New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who exemplifies the growing red-green alliance in the United States—he is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and a follower of Twelver Shiism, the apocalyptic state religion of Iran—has been in office for little more than seven months. But he’s already made it clear what this confluence of radical ideologies means in practice: manufacturing scapegoats and fomenting class, racial, and religious hatreds. In this, Mamdani is following a political playbook used by both Communist and Islamist regimes to advance revolutionary aims.

In a video released on April 15, Tax Day in the United States, Mamdani gleefully announced, “Today, we’re taxing the rich.” He pointed behind him at “this penthouse, which hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin bought for $238 million,” as an example of the properties that would fall under the city’s new pied-à-terre tax. The tax was originally supposed to apply only to family homes worth more than $5 million, and in July the city began sending letters to 17,000 homeowners who “may be subject to the surcharge.” (In a brash tweet, Mamdani told these homeowners to “check your mailbox when you’re back in the five boroughs—because you’ve got mail.”) But the city simultaneously announced that condominiums and co-ops valued at more than $1 million would also be subject to the tax, and publicly listed the names and addresses of over 960,000 property owners who might be affected.

The city’s confusing rollout has drawn strong criticism. The published list erroneously includes working-class rowhouses, mid-$500,000 homes, and primary residences. The appeals process, which had an initial deadline of August 21 (since extended by a month), comes at a time when many people are on summer vacation. The procedural instructions don’t address basic questions and require the submission of multiple pieces of evidence on different websites, some of which have failed to save uploaded materials. The city’s “guilty until proven innocent” approach makes taxpayers responsible for work city officials should have done.

Worst of all, Mamdani’s administration has now singled out supposedly rich people by name, implicitly shaming them for being financially successful, and giving their most embittered and unstable detractors the information they need to find them. (Never mind the fact that Mamdani himself has suggested that anyone who makes less than $1 million a year might be “working class,” presumably to make his wealthy supporters feel like they, too, are oppressed by capitalism.)

Mamdani’s name-and-shame strategy is common to both Communist and Islamist governments. Iran has issued fatwas calling for the assassination of named individuals, including Salman Rushdie, President Trump, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In Mao’s China, local officials would draw up lists of “capitalist roadsters” and landlords. Dragged into public struggle sessions, these unfortunates would be denounced, beaten, and sometimes executed. These “Speak Bitterness” sessions, which were meant to provoke peasant violence against class enemies, furnish a model for Mamdani’s Rental Ripoff Hearings.

Channeling bitterness is central to Mamdani’s divide-and-conquer strategy, and to that of the DSA. Its members have expressed support for Chinese socialism, Maoism, and Stalinism, and Cea Weaver, director of Mamdani’s Office to Protect Tenants, has called to “Elect more communists” and “Seize private property!” A core part of the target audience is the “disappointed haute bourgeoisie” of young, upper-middle-class whites, fully credentialed but half-educated and radicalized by their universities, who are dissatisfied with their career prospects in a rapidly changing economy.

Bitterness is an effective political strategy only insofar as it is directed at particular scapegoats, and Mamdani’s administration has targeted whites and Jews as well as the rich.

Weaver has described home ownership as a “weapon of white supremacy”; Mamdani has publicly supported the anti-Israel boycott campaign BDS and refuses to condemn the antisemitic phrases “globalize the intifada” and “from the river to the sea.” On his first day in office, he revoked Eric Adams’s executive order adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. And he recently produced a video in which he accused Netanyahu of “horrific genocide,” called him a “war criminal,” and, channeling a medieval blood-libel, maintained that the IDF deliberately targets Palestinian babies. He then encouraged New Yorkers to take to the streets to express their anger at Netanyahu.

A day later, a man yelling “Allahu Akbar” stabbed a Jew leaving synagogue with a screwdriver. Jewish New Yorkers understandably believe that Mamdani’s heated rhetoric has created a permission structure for antisemitic crimes, which have increased under his administration.

It’s not clear whether Mamdani is more red than green, or vice versa: Is his endgame the triumph of Islam, or Marxism? From the Jewish point of view, this hardly matters. Stalin executed Jewish poets, arrested Jewish doctors for allegedly plotting to poison Soviet leaders, and, according to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and others, was prepared to send all Soviet Jews to the Gulag—a plan interrupted only by his death. The Communist regimes of Eastern Europe followed suit, with a show trial of Jews in Czechoslovakia in 1952 and a brutal antisemitic campaign in Poland in 1968.

One thing, however, is certain. New Yorkers—and not just Jewish ones—are now getting a small taste of the grinding demoralization inflicted by government bureaucracies in ideological tyrannies. People living in the USSR and its satellite states faced the constant drudgery of assembling documents and standing in endless lines to renew residence permits, obtain identity papers, mail packages to imprisoned relatives, seek information about arrested ones, and otherwise engage with the state. One suspects that, in its handling of pieds-à-terre, the Mamdani Administration is similarly using onerous bureaucratic processes as an informal way of punishing disfavored groups.

When the schemes of radical social activists fail to produce the desired results, as is inevitable, they need an explanation that saves their guiding ideological assumptions. This always involves finding scapegoats, on whom they unload their own sins. And because more failure means more scapegoats, even those who voted for Mamdani will eventually learn the truth of H. L. Mencken’s remark that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”