Better in their words…

Here is what you need to understand about communism.

Source: A Message to a Young Admirer of New York Mayor Comrade Mamdani

By Robert Yoho, MD.

Summary

· Communist governments killed somewhere between 85 and 100 million of their citizens in the 20th century, and the people who voted for them never intended that.

· My generation learned this from the body counts and from 4 novels: Brave New World, 1984, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged, and Rand’s fictional factory failed in 4 years for the same reasons the Soviet ones did.

· Zohran Mamdani is a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member who told a socialist conference in 2021 that “the end goal” was “seizing the means of production.”

· His first 9 months as mayor produced a rent freeze on 1 million apartments, a failed millionaires tax, a broken promise on free buses, and a bus system where nearly half the riders no longer pay.

· George Soros’s Open Society Foundations gave more than $36 million to the Working Families Party and 9 other groups that carried his campaign, and the campaign took about $13,000 from overseas donors and refunded $9,000 of it.

· Feeling cheated by the political class is correct. Handing the city to people who promise free things is the wrong cure, and the last century proved it 1 country at a time.

Why I am writing this

I’m 73 years old, born 7 months after Stalin died. My generation did not have to be taught what communism does. We watched it on the evening news, read refugee accounts, and knew people who had escaped it. Most of us absorbed the lesson so early that we forgot we had ever learned it.

You did not get that education, and it’s no fault of yours. The Berlin Wall came down 2 years before Mamdani was born. The Soviet Union dissolved the year he was born. Your teachers grew up after the argument was settled, so they never had to make it, and your college charged you a fortune to skip it. A man who has never seen a fire has no reason to fear a match.

So I’m not writing to call you a fool. You are angry at a political class that lied to you about wars, about the 2008 bailouts, about the jab, and about what your degree would be worth. I’m angry at the same people, and I have been for longer than you have been alive. What follows is an account of where that anger took other countries when it was pointed in the direction you are pointing it now.

What the books taught us

I was no history buff, but I was a voracious reader since my pre-teen years. Aldous Huxley published Brave New World in 1932, and George Orwell published 1984 in 1949. Both men were on the political left, and both wrote their warnings from inside it.

Huxley described a state that controlled its citizens with pleasure, drugs, and distraction. Orwell took the other route: the state controls language, rewrites the archives, and forces 2 plus 2 to equal 5. On October 21, 1949, Huxley wrote to Orwell to thank him for a copy of 1984 and to disagree with him about the method. He predicted that the world’s rulers would find that “the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience,” and that Orwell’s nightmare would “modulate” into his. Both novels describe a government that promises security and delivers ownership of the human being, and Huxley’s letter says which version to expect.

Ayn Rand wrote The Fountainhead in 1943 and Atlas Shrugged in 1957 after leaving the Soviet Union in 1926. Her heroes are idealized, and her villains are cartoons, and I knew it when I read her at 16. The books stayed with me anyway, because they ask a question no socialist has ever answered. What happens when the people who build things decide to stop? Her answer was that the lights go out, and Venezuela later confirmed it.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago reached the West in 1973, and Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom had been in print since 1944. Hayek explained the mechanism. Once a government plans the whole economy, it must override every individual plan that conflicts with it, and the people willing to do the overriding are the worst people in the country. Solzhenitsyn supplied 1,800 pages of proof from inside the concentration camps. Together, these five authors, and I read them all, gave my generation an immune system.

The count

Communism killed more of its subjects than any other political idea in history. The Black Book of Communism, published in 1997 by a team of French scholars led by Stéphane Courtois, added up the regimes and reached about 94 million dead. Martin Malia’s foreword to the English edition gave the contributors’ range as 85 to 100 million. Rudolph Rummel, the political scientist who spent his career counting government killing, put the figure higher, at about 148 million. The range is wide because the killers kept poor records, and none of the regimes allowed outside auditors.

