In just a few days, a Karl Marx-quoting communist who has struggled to disavow Hamas is likely to be elected the next mayor of the nation’s financial and cultural epicenter. Thirty-three-year-old New York State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani has surged to the front of the race. He leads by double digits in virtually every public poll, he is an overwhelming favorite in the online betting markets. Absent a miracle, in short, Mamdani is going to win and will be the next mayor of New York City. But one might be forgiven for believing in the possibility of miracles. Mamdani must, somehow, be rejected—and if he prevails, the grave consequences will extend far beyond the Big Apple. First, consider Mandani’s platform. He proposes a rent freeze on all rent-stabilized apartments, the creation of hundreds of thousands of publicly owned housing units, “free” city-run grocery stores, universal child care from infancy to kindergarten, free bus service, and steep tax hikes—including a jump in the corporate tax from 7.25% to 11.5%, and a new 2% surcharge on incomes exceeding a million dollars a year. On public safety, he would divert funds away from the New York City Police Department to a new Department of Community Safety staffed by social workers and activists. This is not reform. It is social transformation. And to understand what’s truly at stake for all of us non-New Yorkers, one must remember what New York City still represents. For better or worse, New York remains the economic, cultural and innovative engine of the United States. It is the American epicenter of finance, media and the arts—where Wall Street meets Broadway, and venture capital meets high fashion. Its gross domestic product rivals that of most nations. Its museums, universities and creative industries shape not just American identity but global trends. When the nation’s largest and most important city thrives, the entire country feels the lift. And when New York falters, the ripple effects are often national. What happens in City Hall has the potential to reverberate from sea to shining sea. Yet Mamdani proposes to turn Gotham into a laboratory for radical economic redistribution and left-wing social engineering. A hard-Left mayor with ambitions to transform New York into a “people’s city” governed by public ownership and woke purity would send an unmistakable message: Prosperity is expendable, a traditional religious lifestyle is retrograde, and law enforcement is a relic of oppression. It is true that much of Mamdani’s agenda would require legislation in Albany, but transformative leftist executives have a history of ignoring such procedural niceties—who, after all, can forget former President Barack Obama’s “pen and a phone”? And if Mamdani is successful, business flight, investor uncertainty and tax-base erosion would follow as surely as night follows day. Many remaining religious New Yorkers would follow as well. The national ramifications would be equally profound. If Mamdani wins, the progressive Left, which has been reeling ever since last November’s presidential election, will treat the victory as proof of concept. The Squad-style socialism that once seemed relatively confined to college campuses and activist social media feeds will claim the mantle of America’s most powerful city. The next Democrat presidential primary would inevitably feature numerous candidates pointing to New York as an electoral and ideological model: “If it worked there, it can work anywhere.” Mamdani’s City Hall would become a lodestar for the global Left. And on that note: Mamdani’s worldview extends far beyond municipal policy. He has repeatedly accused Israel of “genocide” in Gaza and has vowed to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were he to visit the city that is home to America’s largest Jewish population. Moral stain aside, does anyone think such an injection of campus-style activism into the practical business of running the world’s financial capital would actually benefit the median New Yorker? But perhaps the most urgent warning is this: If New York elects a Marxist mayor and the city collapses further into crime, exodus and dysfunction, it will not necessarily be leftists who pay the price. It will be working-class families, small-business owners, commuters and the millions who still believe in the American promise—the spirit so perfectly embodied by the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. The long-odds necessity, at this late hour, of rejecting Mamdani is thus not merely a municipal judgment for the Big Apple. Either former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo or Curtis Sliwa, Mamdani’s two opponents on the ballot this coming Tuesday, simply must drop out immediately to give the other a fighting chance at pulling off an upset. Because this mayoral election is a referendum on whether New York will reclaim the virtues that built it—discipline, aspiration, enterprise and law—or surrender to the fantasies of far-left utopianism. If voters choose Mamdani, New York loses. And with it, America risks losing a little more of its dynamism—and its soul. COPYRIGHT 2025 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Reject Radical Mamdani: NYC Mayor Race Has National Ramifications appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Who said this? “If you don’t have any borders, you don’t have a nation.” The speaker went on, “Trump did a better job. I don’t like Trump, but we should have a secure border. It ain’t that hard to do. Biden didn’t do it.” It was Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, in characteristic candor. If, as Milton Friedman argued, you can’t have open borders and a generous welfare state, Sanders, as a self-described socialist, prefers the welfare state. The facts at this point are not in much doubt. The Pew Research Institute, not an anti-immigration outfit, estimated that there were 10.2 million “unauthorized” immigrants (members of groups not approved for legal immigration) in the United States in 2019, the year before former President Joe Biden was elected, and 10.5 million in 2021, the year he took office. That number, as Pew’s Jeffrey Passel and Jens Manuel Krogstad wrote, grew to 14 million in 2023, “the largest two-year increase in more than 30 years of our estimates.” The illegal population probably peaked at about 14.5 million in early 2024, when the Biden Democrats, who said they had no alternative to their open-border policies without new legislation, suddenly decided they actually could clamp down using existing legislation. Let’s put that in a longer perspective. Pew estimated that the illegal immigration population increased from 3.5 million in 1990 to a peak of 12.2 million in 2007-08, the years housing prices and financial markets crashed. Suddenly, net migration from Mexico turned negative, and the illegal population fell through attrition until Biden took office. Then it rose from 10.5 million to 14.5 million. That number has trended downward since President Donald Trump took office last January. Earlier this month, in a report for the Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes illegal immigration and favors lower legal immigration, analysts Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler estimated, based on multiple government statistics, that the foreign-born population declined by 2.2 million since Trump was inaugurated in January. Presumably, almost all of this change can be attributed to illegal immigrants. This provides some backing for the Trump Department of Homeland Security’s claim that it removed 527,000 illegal immigrants and that 1.6 million “have voluntarily self-deported.” That’s obviously an estimate, but it’s not improbable. If 4 million additional illegal immigrants were incentivized to arrive in the first three-plus years of the Biden administration, as compared to a net decline in the 12 years from 2008 to 2020, it’s plausible that 2 million were compelled or decided to leave due to the highly publicized and aggressive actions in 2025. That’s not an uncontroversial process, of course. Government is a blunt instrument, and no doubt Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have wrongfully detained some genuine citizens and legal immigrants. Some people who have lived quietly and constructively, though illegally, for many years have had their lives overturned. There’s an argument that Trump officials have acted too aggressively and in disregard of the limited rights that illegal immigrants have. But if some of the moral opprobrium for the harm done belongs to the Trump administration for arguably enforcing the law too vigorously, some moral opprobrium is owed also to the Biden administration, which deliberately refused to enforce the law in a way that left millions of people vulnerable to severe disruption. My guess is that the current policy will disincentivize illegal immigration long after Trump, as he has conceded this week, leaves office in January 2029. Who will want to make long-term plans that can be ruined by sudden deportation or hurried self-deportation? Much of the drama around the Trump administration’s enforcement of the law comes from opposition, sometimes forcible, of Democrat governors and mayors who promised, in the tradition of John C. Calhoun, to nullify federal law within their jurisdictions. And from self-starting liberals who use “ICE trackers” to violently impede the agency’s operations. These people perhaps see themselves in the position of Northern opponents of the Fugitive Slave Act, who joined former Sen. William Seward in proclaiming, “There is a higher law.” But what is the higher law here? Barring people from entering the U.S. is not thrusting them into slavery. The nullifiers’ legal position is similarly weak. In Arizona v. U.S., the Supreme Court in 2012 overturned parts of a state law that purported to strengthen immigration enforcement, saying federal law was controlling, even when officials were using discretion (as the government often does) to only partially enforce the statute. Much stronger is the argument that, under the Constitution’s supremacy clause, the states lack the power to prevent federal agencies from enforcing federal law. In his 2020 campaign, Biden did not promise to reverse a dozen years of policy and welcome in 4 million unauthorized immigrants. He did not argue that every person in the world has a right to move to the U.S. Yet he did those things, and most elected Democrats continue to support them. As those “in this house we believe” signs