Zohran Mamdani – a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America – is now the mayor of New York City.
He didn't get there alone – America's government schools spent decades building his voter base.
What a Chicago-area government school teacher told students about the people Stalin did exposed why socialism is surging among young people.
Donald Trump called Mamdani a "100 percent Communist Lunatic" – and 78 percent of New York City's under-30 voters voted for him.
Government schools across this country have spent two decades teaching children that socialism is good and capitalism is the enemy.
A veteran high school social studies teacher in the Chicago suburbs – writing for Townhall – recalled watching his mentor teacher describe Stalin's Kulak victims as "greedy" and suggest they had it coming.
The Kulaks were farmers Stalin declared enemies of the state, stripped of their land, and starved to death – between three and seven million of them.
Government schools called them greedy.
That teacher represents exactly the kind of classroom AFT PResident Randi Weingarten's unions have protected for decades – the kind where American children learn that the Soviet Union's problem wasn't mass murder, it was incompetent management.
A survey of college students found that for every one student who came away with a better view of capitalism, four came away with a worse one.
The same reporting found that college faculty were "more often positive toward socialism and negative toward capitalism."
More than seven in ten Gen Z students told the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation they never received a single lesson on communist regimes in twelve years of K-12 education – not one lesson about the 100 million people socialism killed in the 20th century.
A 2025 Cato Institute poll found that 34 percent of Americans under 30 now hold a favorable view of communism.
The Constitution isn't faring any better. When government schools bother to teach it at all, curricula like the widely-used Zinn Education Project frame it for students as a document that "endorsed slavery and favored the interests of the owning classes" – not a blueprint for freedom, but a reason to be embarrassed to be American.
Mamdani's landslide with under-30 voters wasn't a political upset – it was a harvest, the predictable result of a generation that spent twelve years in Randi Weingarten's classrooms being told capitalism is greed and socialism is compassion.
Those students are now voting – and this year, four Democratic Socialists of America candidates won congressional primaries in Philadelphia, New York City, and Denver.
DSA members in Congress could grow to over a dozen after the November election.
The organization has backed more than 300 candidates in 39 states – mayors, city councilors, state lawmakers, and school board members working their way into your community.
The DSA's next move is already public: they want AOC in the White House in 2028.
Getting from Bernie Sanders to Zohran Mamdani to a serious DSA presidential campaign took exactly two generations of government schools.
Florida Passes Communism History Law While the Rest of America Pays the Price
Governor Ron DeSantis signed Senate Bill 1264 into law in 2024, requiring instruction on the history of communism in Florida public schools, and the Florida Board of Education approved new History of Communism standards in November 2025.
Starting this fall, every Florida middle and high school student takes a yearly course on what communism actually does to people.
DeSantis has it right – but Florida can't vote in New York, Denver, or Philadelphia, and those cities already delivered their verdict.
Forty-six percent of Americans between 18 and 34 now hold a favorable view of socialism – the product of a deliberate, decades-long project that used your tax dollars to teach your children to despise the system that built this country and replace it with one that has failed everywhere it has ever been imposed.
The Kulaks were Ukrainian farmers Stalin declared enemies of the state – a government school teacher in the Chicago suburbs sided with Stalin over the farmers, and the students who sat in those classrooms voted 78 percent for a socialist to run the largest city in the United States.
How many of those students ever heard the names Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Holodomor, or the Black Book of Communism?
Someone decided they didn't need to.
That person is still in the classroom.
Sources:
- Chris Talgo, "States Can Help Nip Socialism in the Bud," Townhall, August 28, 2026.
- Staff, "Young Americans Like Socialism Too Much," Cato Institute, March 2025.
- Staff, "Public Schools Must Teach the Truth About Socialism," Heartland Institute, February 19, 2026.
- Deirdre Heavey, "Flashback: Inside the Political Movement That Put a Socialist in Charge of New York City," Fox News, December 30, 2025.