China under Mao is the largest single entry. Frank Dikötter’s Mao’s Great Famine (2010) documented at least 45 million deaths from starvation, overwork, and state violence during the Great Leap Forward of 1958 to 1962. Yang Jisheng, a Chinese journalist who spent years in the provincial archives, counted 36 million deaths from starvation and 40 million lost births. The Chinese government’s figures show that the population in 1961 was 14.58 million lower than in 1959. The famine is the deadliest in recorded history, and it happened because a government ordered peasants to melt their tools, join collective farms, and report harvests that did not exist.

The Soviet Union under Stalin is the second entry. The scholarly consensus, as the historian Scott Strauss described it in 2014, begins at about 20 million dead. That number includes the forced famine in Ukraine, the Great Purge of 1937, in which 700,000 to 1.2 million people were shot, and the Gulag camps that Solzhenitsyn described. Cambodia is the third entry, and the most efficient. The Khmer Rouge took power in April 1975 and killed about 2 million of 7.8 million Cambodians in under 4 years, a quarter of the country.

Yoho note: I have read claims that Mao alone killed 200 million. The documented figures above are large enough to make the argument without inflating them, and a critic who finds 1 wrong number will use it to dismiss the rest. Forty-five million is enough.

None of these regimes advertised mass death. Each came to power promising bread, land, housing, and an end to the corruption of the people in charge. The promises were sincere in the mouths of the young people who repeated them. The men who wrote the promises had other plans, and the young people found out when it was time to pay.

The pattern

Every totalitarian system in history has followed the same short script. A government promises goods that cost money and declines to say where the money comes from. It names an enemy class to pay for them: landlords, kulaks, billionaires, the bourgeoisie, whatever word fits the decade. The enemy class leaves, hides its assets, or stops producing. The goods do not appear, and the government blames sabotage. The remedy for sabotage is control, and control is where the killing starts.

Venezuela ran the script in my lifetime, and it required no Stalin. Hugo Chávez took office in 1999 with oil money, a charismatic smile, and promises of free housing, food, and medicine. Within 20 years, the International Monetary Fund reported that the economy had shrunk by 45 percent between 2013 and 2018. The United Nations refugee agency counts more than 7.9 million Venezuelans who have fled the country, which is about a quarter of the population. The grocery stores were nationalized, the shelves emptied, and the people who complained were jailed.

Most socialists are sincere, and Mamdani appears to be sincere. The program has a direction anyway, and the direction does not depend on the character of the man who starts it. Once a government takes responsibility for providing housing, food, and transport, it must take control of the people who produce them. Every step after that is forced by the step before.

The man

Zohran Kwame Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda, on October 18, 1991. His father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a Columbia University professor of anthropology and political science, born in Mumbai and raised in Uganda. His mother is Mira Nair, the filmmaker who directed Monsoon Wedding and Queen of Katwe. The family moved to New York when he was 7, and he grew up in Morningside Heights, within walking distance of Columbia.

He attended the Bronx High School of Science and graduated from Bowdoin College in 2014 with a degree in Africana studies. He then spent several years rapping under the names Young Cardamom and Mr. Cardamom, curated the soundtrack for his mother’s 2016 film, and worked as a foreclosure-prevention counselor in Queens starting in 2018. He became an American citizen in 2018 and holds dual citizenship with Uganda. He joined the DSA in 2017.

He won a State Assembly seat in 2020 by defeating a 5-term incumbent in the Democratic primary, then ran unopposed in 2022 and 2024. By May 2025, he had sponsored 20 bills, and 3 became law. He belonged to the DSA’s “Socialists in Office” bloc and gave the keynote address at the DSA’s 2023 convention. His signature achievement in Albany was a fare-free bus pilot that later lapsed.

He announced for mayor in October 2024 as a long shot and beat former Governor Andrew Cuomo in the June 2025 Democratic primary by 56 to 44 percent in the final ranked-choice round. On November 4, 2025, he won the general election with 50.78 percent of the vote, against Cuomo’s 41.32 and Curtis Sliwa’s 7.01. Turnout was 43 percent, up 20 points from the previous election. He is New York’s first Muslim mayor, and he took office at 34.

