A new 13-minute video released by New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani backs the idea that property should be controlled by “those who live in it” rather than those who own it. It features Mamdani housing official Cea Weaver, who has attacked the idea of property rights, particularly for “white families.” It also singles out a “billionaire” Jewish “slumlord”—but gets both his photo and the condition of his properties wrong, the Free Beacon’s Ira Stoll reports.
The Mamdani administration’s slickly produced video opens with close-up images of Weaver, wearing a Soviet-red zippered sweater and looking directly into the camera while seated, legs crossed, in an armchair before what appears to be a City Hall fireplace. “This is Cea, Cea Weaver … she’s here to tell us a story about one of the worst landlords in New York City,” the video says.
The video demonizes one landlord, Joel Wiener of Pinnacle, while praising tenant organizers: “everyone should feel so proud of the work that they did advocating for themselves and their neighbors.” A 2026 City Journal article noted a legal brief that said, as City Journal summarized it, “Pinnacle’s properties had fewer violations than the citywide average; that none of its buildings came close to meeting the city’s threshold for ‘unsatisfactory’ housing (three or more violations per unit); and that, had one tenant not vandalized an elevator and barred Pinnacle from entering her apartment to make repairs, the number of violations would have been even lower.” A 2017 Bloomberg article identified Wiener as a billionaire, though dozens of properties he then controlled have since been sold in a bankruptcy proceeding.
An image in the video that portrayed Wiener was originally erroneous; it was actually a picture of someone else, the Washington Free Beacon has learned. The city eventually updated it with a different image. It’s only one of many ways the video was deceptive and inaccurate. The mayor’s video also gives a brief history of rent control that fails to mention the downsides of the policy, or of price controls generally. Those downsides include less dynamism than would be typical of a market-based system, because tenants who obtain below-market-rate apartments tend to stay in place forever, or at least until they die and their children can take over the lease.
READ MORE: Mamdani Backs Squatters’ Rights in Video Demonizing ‘Billionaire’ Jewish ‘Slumlord’
The celebrity Cambridge professor Jason Arday resigned suddenly on Wednesday after the university announced it had opened an investigation into his academic credentials. Though the probe pertains to plagiarism, it’s not the only scandal plaguing Arday, who “has a history of claiming he was the victim of violent, criminal threats that are not supported by law enforcement or any other available records,” investigative reporter Benjamin Ryan reports for the Free Beacon.
Arday’s claims go back a year, when he delivered a previously unreported speech at a British university, a recording of which was obtained by the Free Beacon. Arday made a series of lurid and macabre claims about threats made to him and his family, including “pigs’ heads in my parents’ door,” “bullets in the post,” “threats of raping my 18-year-old daughter,” and “being threatened at knifepoint at work.”
Arday said the threats came because “they” did not want a young black man teaching at Cambridge. He did not specify who “they” were, and he was not facing significant scrutiny or criticism at the time. Now, “a year later, with Arday now fighting accusations of rampant plagiarism and lies about his life story, there's no evidence police investigated these threats or that the threats even existed, based on records searches, recent news reporting, and a document obtained via a freedom-of-information request and viewed by the Free Beacon,” Ryan writes. “The freedom-of-information request, submitted to the Cambridgeshire Constabulary, the police force for the medieval college town, inquired about any reports to the authorities that matched Arday's descriptions of threats and stalking. A search produced no matching reports.”
“In his resignation letter, posted by the left-wing legal advocacy nonprofit The Good Law Project, Arday admitted no wrongdoing, and instead cited the attacks on him as motivating him to step away from the public eye,” writes Ryan. “‘Sadly, the years since my appointment have also been marked by an unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack,’ he said.”
Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed put up a weaker-than-expected showing against primary opponent Haley Stevens, who won more than 725,000 votes and lost to El-Sayed by less than 1 point. Does that mean it’s time for the often inflammatory El-Sayed to “mend bridges” with Stevens’s supporters? Don’t even think about it, his top campaign surrogate, the anti-American streamer Hasan Piker said. He called those supporters “Islamophobic pieces of shit” in an election night livestream from El-Sayed’s watch party in Detroit.
“Everyone being like, ‘Abdul has a fuck-ton of work to do mending bridges,’” said Piker, who is best known for arguing that “America deserved 9/11.” He continued: “Here’s the fucking take nuke for you, okay? You are all unbelievably Islamophobic pieces of shit.” “You literally called the dude a fucking terrorist for months on end, and, like, called him a sexist, misogynist, terrorist, bad candidate, fake doctor, when he has, like, two fucking degrees. And now you’re gonna sit there and be like, ‘Well, you know, you’ve really got to come to me now.’ Like, what are you talking about?”
El-Sayed’s tight margin of victory, which came after polls showed him leading Stevens by double digits, prompted speculation that he could struggle to win over Stevens voters in November, when he will face off against Republican nominee Mike Rogers. Piker expressed some concern that Democrats will struggle to rally behind El-Sayed, but he blamed the issue on Stevens’s backers rather than on El-Sayed’s far-left positions and comments excusing Islamic terrorism.
“I do worry that there are some out there who, in an effort to make sure that this narrative that a progressive can win in a state like Michigan doesn’t take root, will literally either subtly or not so secretively endorse Mike Rogers, or stay out of the race while trying to push the excitement in the opposite direction,” he said. “Like, everyone is already doing the, ‘Can El-Sayed unite the Democrats?’ And that question is just … Can El-Sayed get the people and the groups and the NGOs and the consultants that have worked extensively for pro-Israel candidates to shut the fuck up about El-Sayed being a terrorist for a long enough timeline so that we can consolidate the base and defeat the fucking Republican.” That’s the spirit!
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Left-wing Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico has accused Republican opponent Ken Paxton of voter fraud for using an address tied to his estranged wife. It’s especially awkward given that Talarico “voted in five elections using his parents’ address after purchasing a home for himself nearby, a practice that may have violated state voting laws,” the Texas Tribune reported.
Haley Stevens dominated Abdul El-Sayed with working-class and black voters. But El-Sayed ran up the score in “college towns” like Ann Arbor and Lansing, according to an analysis from CNN’s Harry Enten. The problem: “You can’t just win college towns if you’re gonna win a general election,” Enten observed.
The Senate held a hearing Wednesday on Muslim Brotherhood activities in the United States. Not a single Democrat showed up. “It’s an embarrassment and a disservice to the thousands of American victims of the Muslim Brotherhood, including most recently the dozens of Americans who died on Oct. 7 at the hand of Gaza’s Muslim Brotherhood branch, Hamas,” Sen. Ted Cruz said.
On Monday, the likely Democratic nominee for governor in Wisconsin, socialist Francesca Hong, defended her call to “cancel Thanksgiving,” saying the holiday is “incredibly painful for many people in our communities.” On Wednesday, she told Politico that it’s her “favorite holiday.” How about that!
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It is really disturbing to see government officials singling out private citizens to make them targets for the mob. That our elite universities are producing this kind of trash means we have truly entered a dark age in terms of liberal arts education… we aren’t producing citizens; rather, we are producing enemies of civilization, and their success means we are inching closer to civil war.
It's not the Democratic primary, Democratic senator, Democratic representative, etc. It's Democrat primary, Democrat senator, Democrat representative.