This week, Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order imposing a moratorium on new data centers. She has sold the policy as a prudent pause to protect electricity bills, water, and the grid. “As data-center development threatens to hike up utility bills, deplete our natural resources, and create uncertainty for New Yorkers, it’s my responsibility to take action and lead,” she said Tuesday. But strip away the press-release piety and you find something simpler, sadder, and short-sighted: pure political posturing.

Why sign this order now? Because the political winds shifted and Albany licked its finger. A recent Siena poll found that 46 percent of voters, squeezed by electric bills up nearly 68 percent since 2019, support a moratorium on data-center construction, and Hochul, facing a reelection battle this year, clearly thinks her anti-data-center stance is good politics.

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Hasan Piker, the far-left Twitch streamer, squealed with excitement at an East Williamsburg watch party when he saw yet another Democratic Socialist clinch the Democratic nomination.

“Brother,” he said, “the Democratic Party machine in the blue stronghold of New York City was thoroughly defeated tonight.”

The night was a major test for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who pulled off his own upset almost a year ago against Democratic Party giant Andrew Cuomo. The mayor, a long-standing DSA member, worked overtime to appear at countless campaign events for a trio of candidates he dubbed “the Team”: Claire Valdez, Brad Lander, and Darializa Avila Chevalier. Meet the Mamdani-backed candidates who soared to victory last night.

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Other major cities in America with rent controls tend to use simple formulas to determine how much rents can go up each year. Los Angeles allows rent hikes equal to 90 percent of the increase in the local Consumer Price Index (CPI), with a minimum of 1 percent and a maximum of 4 percent. San Francisco’s math is even cleaner: 60 percent of the local CPI increase.

The greatest city on Earth does things differently. Each year, the Rent Guidelines Board is tasked by law to analyze the economic state of the city and its housing stock to arrive at a “rent adjustment” for one- and two-year leases. It does so over the course of 11 open meetings, including four where members of the public can provide testimony.

I am a landlord whose properties are majority rent-stabilized, but I have never really wanted to participate in these hearings. Owners who complain about expenses that outstrip what they are allowed to charge in rent are invariably drowned out by tenants and activists who shout, stomp their feet, wave placards, and blow whistles to disrupt the proceedings, despite the rules. It is a circus, and it has been for a long time.

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That pattern was on full display in New York’s 13th Congressional District last night, where Mamdani-backed Darializa Avila Chevalier dominated in higher-income precincts, while five-term Democratic incumbent Adriano Espaillat carried lower-income areas by 40 points. The race, featuring two Dominican American candidates, exposed a growing divide between the district’s long-established immigrant community and its more activist, college-educated heirs. Today, Rafael A. Mangual examines these dynamics, focusing not only on the contest itself but on the district’s particular character—and diagnosing what he sees as a new political framework in America: “The immigrant who built a career on becoming American has given way to the American-born activist who rejects American patriotism in favor of militant Third Worldism.” —The Editors

Darializa Avila Chevalier has narrowly won the Democratic nomination in New York’s 13th Congressional District, and the result is rightly being read as a victory for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who endorsed her, loaned her his organization, and broke an earlier promise to back her opponent, five-term Democratic incumbent Adriano Espaillat. And in a district this lopsidedly Democratic, winning the party’s nomination is usually tantamount to winning the seat.

But this contest is about more than Mamdani’s influence in such races. It was a primary fought in Upper Manhattan and the West Bronx, the largest center of Dominican political life in the United States, between two candidates of Dominican origin. The more revealing question is not about how Mamdani’s backing affected the outcome, but what Avila Chevalier’s victory tells us about the changing politics of race, ethnicity, and class within that community.

The man Avila Chevalier defeated is, in many respects, the embodiment of Dominican political ascent in New York. He came to the city as a child and for a time lived here without legal status; he won a seat in the state assembly in the 1990s, advanced to the state senate, and in 2016 succeeded the legendary Charles Rangel to become the first Dominican American elected to Congress, where he now chairs the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

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Their latest and most high-profile victory came Tuesday in New York, where New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s “team” of House candidates all won Democratic primaries—bolstering the party’s anti-Zionist, defund-the-police wing.

One of the candidates—Darializa Avila Chevalier, a community organizer—has refused to condemn Hamas. Another candidate—Claire Valdez, a state assembly member—featured anti-Israel demonstrator Mahmoud Khalil, who the Trump administration has tried to deport, at her campaign launch party; “Free Palestine” appears on Valdez’s campaign signs.

Both are emblematic of the new breed of radical candidates: They have elite credentials—including Chevalier’s undergraduate degree from Columbia—but call themselves working-class, and they are women of color, which appeals to the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) overwhelmingly white, urban, well-credentialed but downwardly mobile base.

In New York’s 13th Congressional District, which encompasses much of upper Manhattan and parts of the Bronx, Chevalier narrowly defeated longtime Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

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The New York Knicks have bookended my life, with elation on both ends and a deep trough of disappointment and agony in between. Measured by time elapsed, the bad years outweigh the good ones, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Looking back on my life, in this moment of great triumph for my team and my hometown of New York, it’s no exaggeration to say the Knicks helped rescue me.

