Source: Town Hall
by Elicia Brand
“When New York’s new mayor vowed to replace rugged individualism with collectivism, he echoed an ideology history has already tested, and buried. Ayn Rand warned us what happens when societies punish excellence. In 2026, New York chose to learn the lesson anyway. On January 1, 2026, in his inaugural address as Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani stated it plainly: ‘We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.’ This was not a flourish or a metaphor gone astray. It was a governing declaration, delivered from the seat of American commerce and offered as the philosophical blueprint for how the nation’s largest city would now be run … Socialist (cough, cough—Communist). History has heard this language before, and it has always ended the same way.” (01/05/25)