New York City may be broker than a barista with a college degree but that isn’t stopping socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani from funding his activist army. On Wednesday, the mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement rolled out a program called “Organize NYC” that’s billed as a “long-term initiative to bring mass public participation into the work of governing.” The first thing these paid activists will do is to get people to participate in the Rent Guidelines Board hearing in June. “Volunteers will canvass across the city to encourage tenants and landlords to testify ahead of the Board’s June vote, which will determine whether rents increase or remain the same for more than 2 million New Yorkers. This vote mainly has to do with a potential further rent freeze in the city. The Mayor’s Office said in a statement that these publicly paid community organizers “will not advocate for any specific outcome,” but you can bet that critics of the program aren’t buying it. If you have any doubts about what that totally, absolutely neutral program is about just watch a few minutes of the ad pumping this grift. New York, let's get organized.In a city of over 8 million, just 400 people showed up to speak at the last Rent Guidelines Board hearing — where decisions about rents are made.We can do better. If we want a city that works for tenants and landlords alike, we need New Yorkers… pic.twitter.com/M6qBtebnu7— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) April 29, 2026 Yes, “Mohammed” in the commercial here is wearing a keffiyeh, which has become a symbol of Palestinian “resistance” to Israel and is often worn by members of Hamas. Even some Democrats weren’t too pleased with this sartorial choice. “It’s all intentionally divisive and hateful,” former Democratic state Assemblyman Dov Hikind said to the New York Post on Saturday. “This man is representing the administration. If someone came to my door with a keffiyeh, I’d immediately be nervous.” But that’s only a small part of the issue with Organize NYC. In a separate New York Post editorial on Sunday John Ketcham and Christian Browne—two Manhattan Institute scholars—called out Organize NYC as an attempt to create a thinly veiled, “taxpayer-funded effort to embed campaign-style political organizing inside city government, dress it up as civic virtue, and deliver Mamdani’s campaign promise under a veneer of official neutrality.” That certainly seems to be the case. As the authors noted, Mamdani’s office has been vague about how much money the utterly broke city government facing a “historic” budget crisis will be sending Organize NYC’s way. It’s clear what Mamdani is doing. He’s funding his activist class and making sure that public money is going to his people while using them to bolster numbers for their pet causes. As I wrote when he won the election in November, Mamdani will “provide an ample training ground for his socialist comrades to gain experience wielding power.” This is a small but critical part of that larger goal. And you can be sure this model will be copied elsewhere. The leftist Dissent Magazine celebrated Mamdani’s initiative to keep activists activated. Though even they had to acknowledge that “pushing against the limits of what is perceived as acceptably ‘political’ within the confines of city government will be one continuing challenge for the Office of Mass Engagement.” You can be sure that not only will Mamdani lean heavily on this organization in New York City, but the Left will launch similar efforts elsewhere. That’s why what happens in New York unfortunately matters beyond the limits of the five boroughs. Mamdani’s revolution is a pilot program for socialist government that the Left hopes to scale up and spread elsewhere. Nevermind that the previous pilot programs didn’t turn out too good. Surely, True Socialism will work this time, right? Right now, Mamdani and company are focused on consolidating, ensuring they keep control long after their popularity plummets. Once Democrats and the Left gain power they focus immediately on cementing it, ensuring that their people get the fruits of patronage, and that public money flows toward their pet projects, their people, and away from their enemies. Whether their policies or other activities serve the broader public matters a lot less than ensuring their own people are taken care of. You can see why the Left’s activist class, their NGO network, and their hordes of government bureaucrats remain so committed to the cause despite obvious governing failures. Those failures are your problem, not theirs. From their perspective, the government doesn’t really have to provide clean streets, efficient services, law and order, or anything like that. It’s about spoils and special benefits, with a little redistribution and social engineering on the side. This is one of the many reasons so many of our big, blue cities seem utterly dysfunctional despite so many economic advantages. Unfortunately for New York, Mamdani is doing everything his predecessors did wrong and making things worse. But he’s doing this while cleverly ensuring that even if his socialist experiments fail there will be nothing anyone can do about it. Dark times in the Big Apple.