Capitalist Capital May Elect a Socialist Mayor

Plus, foreign student ban could devastate Harvard athletics

New York State Assemblymember and mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani as seen in a photo provided by his campaign. Photo credit: Kara McCurdy.

In today’s newsletter:

A look at the real risk that New York City, the capital of capitalism, could wind up with a socialist mayor in Zohran Mamdani, who wants to raise taxes so the city government can build housing, operate grocery stores, and make childcare, college, healthcare and transportation “free.”

Plus three Harvard updates:

1. Trump’s ban on student visas to Harvard could devastate some Harvard sports teams that are overwhelmingly foreign students.

2. Harvard issues a statement distancing itself from Elaine Kim, the Berkeley ethnic studies professor emeritus and boycott-Israel activist it gave an honorary degree to last week.

3. More details emerge on “Crimson Courage” figure Ian Simmons and his Democratic Party connections.

Mayor Mamdani? Following this week’s New York City mayoral debate and the endorsement of Zohran Mamdani by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, fears are rising that New York could be saddled with a socialist mayor. New York City has suffered under and survived and come back from plenty of incompetent and excessively left-wing mayors over the years. Even by New York City standards, though, Mamdani is overpromising on what socialism can actually deliver, and it has disastrous potential if he tries to implement it. A May 28 Emerson College poll found Mamdani surging with “momentum” ahead of the June 24 primary.

Mamdani’s policy page is a lot of tax-and-spend, big government stuff, with the notable exception of “Zohran will make it faster, easier, and cheaper to start and run a business in New York City, so that bodegas and corner stores stay open and dollar slices come back. He will cut small business fines in half, speed up permitting and make online applications easier.” (Though he’d also raise the minimum wage to $30 an hour, erasing whatever benefits the small businesses get from lower fines.) Like a lot of anti-capitalists, he’s extremely anti-Israel.

Maybe Andrew Cuomo, who is 67 and resigned as governor, will manage to defeat Mamdani, 33. Or maybe Mayor Eric Adams, who is running as an independent, will. If not, and Mamdani takes over New York, expect real estate prices in Miami, West Palm Beach, Dallas, and maybe even New Jersey, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut to soar as more city residents lose patience and flee. Will New York City voters who turn out for an off-year municipal election be sensible and street-smart enough to be skeptical of the socialist promises? Or will they see voting for a Uganda-born socialist Muslim as a way to express anti-Trump emotions? Over the next few weeks this will be an increasingly big story. A Mayor Mamdani could make even liberal former mayors like Bill de Blasio or David Dinkins look like Mike Bloomberg or Rudy Giuliani by comparison.

Foreign athletes: President Trump’s move to restrict foreign student access to Harvard, temporarily stayed by a federal judge in Boston, could put some Harvard sports teams out of business.

The Harvard Men’s Squash roster lists 13 players, of whom 10 are international students from Egypt, South Africa, Ecuador, Ireland, India, Canada, England, Israel, and Malaysia. That’s 77 percent foreign.

The Harvard Women’s Soccer roster lists 25 players, of whom 14, or 56 percent, are foreign students from England, Norway, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, Iceland, Denmark, and Australia.

The Harvard Women’s Golf team roster lists seven players, of whom four, or 57 percent, are foreign students from Canada and Hong Kong.

Harvard President Alan Garber, explaining Harvard’s legal moves, said, “Each of us is part of a truly global university community….International students and scholars make outstanding contributions inside and outside of our classrooms and laboratories, fulfilling our mission of excellence in countless ways.”

Compare that to the University of Chicago’s Paul Alivisatos, who wrote recently, “when this university admits students, we do so based on their academic excellence; when we sponsor visas for scholars, we do so with serious care. We are proud of this responsibility and approach it with a spirit of service to American society.”

“Global university community” and “spirit of service to American society” are two different themes to emphasize. If Harvard wants to reach a productive settlement with the “America First” Trump administration it might be better advised to talk more about the service to America and less about “global” community. On the other hand, if Harvard is counting on foreign donors to finance its legal battles and operations while federal funding is frozen, maybe the “global university community” language is understandable.

Elaine Kim honorary degree: Last week The Editors broke the story that Harvard honorary degree recipient Elaine Kim, an emerita professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is a boycott-Israel advocate (see “Harvard Gives Honorary Degree to Berkeley Boycott-Israel Advocate.”)

Harvard has now issued a statement about the situation:

Honorary degree recipients are chosen based on a candidate’s overall and lifetime contributions and accomplishments. Harvard University is grateful for input into its processes, which we are always striving to strengthen and improve.

There have been questions this year about the views of one honorary degree recipient who seems to have supported academic boycotts. In granting an honorary degree, Harvard University is not endorsing the political views of the recipient.

Harvard University’s position on academic boycotts is clear. The University strongly opposes academic boycotts and has stated so publicly. As President Garber and his predecessors have said, any suggestion of targeting or boycotting a particular group because of disagreements over the policies pursued by their governments is antithetical to what we stand for as a university. The University strongly reaffirms that core principle.

It’s funny that this is framed in a content-neutral way as opposing academic boycotts as a tactic—so that Harvard would oppose, say, a boycott of Nazi German universities in the run-up to World War II—rather than as specifically relating to the boycott of Israel, which in Kim’s case extends beyond an academic boycott to also include a cultural boycott of the Batsheva Dance Company and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. It’s like Harvard is afraid to say that boycotting Israel is antisemitic, or that by supporting such a boycott, Kim is engaging in the antisemitism that Harvard has been insisting in court and to the Trump administration that it is combating. There’s no explanation of who suggested Kim for an honorary degree, or of whether Harvard decisionmakers knew of her anti-Israel advocacy before giving her the honor.

Crimson Courage: The recent post on “‘Crimson Courage’ group tied to Democrats, Pritzker,” generated some tips from sophisticated readers (there are no unsophisticated readers of The Editors) about a key figure in the group, Ian Simmons.

The new information: Simmons has described himself as “the silent partner in co-founding and seed-funding ActBlue.” ActBlue is an online fundraising platform that raises money for Democrats: In the first quarter of 2025, Democrats raised $400.7 million through ActBlue, the organization says. His mother, Adele Smith Simmons, Radcliffe 1963, was president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation from 1989 to 1999. He lives on a 16-acre hilltop estate in Concord.