Friday's Final Word

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To a new and a shiny place, click our tabs and we'll say our grace ...

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"This is ridiculous... let's abolish ICE, let's abolish prisons, let's abolish everything, let's abolish the police. It's INSANE."

"Republicans are going to TAR them with this... every Republican strategist is salivating on what these people have said in the past, and they're going to wallpaper it with it."

"Democrats are going down a bad path. They're electing these Democratic socialists. It's a disaster. No matter what you think of it, wherever your politics are, it's bad strategy."

Ed: Democrats can't say they weren't warned. It's not even a great strategy in the primaries, and unless every GOP campaign committee is incompetent, Republicans will make it toxic in the general elections in every single race. And it's not like Deutsch is some kind of crypto conservative; he's just smart enough to see the endgame of the Democrats' full-tilt radicalism. 

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Mark Hemingway at The Federalist: 

Throughout this process I have been reminded of the words of the Austrian economist, Friedrich Hayek, ‘if socialists understood economics, they wouldn’t be socialists,’” said Mr. Mamdani, the democratic socialist mayor. “If these past months have shown us anything, it is that socialists not only understand economics just as well as the capitalists who came before, but that we can solve their years of mismanagement through an embrace of our principles.

Being that this is a pretty arrogant statement, it’s worth asking what, exactly, has Mamdani done that would allow him to pretend that passing a budget — one of the most basic requirements of governance — is both a triumphal victory and a rebuke of capitalism?

First, some basic facts about New York city’s latest budget — the city is spending $126 billion for a single fiscal year. The budget was only made possible by an $8 billion bailout from the state government and deferred pension payments. According to one New York city fiscal analyst who’s bending over backwards to be fair to Mamdani, this has prompted “concerns that the re-amortization [of pension payments] could set the city up for extraordinary problems. … The Mayor who offered a promise in his inaugural address to overcome every moment of fiscal challenge with ‘ambition, not austerity’ may well find himself in contradiction to that pledge.”

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The budget is basically a hellbroth of fiscal time bombs and all kinds of deeply questionable priorities. 

Ed: In fairness, that's not unusual for budgets created by either party. However, Mamdani insists that this budget shows that “Socialists just solved years of Capitalist mismanagement," by claiming he balanced the budget. No, he did not; Kathy Hochul bailed out New York at the expense of taxpayers everywhere else in the state. In comparison, the budget for the entire state of Texas is $337 billion – and that's for two years, in a state with a population of 32 million, more than three times that of NYC. 

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Ed: That's also why they're diving into the deep end of the socialist pool, too. They still refuse to accept the results of the 2024 election and are attempting to criminalize any Democrat loss. Socialists have a long history of that in countries where they come to power. 

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Jonathan Turley: For many of us who were raised in liberal, Democratic families, the infusion of socialist, anti-free-speech, and anti-Semitic elements into the party has been alarming. The party was always in favor of social welfare programs but remained ardently committed to free markets and free speech. Now, we have CNN anchors openly questioning whether candidates are too Jewish-looking for the Democratic base as socialists sweep away establishment candidates. A recent poll reaffirmed that trend with a vast majority of Democrats saying that they are prepared to support the socialists.

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A recent Economist/YouGov survey asked respondents, “Would you ever vote for a candidate who identified as a “Democratic Socialist?”

While 85 percent of Republicans and 40 percent of independents said that they would not vote for socialists, 62 percent of Democrats said that they would.  Among self-described liberals, the percent of support for socialism soars to 73 percent.

Ed: This is what happens when a party adopts revolutionary language rather than oppositional language. It's not an accident or coincidence that Democrats made themselves into "the Resistance" in 2017; they wanted to curry favor with the revolutionaries. Now the revolutionaries are eating the party alive, and they are anti-Semites and Stalin-admiring communists. 

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Ed: God bless our allies in Japan! Politico hardest hit, of course. 

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Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) in the WSJ: I love America. Unfortunately, as we celebrate our nation’s 250th birthday, too many Americans associate those three words only with Republicans. Democrats need to change that.

Many in my party are unhappy with the nation’s current trajectory. Under President Trump, we’ve fallen short on income inequality. We’ve seen masked agents go head-to-head with U.S. citizens. Our elections and voting rights have been attacked, while misinformation proliferates online amid bigotry, extremism and political violence.

Despite all this, we should remain fiercely proud of the American system. It has enabled the quest for “a more perfect union,” making possible the abolition of slavery, the rights of women and black Americans to vote, the protection of civil rights, the confrontation of religious, ethnic and racial bigotry and so much more.

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Ed: They should, but they aren't. This is an excellent essay, by the way; I'm not criticizing Suozzi, who is one of the few Democrats in federal office who openly opposes the Democratic Socialists of America's poaching into Democrat primaries (with Sen. John Fetterman being the most outspoken). He's correct in framing this issue, but I suspect he already knows that the last ten years of shrieking demagoguery and the party leadership's footsie-playing with radicals render his essay a day late and a dollar short. 

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Scott Rasmussen: 

Ed: Great points from my friend Scott. We'll find out whether voters stick to their values in the upcoming election, or whether they sell out to communists just to fight Trump. That is what elections are for. 

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He said America’s wealth was built by working people with “calloused, dirt-streaked hands" while accusing the country of allowing the wealth built by workers to be concentrated in “the soft hands of a precious few.”

Ed: This won't win Mamdani any converts. This is not the time for angry polemics; Americans expect gratitude and appreciation in Independence Day speeches, especially from an immigrant who has succeeded as much as Mamdani has. 

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As parents and citizens who chose her, we have a sacred duty to criticize her quietly when she falls short—so we can help her grow stronger and wiser. But we also have a duty to publicly praise her, celebrate her, defend her, and stand with her—especially on her 250th birthday.

You don’t trash your own kid to the whole world on her big day. That’s not love. That’s not leadership. That’s ingratitude.

I was rescued by this country as a small child. She gave my family freedom, opportunity, and a chance to thrive when we had nothing. I owe her everything. And with that gratitude comes the obligation to serve her, protect her, and make her better every single day—not tear her down in public on the day we celebrate everything she has given the world.

Happy 250th Birthday, America.

I will always choose to lift you up.

God bless the United States of America. 🇺🇸

Ed: Mamdani should have hired Dr. Hemmati to write his speech. 

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Ed: But did they distribute N95 masks? As long as no one got hurt, this is awesome. Make sure you have the audio on. 

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Noah Rothman at NRO: These intrepid Democrats can count on the support of some outside groups. In a praiseworthy op-ed, the leaders of the moderate PAC Third Way declared war on the DSA. The socialists’ “radicalism makes it not a faction to be appeased,” they wrote, “it is a movement to be opposed.”

The op-ed’s authors make a moral case against the DSA, but also an instrumentalist one. After all, the movement’s “ideas are electoral poison,” they wrote. The gun control activist Shannon Watts concurs. So, too, does Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden. “DSA makes claims for speaking for the working class, but Democratic candidates who do the best with working-class voters are pretty anti-DSA,” she wrote, citing Maine candidate Graham Platner’s fading prospects.

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Still other DSA skeptics on the left make the case that the DSA’s cast of overwhelmingly white, downwardly mobile degree-holders is not only unrepresentative of the constituencies for whom they claim to speak — but that they’re also unbelievably condescending.

Manhattan Democrats Vice Chair Mariama James went so far as to accuse the DSA of a “mindset” that shares the paternalism she associates with “white supremacy.” Its members, she contends, “are racist, anti-Black, antisemitic, anti-East Asian.” Perhaps worst of all, they’re “non-Democrats” who are beholden to Bernie Sanders – “a registered Independent who’s never passed any legislation and is the senator of the literal Whitest state in the union.”

Ed: When you have Shannon Watts and Neera Tanden arguing that Democrats have gone off the radical rails, that's worth noting. What we haven't seen is Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, and other party leaders speaking up against the DSA's poaching of the Democrat Party. They're too busy trying to profit off of it. 

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Ed: This is amazing, and what better way to go out tonight?

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Last night's lyric: "Shambala" by Three Dog Night. 

Editor's Note: It’s America’s 250th birthday! Help HotAir celebrate the greatest nation in history by honoring its past, defending its present, and preserving its future with reporting you can trust.

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