A Spectre Is Haunting New York City—and It’s Not Communism, It’s Capital in Drag

To Trump and every Cold War cosplayer who thinks Zohran Mamdani is a communist—congrats, you’ve officially confused New Deal nostalgia with Marxist revolution. The “he’s a communist!” crowd wouldn’t know dialectical materialism if it bit them. They see the word “socialist” and start saluting the flag like Pavlov’s dogs. What are you smoking, and is it laced with Reagan-era propaganda? The man’s a Democrat. A DSA-endorsed Democrat, sure, but that’s not a threat to capitalism. It’s a brunch menu with a side of McCarthy’s ghost—still haunting the syllabus, still grading your dissent.

Our education system is a failure. Of course it is—I’m sure it was designed that way. Years of teaching you that communism was bad because of a supposed boogeyman in the Soviet Union. That ‘boogeyman’ wasn’t a monster. It was a threat to capital. To the corporations that exploit everyday people. To the McDonald’s and Walmart stores that won’t pay a living wage, forcing their employees onto food stamps. The same food stamps that Trump and Republicans refuse to fund.

And yet they taught you to fear the word “redistribution” more than wage theft.
They taught you that freedom meant choice—between hunger and humiliation, between debt and despair.
They taught you to salute the flag while your fridge stayed empty.
To pledge allegiance to a system that breaks you, then blames you for breaking.

They taught you to trust the market, even as it devoured your labor.
To believe in merit, even as the ladder was pulled up.
To chase success while they redefined it as survival.
And when you collapsed, they called it personal failure. Come on! Pull up your own bootstraps!

They didn’t teach you economics. They taught you shame—too much of which becomes pride.
They didn’t teach you history—they taught you mythology.
A sanitized tale of freedom, where capitalism wears a halo and dissent is deviance.
They didn’t teach you to think. They taught you to comply.
And they called it civics.
You called it school.
I call it social conditioning.

To think that Zohran Mamdani is a communist is idiotic—almost laughable. At best, he’s the equivalent of a young Bernie Sanders, and look how disappointing he turned out to be. Zohran Mamdani is a member of the Democratic Party, and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The “Socialist” in DSA is trickery at its finest. A branding exercise, not a revolutionary threat. Their lineage—Norman Thomas, Michael Harrington, the AFL-CIO’s international wing—is steeped in Cold War collaboration. These weren’t revolutionaries; they were ideological subcontractors. The AFL-CIO didn’t export solidarity—it exported sabotage. It partnered with the CIA to suppress leftist unions across Latin America, all while flying the banner of “free labor.” Even Bush Sr. slipped (Freudian slip?) and called them the “AFL-CIA.” This isn’t socialism. It’s imperial management with a red logo. A red logo to distract you from the red baiting baked into their history. So no, Zohran Mamdani isn’t a communist. He’s a product of the same machine. A softer face on the same scaffolding. And softness is not resistance.

Oh but Soros backed Zohran Mamdani, so he must be a communist. Yes, that Soros-the man who named his foundation after Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, a two-volume series defending liberal democracies and, by extension, market capitalism. News flash: Popper criticized Marx in Volume II. He called him a false prophet of history, indicted his dialectical materialism, and rejected the idea that history unfolds according to universal laws. Popper’s critique wasn’t subtle-it was foundational. He lumped Marx in with Plato and Hegel as enemies of the open society. Popper, whose family was close with Freud’s sister. Freud, whose nephew Edward Bernays helped program you to love capitalism—to lick the boots of your corporate masters while calling it freedom. So when Soros chose the name Open Society Foundations, he wasn’t nodding to revolution. He was branding liberalism as resistance. And resistance, in this case, meant dismantling communism with a velvet glove. Soros, who helped bring down communism in the former Soviet bloc, funding opposition movements and “civil society” through Open Society Foundations—a velvet-gloved front for U.S. foreign policy dressed in philanthropy. Yes, that man supported a communist. Or so the story goes. The claim originates from a fraudster turned whistleblower—the former CFO of Crazy Eddie’s (I remember those commercials). And maybe he’s lying. Maybe he’s not. People change. I’ve changed. And while Open Society denies the $40 million funnel, Alex Soros did post a penthouse photo with Mamdani, congratulating him on his win. So maybe it’s not proof. But it’s not nothing. Soros didn’t bring down communism alone. He had help. Open Society was the velvet glove. The CIA was the fist.

Ask Venezuela what “democratic socialism” meant when the AFL-CIA showed up.
Ask Chile. Ask Nicaragua.
The branding changed. The sabotage didn’t.

I’ll get back to our education system soon.