say, “no human being is illegal.” “Immigration is a blind spot where Democrats focus first on the needs of migrants rather than the needs of Americans,” Democrat analyst Josh Barro wrote. Democrats need to “firmly say ‘no’ and deny access to our country, even to people who stand to gain a lot by coming here—and part of saying ‘no’ requires having an effective government apparatus that deports people who are here without authorization.” Instead, blue-state Democrats seem stuck in denial. They point to polls showing less insistence on reducing illegal immigration without realizing that, as Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini pointed out, “that may have something to do with the fact that illegal border crossings have plummeted to zero.” As for dismay at Trump administration enforcement tactics, that’s real, but, as Ruffini noted, voters of all education levels prefer “a party that’s better at getting things done, even if its views are sometimes extreme.” This gets back, doesn’t it, to Sanders’ words: “If you don’t have any borders, you don’t have a nation.” COPYRIGHT 2025 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Democrats Want Open Borders; Most Americans Don’t appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Last month, former Vice President Kamala Harris made the rounds of supportive liberal networks to promote her campaign book “107 Days.” The title implied it was impossible for her to beat that allegedly despised dictator Donald Trump with so little time. No one expected much of the interviewers, starting with ABC’s “The View,” which could have titled the interview “You Had Me at Hello.” They put a six-pack of suck-ups on the set. The “conservative” Alyssa Farah Griffin could only ask if Harris missed any warning signs. The biggest event in that interview was co-host Sunny Hostin confessing to the Mom-ala that she felt she’d hurt her chances by asking an obvious question: Where do you differ from Joe Biden? Harris said she couldn’t think of anything. That shouldn’t be a destructive question. It’s an obvious question, even if the answer was exploitable. ABC’s “Good Morning America” was no better. Co-host Michael Strahan tiptoed in with Democrat concerns: “There’s some Democrats who said that you don’t take enough responsibility for the loss. How do you respond to that?” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow gushed over Harris as the “patron saint of ‘I Told You So,’” and let her subject compare Trump to a communist dictator. We won’t even get into her interviews with Don Lemon and Joy Reid. All these Americans looked dreadful when the Harris book tour went international. BBC interviewer Laura Kuenssberg noticed Harris said, “I’m not done,” suggesting another presidential run. She warned: “But when you look at the bookies’ odds, they put you, as an outsider, even behind Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson.” Harris claimed she’s never “listened to polls.” That seems obvious, since she dropped out of her first presidential campaign before the primaries even began. Kuenssberg also went after Biden’s cognitive decline: “You write that President Biden didn’t raise his frailty with you, and you write that you didn’t really raise it with him. That’s extraordinary to read in your account.” Harris claimed she didn’t doubt his capacity to serve as president, but he lacked the capacity to run for reelection. The BBC anchor was gobsmacked: “Isn’t it a strange message to the public to say, you know, what you need to be tougher and more able to run a political campaign than actually to be the person behind the desk in the Oval Office?” Harris stuck to her line. Then came Australia’s ABC. Interviewer Sarah Ferguson also pressed on the decline question: “Didn’t you also have a responsibility? You were one of the people in the room. … Didn’t you have a responsibility as an American to step up and say something at that point?” Harris insisted: “I did not question Joe Biden’s capacity to be president at all.” Ferguson blamed Biden: “Wasn’t his refusal to recognize his own frailties the reason that you faced a nearly impossible task?” When Harris shifted to saying Trump was the real challenge, Ferguson called her out: “I want to interrupt you because that is a world-class pivot, but it is not the question that I asked you, which is about Joe Biden’s failure to recognize his own frailties and what that did to you. The question is about Joe Biden. Are you still reluctant to criticize the former president?” Harris answered: “In what regard, please?” Ferguson restated her thesis that Biden damaged her chances. Harris repeated: “He was not frail as president of the United States.” This was about as accurate as comparing Trump to a communist dictator. It’s a colossal shame that American journalists can’t ask the questions that foreigners can. COPYRIGHT 2025 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Foreign Journalists Asked Kamala the Questions Americans Wouldn’t appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The left wing and media rage hysterically from one Trump psychodrama to the next, while President Donald Trump trolls both on social media.But all that is verbiage. What matters is the data and facts of Trump’s first nine months since Jan. 20, 2025, in comparison to either former President Joe Biden’s prior year or the averages of his four years in office. Take the border. No one knows how many illegal aliens entered—or stayed in—the U.S. during Biden’s four years of open borders. What is clear is that he set a presidential record of well over 7 million illegal entrants. The border under Trump is now tightly closed. Prior to his administration, it was common for 10,000 people to cross illegally in a single day. In just nine months, approximately 2 million illegal aliens have been deported or self-deported. The rate of border crossings is now the lowest it’s ever been since 1970. How about energy? For Trump’s first nine months, gas prices have averaged $3.19 versus Biden’s 2024 average of $3.30 a gallon. Over Biden’s four years, gas averaged $3.46 a gallon. During the Biden years, oil production averaged 12.3 million barrels per day, compared to 13.5 million barrels during Trump’s first nine months. Biden removed 200 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, leaving office with only 394 million barrels in the reserve.The reserve has already inched upward under Trump’s initial months to 406 million barrels. Releases have been canceled. Purchases of replacement oil have been scheduled. Regarding the economy, Biden’s four years averaged 2.9% gross domestic product growth per annum. Trump’s GDP rose 3.8% in the second quarter, with final estimates for 2025 ranging around 3%. Inflation under Trump so far averages about 3%. Under Biden’s tenure, inflation increased by 21.4% over four years, or on average about 5.3% a year. How about U.S. deterrence and defense? Under Biden, the military fell short by approximately 15,000 recruits per year, crashing to a shortfall of 41,000 in 2023. Following Trump’s election and throughout the first nine months of 2025, all branches of the military met or exceeded their recruitment goals. The number of NATO nations meeting their promise to spend 2% of GDP on defense rose from 23 in 2024 to a likely total of 31 in 2025, with several pledging to spend as much as 5%. Trump left office in 2021 with no major ongoing wars. His first administration had nearly bankrupted Iran, destroyed ISIS, decimated the Russian Wagner group in Syria, and birthed the Abraham Accords. Under Biden, the Middle East exploded into a four-front war against Israel. Iran boasted that it was within months of developing nuclear weapons after the Biden administration lifted prior Trump sanctions and courted Tehran to return to the so-called “Iran Deal.” Over the last decade and a half, Russian leader Vladimir Putin had only kept within his borders during Trump’s first term, invading neighboring countries during the George Bush, Barack Obama, and Biden presidencies. In 2022, Putin attacked Kyiv during Biden’s second year in office—leading to a full-scale Ukrainian-Russian war, incurring the greatest combat losses in Europe since the Second World War. In August 2021, in one of the greatest military humiliations in U.S. history, Biden ordered the abrupt flight of all U.S. personnel from Kabul, Afghanistan. The skedaddle resulted in utter chaos, the deaths of 13 Marines, and destroyed U.S. deterrence. Thousands of U.S. contractors and employees were left behind, and the administration abandoned billions of dollars of new weapons and military equipment to the terrorist Taliban. In contrast, there is now a tentative calm across the Middle East. After Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, the theocracy is not expected to be able to acquire a nuclear weapon for years. Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis are decimated and increasingly impotent. No wars broke out during Trump’s current year. Tentative Trump-inspired ceasefires helped stop violence between India and Pakistan, Cambodia and Thailand, Egypt and Ethiopia, Serbia and Kosovo, and Armenia and Azerbaijan. Trump’s tariffs so far have not caused, as critics predicted, a recession or stock collapse. Instead, the stock market has reached all-time highs. Trillions of dollars in promised foreign investments in the U.S. have set a record. And China, for the first time in 50 years, is facing an American-led global pushback against its exploitative, mercantilist trade policies. The Left is outraged about many of Trump’s executive orders.But the public largely supports destroying the cartels’ seaborne drug shipments bound for the U.S. Polls show majorities favor banning transgender males from female sports, ending diversity, equity, and inclusion racialist fixations, and enacting long-overdue higher education reforms. Yet the daily news is about politicians’ f-bombs, government shutdowns, Trump’s social media trolling, and street violence. But the facts tell a different story of national recovery from the self-inflicted disasters of the recent past. (C)2025 Tribune Content Agency, LLC. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Are Americans Better or Worse Off Since January? appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Trump administration is currently listening to feedback from colleges and universities asked to sign a compact to adhere to the administration’s education agenda in exchange for preferential funding, a White House official told The Daily Signal. Education experts say President Donald Trump’s offer to expand the compact to any institution “willing to help bring about the Golden Age of Academic Excellence” could transform higher education. “This is really one of the first times that there’s been a formal statement about what the federal government’s interest [is] in spending literally hundreds of billions of dollars on higher ed each year,” said Michael Shires, vice chair of America First Policy Institute’s Center for Education Opportunity. “This is the first statement of [its] kind of what the federal government expects in return.” On Oct. 1, the White House invited nine elite universities to sign a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” in order to gain preferential federal funding. At least seven of the nine have declined to sign it in its current form. Colleges have until Nov. 20 to send suggested revisions. But Trump expanded the invitation beyond the University of Arizona, Brown University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, University of Texas, University of Virginia, and Vanderbilt University.  The administration encourages any university committed to implementing “common sense principles, like student equality, financial responsibility, merit-based hiring, and civil discourse, to engage with the administration,” according to the White House official. The official added that the administration wants universities to “prioritize academic excellence and to serve as laboratories of American greatness.” This is one of the Trump administration’s many efforts to straighten out a higher education system that the president says “has lost its way, and is now corrupting our Youth and Society with WOKE, SOCIALIST, and ANTI-AMERICAN Ideology that serves as justification for discriminatory practices by Universities that are Unconstitutional and Unlawful.” The compact addresses “Equality in Admissions”; “Marketplace of Ideas & Civil Discourse”; “Nondiscrimination in Faculty and Administrative Hiring”; “Institutional Neutrality”; “Student Learning”; “Student Equality”; “Financial Responsibility”; and “Foreign Entanglements.” Some schools have competing factors to evaluate as they wait to see if they will receive a formal invitation. The University of Southern California, for instance, must consider if it would benefit more from the Trump administration’s preferential treatment or from remaining in the good graces of Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom. “If any California University signs this radical agreement, they’ll lose billions in state funding—including Cal Grants—instantly,” Newsom said. Higher education is in crisis, but the federal government needs to be careful about expanding its role in education, according to Madison Marino Doan, an education expert at The Heritage Foundation. “Facing a crisis in higher education, the Trump administration’s ‘Compact for Academic Excellence’ seeks to restore America’s colleges to their rightful place as the world’s leading postsecondary institutions,” Doan told The Daily Signal. She said federal officials can accomplish the compact’s goals in a way that avoids expanding the federal government’s role in higher education. “Many of the provisions can already be found in federal law,” she said. “Meanwhile, state officials can consider these ideas, too, to ensure that their institutions remain, or become, both academically rigorous and financially responsible.” Shires, on the other hand, said the federal government is the entity writing billions of dollars of checks to universities. “There’s all of these ways that the federal government is underwriting the higher education enterprise,” he told The Daily Signal, “and I think the taxpayers are entitled to say, ‘Hey, we want you to follow basic American values while you’re doing that.’” Highlights of the 10-point compact include provisions capping international students at 15% of the undergraduate student body; banning race-based admissions and faculty hiring; “abolishing institutional units” hostile to conservative ideas; preventing disruptions caused by student protests; adopting policies banning employees from making political statements on behalf of the university; and adopting biological definitions of sex. For the past 70 years, the relationship between higher ed and government has entailed the government writing checks and trusting universities to do good things with the money, Shires said. That has worked well, as the American higher education system is the envy of the world, but in recent years, Americans have become more aware of the left-wing political ideology that has infiltrated the system, he added. “Everybody assumed that universities were on the same page as they were, and all of a sudden, everybody became aware that they weren’t,” Shires said. While he expects universities to request minor revisions to the compact, he thinks some states will have their university systems join. “This is really about having a conversation about what [higher education] is, what are our goals, and what are the boundaries, in terms of what we’re trying to do in higher education,” Shires said. The post What to Know About Trump’s Proposed Terms to Give Top Universities Preferential Funding appeared first on The Daily Signal.