Crowd Chants “Tax the Rich” at Mamdani Rally; Candidate Attacks Ackman, Langone
“The billionaires got scared,” says socialist mayoral candidate at event with Sanders, AOC
The 34-year-old socialist assemblyman who is the Democratic Party’s candidate for mayor of New York City is moving into the closing stretch of his campaign with a stepped-up emphasis on class warfare.
The master of ceremonies at the Sunday night, October 26, event, Sarah Sherman, led the audience of thousands at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens in chants of “Tax the rich! Tax the rich! Tax the rich!” (At about 1:38:30 into the video). Mamdani praised her for doing an “incredible” job.
The audience repeated the “Tax the rich!” chant for an extended stretch after Senator Sanders, a socialist of Vermont, said, “It is not a radical idea to say the rich should start paying their fair share of taxes.”
Mamdani is campaigning on a $10 billion tax increase, with $9 billion of it coming from an increased income tax on those earning more than $1 million a year and an increased corporate tax rate, which economists say also winds up being a tax on the shareholders of those corporations.
The top city, state, and federal combined marginal income tax rate in New York already is about 52 percent, which has contributed to the exodus of high-earning New Yorkers to Florida. The Citizens Budget Commission says it is already the highest rate in the nation. “New York City residents earning over $25 million annually are subject to a 14.776 percent marginal personal income tax rate, comprised of the State’s 10.9 percent and the City’s 3.876 percent rates. This exceeds California’s 13.3 percent—the nation’s second highest top marginal rate. New York City residents earning $2.2 million pay a combined rate of 13.526 percent, still exceeding California.”
New York is already heavily reliant on the rich; according to the Citizens Budget Commission, “In 2012, they comprised less than 1 percent of New York State’s and New York City’s resident filers, yet paid 44 percent and 40 percent of State and City’s personal income taxes, respectively.”
In his speech concluding the Forest Hills rally, Mamdani was surrounded as an immediate backdrop—apparently intentionally, because the rally was orchestrated and planned by his campaign—by four people wearing Soviet-red sweatshirts that said “SOCIALISTS” on the front in white capital letters.
Mamdani, who arrogantly likened himself to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, denounced “corrupt politicians and the billionaires who fund them.”
“The billionaires got scared, or, as the New York Times would describe it, the Hamptons were basically in group therapy about the mayoral race,” Mamdani said.
He said of the “big money donors,” that, “they know that a reimagined New York hurts their bottom line.”
Mamdani offered a classic Karl Marx ideological view that wealth is created by stealing from labor.
He spoke of “the oligarchs who have accumulated vast wealth off those who labor from before the light breaks the horizon until long after the color has drained from the sky.”
“They are the robber barons of America,” Mamdani said, naming “the Bill Ackmans and Ken Langones of the world.”
“We will triumph over the oligarchs,” Mamdani said.
As is typical (See, “Mamdani Steps Up Strident ‘Working Class’ Campaign While Sounding Like Pompous Phony,” October 15, 2025), Mamdani spouted florid rhetoric that sounds foreign, or at least pretentious and awkward. “Our city got to know each other and itself,” he said at one point.
He also had terrible timing using the Teleprompter, which was not functioning at the beginning of his appearance. “On November 4 we will set the course of our city back,” he said, pausing puzzlingly for a long beat and leaving the audience why a progressive was promising a setback before finishing “in the direction it belongs.”
The section on FDR included a paean to big government. “It was government that established the right to unionize and collectively bargain,” Mamdani said, an apparent reference to the National Labor Relations Act that FDR signed into law in 1935. Yet the right to organize and bargain collectively wasn’t established by government but by the unions, who advocated for it and had won some recognition for it already in the Clayton Act signed by President Wilson in 1914. And Mamdani’s assertion that government established the rights is literally taking the Communist and King George III side against President Kennedy’s inaugural address line. Kennedy said, “And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe--the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.” It was an incredibly telling and tone-deaf line from Mamdani, telling that he really is ignorant of and detached from American history and ideologically closer to the communists than to President Kennedy or the American founding fathers.
Governor Hochul, New York State Senate majority leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, and New York State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie all spoke at the rally, a cautionary fact for anyone hoping that Albany will somehow moderate Mamdani’s extremism.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also denounced what she called the “billionaire class.” She also deplored America paying for “the flattening of Palestinians and oppressed people abroad.”
Senator Sanders said, “We have a rigged economy with more income and wealth inequality than we have ever had in the history of our country.” That’s not accurate on a post-tax, post-transfer basis. Sanders portrayed a zero-sum battle between “working families” and “the billionaire class.”
“New York must have a mayor who represents the working families of our city, not the billionaire class,” Sanders said, “This country belongs to us, not to them.”
Mamdani has repeatedly tried to reassure New Yorkers that he hopes to be the mayor of all New Yorkers, even those who didn’t vote for him, while also backing a confiscatory tax plan narrowly targeted at upper-income New Yorkers and while also participating in and platforming stridently divisive class warfare rhetoric. It is just as ugly as any other mob beating up on any other unpopular minority and threatening to take away their property—which is to say, pretty ugly.
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