Defend the Billionaires, Call It Patriotism

Responding to: Socialism moves into the mainstream — the warning signs are all here · 2026-08-11

What the Piece Argues

The piece argues that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — a Democratic Socialist — is “testing what the American people will tolerate” by publishing a public database of million-dollar-plus properties and proposing a pied-à-terre tax on $5 million-plus second homes, with the explicit goal of normalizing socialism nationally. The piece’s single primary power-protecting talking point is the author’s verbatim call that “It is incumbent on all of us to resist the normalization of socialism in America” — a sentence that recasts municipal-level childcare, fare-free transit, and second-home taxation as an existential threat requiring nationwide mobilization against them. The author, a West Point graduate and Hudson Institute fellow, frames these policies as intimidation and “doxxing” of wealthy property owners, and urges “everyday Americans” to push back before Mamdani’s tactics spread beyond New York. The piece positions the Democratic Socialists of America as now occupying “the heart of the Democrat Party,” and characterizes their stated goal of replacing capitalism as an existential threat requiring immediate, public pushback.

Receipts

The piece’s alarm — anchored on its primary talking point, “It is incumbent on all of us to resist the normalization of socialism in America” — collapses on inspection: the policies it calls radical are specific, popular, and aimed at the many, while the property it calls “doxxed” was never private to begin with.

The framing wants you to believe

• A public-records property database is “doxxing” and “intimidation” of wealthy owners.
• A pied-à-terre tax on $5M+ second homes is an existential threat to “everyday Americans.”
• The way to defend working people is to defeat Mamdani’s platform before it spreads.
• The Democratic Socialists are now “the heart” of the Democratic Party, and their goals require urgent national mobilization.

What’s really going on

• New York property ownership has been a matter of public record for generations — deed recording is required to perfect title; the NYC Automated City Register Information System (ACRIS) has allowed free public searching of property records since 1966, and the underlying deed-recording requirement is far older (NYC Department of Finance — ACRIS records, publicly searchable at nyc.gov).
• A pied-à-terre tax applies to second homes worth $5 million or more — not to primary residences, and not to the 99% of New Yorkers who don’t own multiple multi-million-dollar properties; the policy is funded by taxing the apex, not the many (Mamdani’s published mayoral platform, 2025).
• The actual beneficiaries of the “free childcare and fare-free buses” policies the piece mocks are working mothers and working commuters — the constituency the piece claims to defend (Mamdani’s published mayoral platform, 2025).
• The piece is published in Fox News Opinion and written by a Hudson Institute media fellow; the Hudson Institute has been identified in investigative reporting and Form 990 disclosures as receiving Koch-family foundation funding, including from the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation and the Charles Koch Foundation — the same donor network that has funded anti-tax, anti-redistribution policy infrastructure for two generations (OpenSecrets; ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer — Hudson Institute Form 990 filings).
• The author is identified as “chairman of Veterans on Duty, a nonprofit organization focused on national security” — an advocacy nonprofit in the broader Koch-aligned policy ecosystem (organizational tax filings via ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer).

The mechanism the piece obscures: it asks working people to defend the privacy of billionaires whose wealth has been built on the public infrastructure the working class pays for, and against the very policies that would redistribute some of that wealth to working mothers and bus riders. The author calls this “patriotism”; the operation is donor-class protection.

The Response Ladder

Polite Reframe

When to use: when the speaker is a relative who watches Fox News and means well — a good-faith uncle at Thanksgiving, a parent who voted one way their whole life and wants to understand what’s happening now, a co-worker who shares these posts on the family group chat. The goal is to leave the conversation intact.

I want to talk about this Mamdani thing, because I think the part they’re upset about is not the part that should upset you.

Here’s Brenda. Brenda is a single mother in the Bronx. She works two jobs. Her rent is $1,800 a month for a two-bedroom. She takes the 2 train to her second job, and her daycare costs $400 a week — more than a third of her paycheck. She does not own a $5 million second home. She has never owned anything that would land in the database the mayor published. She will never receive a pied-à-terre tax bill in her life.

