A Candidate and a Clown: Zohran Mamdani's ludicrous critic strikes out at criticizing socialism

Today's right-wing media organizations, like Christopher Rufo's Manhattan Institute or Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, have this inexplicable fascination with grooming young happy idiots who can spew their talking points all over creations as if they actually understood them. Or had researched them. Or could even write a coherent essay that would earn a decent grade in an undergraduate political science class.

Case in point: this week's Santiago Vidal Calvo's intended-to-be-a-hit-piece in the New York Post, "Unlike Zohran Mamdani, most Dems want prosperity -- not class warfare."

In this post we're going to walk through Mr Calvo's sophomoric attempt at a hit piece on socialism, sentence. Maybe if at least one of his professors at Georgetown had ever bothered to do so, he wouldn't be out here publishing such drek.

Let's start:

This is a textbook case of intentionally confusing terms in order to create a false equivalence.

First, Mr Calvo adds "revolution" to tag onto "democratic socialist," which he thinks permits him to directly compare an elected mayor attempting policy changes in a single urban area to the Bolshevik Revolution (including the Russian Civil War, the Kulak displacement, and the Great Terror), as well as the Chinese Revolution (including the Chinese Civil War, the Long March, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution). 

It's worth knowing -- since Clown Calvo apparently doesn't -- that comparing a single elected mayor within a fixed democratic system that requires him to get all of his policy ideas approved by other to multi-decade social, political, and economic wars and upheavals in pre-industrial nations is ... well ... clown car stupid.

But he doesn't just offer this comparison ... like some Bozo clanking his finger cymbals -- he doubles down.

In order to produce this number (which he clearly copied from multiple other right-wing polemics rather than originated), Mr Calvo again conflates the administration of the mayor of a single city (no matter its size) with the depredations of absolute dictators throughout all-out civil wars, again ... across decades.

Unless the Mayor of New York is somehow positioned to take over the entire United States during his term as mayor, the implicit comparison of Zohran Mamdani to Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong are not just laughable, they're intellectually incontinent.

Our Clown obviously misse the fact that it is not Mr Mamdani's democratic socialism currently involved in building an extensive system of new prisons across the US or eliminating the labor necessary to harvest and bring our crops to market. It's our billionaire CAPITALIST ruling oligarchy.

Let's keep going through this drivel:

"Socialism's greatest failures"?

Let's go -- as G. Gordon Liddy used to say -- seriatem.

"Public utilities" as one of "socialism's greatest failures" Hmm.

Given that 59% of all electric utilities in the US are publicly owned (chiefly by smaller communities) and have successfully served 55 million Americans in 2,000 communities for decades with lower-cost power than investor-financed utilities, portraying public ownership of utilities is little short of moronic. And 72% of the American public agrees with the idea of public utilities for power production.

By the way, dumbass ("clown" isn't good enough) public utilities in New York state are currently provided electricity (and sometimes gas and water) to 74 cities, towns, and counties, while 

I should also note, on the larger scale, that the federal government's largest public utility project -- the Hoover Dam, which was built during the Great Depression -- is still going strong nearly a century later, and delivering MASSIVE amounts of electric power across multiple states at lower cost than privately owned utilities (and is still controlled by the US Bureau of Reclamation).

Here's how Hoover Damn electricity is currently being distributed:

So that's strike one on socialism's greatest failures, clown.

"Price controls" -- apparently putting on the clown nose has deprived Mr Calvo of the knowledge that rent control has existed in New York city in various formulations for about 70 years.

Here's what the highly regarded Matthews Real Estate Investment Services says about it:

That would be strike two. Let's go for a KO.

"Government-run retail"?

I have to wonder if putting on the big shoes kept our clown from ever knowing about the Army & Air Force Exchange Service:

This has only been going on -- successfully -- since 1895, so it's probably too new for our clown to know about it.

Maybe it also never crossed his mind -- under the white make-up -- that 17 states run their own liquor stores, and have since the end of Prohibition.

This is getting tedious. But if Mr Calvo only wrote about things he knew something about it would have been a very short article.

Next up:

Apparently, at Georgetown, Public Policy majors are not required to take any history courses.

"Capitalism's ledger shows no mass graves"?

American industrial capitalism was jump-started by two major elements prior to 1860: plantation-based monoculture agriculture and the seemingly inexhaustible availability of "free land" in the west.

The human cost of the former was tens of millions of Black Americans who lived and died in chattel slavery --

And of the second -- the depopulating of all those "free" or "public" lands?

Roughly 4.2 million people in what even the Holocaust Museum system considers a major "genocide of indigenous peoples."

It's also exceptionally cute -- in a sideshow kind of way -- that Mr Calvo attempts to sidestep the fact that what exists in the People's Republic of China today is in fact defined by every economist worthy of note as a "SOCIALIST MARKET ECONOMY," not capitalism. A socialist reform that Clown Calvo himself credits with creating China's new "middle-class affluence."

Is this getting tedious?

The problem is that there is literally NOTHING in Clown Calvo's supposed take-down of "democratic socialism" that is actually FACTUAL.

I will just give you one more example of HOW FUCKING DUMB his arguments are:

This conclusion is that of a single paper, that in fact emphasized that the decrease was short-term (and that the Mietendeckal was declared unconstitutional before any longer term impacts could be assessed), and that there was "no spillover effect" on units for sale during the period. Our clown ignored the mixed nature of such findings.

Moreover, rent control has existed in Germany since the 1970s, and became a national law in 2015, which is what one should be studying, not the short-lived experiment of 2020-2021:

Other scholarship demonstrates that the 2020 Berlin experiment was in fact a "step backward" toward what are considered "first generation"rent control policies that do not factor in mechanisms to maintain supply, whereas the 2015 national law did so, and is seen as quite successful.

This, in other words, is an example of Clown cherry-picking. He had to work to find one major unsuccessful example of rent control in the midst of a nation that has successfully been using rent control strategies for 50 years -- and then pretend that part of the story doesn't exist.

Take note of the last sentence of one of the Clown's closing paragraphs, the sentence about the NYC Housing Authority:

I could point out that the NY state legislature just invested $1.3 BILLION in fixing up 39,000 properties, but it's even MORE FUN to quote this paragraph from that story:

Oh, shit, would you look at that?

Mr Mamdani's emphasis on public housing is not only shares by the States Governor and the State legislature, but Mr Mamdani's opponents in the general election: current Mayor Eric Adams.

In other words, that socialist policy of supporting public housing that is so revolutionary ... turns out to be not so revolutionary at all, expecially if BOTH MAJOR CANDIDATES AGREE ON IT.

Oops.

This, unfortunately, is why we are losing. I have had to spend more time debunking this Clown's ridiculous ope-ed:

... that just about anybody is going to take the time to read.

We need to do better.