In 1970, I was 13, an introverted kid, unsettled and frightened by the disorder and random violence of New York at the time. I was intrigued by drugs and spent a lot of time indoors. In other words, I was a mess. The Knicks were my escape.

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Six weeks ago, Mamdani announced the launch of Organize NYC, which he said “will mobilize New Yorkers to make sure they know they have a voice in that decision—and how to use it—because government only works when it answers to the people it serves.” The city agency in charge of Organize NYC is led by Tascha Van Auken, who built Mamdani’s campaign organizing operation.

It wasn’t the first time I responded to the mayor’s call to participate in civic life. After a major snowstorm in February, I enlisted in the city’s emergency snow shoveling corps for a day. I earned $70—but still haven’t been paid. (On Thursday, a city official told me that my paycheck exists, is sitting in a downtown office, and will be promptly mailed to me.) In March, I attended a “Rental Rip-off” hearing, sitting under a banner that said “New Yorkers vs. Bad Landlords.” Most of the complaints I heard were about the same landlord: the city.

For the canvassing effort, the mayor said volunteers would fan out across the city to encourage tenants and landlords to testify at hearings, including one on Thursday night in Brooklyn, by the Rent Guidelines Board (RGB), which proposed raising rents by 0 to 2 percent on one-year leases. The announcement also said canvassers “will not advocate for any specific outcome in the RGB vote or guide what participants say if they choose to testify.”

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“I’m standing on business, fuck Brian Thompson,” one of the women said about the CEO of UnitedHealthcare who was gunned down in cold blood outside a hotel in midtown Manhattan in December 2024. The woman slapped a paper fan in her palm for emphasis, then added: “I don’t give a flying fuck he died.”

A video of that comment posted by a New York Daily News reporter on X has been viewed 3.8 million times. You could see their press credentials, which said: “Press Identification City of New York.”

Just moments earlier, the same woman said that she and her two friends were part of a group called “The Mangionistas.” “We’re essentially here to be Luigi Mangione’s advocate as well as bring, um, social issues to light,” she said, her lips shiny with lip gloss.

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According to her fans, Duwaji, the wife of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, is a “modern-day Princess Diana.” Some have gone so far as to cut their hair in her signature “bixie.” In late January, The New York Times wrote an entire article about Duwaji’s attendance at a Whitney Museum party, noting that she “hung out with a small band of friends” while a security detail kept watch. Meanwhile, her Instagram following keeps growing. This time last year she had about 24,000 followers. Today, she has more than 2 million.

The irony, according to Duwaji, is that she is not a public figure. In the one interview the 28-year-old has granted since her husband took office, she told Hyperallergic, a social justice–minded arts publication, that she is more focused on “allowing my art to speak for itself.” The mayor used similar language in early March to brush off reports that she had liked a post supporting the Hamas attack against Israel on October 7, 2023. Mamdani told reporters that she’s a “private person” who doesn’t deserve the scrutiny of an elected official.

“I, however, was elected to represent all eight and a half million people in this city, and I believe that it’s my responsibility, because of that role, to answer any questions about my thoughts and my policies and my decisions,” he added.

Almost immediately, debates broke out over the definition of a private person. Can a First Lady who lives in Gracie Mansion claim to be such a thing? Or is that just a shield she and the mayor hide behind to evade tough questions on her inflammatory politics?

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Which is why, when I think about suicidal empathy, I don’t first think about immigration, or criminal justice, or even the murder of an elderly man in New York City by a violent serial offender this past weekend.

Instead, I think about the NASCAR driver who, in 2005, was mauled nearly to death during a birthday party for a chimpanzee named Moe.

St. James Davis and his wife, LaDonna, adopted Moe as a baby in 1967 after his mother was killed by poachers. They raised him in their home in California as though he were their child, and they also made excuses for him, like a child, when he began biting people. He was just a baby, an orphan, a victim. “The honesty I see in Moe’s eyes is beyond anything I can compare to it,” Davis told the Los Angeles Times in 1999 after the chimp bit a houseguest, mauled a police officer, and was forcibly removed from their home and relocated to a sanctuary.

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It was late in the morning on a cloudy Thursday in southeast Queens, just two days after the casino’s public debut. And the place was already busy. Its roughly 175,000 square feet of gaming excitement somehow feel a good deal smaller than that. The first floor was mostly electric slot machines, virtual roulette tables, bright lights, and big screens entrancing at least a few hundred people. Nobody was talking to each other, but the digital din, the dings and bells and Muzak coming from each machine, was deafening. Many of the patrons were Asian, most of the signs in English and Chinese, a testament to local demographics. The gamblers skewed older but morose young men in baggy clothing milled about among them. If young women were there, I didn’t see them.

These games were Asian-themed in a crude way—cartoon dragons, samurai, vaguely pornographic anime women. Dale and I looked for a way to the real gaming tables, the ones with cards and dice and human dealers, but kept getting lost. We walked outside to a concrete patio where Chinese smokers gazed out on the old Aqueduct Racetrack, where jockeys have vied against each other since the late 19th century, its greenery and classical dimensions easily the prettiest thing about this gruesome would-be adjunct of JFK Airport. The Aqueduct’s last horse race is set for June.

