I should find an anti-communist song to perform at the Brown University alumni karaoke night taking place at Baby Grand Lower East Side on August 19th here in New York City. Maybe “Won’t Get Fooled Again” or “Right Here, Right Now” by Jesus Jones.
Back in the 20th century, I heard the album Sandinista! by the Clash played often enough at Brown to suspect it was helping to boost some naïve students’ (and perhaps a few of the hipper professors’) loyalty to the Nicaraguan communist movement of the same name. So musical turnabout now would be political fair play, especially since Sandinista leader Daniel Noriega has just declared himself president-for-life in Nicaragua and implied his family members can pick up the slack when he’s gone. No more elections. So basically, Latin American communism leads to monarchism.
Yet if I had a dime for every time I was declared an oppressor and an enemy of democracy—back when activist students were holding “die-ins” to protest the anti-Sandinista contra movement and the U.S. government that supported it—I’d have enough money that the socialists would dream of expropriating it and patting themselves on the back for their moral vision. The self-righteous, idiotic campus leftists/liberals who defended Latino communism then were very similar in psychology to the social democrats and Hamas-ophiles making so much noise now, over a generation later.
And a generation prior to the Sandinista-wannabes, there were Maoists the world over, that movement racking up some 40 million dead all by itself, a feat to which the Sandinistas couldn’t aspire unless they stole an American nuke. Yet Jackie Chan, who brought martial arts movie fans so much joy back in the capitalistic 1980s and 90s, now declares his loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party and chastises independent-minded Hong Kong where most of his lucrative career took place—a sad moral decline that may just be a disappointing but routine case of trying to protect one’s family and business by appeasing the regime, as Asa Park (of Norway) explains here.
Pining for Jackie’s glory days, I tried Googling what I think was the title of an article by Scott Nybakken on the topic, “Jackie Chan Must Fight,” combined with the phrase “NYPress” (something of a predecessor paper to this website), but the genius A.I. responded with the summary “Jackie Chan does not need to fight NY Press, as there is no actual rivalry or physical match between the martial arts star and the New York publication.” A.I. is almost enough to make one wonder if science and capitalism were mistakes after all.
New York City, like Brown, is filled with people who opposed those two philosophies long before A.I. came along, though. Mayor Mamdani is just the cherry on the socialist, palm-reading sundae here, despite all the expensive, high-tech skyscrapers. Whatever his moderate, upbeat vocal tones, Mamdani will likely be remembered for nudging New York into becoming a city that hates Jews and (more openly than before) hates capitalists, despite its outward trappings to the contrary.
Mamdani’s now publicly naming all the targets of his pied-a-terre tax individually—each of those bastards who committed the ghastly crime of, well, renting a second apartment here. I hope some strategy-whiz lawyer is considering arguing that the Mayor has thereby transformed the tax code itself into a bill of attainder that must be deemed unconstitutional. People can pay for services on the market instead. Yes, all of them.
I’ll say this much for Mamdani, though: In his separate new plan to fine companies who make it virtually impossible to unsubscribe from their services, he shows some desire to make an increasingly complicated and bureaucratic society more navigable. True navigability would do wonders to decrease everyone’s anxiety levels and is a mission that, in their different ways, is shared by anti-regulatory libertarians like me, snarling tear-it-all-down populists like Trump, those leftists who still sincerely root for the little guy, liberals who don’t want to see society become a cold maze that makes all the English majors and artists sad, and religious people who long to be whisked away from it all to a heaven where practical difficulties vanish.
Here in the real world, for now, you instead meet people who feel trapped or else people who’ve figured out how to navigate the system but only in ways that benefit them personally, whether that means some sneering rich kid bragging that he and his buddies have concocted an insider-trading scheme or just left-liberal TV host Sunny Hostin (a stage name, I finally realized, having long thought it was too good to be true) from ABC’s The View.
A few days ago, Hostin tried throwing her weight around to get her son out of a citation for trespassing on Metro North train tracks in New Rochelle, NY. As widely seen in a video of the incident, she repeatedly warned the cops that she was a federal prosecutor (before she was a TV host) and furthermore that her son’s going to Harvard. Give Mom props for showing up on the scene so quickly, right there at the train yard, but if she believes, as she often tells badgered conservative guests on The View, that we live in an unjust, two-tiered justice system, she’s plainly occupying the top tier, not the dungeon into which she imagines hapless young black males like her innocent son being thrown.
Now there are rumors she might be ousted from The View (with very convenient timing) for insulting the American flag or something, but they probably ought instead to oust her for having an audience member thrown out of the studio by two security guards for insisting that she explain the train incident. She soon bolted from the studio, reportedly covering her face as she rushed to her SUV and a crowd in the street shouted, “ABC is against freedom of speech.”
By none of this do I mean to suggest that we should always defer to police. For examples of how useless they can be, we needn’t look to complex scandals or vicious beatings of prisoners but can examine something as depressingly mundane as the 2024 Spartanburg, SC case in which a woman kept calling 911 one night to report a dangerous-looking man lurking outside her house in the darkness, leading eventually to a bored-sounding dispatcher telling the plainly terrified woman that a police car drove by earlier and didn’t see anyone, so, no, we will not have someone drive by again. “I’m going to say goodbye now,” added the dispatcher as she hung up.
Police being just as useless as economic and social planners—the right-leaning and left-leaning parts of government united in their pointlessness—means we should instead look to markets (including private security guards) and voluntary social networks to keep the peace. And if we’re to foster good behavior, the kind that usually prevents crime and falling through the economic cracks, we should indeed listen to black female voices regarding community-building and social decay, but not to the likes of Sunny Hostin.
Here’s some all-too-rarely-heard real perspective from black women on the problems of the poor and the crime-beset. If Hostin’s on the way out, the two women in that video might be worthy replacements. Or the younger one could host The View and the older one could be Ortega’s successor in Nicaragua. Power to the people.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey