Month: August 2026

Chronicles – Socialism’s march through the Democratic Party continued in the least expected of places last Tuesday, as Florida’s Democratic U.S. Senate hopeful, establishment darling, and Trump impeachment witness Alexander Vindman was crushed by little-known Democratic State Representative Angie Nixon.  Nixon, a self-described democratic socialist who wants Medicare for all, the abolition of ICE, and an end to all support for Israel, holds to all of these positions while also saying in a video posted on X that drag shows are “wholesome entertainment” for her children.

Earlier this year, Nixon, who will challenge incumbent Republican Senator Ashley Moody for the Senate seat held until last year by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, burnished her radical image by attempting to disrupt the state legislature’s vote on congressional redistricting, denouncing the measure with a megaphone while dressed in a pink jump suit. In May, she was arrested during a sit-in at Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s office to protest the measure. And perhaps fatally among Florida’s heavily anti-communist Hispanic electorate, on Aug. 13 her backers, the Democratic Socialists of America, released a statement celebrating the centennial of Fidel Castro’s birth.

Vindman, a national celebrity for his infamous opposition to President Trump, moved to Fort Lauderdale in 2023 and launched a campaign centered on “affordability.” He has raised a reported $16.3 million to Nixon’s paltry $975,000—a sum so low that she apparently could not afford a single television ad. Vindman seems to have been so confident of victory that he refused to debate Nixon throughout the primary and appears to have planned a post-primary fundraiser on Nantucket to support what he likely presumed would be his continuing campaign for the general election. Yet he lost.

Nixon crushed him by 12 points in what the Hill called “the biggest upset of the year”—so far at least—and what President Trump hailed on social media as “the most gratifying loss last night.”

Florida Democrats, in the wake of this upset, are struggling to find a path forward. They have ceased to hold any statewide office. Their 300,000 registered voter advantage in 2018 has vanished and been replaced by a 1.5 million Republican advantage. In addition to all state offices, Republicans hold both of Florida’s Senate seats, 20 of its 28 House seats, and supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature. In Jan. 2023, at the height of his popularity, DeSantis memorably called the state Democratic Party a “dead, rotten carcass on the side of the road.”

With nowhere to go but up, the return to relevance has been a winding road for Florida Democrats. Earlier this year, a handful of Democratic candidates prevailed in off-year state and local elections, where moderation, a focus on affordability that mirrored Vindman’s, and, in some cases, military service records were prominently featured in their campaigns. In the absence of strong or united Republican opposition, several Democratic hopefuls prevailed in contests that drew national attention, including mayoral elections in Miami and Boca Raton, the Florida house district that includes Mar-a-Lago, and a state senate seat vacated by Republican Jay Collins, who left to become the state’s lieutenant governor.

Some Florida Democrats are also hedging against their party’s socialist trend. The Democratic nominee for the governor’s race to succeed DeSantis, David Jolly, is a former Republican congressman who only became a Democrat last year. In a joint CNN interview rebroadcast by Breitbart, incumbent congressmen Jared Moskowitz and Debbie Wasserman Schultz denounced the democratic socialist drift in their party and pledged to resist it. “I reject the DSA,” Wasserman Schultz said, “I reject the fringe left socialism that they are promoting.”

Moskowitz, who is one of only four incumbent Democrats nationally whose district is rated as a “toss up” by the Cook Political Report, leaned centrist to win a decisive primary victory over democratic socialist Oliver Larkin. Larkin had attacked Moskowitz as “DeSantis Democrat” because of the congressman’s reputation for bipartisanship and his acceptance of state and county-level administrative appointments from DeSantis. In his revised district, which leans redder than his old one, that may not be enough to head off Scott Singer. Moskowitz faces the popular former mayor of Boca Raton who won the GOP’s nomination for the district.

In spite of this growing red trend, however, some Florida Democrats are clinging to the socialist label. Many remember that Andrew Gillum, the former mayor of Tallahassee who was DeSantis’s Democratic opponent for governor in 2018, held far-left positions and was often described as a democratic socialist. He lost, but only by 32,000 votes. Wasserman Schultz, a white incumbent who switched districts this year to a new formation that includes a large black population, was widely criticized by fellow Democrats for competing against black candidates. She ultimately won by a plurality over four black opponents who divided most of the ballots, but the ideology was clear. Elijah Manley, a democratic socialist challenger for the district nomination, said Wassserman Schultz “stabbed us in the back, trying to take away Black representation” by which, presumably, he just means that she is white and presumed to run anyway.