The pied-à-terre tax is on second homes worth $5 million or more. That’s not Brenda’s house. It’s not Brenda’s neighbor’s house. It’s not most of New York’s houses. It’s the apartment in Manhattan that Ken Griffin bought for about $238 million in 2019 — one of the most expensive homes ever sold in America — and only uses some of the time.

The database the mayor published? That’s a list of properties worth more than $1 million, with the owners’ names on it. Here’s the part the article doesn’t mention: New York property ownership has been a matter of public record since long before any of us were born. The deed to your house, when you bought it, got recorded at the city register. That’s not a secret. That’s how property law works. You can look up anyone’s property right now on the city’s own website. The mayor built a more useful version. He didn’t unlock a vault.

So when the article says “the mayor is intimidating wealthy owners,” what’s actually happening is the mayor is making information that has been public for two centuries easier to find — and proposing a tax on mansions of $5 million or more to fund childcare for the Brendas of the city. That’s the operation.

Look at who is actually asking you to push back. The article is by a Hudson Institute fellow. The Hudson Institute has received millions from Koch-family foundations, the same donor network that built the policy infrastructure for the tax cuts and deregulation you and I have been told to defend for forty years. Fox News Opinion is the platform. The author is the chairman of Veterans on Duty, a Koch-aligned advocacy nonprofit. The “everyday Americans” the article says must push back are being mobilized to protect the privacy of the man who paid $238 million for a Manhattan penthouse.

Now ask yourself the question the article is engineered to keep you from asking: who actually benefits if these policies fail? Not Brenda. Brenda gets nothing from the defeat of free childcare. She gets nothing from the defeat of fare-free buses. She gets nothing from keeping Ken Griffin’s mailing address quiet.

The people who benefit from keeping these policies off the table are the people who would have to pay for them. The people who benefit from keeping the property records quiet are the people who own the property. That’s the operation. You are being asked to do it for them.

I’m not asking you to become a socialist. I’m asking you to read the policies, look at who benefits and who pays, and decide whether the operation the article is performing is the one you signed up for. Because if Brenda is the everyday American, then the article is not defending Brenda. It’s defending the man who has never met her.

Mockery and Ridicule

When to use: for the Facebook reply thread, the group chat thread that needs dislodging, the conversation with someone who is repeating the line because it sounded right and hasn’t been challenged. The audience is the bystander, not the speaker — the goal is to make the line look ridiculous so it can’t be repeated without self-consciousness.

So let me make sure I have this straight. Jeremy Hunt, a West Point graduate, a former U.S. Army intelligence captain, a Hudson Institute fellow, and the chairman of a nonprofit called Veterans on Duty, took time out of his schedule to write a 700-word op-ed asking me — an everyday American — to push back against the mayor of New York City for the high crime of… publishing a list of publicly recorded million-dollar property owners. And proposing a tax on second homes worth more than $5 million. And proposing free childcare for working mothers.

This man identified the threat to the republic. He went to West Point. He was an Army intelligence officer. He has access to the actual classified threat assessments the U.S. government produces. And what he has spotted, what the apparatus he was trained by has flagged as the most urgent danger facing the country in this moment, is fare-free buses.

I’m sorry, I need a second.

OK. Fare-free buses. That’s the threat. Free childcare for working mothers. Threat number two. A tax on $5 million second homes — the kind of home where you keep your second one and your third one and your fourth one — threat number three.

And the operation he is asking “everyday Americans” to perform is… to defend Ken Griffin’s right to own a $238 million Manhattan penthouse without the mayor of New York knowing he owns it. The man who runs Citadel — a firm that has spent the last decade fighting every proposal to tax carried interest, to close the loophole that lets hedge fund managers pay less income tax than their secretaries — needs his mailing address protected. And the West Point grad has identified you as the volunteer.