What he has said

Mamdani calls himself a democratic socialist, and the press has been careful to repeat the adjective. His recorded words are more specific. At a Young Democratic Socialists of America conference in 2021, he listed the positions socialists “firmly believe in” in a live-streamed talk, including “the end goal of seizing the means of production,” and added that “we do not have the same level of support at this very moment.” In 2020, he posted that “we need worker ownership of the means of production.” In a 2020 podcast interview, he said a system guaranteeing housing was preferable “whether you call it the abolition of private property or you call it a statewide housing guarantee.”

On NBC’s Meet the Press on June 29, 2025, Kristen Welker asked whether billionaires have a right to exist. He answered, “I don’t think that we should have billionaires.” He has since said Martin Luther King, rather than Marx, is his inspiration. The DSA, whose convention he keynoted, does not hide its program, and its members in office have voted as a bloc.

I take him at his word. “Seizing the means of production” is the textbook definition of communism, and “the abolition of private property” is the first demand in the Communist Manifesto. The phrase “we do not have the same level of support at this very moment” tells you that he knows the end goal is unpopular and that he sees the present program as a stage. A politician who tells a friendly audience his end goal and a hostile audience his first step isn’t lying to either.

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What he has done

He took office on January 1, 2026, and his first act was to revoke the previous mayor’s executive orders, including the one adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism. On January 5, he paused the sweeps of homeless encampments. On February 18, after 20 people died in a 2-week cold snap, he resumed them. That is the first entry in a record that has repeated itself: a promise, a reversal, and an explanation.

His supporters point to the rent freeze as the achievement. He appointed 6 of the 9 members of the Rent Guidelines Board in February. On June 25, the board voted 7-1 to freeze rents on about 1 million rent-stabilized apartments, roughly 40 percent of the city’s rental housing. One member resigned before the vote and called the result “predetermined.” Landlord groups report that costs keep rising under the freeze, and researchers at NYU’s Stern School have linked rent regulation to slower housing supply growth. A freeze looks like a gift to tenants who already have an apartment. The tenant who needs one finds fewer of them.

The free buses were the campaign’s most repeated promise, estimated to cost $700 million to $1 billion a year. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is run by the state, and the mayor does not set fares. In April, he told Politico the buses would likely not be free that year. Riders drew their own conclusion. Through June 2026, nearly half of bus riders skipped the fare, bus revenue fell $31 million, and the MTA announced plans to hire fare enforcement staff. The mayor who promised free buses got them, in a sense, and the people who still pay are subsidizing the ones who stopped.

The money was supposed to come from a 2-point income tax surcharge on New Yorkers earning more than $1 million, projected at $3 billion a year. Governor Kathy Hochul refused, and the tax died. He floated a 9.5 percent property tax increase as a “last resort,” and the New York Times reported on March 25 that he had privately dropped it after backlash from his own side. The budget was balanced with about $4 billion in state aid, a new tax on luxury second homes, and savings that the Financial Control Board called nonrecurring. The board projects a gap of $6.4 billion to $8.5 billion by 2030.

The city-owned grocery stores are the purest socialist item on the list. The first site is La Marqueta in East Harlem; the City Council approved $70 million in capital funds, and the first store is projected to open by the end of 2027, with 5 by 2029. In July, the city announced the stores would sell at a 30 percent discount. The Empire Center and the Cato Institute called the revenue projections overoptimistic. I spent my career watching government-regulated medicine, and I know what a 30 percent discount means. The other 30 percent comes from someone who was not asked.

He has also reversed himself on mayoral control of schools, which he agreed to keep hours before his inauguration. He dropped his plan to expand the CityFHEPS rental voucher program, which had grown from $25 million in 2019 to over $1.2 billion in 2025. He kept Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, added 580 officers, and left the gang database and the Strategic Response Group in place, which earned him a public scolding from the DSA. Murders in the first half of 2026 were down 21 percent from the year before, and the fact-checkers who reported it noted that the decline began in 2020 and belongs to no mayor.

