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'We adhere to the principle of maintaining security'

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. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Everybody in New York City is on edge because it looks like, for the first time in the modern era at least, Zohran Mamdani is going to be the mayor in our November election. Now, what’s disturbing about it is he is an unapologetic socialist. He says he is a democratic socialist, but on occasions in the past, he has said things like, to be a real socialist, “you must acquire or take possessions of the means of production.” That’s right out of the communist playbook of Friedrich Engels. It’s essential to communism. And he said things that make sense only in a communist context. He wants to get rid of elite schools that are meritocratic. He wants to go into areas that are affluent and white and tax them more inordinately. He wants to give free transportation to people and make a particular group pay for it, the so-called wealthy. So, he wants to turn the financial capital of the world upside down. Normally, even in New York City, which is a liberal city, this would be impossible, to see somebody like Mamdani elected. But there have been massive demographic changes. Almost a million Jewish, middle-class, and affluent voters have left over the last 20 years, for a variety of reasons. We’ve had open borders policy where hundreds of thousands of new immigrants have come into New York. And it’s no longer just a Democratic city, it’s a radically Democratic city. So, Mr. Mamdani thinks that in an off year—this is an off year. There is no great presidential election. There is no midterm election. There’s not a lot of reasons for the normal voter to come out. And he can appeal to these hard-left constituencies in a way that would make his election possible with very low turnout. And of course, this is a municipal election to begin with. So, he counts on very few people coming out. And the people who do turn out are minorities, but more importantly, upscale, middle-class, mostly white affluent and Asian younger people, who feel they have letters after their names, they have titles, they went to good schools—New York University, Columbia—and they should be deserving of a brownstone, of a car, of good schools for their kid. And they can’t afford it. Not in New York. They’re not like Mr. Mamdani, who has subsidized housing. They can’t get housing like he has. So, he appeals to their socialist sensitivities. Can he be stopped? The only way that he could be stopped, if the right part of the Left and the Center and the Right were to combine and say: “We don’t like each other. We have very little in common. But this man represents the destruction of our way of life. He’s anti-Israel. He is antisemitic. He is pro-Hamas. He is anti-capitalist. He’s anti-free enterprise. He’s socialistic. And he’s gonna bankrupt the state and drive out our entire source of wealth that is the financial class itself.” But to do that, you’d have to have a strong opposition. But there is no Mike Bloomberg. There is no Rudy Giuliani. So, you have two choices, other than Mamdani. You have Curtis Sliwa. He is a conservative. But he’s been around New York for, you know, 30 or 40 years. He is a known quantity. He is a French candidate. And he’s not going to win the election. He is now enunciating conservative positions and he may draw off 10% or 15% of the total vote. But he is not gonna win the election. Then you have Andrew Cuomo from the famed Cuomo family. Chris Cuomo was a CNN anchor. You had Mario Cuomo, his father, was the former governor of New York. But there’s some problems there. He was responsible for redirecting from hospitals, so the hospitals would not be overwhelmed by COVID-19 indigent patients and go broke, they thought. He put them in rest homes where, among vulnerable elderly people, they infected them. And thousands, maybe 12,000 or 13,000 people, in the greater New York area died from that decision to redirect people from hospitals to rest homes. And No. 2, he had a long record of alleged sexual harassment and was forced to resign from his governorship. But more importantly, when you see him on stage, he is not the vital, robust, quick-witted, facts-at-his-fingertips candidate that we associate. Whether you liked Andrew Cuomo or not, no one wanted to get in an argument with him. He knew his stuff. He was energetic. He looks lethargic. He looks anemic. He took 10 days off of the campaign. So, what am I getting at is that if you put the percentage of Cuomo and you put the percentage of Sliwa together, they could beat Mamdani. But conservatives and centrists do not wanna vote for Cuomo, given the record I just talked about. And independents that are on the left-hand side do not wanna vote for a fringe conservative. And neither one is gonna drop out. Mr. Cuomo doesn’t say, “I’ve lost a step. I’m sorry. I’m more conservative than liberal. Please, everybody, vote for Sliwa.” That probably wouldn’t work anyway. And Mr. Sliwa’s not gonna say, “You know, this man told everybody to get out of New York if you were for abortion once. He’s a hard leftist. I know he is running as independent. He is not really. He’s a hardcore Democrat. I’m not getting out of the race.” So, what they’re going to do is split this tiny vote and give the election to Mr. Mamdani. And most people think—as all of the aristocrats in white Russia did during the Bolshevik Revolution, as business people thought in Cuba in 1959, as people in Venezuela thought—“We can handle him. We can finesse him. We can massage Mamdani. He’ll give me an exemption. My investment firm will be OK.” No, no, no. You can’t deal with Mamdani. You cannot deal with him. If he wins, he’s going to target all of you. And New York is not going to be New York as we knew it. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post There’s No Going Back If NYC Elects Zohran Mamdani appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Major tech companies are distancing themselves from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a leftist group that demonizes conservatives and Christians, after facing pressure over previous relationships with the SPLC in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Kirk’s alleged murderer said he killed the Turning Point USA founder because he “spreads too much hate.” The assassination took place two months after the SPLC put Turning Point USA on a “hate map” with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan—a “hate map” that had inspired a terrorist attack in 2012. The SPLC condemned the assassination, but kept Turning Point on the map. Earlier this month, shareholders filed proposals at major companies, urging them to investigate whether the companies have used politicized tools like the SPLC’s “hate map.” Conservative groups also sent a letter to Benevity, which connects nonprofits to major corporations, urging it to stop using the SPLC “hate map.” Many of the companies told The Daily Signal that they do not have relationships with the SPLC any longer and do not use the “hate map.” The Heritage Foundation filed seven shareholder proposals with companies including Alphabet, Mastercard, Meta, PayPal, and Salesforce. “The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated October as Hate Crimes Awareness Month—but few organizations have sown more hatred against fellow Americans than the SPLC itself,” Heritage Chief Advancement Officer Andrew Olivastro previously told The Daily Signal. “It doesn’t fight hate—it manufactures it, embedding division into every press release they issue and every word they post; their business model is defamation, and America is finally waking up.” Eleven conservative groups on the “hate map” sent the letter to Benevity. “The SPLC’s claim to be a civil rights organization cannot be taken seriously,” the signatories wrote. “Instead, it is a political weapon that targets mainstream libertarian, conservative, religious, and family advocacy organizations for ideological reasons.” The signatories claim the SPLC attacks organizations “not because of violence or extremism, but because they dissent from the SPLC’s preferred progressive orthodoxy.” Alphabet Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, has faced criticism for including the SPLC in YouTube’s “Priority Flagger” program, which helps police YouTube for extremist content, and for the SPLC’s prominent place in Google search results for key conservative figures. Google and YouTube distanced themselves from the SPLC. “We don’t and have never used SPLC’s hate map for any reason, including for content moderation,” a YouTube spokesperson told The Daily Signal in a statement Tuesday. “On the YouTube side, I can confirm that the Southern Poverty Law Center is not part of our priority flagger program and has not been for at least three years,” Nicole Bell, YouTube’s head of reputation and responsibility communications, told The Daily Signal. Google spokesman Ned Adriance told The Daily Signal that the SPLC’s website “does not receive preferential treatment in Search and its ranking is determined by the same algorithmic factors as any other site.” He clarified that the search “ranking is based on a number of algorithmic factors, like links to a page from other sites, freshness, and user interactions.” Benevity According to its website, Benevity connects “nearly 1,000 enterprise companies” to a network of 513,000 nonprofits after vetting 2.2 million of them. It says it has managed $16 billion in grants and 99 million employee volunteer hours. In 2023, more than 2.3 million people donated through the Benevity platform, representing $3.2 billion. 