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. James Comey, the former director of the FBI, was again indicted recently, this time for putting a picture of seashells on his social media that were arranged to convey a message threatening Donald Trump. And the message was “86/47.” In other words, however you define 86, I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, when the term was used to eject somebody from a bar. But over the ensuing decades, people have used it in an eliminationist fashion. The mafia, get rid of somebody, “86 them,” “kill them.” But here’s the problem. James Comey says that he was just walking along the beach and that he happened to see this message, and he didn’t quite know what it meant. But why would he put something on social media if he didn’t know what it meant? And how in the world would the FBI director—who’s supposed to be knowledgeable about all the terms that gangsters use or bars use; this comes with the field—and he claims he didn’t know what he was doing? But why would he do it in the first place? More importantly, we have had three assassination attempts against Donald Trump. So when you look at the case ostensibly, you say, “Well, what’s so wrong in a free-speech America with just putting out a seashell message?” Well, nothing is wrong if that’s what it was, but we don’t know what it was. In other words, we don’t know to what degree he might have made the message deliberately or whether he deliberately wanted to convey a message in a climate in which the president of the United States is in constant jeopardy of being shot, and he was the former FBI director. Now, most of our legal eagles, on both the Left and Right, agree that it’s a weak case and, under the First Amendment, it will be thrown out. But there’s another wrinkle to it, and that is we were told this was a weeks-long, even a months-long investigation. Ostensibly, it didn’t take any time to investigate a seashell photo. All you do is look at it. Maybe you talk to his family or whatever, and there’s the evidence. But it seems as if they were subpoenaing personal tweets, I don’t know, correspondence with his family and friends. The point of all that apparently is that the DOJ is trying to see if he contextualized what he was doing. If he said something like, “This is neat. I threaten the president with a vicarious method that kind of exculpates me, but it still gets the message,” I don’t know if that happened, but there’s something more to the case, because I don’t think otherwise they would have brought it. Finally, this particular case may not go to trial. It may or may not, depending on what the investigation has found, but it’s in a larger context. It’s really disturbing. Remember that he went before the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, and he testified about all the aspects of the Russian collusion case and all the misadventures of the FBI. On 245 occasions, James Comey said [variations of] “I don’t know. I don’t remember. I can’t think of anything.” In other words, he deliberately stonewalled a congressional investigation while he was under oath. If any of you listening were to have, I don’t know, not reported $10,000 and the IRS asked you about the conditions of how you earned it, and you said, “I don’t know. I can’t remember,” I don’t think that would last very long. In addition to that, you remember that he had a private conversation shortly before he was fired with the president of the United States. After that conversation was over, in which he claims that Donald Trump said to go easy on former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, and Trump says he explicitly asked him if Trump himself was the object of an investigation, which we know he was, and Comey had assured him that he was not. Comey went out and, on FBI pad, he memorialized that, at least his version. And then he deliberately took a third-party friend and gave him that message, that description of the conversation, with the sole intent to leak it to The New York Times. And then, when the inspector general, Michael Horowitz, looked at that, he claimed that a private conversation with the president of the United States covering some of the most intimate matters of governance was not classified. He said it was confidential. And so there were never any indictments lodged against James Comey for, on 245 occasions, not telling the truth, leaking what should have been a classified document that the government owned and that he took out himself. He did not put it in the FBI filing system. He took it, as he said, kind of an insurance policy, and then he deliberately leaked it to The New York Times. I could add a couple of epilogues to the James Comey story. In addition to all this, you’ve got to remember that he was the architect of Operation Crossfire Hurricane. The FBI hired Christopher Steele as a contractor and paid him money even though, according to the testimony of FBI investigators, they could not corroborate much or most of the Christopher Steele dossier. They couldn’t. And yet they used that dossier, by the testimony of Andrew McCabe, Comey’s successor. They used that dossier to get FISA warrants against U.S. citizens. An erroneous document was used to confuse the judge as if there really was some type of Russian collusion, and therefore they had a right to spy on people like Carter Page. And then we get back to the 2016 election when Hillary Clinton used a private home-brewed server against the law to do that. If you’re secretary of state, it might have been a misdemeanor, might have been a felony, depending on how it was interpreted. Number two, her husband, Bill Clinton, met the attorney general of the United States, Loretta Lynch, kind of on an accidental private-plane rendezvous at the Phoenix airport right in the middle of this investigation of Bill Clinton’s wife. Then we also learned that when these emails were subpoenaed, they were destroyed by Hillary Clinton, and the servers themselves were destroyed. And Comey—and this is very interesting—Comey was the director of the FBI. He was not the attorney general, but he took on the role of both FBI director investigator and Department of Justice prosecutor to adjudicate himself. In other words, he presents evidence to the attorney general, who then adjudicates whether it’s worthy to go to trial, and that person was James Comey. And of course, he said that while Hillary had broken the law, no normal prosecutor would have furthered the case and brought her an indictment. What am I getting at? I don’t know the degree to which the DOJ will be able to file an indictment that sticks and will have an actual trial. But that said, what James Comey did to the FBI on numerous occasions was a betrayal of his office and a betrayal of the United States. And just to finish, he was not an isolated case. Robert Mueller, his predecessor, testified before the House committee and said he did not know much at all about the Steele dossier. The Steele dossier was the sole catalyst that prompted his appointment as special counsel. He said under oath he didn’t even know much about it, couldn’t talk about it. I just mentioned his successor, James Comey’s successor, interim chief of the FBI, Andrew McCabe. On four occasions, he lied, two of them under oath, to federal investigators. He lied about leaking material about an investigation. And finally, Christopher Wray, the fourth FBI director in succession, didn’t tell us the complete truth about the role of the FBI on Jan. 6 and the aftermath—the role and the number of FBI informants who were there on Jan. 6, the exact role of the FBI surveilling traditional Catholics. He said it was an isolated case. It was not, and he didn’t tell us why the FBI was going to school board meetings, likely at the prompt of teachers’ unions. So we’ve had a miserable, despicable record of four FBI directors in succession who have either lied to Congress or broken the law or lied to investigators or haven’t come full and told the truth to a congressional committee under oath. And so, whatever we find out with James Comey, he’s got a lot of culpability, moral if not legal. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

America’s Mayor is on the mend. Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani is recovering from pneumonia, according to a statement from his spokesman Monday, and he remains hospitalized in critical but stable condition. Giuliani, 81, came to global prominence in 2001 as he led New York’s recovery from the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center towers, which his spokesperson said led to him developing restrictive airway disease. “This condition adds complications to any respiratory illness, and the virus quickly overwhelmed his body, requiring mechanical ventilation to maintain adequate oxygen and stabilize his condition,” spokesperson Ted Goodman said in a post on X. He added that Giuliani was now breathing on his own. Giuliani was hospitalized at Good Samaritan Medical Center in West Palm Beach, where he lives, according to a person familiar with the matter and The Palm Beach Post. He was admitted there on Sunday. This latest health crisis comes eight months after the former mayor was injured in a vehicle accident in New Hampshire. In a statement on Truth Social, President Donald Trump called Giuliani “a True Warrior and the Best Mayor in the History of New York City, BY FAR.” New York’s current mayor, Zohran Mamdani, a Democrat, on Monday wished Giuliani a steady recovery. “He’s been a fixture in our city’s politics and public life for so many years. And I know that many New Yorkers are concerned by the reports that he’s in critical condition,” Mamdani said. Former New York City Mayor Eric Adams said on X he is “praying for Rudy and his family and hoping for a full recovery.” “We shared a cigar in Florida not too long ago,” Adams added. “I’m saving one for when you are back home, my friend.” Mayor @RudyGiuliani devoted his life to this city, from his days as a federal prosecutor to leading New York through 9/11. He was there when we needed him most.I’m praying for Rudy and his family and hoping for a full recovery.We shared a cigar in Florida not too long ago.… https://t.co/JNGJUT1LoN— Eric Adams (@ericadamsfornyc) May 4, 2026 Reuters contributed to this story.

Reality TV personality and Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt released a hard-hitting ad last week criticizing Mayor Karen Bass and City Councilmember Nithya Raman for their “failed leadership” in response to the Palisades fires and homelessness crisis—so far it has received more than 12 million views. Released April 29, the ad shows the two Democrats’ posh homes and neighborhoods, which are contrasted with Pratt’s own neighborhood, which burned to the ground in the Palisades fires of January 2025. “They don’t have to live in the mess they created … they let my home burn down,” Pratt says in the video. They not like us pic.twitter.com/78hducHDUE— Spencer Pratt (@spencerpratt) April 29, 2026 The fires devastated 56% of the Palisades-area structures and 55% of single-family homes, according to the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation report. Bass has received widespread criticism from fire, police, and other disaster response teams for her effort in protecting residents from a major disaster. In a comment to The Daily Signal, Pratt shared his discontent with Karen Bass and Nithya Raman. “They’ve been in office for years now, and we can judge them with our own two eyes,” he said. “When people look around Nithya’s district, they see drug needles in their children’s playgrounds, and Nithya is constantly rolling her eyes at concerned parents who beg her to do something about it. You do not roll your eyes at a concerned mom and survive politically to tell the tale.” On Pratt’s campaign website — where he calls himself “Karen Bass’ Worst Nightmare” — the candidate outlined his mission as being “committed to accountability and growth” and “fighting for the communities too often ignored by those in power.” In response to the Pratt campaign ad, Alex Stack, spokesperson for Bass, told The Daily Signal, “Spencer is doing his best Trump impression but it’s not going to work in LA.” Latest Polling A UCLA poll conducted at the end of March shows Bass ahead of the pack at 25%, followed by Pratt at 11% and Raman at 9%. However, on Polymarket last week, Pratt surged past Bass with 24% support compared to Bass’ 20%, although Pratt said he favors actual polling to Polymarket predictions. “It’s very easy to manipulate Polymarket by having bots and donors buy stock, so I’m not very concerned about that,” he said. “The real polls show it’s me versus Karen Bass. Ultimately, they both have a fatal flaw … their record.” Pratt vs. Raman According to Raman’s campaign website, she plans to improve Los Angeles by tackling homelessness, housing, transportation, Hollywood jobs, and parks. The LA council member has come under fire, however, after a recording of a mother asking her about homeless encampments near schools went viral. Raman’s team did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment. All they need to do is show how she treats moms in public forums, when they beg her to clear drug addicts away from their kids’ schools. Here, saved ya a quarter mill. https://t.co/1bsvzxOAcT pic.twitter.com/Gs6iPL1rYy— Spencer Pratt (@spencerpratt) April 28, 2026 In an interview with The Daily Signal regarding the Los Angeles homelessness crisis, Pratt said, “I’m going to enforce SB 43. These people need mandatory treatment. … We need to treat the drug addicts, get them sober, and give them a chance.”

The United States has sunk Iranian vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, President Donald Trump said in a statement on Monday as the Navy worked to reopen the global shipping lane. “We’ve shot down seven small Boats or, as they like to call them, ‘fast’ Boats. It’s all they have left,” Trump wrote on social media, saying the strikes came in response to an Iranian attack on a South Korean cargo ship. “Other than the South Korean Ship, there has been, at this moment, no damage going through the Strait,” Trump added. “Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine, will have a News Conference tomorrow morning,” he added. NEW: President Trump says the U.S. has taken out seven Iranian "small boats" in the Strait of Hormuz, and confirms that the regime has "taken some shots" at ships from "unrelated nations.""Other than the South Korean Ship, there has been, at this moment, no damage going through… pic.twitter.com/otzeQ6lmm9— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 4, 2026 The United States entered a ceasefire with Iran on April 8, which has continued despite Iranian disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, Israeli-Lebanese combat, and an American blockade on Iranian commerce. On Monday, the United States began to attempt to escort ships through the strait, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil passed before the conflict. Global oil and gasoline prices have soared since the start of the conflict. Remarks to media today from Adm. Brad Cooper, CENTCOM commander, on Project Freedom: pic.twitter.com/68hSeZfGXO— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) May 4, 2026 The United Arab Emirates said on Monday that it was receiving missile and drone strikes from Iran. Adm. Brad Cooper, the commander of United States Central Command, said on Monday, “We’ve reached out to dozens of ships and shipping companies to encourage traffic flow.” Asked what the renewed combat means for the ceasefire and the future of the conflict, a Pentagon spokesperson directed The Daily Signal to contact the White House, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment. On Friday, Trump sent letters to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate President Pro Tempore Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, saying that hostilities with Iran “have terminated,” which, in theory, would absolve him of the need to seek a congressional extension of his war powers.