During his inauguration address, New York City Mayor and avowed democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani declared he will transition the Big Apple away from “frigid rugged individualism” to a future defined by the “warmth of collectivism.”

He declared, “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism."

This was chilling and scary for this child of Soviet Union escapees to hear. It’s inconceivable to me that NYC, the financial capital of the world, is now being overseen by a Marxist-Leninist. Anyone who was alive last century knows that 20th-century experiments with collectivism and socialism are anything but warm. They’re always ruinous as they are frigid, and ultimately, deadly. Whitewashing collectivism and socialism with cutesy qualifiers like “democratic” doesn’t change their notoriety as destructive ideologies.

My parents frequently recount their lived experiences in the Soviet Union to me. Naturally, they were disgusted by Mayor Mamdani’s comments. People, they often say, were lucky to experience any semblance of “warmth” under socialism. There was hardly anything “warm” and loving about central planning. Millions of people behind the Iron Curtain experienced food rations, property confiscation, 90% taxation, poor health and environmental conditions, crammed communal apartments, deportations to frigid places in the Arctic known as gulags, and death for many. Lest we forget, over 100 million people died under........

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