I want to be clear about what “doxxing” means in the article. Doxxing is when you publish private information about a private person — home address, phone number, workplace — to enable harassment. That’s not what happened here. Ken Griffin’s ownership of 220 Central Park South is a matter of public record. The deed is recorded at the New York County Register’s office. Anyone with internet access can look it up. The Wall Street Journal reported on the purchase. Bloomberg reported on it. The New York Times reported on it. The information is not private. The mayor built a more useful interface.

So when the article says “intimidation,” it means: the mayor used public data to send a tax bill to a man whose company has spent a generation using every available mechanism to avoid sending tax bills. That’s not intimidation. That’s reciprocity.

Now look at the ask. “Everyday Americans must push back in one of the most powerful but overlooked ways: by talking about it.” That’s the call to action. That’s the call from the West Point grad, the Army intel captain, the Hudson Institute fellow, the Veterans on Duty chairman. The move he is recommending, the powerful one he has identified, the overlooked one he wants you to perform — is to talk. In your group chats. To your relatives. About how the mayor of New York is dangerous for proposing free childcare.

The asymmetry is the joke. The man who wrote the article is on the board of a Koch-funded think tank. The publication is owned by a media company whose editorial line on every tax increase since 1980 has been to oppose it. The “everyday Americans” the article claims to be mobilizing are the same working people who would benefit from the policies the article is engineered to defeat. The operation is being performed on them.

If you read this article and felt a surge of civic duty, congratulations: you have been successfully mobilized to defend the privacy of a billionaire’s mailing address against the interests of working mothers. That is what your patriotism is being spent on this week.

Nuclear Satire

When to use: when the cycle demands that something be burned to the ground — when the polite version has not moved the conversation, when the mockery version has been laughed off, when the people reading need to see the operation performed with its full machinery exposed. Audience: those who can take the heat.

So the intelligence apparatus of the United States of America — the one that missed the weapons of mass destruction, the one that missed the 2008 financial crisis, the one that missed January 6 until it was on television, the one that is currently failing to identify a single foreign disinformation operation it doesn’t already agree with — has produced, via Jeremy Hunt, its assessment of the greatest threat to the American republic in the summer of 2026.

The threat is: a mayor of New York City has published a list of properties worth more than $1 million.

That is the threat.

Not the climate. Not the 30-year stagnation of real wages. Not the four firms that control 80% of beef. Not the private equity firms that have looted every nursing home in the country. Not the fund that owns every house on your block and rents it back to you at a markup. Not the employer of last resort in three hundred small towns who pays $14 an hour and lobbies to keep the minimum wage where it is. Not the insurance company that just denied your mother her chemotherapy. Not the data broker that sold your location history to every bounty hunter with a phone. Not the employer who stole $400 million of your wages last year and paid a fine that was less than the wages were worth.

The threat is: the mayor made a database. Of public records. About million-dollar properties. And proposed a tax on second homes worth more than $5 million.

I want to be precise about what is happening here, because the article is engineered to make precision difficult. The “doxxing” charge — that Mamdani “doxxed” Ken Griffin by publishing his penthouse’s tax notification — rests on the proposition that Ken Griffin’s ownership of a Manhattan penthouse was private information. It was not. The deed was recorded at the New York County Register’s office at the moment of purchase. The purchase price was reported by every business outlet in the country. The address has been in the New York Times’ real estate section since the day he closed. The “doxxing” is the receipt of a tax bill by the man whose industry has spent fifty years building the political machinery that prevents tax bills from being received by anyone with a structured product to hide income in.

The “intimidation” charge rests on the proposition that there is something intimidating about a publicly-available property database. There is not. There is something intimidating about a hedge fund industry that has captured the regulatory state. There is something intimidating about a tax code that lets a man who made $1.7 billion in a year pay a lower effective rate than his secretary. There is something intimidating about a political economy in which the median American family has the same real wealth as in 1995 and the top 1% has three times more. There is something intimidating about all of that. The mayor’s database is not it.