Yoho note: Reversals are not a character flaw. They happen when a man who has never run anything meets a budget. The alarming part is not that he broke the promises. It is that he made them, and that 1.1 million people believed a city would give away $1 billion in bus fares without asking where the money would come from.

The money behind him

A campaign is a business, and the first question about any business is who put up the capital. The New York Post reported in July 2025, based on financial records it reviewed, that George Soros’s Open Society Foundations sent more than $36 million to 10 organizations that promoted Mamdani’s candidacy. The Working Families Party, which gave him its ballot line, received at least $23.7 million since 2016 through its nonprofit arm. Make the Road Action got $3.51 million, Emgage Action $3.47 million, MoveOn Civic Action $2.34 million, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations $366,010. Soros’s Democracy PAC, managed by his son Alex, gave the Working Families Party $2 million in a single cycle.

The record also shows that nearly 28,000 individual contributions to the campaign, totaling over $1.7 million, were routed through professional fundraisers. About 94 percent were first attributed to 1 man, a development associate at a nonprofit called the Action Lab, which had received $1.5 million from Open Society in 2023. The campaign later removed the attribution and reclassified the money as donations with no intermediary. The campaign spent $82,000 on compliance work. No one has found any of this illegal, and the campaign has not been charged with anything.

Foreign money is a separate question, and the documented amount is small. The New York Post reported in October 2025 that the campaign had taken nearly $13,000 from donors overseas. The campaign refunded about $9,000 and said the rest came from American citizens living abroad, which is legal. A Dubai-based investor gave the $2,100 maximum. The Coolidge Reagan Foundation filed 2 criminal referrals, and the New York City Campaign Finance Board said the donations “should not have been processed.” Cuomo’s campaign took about $1,100 from overseas and refunded half, and Sliwa’s took $70.

I put the Soros connection at the level of inference. The grants to the groups are documented in Open Society’s own filings, and the groups’ work for Mamdani is a matter of public record. What is not documented is a check from Soros to Mamdani, because there was none, and no one who understands how this money moves would expect one. The foundations fund the organizations, the organizations supply the ballot line, the phone banks, and the volunteers, and the candidate owes everything to people he never met. That is how a globalist buys a city without his name on the deed.

Yoho note: The plain reading of the foreign-donation story is that $13,000 out of $4 million is a rounding error, and the referrals are a political weapon. The Soros money is the story, and it is legal. That is the part that should worry you more. When the law lets a foreign-born billionaire spend $36 million building the machine that elects a mayor, the problem isn’t the mayor.

The influencers and The Hague

The administration also built a propaganda operation that the previous mayor never had. Reporters found a Signal group of more than 200 social media influencers run by the mayor’s office, and some of them were paid. No public record shows who was in it or what they were told to say. Government watchdogs objected on transparency grounds, and the records are still not public. A mayor who speaks to a million young voters through paid accounts that look like friends is using the method Huxley described, and the people on the receiving end have no way to know it.

In July 2026, he said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “belongs in The Hague,” and 3 days later he conceded that the city has no legal authority to enforce an international warrant. Netanyahu accused him of “fomenting hate” and said Israel would have “special forces around” if anyone tried. President Trump said the arrest would not happen “in any way, shape, or form.” The episode accomplished nothing, and it showed where the mayor’s attention goes when the budget isn’t in front of him. A YouGov poll that month found 49 percent of Americans agreed with him, showing how far the ground has moved since I was your age.

I raise it because it shows the pattern of the whole first year. The statement comes first, the retreat follows, and the explanation is that the office lacked the power. A man who has learned that lesson half a dozen times in 9 months either changes his program or starts looking for more power. The 20th century records which choice such men make.

