This letter is one of the best responses Iโve seen..
Dear Mayor Mamdani,
I'm writing from Canada, which means I have no vote, no dog in your reelection, and no reason to care about your press strategy. Except that I do, because it's hard not to notice a mayor treat foreign policy like it's the only portfolio he actually wants.
I'll be honest about how this started. When the video first crossed my feed, I assumed it was fake. Not in the "bold move" way, in the actual "someone ran this through a deepfake generator to make a point" way. A sitting mayor, on camera, gravely announcing he'd exhausted every legal avenue to arrest a foreign head of state, only to concede he never had the authority in the first place. I sat there looking for anything that would let me file this under a bad prank instead of a real statement from a real sitting mayor. Then I found the CNN piece, the NPR piece, the France 24 piece, all reporting it straight, and had to sit with the fact that this actually happened, on purpose, from the mayor of New York City.
So now I'm just curious, genuinely, no axe to grind, from way up here with no stake in your reelection. Whose mandate is this? You ran for mayor of New York. Housing, transit, safety, the budget, childcare, groceries people can actually afford, that's the job description. Nowhere in there does it say "unofficial spokesperson for the International Criminal Court" or "designated antagonist of the Israeli government." Nobody voted on that. There was no ballot line for it. So who exactly gave you the right to carry this out on the city's behalf, and in whose name are you actually doing it? From where I'm standing, this mandate doesn't look like it belongs to the people of New York at all. It looks like it belongs to Hamas, Hezbollah, and the IRGC.
Here's the part that makes it feel less like conviction and more like theatre. Ask yourself the question your video conveniently skipped. If the head of the IRGC landed at JFK, would there be a video? If a Hezbollah commander wanted a night out in Manhattan at some swanky club, would you tell him, with that same solemn cadence, that he's not welcome? If someone from Hamas's political bureau, the men who actually planned October 7th, decided to visit, would you even flinch? Somehow I doubt it. The cameras only seem to come out for the one target that plays well to a specific room, and I notice, from all the way up here, that the room never asks about the others. It makes a person wonder who this performance is actually for.
You don't owe me an answer. I can't vote, I can't donate, I can't even yell at you at a town hall. But the question doesn't need an American passport to be obvious. It's obvious from Canada. It's probably obvious from the moon.
With all the respect you've earned, which is none.
Francine Goldberg
I know who needs to hear this. Everyone!
This country was created based on the recognition of property rights which means:
- The man who built or bought a building owns it.
- The rent is his to set, and yours to accept or decline.
- A lease is a voluntary agreement between equals, enforceable against either party.
- No mayor, board, or mob gets a vote on the terms two free people agree to.
Now set that against Mamdani's record. He handpicked the Rent Guidelines Board, by his own words: "I name the members... I instructed the Rent Guidelines Board", and it's now being sued after freezing rents on a million apartments while owners' costs climb with inflation. He's moving to ban credit checks, so an owner may not even judge who can pay for what he's offering. Small landlords say they're at their breaking point, and tens of thousands of stabilized units sit empty because the rent laws he champions make repairing them a guaranteed loss.
His list makes the landlord a suspect class with obligations and no rights, and the tenant a protected class with rights and no obligations. The contract disappears, replaced by whatever City Hall decrees, and the owner becomes a criminal-in-waiting on his own property.
You want to talk about people being forced out of what's theirs, Mayor? Ask the owners. You're the one doing it, by law, and the empty buildings are the evidence.
I think half the division is caused by foreign actors & infiltrators.
Racism was so nonexistent that democrats had to pay to fund it so they could โfight it.โ
How many fake MAGA accounts are created to be absolutely vile so that people believe the stereotypes.๐ค