The piece is published on Fox News Opinion. It is written by a Hudson Institute fellow. Hudson Institute has been identified in investigative reporting and Form 990 disclosures as receiving funding from the same Koch-family donor network that funded the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, Americans for Prosperity, and the State Policy Network, the coordinated architecture that built the modern American right’s policy infrastructure and that has, as its animating project, the reduction of taxes on capital and the suppression of redistribution. The “everyday Americans” the article invokes are the public face of a donor-class protection operation. The “patriotism” is the cover story. The actual operation is: keep the pied-à-terre tax off the books.

And here is the part that makes the article what it is. The article does not name a single working-class benefit of the policies it opposes. It does not name a single harm that will come to a working mother from free childcare. It does not name a single harm that will come to a bus rider from fare-free buses. It does not name a single harm that will come to anyone whose address is not already in a public record from the publication of a more accessible version of that record. The article’s entire substantive case is against the consequences to people who own multiple multi-million-dollar properties.

The “everyday Americans” the article addresses — the people it claims to be defending — are not the people the policies threaten. They are the people the policies help. The article is asking them to defend, against their own interest, the privacy of the people the policies are designed to fund.

That is not patriotism. That is not conservatism. That is not even politics in any meaningful sense. That is a fundraising letter disguised as civic alarm, asking for your service in defense of a class that has never once asked what your service costs.

The DSA co-chair’s stated goal is “to replace capitalism with socialism,” and the article is right to take the statement seriously. It is wrong about the threat it represents. The threat is not that the DSA will succeed in the next decade. The threat is that the operation the article is performing — the donor-class protection operation, the billionaire-privacy defense, the framing of redistribution as communism — has succeeded for forty years, and the country you and I live in is what it has produced.

You want to push back against something? Push back against the operation that took your wages, that took your healthcare, that took your children’s future, that left your town a food desert and your neighbor a graveyard from the opioids somebody else’s company sold and somebody else’s foundation funded and somebody else’s think tank defended in exactly the register this article is performing.

That is the threat. The threat has been operational for longer than you have been alive. The mayor of New York is not it.

Profane Scorched-Earth

When to use: when you’ve had it, when the people in the room need catharsis and clarity in the same breath, when the polite reframes have been ignored and the mockery has been dismissed and the nuclear satire has been met with “well, both sides.” The goal is not to persuade the speaker; it is to vindicate the people the speaker is asking you to throw under the bus.

Let me talk to you about Jeremy Hunt’s fucking op-ed.

Jeremy Hunt is a West Point graduate. He was a U.S. Army intelligence captain. He is now a “media fellow” at the Hudson Institute — a think tank that has received millions of dollars from the Koch family foundations, the same donor network that funded the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation and ALEC and the entire fucking architecture of American conservative policy since 1970. He is also the chairman of “Veterans on Duty,” a nonprofit in the same ecosystem. He writes for Fox News Opinion. This is the resume of the man who has identified the gravest threat to the American republic in this moment.

The threat is: free childcare for working mothers in New York City.

I’m sorry. I need you to hear that again. The threat is: free childcare for working mothers in New York City. The threat is: fare-free buses. The threat is: a tax on second homes worth more than $5 million — not first homes, not middle-class homes, not even a fucking duplex, but the kind of property you buy when you have so much money you need a place to keep your coats in Manhattan.

And the man who has identified this threat — who has, with his training and his apparatus and his access to the actual national-security-assessment machinery — concluded that the most urgent operation facing everyday Americans today is for them to spend their time defending the privacy of a man who paid $238 million for a Manhattan penthouse and has spent the last fifteen years using every mechanism in the political economy to make sure he never pays tax on any of it.

That is the ask. That is the operation. That is what your time is being requested for.

