The Bane Playbook Is No Longer Fiction

New York City has fallen.

It’s similar to “The Dark Knight Rises,” when the villain Bane decides to take over and destroy Gotham City by unleashing a gigantic class war.

Now imagine that Bane doesn’t wear a mask, but instead a smarmy smile, has the adoration of the entire legacy media, and also sympathizes with radical Islamists in their hatred for the United States.

That’s Zohran Mamdani.

It is certainly not unprecedented in human history that when people take positions of power, they seek to unleash the proletariat against the bourgeois. It’s quite common.

That’s what Zohran Mamdani did on Monday in the most obvious and disgusting way.

The New York Post reported:

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration has published a searchable database of Big Apple properties that could fall under the state’s new pied-à-terre tax, effectively doxxing thousands of wealthy New Yorkers. The city’s Department of Finance uploaded the comprehensive list — which purports to cover all unoccupied, non-primary residences in the five boroughs worth north of $1 million — including the full names and addresses of every property owner. … Citywide, The Post counted over 960,000 residences and individuals listed as potentially in line to be hit with Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax, even though just 31,000 homes were supposed to be subjected to the new levy as he and Hochul initially sold it to the public.

Why is it your business which person owes taxes? As long as they are abiding by the law and paying the tax that they owe, why should you know their name and address?

There’s only one reason to dox people this way — releasing people’s names and addresses and saying, “These are the Richie Riches.”

You wish to unleash the proletariat on the bourgeoisie. You are increasing danger to actual human beings for political gain.

That is what Mamdani is doing. It turns out that he’s also bad at it, because he also is targeting a bunch of people who are living in their apartments. Remember, pied-à-terre is supposed to be a second home tax. Instead, he listed a bunch of people who live in their homes.

This is an intimidation tactic. Mamdani’s goal is to force people to leave. This is revolution. The idea is you are not protected if you are in New York. In fact, they are going to put out your name and address. If you are famous and rich and you own a place, you either have to pay for additional security — an unofficial tax just to keep your home safe — or sell it and go.

That is not going to alleviate the housing problem. All of the communist “solutions” that are being proposed by Mamdani are not about actual solutions. They’re about destroying the system from within.

That’s because if you force all these people to sell, it leads to a decline in home prices. That decline sounds good at the beginning, but it turns out that when you have rent control and heavy building regulation, no one is going to build a home ever again because if the only way that anyone could make a profit was to build a new home but you’re forcing the market down, what you are doing is removing all incentive for development. No one is going to build new houses or new apartment buildings in New York.

I know many, many, many investors at this point who are pulling their money from New York City as we speak. We’re also talking about a massive decline in tax revenues. The people who bought those places and are already paying property tax in New York City are not taking advantage of New York City’s services because they’re not there full-time. They are already tax-positive for New York City.

But none of this is the real point, which is that class resentment is literal class warfare. That is the goal. It is the first step. It is about unleashing a population against the rich. It is about eating the rich. That’s all it is.

This is nothing new. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in “The Communist Manifesto”:

Revolution cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property and on the conditions of bourgeois production, by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.

In other words, make things unworkable. Jam the system, and when you jam the system, you create more ire and more anger and more of a movement. And eventually that turns into full-scale property seizures or mobilizing the population against one another.

That is the goal. You’ve seen this in every communist country; all of them. In 1929, Stalin was unleashing the proletariat against the so-called kulaks, the private homeowners and landowners. Mao in 1934 gave a speech in which he said, “If we only mobilize the people to carry on the war and do nothing else, can we succeed in defeating the enemy? Of course not. If we want to win, we must do a great deal more. We must lead the peasants’ struggle for land and distribute the land to them.”

It is the same logic always and forever. It starts off with populist talk, then turns into the complete violation of private property, its seizure, and violence.

In the United States, we have a right to property ownership. We have a Constitution. We do have laws on the books — at least for now.

Mamdani is using pure intimidation. It’s why, a few months back, he posted a video pointing to Ken Griffin’s apartment in New York City in an attempt to intimidate him.

That’s the only reason you do these things: to mobilize one group of people against those who are wealthier than they are.

It’s disgusting. It is vile. He’s not saying he’s going to make your life better. He’s pledging to make the rich guy’s life worse. That’s supposed to be what you rally around. It is full-scale destructive.

It is Bane. Understand that for Zohran Mamdani, the Bane mask isn’t the face mask Tom Hardy wore. The face mask is the smile.

Because underneath that smarmy smile, underneath that plastered-on grin, is the most vile anti-American person you can imagine.

And he’s running New York City.