1792 Exchange, a nonprofit that exposes bias in corporate businesses, has counted 224 of the Fortune 1,000 companies that use Benevity. The list includes Amazon, Apple, Best Buy, Coca Cola, Costco, Lowe’s, Macy’s, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Netflix, Paramount, and UPS. In 2021, then-Benevity CEO Kelly Schmitt delivered a PowerPoint presentation explicitly stating that the company had “vetted” almost “2 million nonprofits,” adding that it used the “Southern Poverty Law Center Hate List.” The conservative nonprofits’ letter notes that “there are also recent reports of employees from major corporations that Benevity’s system blocked them from donating to Turning Point USA because of the SPLC’s designation. Benevity said it hasn’t relied on the SPLC “hate map.” “Benevity has never relied on the SPLC hate map to determine whether nonprofits are eligible for the platform,” the spokesperson told The Daily Signal. “The nonprofits included on the current SPLC hate map are eligible for Benevity as long as they are in good standing with the IRS and in compliance with our terms of use. Some nonprofits may not be eligible for a specific client’s program if a client has chosen to exclude them as part of their program guidelines or for any other reason.” “Benevity’s former CEO herself bragged about using Southern Poverty Law Center to vet charities. Today’s anonymous denial is not credible,” Greg Scott, executive vice president of 1792 Exchange, told The Daily Signal in response to Benevity’s denial. Mastercard The SPLC condemns the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which warns about the threat of radical Islamist terrorism, as an “anti-Muslim hate group.” In congressional testimony, the SPLC bragged that the center’s eponymous founder said, “The reason Mastercard and Visa gave us for cutting us off and thus sabotaging our online fund-raising operation is that the SPLC told them that we were a hate group.” Mastercard denied this claim. “We are regularly made aware of merchants and websites that may have illegal content or incite violence,” Seth Eisen, Mastercard’s senior vice president for communications, told The Daily Signal. “As part of our normal process, we share this information with the acquirer—or merchant’s bank—who connects the website to our network to accept card payments.” “The acquirer would then review the site to determine if there is compliance with legal requirements and our standards,” Eisen added. “The acquirer would then determine what action to take. In this case, the acquirer advised us that they decided to terminate card acceptance on the site.” Meta Facebook, whose parent company is Meta, consulted with the SPLC in policing the platform for “hate speech” and “hate groups,” according to a Daily Caller report from 2018. The SPLC appeared on a list of “external experts and organizations” that Facebook works with “to inform our hate speech policies.” The company said it no longer works with the SPLC, however. “Meta does not work with the SPLC and has never relied on its ‘hate map’ when creating our policies,” a spokesman told The Daily Signal in a statement Wednesday. Meta has altered its policies in recent years, to the SPLC’s consternation. As far back as 2019, Meta clarified that it did not accept the SPLC’s claim that certain conservative organizations are “hate groups.” Charlie Kirk praised Meta’s January policy changes after meeting with the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. “Mark Zuckerberg announced sweeping policy changes, saying they’re getting rid of their fact checking department, that this election was about more speech, not less speech,” Kirk said. He praised Zuckerberg as “very sincere,” and praised Facebook’s willingness to “stand up to these regimes and say, ‘No, we are going to protect freedom of speech.'” The SPLC attacked Meta’s policy changes, warning that they could “encourage hate and threaten democracy.” PayPal PayPal’s then-CEO Dan Schulman mentioned the SPLC when The Wall Street Journal asked him in 2019 “what outside groups are most helpful in terms of informing PayPal’s decisions on users or websites that may be violating the company’s policies?” “PayPal does not rely on the Southern Poverty Law Center when making assessments about activity on our platform,” a spokesperson told The Daily Signal in a statement Wednesday. Salesforce In a 2022 blog post, Salesforce stated that it uses the SPLC list “to identify hate groups and keep hateful material off our platform.” That same year, Fox News reported that Salesforce’s Slack had banned the Federation on American Immigration Reform, which the SPLC calls an “anti-immigrant hate group” from the platform. A Salesforce spokesperson said the company does not solely rely on the SPLC “hate map.” “All customers are bound by our acceptable use policies, which govern how our products and services may be used,” the spokesperson told The Daily Signal. “We don’t rely on the SPLC list or any single external source when making [Acceptable Use Policies] decisions. When we receive reports of potential violations, our internal teams review them for [Acceptable Use Policies] compliance, focusing on policy adherence rather than ideology.” Next Steps on SPLC “It is instructive that Benevity and multiple corporations are distancing themselves from SPLC,” Scott, the 1792 Exchange leader, told The Daily Signal. “Now it’s time for those companies to move from sheepish denial to substantive change by officially ending their relationships with SPLC and stop excluding charities based on noxious slander by this discredited organization.” The SPLC did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment by publication time. Amazon, Starbucks, and Texas Instruments did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request, either. The post Tech Companies Distance Themselves From Far-Left Smear Factory Under Pressure After Charlie Kirk Assassination appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Democrats Fritz on a Ballroom Blitz