Now let me tell you what “doxxing” means in this article, because the word is doing some work. Doxxing is when you publish private information about a private person — a home address, a phone number, a workplace — to enable harassment. The information about Ken Griffin’s penthouse has been in the public record since the day he bought it. The deed is recorded at the New York County Register’s office. The Wall Street Journal reported the purchase price. The New York Times has his address in print. The information is not private. The mayor built a more accessible interface to information that has been public for two hundred years and mailed a tax bill to a man whose industry has spent two generations making sure tax bills don’t get mailed to him.

That is not doxxing. That is what the word “democracy” fucking means when you put it on a bumper sticker.

And the article wants you — you, working person reading this, you who takes the bus, you who has a kid in daycare, you who pays rent, you who has never seen $5 million in one place — to volunteer as a human shield for this man’s privacy. The ask is: take time out of your day, your group chats, your conversations with your relatives, your attention — the most valuable resource you have, which the article explicitly invokes when it tells you Americans “have short attention spans” — and spend it on this. Spend it defending Ken Griffin’s right to own a Manhattan penthouse anonymously. Spend it opposing free childcare for mothers who work at Wendy’s. Spend it opposing fare-free buses for the kid who has to get to his second job. Spend it opposing a tax on second homes owned by people who already have first homes and third homes and fourth homes.

That is the ask. That is what they want from you. And the language they have built to package this ask is “patriotism.” The language they have built to package your service in this operation is “love of country.” The language they have built to package the protection of a billionaire’s right to hide his property is “everyday Americans.”

I have a question for you. King — yes, that King, Martin Luther King Jr., the one whose birthday they turned into a three-day weekend — King wrote and spoke on the matter in 1967, in the months before he was killed — most pointedly in his August 16, 1967 SCLC presidential address — that the country was structured to prefer property over persons, and that until that was reversed there would be no justice in it. King said the country had socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor. King said the three evils — racism, materialism, militarism — were a single pathology. King said, in the same year, that the United States was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. King was not a Democrat. King was not a Republican. King was a Black Baptist preacher who read the prophets and said what the prophets said, which was that the operation that built the country was a crime and that the country’s stated values were a confession of what it owed.

King said: America must move toward a democratic socialism if it is to be the country it says it is. King said that in 1967. He was killed in 1968. The country he was talking about is the country you and I are still living in. The same donor network that called King dangerous then is the donor network that funds the Hudson Institute today. The same op-ed page that called King an agitator is the op-ed page that published Jeremy Hunt’s piece. The same machinery that opposed the Civil Rights Act is the machinery that opposes the pied-à-terre tax.

You want to push back against something? Push back against that.

The mayor of New York is not your enemy. The mayor of New York is offering your sister free childcare. The mayor of New York is offering your brother a free bus ride to the job he’s working two of. The mayor of New York is offering to make Ken Griffin pay, for once in his fucking life, his share of the city he lives in. That is not communism. That is what a city government is for. That is what taxes are for. That is what the public record was for in the first place — to make property visible so that property could be taxed and the tax could be spent on the public good that justified the property’s existence.

Jeremy Hunt is not asking you to defend your country. Jeremy Hunt is asking you to defend his donor’s penthouse. There is no version of that operation in which your country benefits. There is no version of that operation in which your wages go up. There is no version of that operation in which your mother gets her chemo approved or your kid gets her daycare bill cut in half or your bus fare stops costing you $2.90 a ride. There is no version of that operation in which anything happens to you except that you spend your life performing the civic theater of opposition to your own material interest on behalf of people who will never learn your name.

So no. I will not be pushing back against the mayor of New York for the high crime of mailing a tax bill to a man who owns more homes than I will ever visit. I will not be performing the patriotism of protecting Ken Griffin’s mailing address. I will not be volunteering as the human shield for an operation I did not consent to and that produces no benefit I will ever see.

If the article wants my attention, it can have it. Here it is. Use it for the thing the article’s donors don’t want it used for: the proposition that a mayor who publishes a property database is doing the job, and that an op-ed page asking working people to oppose that job is not patriotism, it is a protection racket with a flag on it.