be representative, to quoting Robert Heinlein’s mantra that “an armed society is a polite society” to the obligatory mention of Ayn Rand, “libertarians’ favorite novelist” due to glamorizing “rich, brilliant supermen” who “despise everyone else” — but not her nonfictional clarification distinguishing her preferred, ethical egoism from that of those who “are lone wolves (stressing that species’ most predatory characteristics)” — about the only cliché missing is a nod to the Mad Max series more overt than a supposed ideal of “a nerd-warlord society of failed states.”  Yet a fuller and closer reading of the libertarian bookshelf, rather than a glance at placarded slogans, would reveal a wish, not to let loose the likes of Max nemesis Immortan Joe, but rather to prevent concentrations of power from existing for such malefactors to exploit.

To Brunton, the contrasting model of power offered by Scranton Joe Biden is at worst “inconsistent, confusing and cautious.”  Yet it was Rothbard who clued in the coalescing libertarian movement to the work of leftist scholars like Gabriel Kolko, who saw Progressive Era efforts to centralize banking as a broader effort not to bring an oligarchic economy under popular control but to “increase the power of the big national banks to compete with the rapidly growing state banks.” Rather than calling for “removing all checks on the power of the wealthy to do what they want,” Rothbard traced how it came from inside the Jekyll Island Clubhouse where the Fed was conceived.

Rothbard also asked those who “charge that fraud would run rampant” if currency competition was allowed: “if government cannot be trusted to ferret out the occasional villain in the free market in coin, why can government be trusted when it finds itself in a position of total control over money?”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “We have met King Joe and he is us” by Joel Schlosberg, Lake Havasu City, Arizona News, November 2, 2025
2. “We have met King Joe and he is us” by Joel Schlosberg, Mohave Valley Daily News [Bullhead City, Arizona], November 2, 2025