On one side of the patio, there was a massive fake roulette table with giant casino chips for pieces and cornhole boards next to it. It seemed to be a place where parents can park their kids while they hit the slots. Thankfully, there were no children in sight.

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Yet the real risk for New York City and other big cities doesn’t come from catastrophes. Economies stagnate when they’re layered with policies that slowly sap their productivity and orderliness—some red tape on business here, budget cuts to policing there. That’s what New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is risking with his latest tax proposal.

Mamdani announced the scheme to coincide with Tax Day. “When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich. Well today, we’re taxing the rich,” he said to the camera in one of his trademark short videos.

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The rent remains unfrozen. The buses are not free. And New Yorkers still do not have access to universal childcare—only 2,000 spots have been made available for a new daycare program for 2-year-olds.

That’s not to say his administration has been without accomplishments. In the weeks leading up to his 100th day, Mamdani has pointed to a series of incremental wins: a new 104-bed unit at Bellevue Hospital for inmates in city jails, a pilot program offering free childcare to 40 children of municipal workers, and an additional $1.5 billion in state aid secured from Albany.

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The mayor’s office on Monday released a report titled “New York City Preliminary Racial Equity Plan.” New York’s city council mandated racial equity reports in 2022 in response to the 2020 death of George Floyd and the spasmodic racial reckoning that followed. But the supposedly mandatory reports were ignored by the previous mayor Eric Adams, a black former police officer who was less devoted than his successor to a left-wing view of race relations.

Mamdani’s City Hall is compensating for that oversight, to say the least. The report identifies a history of race-related problems that must now be addressed in every city department, from garbage collection (“disparities in cleanliness and environmental safety”) to the “Office of Media and Entertainment,” in which, we are told, “systemic racism continues to shape both representation and opportunities.”

For benighted New Yorkers who take pride in the city’s history of allowing immigrants of all backgrounds to improve their lot, the mayor offers a correction. “New York’s history has been one of colonization, exploitation, and racial oppression,” the report says. “The land New York City stands on today once belonged to the Lenape people, who were forcibly displaced through settler colonialism. From the era of Dutch colonization to modern times, systemic racism has shaped the experiences of Black, Indigenous, Latine, Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, and other communities of color.” (Note the absence on that list of Jews who, prior to a 1948 Supreme Court decision, were targeted by deed restrictions that barred “Hebrews.”)

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That was the reaction of Linda Coleson, 23, to the hundreds of people who showed up to Fordham University on Wednesday evening for one of Zohran Mamdani’s Rental Rip-off hearings.

The Big Apple’s democratic socialist mayor campaigned as a leader who would fight for the little guy and take on the Goliaths of capitalism. The hearings, according to the city, promised to “offer New Yorkers a microphone to share poor conditions and unconscionable business practices.” This was Mamdani’s chance to shine.

When I arrived at Fordham’s brightly lit student center, the scene looked less like a struggle session and more like a science fair. A sign declaring the righteous struggle of “New Yorkers vs. Bad Landlords” adorned a projector screen above a stage. There were booths with tenant unions offering know-your-rights workshops and nonprofits providing free legal aid for renters. Coloring books, puzzles, and stuffed animals were set out for children (though I saw only one child at the event).

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The episode was, in many ways, a test for New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani. As a progressive Muslim leader whose own home was the site of this near disaster, his response was bound to draw scrutiny.

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But you would never know any of that from the mayor’s statement—or from much of the mainstream media’s coverage. If you were reading that, or listening to the words of the city’s top elected official, you would assume the bombs were placed by white supremacists.

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That was just one of more than 70 Instagram posts uncovered by The Free Press in which the First Lady of New York City cosigned extreme positions against Israel. A sampling of the posts say Israel is waging a “vile land grab,” and the protesters who took over a Columbia University building in April 2024 were “on the right side of progress.” Another post liked by Duwaji, who identifies as Syrian but was born in Houston, Texas, calls for the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—which Mamdani has said he would honor if the Israeli leader steps foot in New York City on his watch. One post she liked referred to then-President Joe Biden as “Butcher Biden,” and said, “Your legacy is genocide, Joe.”

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Here was my chance to be a part of history, a big-government success story, a sort of winter Works Progress Administration. The warmth of collectivism would keep me toasty in the freezing cold as I served the socialist mayor’s snow-shoveling corps. “All you need to bring is two forms of ID to ensure you get paid,” Mamdani said in a video posted to X on Monday. Easy, right? Not quite.

What started with 16 inches of snow and a dream quickly morphed into something I can describe only as a bizarre, heartwarming, and frustrating journey. The bureaucracy was, to use a technical term, a hot mess.

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That would be the effect of the 9.5 percent hike in the city’s property tax that Mamdani proposed this week, as it hits everyone from homeowners on Staten Island to tenants whose landlords would have to pass through the hikes or go bust. The deputy speaker of the city council, Nantasha Williams, a member of the council’s progressive caucus, fired the first shot of what could be a Big Apple tax revolt, branding it with the worst slur for a progressive: not “equitable.”

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