Energized by her primary victory, Nixon shows no sign of slowing down as November approaches. “I’ve unseated incumbents before. I’ve been outspent 5-to-1,” she said the morning after her victory in an MSNOW interview quoted by the Hill, “Ashley Moody will be calling me ‘senator’ in November.” Nixon’s path to victory will be difficult in this red state, but she will have some help on the campaign trail—Alexander Vindman has announced that he “will be standing by her side in the fight against Ashley Moody.”

City Journal – Its endorsement of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Senate race caps the AAUP’s gradual transformation from a professional organization into a partisan one.

On July 31, the American Association of University Professors announced its “first-ever national electoral endorsement,” putting its weight behind Abdul El-Sayed’s bid for the Democratic Party nomination in Michigan’s 2026 senate race. The endorsement marked a dramatic transformation for the 111-year-old national organization for college and university faculty members—from a professional association that advocates for academic freedom and other professional rights to a radical-left activist group that seems determined to play an explicitly partisan role in national politics.

The AAUP’s endorsement of El-Sayed—an AAUP member and “former teacher” who on August 4 narrowly defeated the more moderate Michigan Representative Haley Stevens in the Democratic primary—already says enough. Though El-Sayed has disavowed the “socialist” label embraced by a rising generation of Democrats, his policies place him decidedly on his party’s far left wing. He favors Medicare for all, wants to abolish ICE, advocates tax hikes, and opposes military aid to Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and his parents’ native Egypt—all U.S. allies. He campaigned for the Democratic nomination with New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the DSA-aligned streamer Hasan Piker, who has praised Mao Zedong, lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union, and opined that “America deserved 9/11.”

According to the Washington Free Beacon, El-Sayed’s father-in-law Jukaku Tayeb, who contributed heavily to a PAC connected to his campaign, is also a longtime donor and member of the Founders Committee of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and a past president and current board member of Michigan’s chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). The Justice Department named both groups as unindicted co-conspirators in a 2007 criminal case in which the defendants—founders of a supposed “relief organization”—were convicted of illegally funneling $12 million to Hamas.

The AAUP apparently overlooked these controversial associations on the theory that “El-Sayed will be an invaluable ally for academic freedom and higher education as a public good” and praised him for having “vowed to stand up to the Trump administration’s ideological assault on the sector and defend the rights of students and faculty to speak out on political issues.”

The AAUP decided to enshrine its own politicization in June, when it says members attending its biennial meeting “unanimously” adopted a package of resolutions “to help better position the union to build power to win the future of higher education and democracy.” The resolutions included a determination to “support and participate in coordinated political and public campaigns” intended “to resist authoritarian policies.” That directive identifies such policies as coming only from one direction. “Right-wing political actors,” it declares, “are advancing coordinated efforts to undermine democratic institutions, restrict voting rights, weaken labor protections, and erode public trust in knowledge-producing institutions,” among which it believes higher education is a “central target.”

AAUP’s repositioning as a radicalized political group has been years in the making. In August 2024, the organization reversed its long-standing opposition to academic boycotts based on “political or religious viewpoint”—virtually all of which target Israel—bizarrely concluding that merely opposing such boycotts as a matter of policy “contravenes academic freedom.” Former AAUP president Cary Nelson denounced the decision in the Chronicle of Higher Education, worrying that the AAUP had “set aside its hundred-year defense of academic freedom” and proclaimed that “we must no longer use AAUP policy as the gold standard” for the concept it had spent a century defending on at least a nominally apolitical basis. In October 2025, the AAUP’s official X account sarcastically posted that “fascism generally doesn’t do great under peer review” in response to musings on why there are so few conservative academics. That same month, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) released a survey suggesting heavy political bias in how faculty unions like the AAUP address complaints alleging free-speech violations: only 7 percent of conservative faculty members reported receiving support in such cases, compared with 29 percent of liberal academics.

Earlier this year, the AAUP’s Isaac Kamola, who leads its Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, said in a leaked audio recording about the many recently created civics institutes that he wants “to strategically map who these f—ers are, and figure out what the weaknesses are, and design a research agenda that just goes through them and tries to knock them out.” So much for the free marketplace of ideas.

Will the AAUP’s politicization move the needle in a divided nation as it hurdles toward contentious midterm elections in November? It may be too early to tell, but its late-hour endorsement of El-Sayed, who was expected to trounce Stevens yet prevailed by fewer than 16,000 votes, didn’t appear to sway the public, and that’s no surprise: only 38 percent of those surveyed express strong confidence in higher education, according to a Lumina Foundation and Gallup poll released in July.

