- Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old self-avowed democratic socialist and Muslim, elected mayor of New York City in 2025, defeating Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa.
- Becomes New York City’s first socialist mayor starting January 1, 2026.
- Touted as a potential rising star for the Democratic Party’s progressive wing.
- Policy agenda includes universal childcare, free public buses, and government-run grocery stores.
- Plans to halt forced clearances of homeless encampments, favoring voluntary shelter options.
- Transition team of over 400 members includes police abolition advocates, a transgender rabbi, DSA organizers, radical academics, former de Blasio staffers, and individuals with criminal records.
- Governor Kathy Hochul endorsed Mamdani and may face demands for state funding.
- Expected to promote socialist policies aggressively, amplify successes via media, and blame shortfalls on higher government levels.
- Predicted to lead to funding challenges, city deterioration, and potential business/resident exodus.
- Transition seen as training ground for leftist activists with broader influence on future Democratic politics.
(Daily Signal)—When Jan. 1 rolls around, New York City will have its first self-avowed socialist mayor. As a New York resident and a keen observer of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s rise to power, I thought it worthwhile to write what I expect of him in the new year.
A lot is riding on Mamdani’s success for the Left. He’ been touted as the way of the future for the Democratic Party. He’s the Barack Obama for a new generation, just as the old Obama becomes passe.
Whereas Obama carefully laid the groundwork for the radical turn in American government and institutions leading up to the Great Awokening of 2020, my feeling is that Mamdani will be more open and aggressive in the way he promotes his agenda.
Obama insisted he was neither a Muslim nor a socialist. His replacement proudly says he’s both and is hardly concerned about being lumped in with some seriously radical folks. He wants to show everyone that real socialism is going to be tried this time, and it will work great when the cameras are rolling.
While Mamdani can’t run for president, given that he wasn’t born an American citizen, he will almost certainly have a huge amount of influence in state and national politics. The media will amplify his every action, downplay his setbacks, and tout every policy as a remarkable and incredible success.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, who was already browbeaten into endorsing him, will have a difficult time refusing Mamdani’s demands. Any attempt by New York state leaders to constrain his ability to act will likely be treated as a betrayal of the energized voters who put him in office.
What will the Zohran Mamdani era mean for Democrats?
Nothing good ever came from socialism—and I suspect Americans will quickly sour on his misguided ideas.
📺 @NEWSMAX pic.twitter.com/C8wolpb6Yn
— Rob Bluey (@RobertBluey) December 31, 2025
Universal childcare, free buses, and even the government-run grocery stores he promised will need significant funding and approval from the state government. Will Democrats who effectively run the state be able to tell him “no” when the money runs out or isn’t there to begin with?
And if at any point the city, state, or federal government refuses to foist over money to pay for his numerous programs, he’ll have a built-in excuse for why they failed and enemies to pin the blame on when they do.
Though I’d almost certainly bet on Mamdani’s project ultimately failing in New York, let’s not set the bar too low here. This is perhaps in part why President Donald Trump held his fire when Mamdani came to visit the White House. It never helps to be hysterical.
The expectation should be that things will work out. After all, New York is one of the great cities of the world, the heart of American finance, and has proven to be quite functional when managed successfully.
You can be sure that if the city doesn’t immediately turn into a real life “Escape from New York” the day Mamdani enters office it will be spun as proof that his critics were wrong. That shouldn’t be the standard.
If Mamdani’s socialist ideas are so great and can make an unaffordable blue city a suddenly affordable socialist paradise, his standard for success shouldn’t just be modern Venezuela with worse weather.
I suspect that Mamdani won’t be pleased just to keep the free buses running on time. His 400-person transition team is so filled with loonies that you could post a list of the names on a wall, throw a dart at it, and expect to find someone who demands the police be abolished on a committee for safety, a transgender rabbi working on a committee for health, or a literal career criminal among a crowd of Democratic Socialists of America organizers, radical academics, and staffers of the previous disastrous regime of former Mayor Bill de Blasio.
The best thing that could be said about Mamdani’s transition team is that perhaps he is simply awarding campaign loyalists and will simply jettison them later when he doesn’t need them. More likely, he will be using the New York government apparatus as a training ground for his activist army.
But there are other signs that Mamdani really means to carry through with the far-left’s war against human nature.
In early December, Mamdani announced that he will stop shutting down homeless encampments in the city. In 2022, the soon-to-be former Mayor Eric Adams wisely decided to shut down the homeless encampments that were popping up in the city and provided opportunities for those on the street to enter homeless shelters.
I hesitate to elevate this move the level of “wisdom.” It was simply common sense. Pockets of homeless people, where drug use was rampant, were popping up through the city.
Mamdani apparently saw that and thought that he’d rather turn New York into San Francisco, where open air drug markets and tent cities are the norm.
This doesn’t seem like a person who will suddenly tack to the center and work on bringing high quality, competent governance to the city. That would be the shrewd thing to do. Promise socialism but make sure it works by not following through and pretending it did.
That outcome seems unlikely. I’d expect Mamdani to use every tool at his disposal to ensure that the perception is that he’s ushering in an irresistible tide of socialism in America.
He will do television appearances, he’ll make slick social media posts about how he’s stopping Trump, and he’ll do his part to ensure that the Democratic Party’s socialist faction emerges triumphant in 2028.
He will also push through with his most high-profile programs and make a grand show demonstrating that they “work” as the city slowly deteriorates. That’s what I predict is in store for the Big Apple’s new mayor.
The city is in for some interesting times.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.