On the other side, their comrades hold the levers of power in Manhattan. These groups, with links to the Muslim Brotherhood, openly state they will behave like the Bolsheviks they are and will seize private property from rightful owners, handing it to friendly nongovernmental organizations.

The first flank of the pincer movement is headed by Marxist NGOs funded from China, featuring leaders trained in Havana and the Cuban countryside. The second flank is the Marxists who have taken over City Hall in New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, his chief urban planner Cea Weaver, and their other grim comrades.

How the land of the free and the home of the brave got itself into this pickle is, to say the least, a matter worthy of study. America was once the bulwark against world Communism, leading the free world in the Cold War and ensuring that its home institutions were not overrun by Marxists.

What happened?

In short, we stopped teaching the native-born about the greatness of America and how evil Marxism intrinsically is. At the same time, we opened our borders to immigrants irrespective of their love for the American way of life and stopped assimilating them into it. We taught both the native born and the immigrant to hate America and the West.

Mamdani, a Muslim ethnic Indian born in Uganda, is one immigrant who abhors the American way of life and especially capitalism, one of its chief components, and seeks to destroy it. Both his parents are strong critics of the United States, with his father, Mahmood Mamdani, a Columbia University lecturer, regularly accusing his adopted land of “imperialism” and “genocide.”

Another America-hating immigrant is Manolo De Los Santos, a Marxist NGO leader who told an interviewer in the Cuban capital last week that what is needed is “the massive mobilization of people in the United States to change the reality within the United States.” The “U.S. Empire” is a “cancer to humanity,” and “now is the time to fight. Now is the time to not stay at home. This is the time to be out in the street, to mobilize, to add, to organize,” Manolo told the interviewer. And he left no doubt whom he was fighting for — our enemies in Cuba, Iran, and elsewhere.

Manolo was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to the South Bronx at 5. According to one of his bios, he spent years in Cuba. His social media postings include many pictures with Cuba’s dictators, including a meeting earlier this year with the entire politburo.

His are not empty threats. The People’s Forum he leads is one of several foreign-funded NGOs creating havoc on U.S. streets on the pretext du jour — Gaza, Iran, ICE, the weather, etc. If the nightly news is reporting about a demonstration against this or that, it’s a safe bet that the People’s Forum either participated in it or hatched it at its headquarters in midtown Manhattan.

And of course, while Manolo is telling us from Havana how he will create an uprising here, he is getting support from Cuban diplomats who meet with U.S. activists to coordinate strategy on how to lobby Congress. Virtually on the same day as Manolo’s interview, David Ramirez Alvarez told these activists that the U.S. was committing “acts of crime against humanity.”

How people such as Mamdani and De Los Santos get through a U.S. Embassy’s interview process and get a U.S. visa is a tale unto itself.

Normally, the State Department asks applicants if they are members of Nazi or Communist parties, and that is usually disqualifying. But that’s obviously not sufficient. Luckily, some embassies are now combing through the social media postings of applicants, and if their profiles have been scrubbed, that’s disqualifying.

But how did Mamdani himself get elected mayor of the Big Apple? Convincing a consular official to give you an immigrant visa is one thing. It is a taller order to convince 1.1 million New Yorkers, just over 50% of the electorate, to vote for you.

Well, in part with the heavy support from the foreign-born, about 62% according to polls. And the shorter their stay in the U.S., the more ardent was their support. ABC News exit polls showed that Mamdani won in 2024 with “81% of those who have lived in New York City less than 10 years supporting him.”

So, he is now poised to confiscate the property of Americans because he didn’t have to sway voters who knew and appreciated America after decades or generations here, only those who have never been taught the value of Ben Franklin’s 13 necessary American virtues: temperance, order, resolution, frugality, silence, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity and humility.

And taking property — like the Cuban Revolution did in the early 1960s, the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917, or Mao Zedong in China post 1949 — is exactly what Mamdani means to do.

“When necessary, we will take aggressive legal action to remove negligent owners and property managers,” he told a crowd of adoring leftists in Brooklyn on May 26. “For buildings that have suffered chronic neglect, we will work to transfer ownership to responsible stewards [including] community land trusts, nonprofits, or even the tenants themselves.”

Incidentally, the degree of “negligence” that will be required for these property seizures will be easily produced by the much stricter regulatory framework that Mamdani and Weaver mean to put in place.

To U.S. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), if it looks and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. “Let’s call this what this is. This is trying to seize private property. That is communism,” she told Fox Business on May 27, and she surely knows this if she heard stories from her Cuban-born mother.

But it’s not exactly like Mamdani’s crew plays hide the ball. “I was elected as a Democratic socialist. And I will govern as a Democratic socialist,” Mamdani said defiantly at his inauguration address. Weaver, meanwhile, likes to post on social media fun stuff like, “Property is theft,” or “seize all property.”

Not too long ago, she exclaimed, “For centuries, we’ve really treated property as an individualized good, and not a collective good, and we are gonna transition into treating it as a collective good.”

Interestingly, all this may be related, and not just because the NGO activists flocking to Havana, their Cuban trainers and China-based funders, and the nepo babies and trust funders occupying Gracie Mansion, Mamdani and Weaver, have all read Marx and are enacting his radical designs. Yes, it’s that, but also, as the old adage says, follow the money.

The columnist Miranda Devine, who covers City Hall for the New York Post like a blanket, quotes Mamdani nemesis Vickie Paladino, a Queens firebrand who is one of only five Republicans left on the New York City Council, as saying that Mamdani is stepping in to provide funding for NGOs like the People’s Forum that President Donald Trump is taking away.

Most of the NGOs supporting Cuba’s communist regime and fomenting violence on U.S. streets are partly funded by an American-born multimillionaire who lives in Shanghai, Neville Roy Singham. Among the groups he funds are the People’s Forum, the ANSWER Coalition, Code Pink, and the like. Singham is even married to Code Pink co-founder Jody Evans.

What Singham doesn’t support is covered by other funders of the Left, such as the Tides Foundation, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the universe of establishments funded by financier George Soros and now his son, Alex. Taxpayers also used to contribute to the dismantling of their own society through the U.S. Agency for International Development. But now that Trump has dismantled this network, another way must be found.

“The Trump administration’s moves to dismantle leftist boondoggles such as USAID, indict the Southern Poverty Law Center and investigate CCP-linked mega-donors like Neville Roy Singham represent an existential threat to the funding networks that sustain the militant left’s activist infrastructure,” writes Devine. “So Mamdani’s solution is to allocate potentially hundreds of billions of dollars of New York real estate to allied nonprofits.”

Mamdani himself knows about receiving funding from organizations with questionable foreign ties. The Council on American Islamic Relations was one of his top 10 sources of financial support. It gave Mamdani’s 2025 NYC mayoral campaign primarily through its super PAC, the Unity & Justice Fund, which contributed $120,000.

CAIR counts among its founders men like Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad, who had been active in organizations linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, including the Islamic Association for Palestine. CAIR was an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 case against the 2007 the Holy Land Foundation Case, which was accused of funding both Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

How America disentangles itself from this will not be easy. Trump could envisage using federal power to prevent Mamdani from confiscating private property. The State Department should call in the Cuban ambassador.

THE IMPENDING REPUBLICAN COLLAPSE

And, for Pete’s sake, we need to get serious about the indoctrination of immigrants and our youth. Mamdani and De Los Santos were born elsewhere. Weaver has been here for generations and attended Bryn Mawr.

Some ideas can be more destructive than tanks.