Mamdani wants New Yorkers to hate success. That should scare every last one of us

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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani launched a very public war on billionaire Ken Griffin, and it has nothing to do with justice or lawbreaking. Mamdani did not accuse Griffin of dodging taxes or violating any statute. His sole aim was to turn the successful businessman into a symbol of everything “wrong” with the system, and to teach Americans to hate success so much that surrendering their own agency to a nanny-state government starts to feel like virtue.

As I continue my Walk Across America, I have watched this story with anger, but not surprise. We have seen this kind of politics before. A politician finds a wealthy man, turns him into a villain, and uses him as a prop to stir up resentment. Mamdani did exactly that when he stood outside Griffin’s $238 million penthouse on Tax Day and called for a new tax on luxury second homes owned by nonresidents.

Griffin was not singled out because he broke any law. He was singled out because he succeeded too visibly. Mamdani, the overprivileged child of millionaires with very little real achievement of his own, looked at a man who climbed to the top of American capitalism and decided the best way to build his own brand was to point at him and say, “There is your enemy.” That may play well as socialist theater, but it is poisonous leadership.

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I do not know Ken Griffin personally, but I know enough about his life to know he is not the cartoon villain Mamdani wants New Yorkers to see. Griffin was born into a middle-class family, started trading while he was still in college, and built a firm from scratch into one of the most successful in the world. His businesses employ thousands of people and generate enormous tax revenue. He has given large sums to universities, museums, medical research, civic institutions, and even nonprofits in the very cities where he does business. That matters because it shows a man using his success to build and to give, not simply to hoard and to hide.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaking at a May Day rally

I am not speaking about this as a distant observer. I am literally walking across America right now to raise $25 million for a Leadership and Economic Opportunity Center on the South Side of Chicago. I am doing that because I want the young people in my neighborhood to move from a life of government dependency to a life where they can use the tools of capitalism to climb as high as their God-given talents will take them. I want them to have their shot at the American Dream.

We have seen this kind of politics before. A politician finds a wealthy man, turns him into a villain, and uses him as a prop to stir up resentment.

What Mamdani is doing spits on that hope. When you teach a generation that wealth is always theft and success is always suspect, you are not just attacking billionaires. You are telling a boy on the South Side, already trapped by socialist policies of government dependency, that capitalism itself is a corrupt and evil system. That is how you hurt the future. That is not justice. That is evil.

Men like Ken Griffin, for all their flaws, at least prove that it is still possible to build, to hire, to give, and to create opportunity. That story inspires. Mamdani’s story does the opposite. It does not lift people up. It teaches them to resent, to wait, and to depend. One points toward an open door. The other tears down success and nails it shut in a coffin.

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And there is a cost when leaders choose resentment over responsibility. Citadel had been planning a major redevelopment project in New York tied to thousands of jobs, and after Mamdani’s attack, Griffin signaled he was ready to keep that investment in Miami instead.

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Wealth can move. Jobs can move. Capital can move. The people left behind are the workers who never get hired and the neighborhoods that never get rebuilt. I watched him leave Chicago for similar reasons: a city that punished success and tolerated crime until he finally took his business and his billions elsewhere.

That is why this fight between Mamdani and Griffin matters beyond one tax and one tower. It reveals a worldview where the private sector is always suspect, the rich are always guilty, and government is always the redeemer. If our youth can be indoctrinated to resent those who create wealth, it becomes easier for the Mamdanis of the world to persuade them to hand their future over to the state. That is not empowerment. That is dependency dressed up as compassion.

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As a pastor, I do not believe wealth is evil. I believe the love of money is evil. Mamdani loves money for his government, and his ambition here is to move money out of Griffin’s pocket and into the hands of the state. If this is not state-sanctioned robbery of a private citizen, I do not know what is. All I know is that ordinary people do not benefit from it. The only winner is an overgrown government bureaucracy that needs more and more of our tax dollars to sustain far too many of its failures.

Zohran Mamdani has chosen the path of anti-American resentment. He thinks he is standing up for the little guy. In reality, he is fighting for a world where the little guy never grows up, never builds, never owns, never gives, because he has been trained to believe that success is a sin and the state is his savior. From where I stand in a hurting neighborhood, I know which path I am walking toward — and it is not his.

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