Why he appeals to you

I understand the appeal. He is young, funny, films himself on the subway, and says things about landlords and billionaires that you have been thinking while paying half your income for a studio. Cuomo was a disgraced governor who resigned over harassment complaints. Sliwa wore a red beret. Mamdani won because he was the only candidate on the ballot who seemed to notice the city had become unaffordable, and he was right.

You are not alone in any of this. A Cato Institute and YouGov survey of 2,000 adults in March 2025 found that 62 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 view socialism favorably, and 34 percent view communism favorably, against 14 percent of adults overall. One in 3 of your generation has a favorable opinion of the system that killed 94 million people, and I do not think it is because you studied the record and approved. It is because no one showed you the record. In Brooklyn’s 7th congressional district, a PIX11 poll in May 2026 found 91 percent of voters aged 18 to 39 approved of the mayor.

You feel disenfranchised by the entire political class, and I have felt it too. Decades of corruption that no one prosecutes will do that to a man. I watched the medical profession I trained in become a sales force for Pharma, and I wrote several books about it. After that kind of education, the temptation is to conclude the whole system is rotten and that anyone who promises to burn it down deserves a chance. Many in your generation have gone past that into nihilism, the belief that nothing is worth defending.

We differ at 1 point, and it is the whole argument. When I concluded the system was corrupt, I didn’t conclude the solution was to give it more power. The corruption I found in medicine came from the same place every time: a government agency, a licensing board, or an insurance monopoly that compelled people to buy what it approved. Mamdani’s program extends that compulsion to housing, groceries, and transport. You are angry that the government failed you, and his answer is more government. The arsonist is offering to run the fire department.

What socialism does to the people who believe in it

The dead make the headlines, but they don’t tell the full story. A socialist economy also kills the people who stay alive, slowly, by taking away the reason to work. Soviet workers had a saying: they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work. The collective farms produced less than the small private plots beside them, and the government knew it. The system survived for 70 years by taking from the few people who still produced.

The young people who built those systems were the first ones destroyed by them. The idealists of 1917 were shot in 1937. The Chinese students who followed Mao into the countryside in 1966 lost a decade of education and came home to find their parents denounced. The Cambodian intellectuals who welcomed the Khmer Rouge were executed for wearing glasses. The revolution eats its children because the children are the only ones who believed it.

Huxley’s prediction came true in the West. No one is coming to seize your apartment. The method is softer: a rent freeze that feels like a gift, a bus ride that feels free, a grocery store that sells below cost, and a political movement that feels like belonging. Each one makes you a little more dependent on a government that decides what you get. The World Controller in Brave New World explains the system in 1 sentence: “People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get.” The servitude is loved, as Huxley told Orwell it would be, because it arrives as a benefit.

Yoho note: I ran a medical practice for most of my career. I made payroll every 2 weeks, I paid the rent, and when the government changed the rules, I ate the cost or closed. No one who has done that believes a city grocery store with 5% profit margins survives a 30 percent discount. The people who believe it have never signed a paycheck, and that includes nearly everyone in City Hall now.

What to read

Start with Orwell, because he is short and he was a socialist who told the truth about his side. Animal Farm takes 2 hours. 1984 takes a weekend. Then read Huxley’s Brave New World, and the letter to Orwell printed in most editions, and notice which of the 2 predictions describes your phone. Then read Dikötter’s Mao’s Great Famine, which is the best single book on what a government does when it decides to feed people by decree.

Rand is optional. She is a bad novelist and a good diagnostician, and Atlas Shrugged is 1,100 pages. If you read nothing else by her, read the 10 pages in Part II, Chapter X, where a tramp named Jeff Allen tells what happened at the Twentieth Century Motor Company. The founder’s heirs put the factory’s 6,000 workers to a vote on running it by the rule “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” and the workers voted yes because they had heard all their lives that the idea was righteous. “The best men among us left the factory in the first week of the plan,” Allen says, and “within one year under the new plan, there wasn’t an honest man left among us.” The plan took 4 years to reach bankruptcy.