The AAUP’s involvement may even have hurt El-Sayed’s chances. His Republican opponent Mike Rogers, a former congressman who narrowly lost to Elissa Slotkin in 2024 and won this year’s GOP Senate nomination unopposed, consistently trailed both El-Sayed and Stevens in pre-primary polling. The first post-primary poll, however, gives Rogers a four-point edge.

Chronicles – New York City mayor and Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani admonished his city’s property owners in a recent X post, saying owners of second homes worth $5 million or more will have to pay a new “pied-à-terre” tax.

“Check your mailbox when you’re back in the five boroughs—because you’ve got mail,” he wrote.

The “mail” to which Mamdani referred is an official letter from the city about the new tax that Mamdani says he needs to assess because of the city’s troubled budget.

Mamdani’s comment was not entirely accurate, however. The new pied-à-terre tax, which New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced in April, applies not only to $5 million “luxury properties,” but also to co-ops and condominiums worth just $1 million or more—which is not a high ceiling in New York’s inflated real estate market. In Manhattan, both average and median apartment prices in 2025 were estimated to be nearly twice that amount, according to the real estate firm Brown Harris Stevens. That means that virtually all nonresident owners of places larger than a small studio apartment will qualify for the new tax.

The Mamdani administration has gone far beyond punitive fiscal measures, which the mayor claimed would be confined to extremely rich individuals like hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin. (Mamdani famously taunted Griffin in an X video on April 15—tax day—about taxing the “richest of the rich.”) On July 27, New York’s Department of Finance published a searchable list available to the general public of city property owners who it says may qualify for the tax.

Initially, according to an April public announcement from Gov. Hochul, the tax was only meant to apply to only about 13,000 people, and there was no indication that their identities or addresses would be disclosed to the general public. The Finance Department’s list, however, contains more than 960,000 properties and the full names and addresses of their owners. According to an analysis by The New York Post, many individuals who appear on the list may not, in fact, be liable for the tax. Some appear to inhabit the listed properties as primary residences, while some listed properties are in neighborhoods where average values are under the $1 million tax threshold. Still other properties appear to be commercial real estate and thus not “residences” that might otherwise be liable for the new tax.

Regardless of their tax liabilities, residence statuses, and individual net worths, all of the people on Mamdani’s list have been “doxxed,” that is, publicly identified with private information in a government register indicating where they live.

While the imposition of the pied-à-terre tax may or may not ultimately force all of them to pay more for their city dwellings, the list’s mere existence suggests that the people on it are members of a suspect class of citizens—deserving of both higher taxes and public shaming. This categorization and doxxing recalls the Soviet Union’s treatment of “the possessing classes.” Then, as now, the point was to single them out for separate, and therefore discriminatory, treatment by their government.

This is in keeping with the left’s ongoing efforts to categorize people into classes of “oppressors” or “the oppressed” and claiming to champion the latter. The ideological point is to marginalize and ostracize disfavored social groups, much as DEI theorists today advocate discrimination on the basis of race to correct perceived past injustices. In practice, however, it places practically the entire population at risk of being subject to discriminatory treatment if a party hack or government bureaucrat decides to place an individual in the objectionable category. Many of the 960,000 property owners on Mamdani’s list are likely not what anyone would call “rich,” and many more—perhaps even all—are not engaged in the “oppression” of others, but city officials now, apparently, have the power to determine that for themselves.

What could happen to the people named, whose addresses and property values are now publicly listed? One might ask criminal defendant Luigi Mangione, who allegedly gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York in December 2024. According to diary entries and other written statements cited by the prosecution, Mangione acted out of alleged “hostility toward the health insurance industry and wealthy executives in particular.” CNN says he has a “cult-like” following and had by June 2025 received over $1 million in donations to his legal defense.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), an independent who caucuses with the Democrats and identifies as a socialist, has frequently said that “billionaires should not exist.” Shortly after winning New York’s Democratic mayoral nomination in 2025, Mamdani himself said, “I don’t think we should have billionaires,” announcing that he intended to transfer residential real estate from private owners to government-aligned institutions.

President Donald Trump, a billionaire who long resided in New York City, has been the target of at least three assassination attempts since July 2024. According to the Washington Post, leftist groups routinely use doxxing to identify, shame, humiliate, ostracize, and cause harm to those who disagree with them. Doxxings of conservative Supreme Court justices have led to multiple arrests amid suspected assassination plots.

Now New York City has doxxed nearly a million property owners that any angry leftist can now research, classify negatively, and take action against. The commissars of revolutionary Moscow would be proud.