Miranda Devine: History shows that Mamdani’s dangerous plan to seize property from landlords only leads to misery and tyranny

Zohran Mamdani’s promise to seize the properties of landlords he deems unworthy should send a chill down the spine of every New Yorker.

“When necessary, we will take aggressive legal action to remove negligent owners and property managers,” the socialist mayor told a cheering crowd of leftists in Brooklyn Tuesday when he unveiled his “block by block” housing plan.

“For buildings that have suffered chronic neglect, we will work to transfer ownership to responsible stewards [including] community land trusts, nonprofits, or even the tenants themselves.”

Wherever in history his Marxist prescriptions have been applied, misery and tyranny follow — from Stalin to Mao to Pol Pot, 100 million deaths were caused by communist regimes in the 20th century alone.

This is a lesson the 34-year-old nepo baby appears to have missed — or doesn’t care to heed because the revolution is never about improving the lot of the downtrodden. It’s about seizing power.

Mamdani, having won office on the Democratic Socialists of America ticket, told us what he thought of America in his inaugural address: “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism,” he said.

By collectivism, he means the state must seize the means of production — the factories, land, businesses, property and capital that generate wealth.

This requires total economic control, which is impossible without total social control.

The result is always one-party rule, secret police, censorship and tyranny.

Creating misery

In his victory speech, Mamdani singled out non-Western immigrants for praise: “I speak of Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties.”

He gave a special shout-out to neighborhoods with a heavy Muslim presence: “Every New Yorker in Kensington and Midwood and Hunts Point, knows that this city is your city, and this democracy is yours, too.”

Thus, the Ugandan-born Muslim signaled from Day 1 that his mayoralty would elevate only people like him — recent arrivals from countries plagued by failed socialist policies, weak institutions, minimal property rights and a breakdown in law and order.

Ironically, while he claims to champion the refugees of failed collectivism, he works to recreate those same miserable conditions in New York.

The plight of hardworking fourth-generation New Yorker Tom Diana, 64, is a salutary example of how the little guy gets screwed under the radical-left policies that have accumulated in this city over the past decade.

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Diana, a father of three, hails from Italian, Irish and German roots.

His wife is a legal immigrant of Indian-British extraction.

He grew up in Queens and worked for 45 years in heavy construction as a licensed engineer and builder.

In 1988 he set himself up for retirement by buying a run-down eight-unit apartment building in Park Slope.

For years he laboriously renovated the building, working all day on construction jobs, coming home and putting in another four or five hours on the tools, sleeping on a mattress on the floor, cooking in a microwave and taking his laundry to his mother’s place on weekends.

But for the last eight years, one of his tenants has refused to pay rent, and refuses to move out of the building, leaving Diana more than $200,000 out-of-pocket while still having to pay $1,500 a month in outgoing expenses for the two-bedroom apartment, plus thousands in legal costs trying to have the squatter evicted.

To rub salt in the wound, he pays exorbitant property taxes to the city that gives his deadbeat tenant free legal representation in front of activist left-wing judges who regard her as a victim and Diana as a greedy capitalist.

He was back in court last month, but got word from his lawyer this week that his case has been postponed yet again, to August.

“I have no money left,” he says.

“It’s not fair.”

If it weren’t for the fact that he still works and his two builder sons help him with maintenance, he would be underwater. He can’t even help his daughter with tuition for community college.

“With all the work I put into that building, I wonder if it would have been worth it if I just worked overtime at the job. Problem is I’m a builder. I like building things.”

Mamdani uses phony smiles and soft clichés to disguise his intent, but his friend and fellow champagne socialist, the dog-torturing Turkish-American Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, 34, spelled it out during one of his live­stream rants against landlords like Diana.

“Kill them,” he said.

“Murder those motherf–kers in the street. Let the streets soak in their f–king red capitalist blood.”

Cea Weaver, the 37-year-old militant trust-fund socialist whom Mamdani appointed director of the New York City Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, was more specific.

“Property is theft,” “seize all property,” “homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy,” she has said on social media.

In a 2021 DSA video, she declared: “Transitioning to treating [private property] as a collective good towards a model of shared equity . . . will mean that families, and white families especially . . . who are homeowners are going to have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have.”

While some New Yorkers dismiss Mamdani’s ravings about seizing private property as childish babble, pointing out the mayor can’t override the rule of law, sage political operatives are less sanguine.

Queens political firebrand Vickie Paladino, one of only five Republicans on the City Council, works inside the belly of the beast that is the Democratic machine controlling this city.

‘Violations’ blitz

The former small-business owner has observed policies once unthinkable come to fruition under the ascendant far left of the Democratic Party — like defunding the police, catch-and-release bail and sanctuary city protection for illegal migrant criminals.

She warns that Mamdani and other DSA “organizers” like Weaver will weaponize the city Department of Buildings to “begin writing as many violations as possible in order to bolster the city’s effort to justify a seizure.”

“The combination of . . . hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, rent strikes and constant threats and harassment against landlords by militant activists will make the situation untenable for any property owner to realistically fight back, and the city will seize the property,” she wrote on X.

“The landlord will be lucky to walk away without prison or being beaten to death in the street by an angry mob.”

Paladino also points out the ominous intent behind Mamdani’s promise to turn the seized properties over to nonprofits.

The Trump administration’s moves to dismantle leftist boondoggles such as USAID, indict the Southern Poverty Law Center and investigate CCP-linked mega-donors like Neville Roy Singham represent an existential threat to the funding networks that sustain the militant left’s activist infrastructure.

So Mamdani’s solution is to allocate potentially hundreds of billions of dollars of New York real estate to allied nonprofits to make them financially self-sufficient, no matter who’s in the White House.

“There are no bad ideas,” former VP Kamala Harris recently declared in a speech pandering to her party’s new socialist base for a potential presidential run.

That’s the specialty of the DSA — reviving bad ideas that history has proven disastrous.