The most important detail comes at the end. At the last meeting, the heir who designed the plan announced it had failed because the rest of the country hadn’t adopted it and because “human nature was not good enough for it.” You will hear the same 2 excuses from every defender of every socialist experiment that has ever collapsed, and Rand wrote them down in 1957. When a plan’s failure is blamed on the people it was imposed on, the plan was the problem. It is the shortest explanation of socialism I know.

Then do 1 thing that no book will do for you. Find a Cuban, a Venezuelan, a Vietnamese, or a Russian who is over 60, and ask him about it. New York has hundreds of thousands of them, and they did not come here for the weather. They came because they lived through the program Mamdani described at that conference, and they know how it ends.

Ask one of them what he thinks about a mayor who wants to run the grocery stores. His answer will be more convincing than mine.

Synthesis

Vote for the man if you want to, but know what you are voting for, and keep count. Write down the promises: free buses, a rent freeze that increases housing, subsidized grocery stores, and a tax on millionaires that pays for it all. Check the list in 2029. If the buses are free, the apartments are plentiful, and the stores are open, I will have been wrong, and I will say so in print. If the city has fewer apartments, more fare evaders, an $8 billion budget gap, and a grocery store that lost money, you will have learned in 4 years what took my generation a lifetime of reading.

I have no doubt about the outcome, because the experiment has been run on 4 continents and the result never varied. The only question is how far New York gets before it stops. A city is not a country. It cannot close the borders, and people who dislike the program leave for New Jersey. That is the safety valve, and it is also why the program fails faster in a city than anywhere else: the people it needs to pay for it are the first ones out.

Your disgust with the people who run this country is your most valuable asset. Do not spend it on a man who wants to run more of it. Spend it on the only remedy that has ever worked: a government too small to steal from you and a population that produces enough to tell it no. The men who wrote the books I read at 16 all learned that lesson the hard way, and most of them learned it from inside the movement. I would rather you learned it from them.

Selected references

· Mayoralty of Zohran Mamdani, Wikipedia, with dated entries on the rent freeze, the bus promise, the budget, and the grocery stores.

· Mamdani at Eight Months: Promises, Delivery, and What the Record Shows, The Crosscheck, August 26, 2026.

· Zohran Mamdani, Wikipedia, biography.

· 2025 New York City mayoral election, Wikipedia, vote totals.

· “The End Goal of Seizing the Means of Production”, Jonathan Turley, July 2, 2025.

· Dem Socialist Mamdani Called For Abolition Of Private Property, Daily Wire, with the 2020 and 2021 quotations.

· Zohran Mamdani on Meet the Press: “I Don’t Think That We Should Have Billionaires”, Mediaite, June 29, 2025.

· Mamdani returns $9k in campaign donations after investigation, Washington Examiner, October 30, 2025.

· Soros donated $37 million to leftist groups supporting Zohran Mamdani’s candidacy, Voz, July 14, 2025, summarizing the New York Post report of July 12.

· Zohran Mamdani: Soros’s Man in New York?, National Legal and Policy Center, July 8, 2025, on the bundling and the Action Lab.

· Aldous Huxley, letter to George Orwell, October 21, 1949, printed in the ePubLibre edition of Brave New World.

· Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Part II, Chapter X, “The Sign of the Dollar” (Plume edition).

· Young Americans Like Socialism Too Much, Cato Institute, May 15, 2025, with the Cato/YouGov March 2025 figures.

· Mass killings under communist regimes, Wikipedia, with the Courtois, Malia, Rummel, and Strauss figures.

· Great Chinese Famine, Wikipedia, with the Dikötter, Yang, and official figures.

· Cambodian genocide, Wikipedia.

· Venezuelan refugee crisis, Wikipedia, with the UNHCR and IMF figures.

It amazes me when well-educated people lack this background. Although I’ve been quite a reader all my life, you don’t have to be comprehensively knowledgeable to reject this narrative. The dark part of the story is what’s been done to our education system. I hope you think this is worth a paid subscription. I work full-time, 7 days a week, on this project.