A CULTURE THAT TRAINS ITS YOUNG TO RESENT THE VALUES THAT SAFEGUARD THEIR FREEDOM EVENTUALLY PAYS A PRICE

New York’s warning to America

A society that forgets its blessings becomes easy prey for those determined to dismantle them. 

 

By Dr. Marc Weisman 

 

JNS

Nov 21, 2025

 

 

A typical street scene in New York.

 

It is no political accident that New York City elected a mayor who openly embraces anti-Western and antisemitic positions. It is the predictable result of a long cultural drift in which mainstream liberals ceded their universities, newsrooms, schools and corporate bureaucracies to activists who disdain the very civilization that made their prosperity possible. A society that forgets its blessings becomes easy prey for those determined to dismantle them.

New York City once welcomed dreamers from around the world, blending cultures through genuine inclusion without sacrificing the American experiment. That mosaic helped make America great—distinct pieces keeping their heritage yet fitting into a unified whole. But as love for that whole—America itself—has faded under the modern left’s identity-politics framework, the mosaic has begun to break apart; its pieces no longer blend, growing more insular and distant rather than uniting in a common purpose.

In recent years, the city’s social fabric has unraveled. Police have been sidelined, campuses have erupted in pro-Hamas demonstrations, and political leaders routinely signal that enforcing the law is optional.

The shift is unmistakable: Columbia University’s encampments left Jewish students afraid to walk their own campus; a CUNY Law School commencement speaker used her platform to denounce the New York City Police Department and praise anti-Israel activism; and the Manhattan district attorney declined to prosecute major crime categories while aggressively pursuing an unprecedented case against Donald Trump, which was widely criticized as politically driven. These moments are not isolated; they define the city’s new public ethos.

 As those foundations erode, Manhattan has embraced the oldest political illusion in the book: that socialism can give everyone everything.

It has never worked—not in Europe, not in Latin America, not in a single society that tried it. The arithmetic always fails. Margaret Thatcher put it best: “The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” New York will ultimately confront this reality, though only after enduring self-inflicted and entirely preventable harm. Hopefully, then, liberals will finally connect the dots and recognize the need to reclaim their movement from its most extreme voices.

In any city, a mayor-elect’s openly antisemitic rhetoric would be alarming, but in New York—home to the largest Jewish community outside Israel—it should have been politically disqualifying.

This transformation did not begin in New York; it simply surfaced there first. Over decades, universities, public schools, major media outlets and corporate bureaucracies drifted away from the foundational principles that once unified the country. As researchers at Heterodox Academy have shown, campuses became ideological monocultures that punished dissent. Critical Race Theory replaced traditional civics, casting the West not as a defender of liberty but as an engine of oppression.

These ideas migrated from the campus into mainstream institutions, where activism replaced inquiry and merit was recast as privilege. What began as campus theatrics and media slogans became the Trojan code that rewrote these institutions from within. The result is a generation fluent in America’s flaws yet unfamiliar with the principles that safeguard their freedom: individual rights, free speech, due process and constitutional norms.

A 2024 Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll illustrates the consequence: 51% of Americans aged 18 to 24 viewed the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, as “justified.” This is the predictable outcome of a cultural apparatus that teaches what to condemn but never what to cherish.

As these internal fractures widened, foreign adversaries—from Islamist propagandists to Chinese and Russian influence networks—flooded American social media with disinformation engineered to deepen every divide. America created the cracks; its enemies merely widened them.

As intersectionality rose, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory that identity labels such as race, ethnicity, gender identity and sexuality each add another layer of oppression became the left’s new moral compass. Virtue was assigned to the “oppressed,” guilt to the West cast as the ultimate oppressor, and equality gave way to “equity,” a doctrine demanding unequal treatment to impose equal outcomes.

Through this lens, ideologies openly hostile to the West—from radical environmental extremism to Islamism—were recast as authentic resistance. Even Europe’s near-civil conflict, born of clashing cultures, is dismissed by American liberals who insist the West is the true villain, even when the alternative is violent, intolerant, misogynistic, antisemitic Islamists. In this inversion, persecutors become victims, and haters become heroes.

Back in America, radicals did not storm liberal strongholds. Liberals opened the gates.

Universities became echo chambers because scholars stopped defending inquiry.
Prosecutors reframed crime as a product of society because liberals insisted offenders were too mistreated to be blamed. Journalists abandoned impartiality because audiences rewarded activism. And Democratic leaders shrank from confronting extremists—fearing social-media mobs, primary challengers and ostracism from the very forces and voting blocs they had empowered.

Believing that they could manage the storm, liberals tolerated its growth. But the radicalism they indulged soon consumed the institutions they abandoned.

A culture that trains its young to resent the values that safeguard their freedom eventually pays a price. The rule of law, merit, free expression and even the presumption of innocence have been recast as instruments of oppression, particularly when applied to anyone right-of-center. Once those foundations erode, the society built upon them falters. In this environment, the new mayor’s blend of socialism, Islamism and antisemitism became not a disqualifier but a badge of ideological purity within a worldview that casts Israel as a colonial offender despite millennia of Jewish presence in the land, and the West as an oppressor.

The question is not only how New York elected this mayor, but whether America can rebuild the common ground it has allowed to erode. Conservatives cannot repair what liberals permitted to decay; they do not control the universities, the media, the schools or the cultural machinery shaping the next generation. They did not construct the ideological framework governing the left and cannot dismantle it.

Only liberals can reclaim their movement from the radicals they enabled. And only liberals and conservatives working together can rebuild a shared cultural center strong enough to withstand ideological extremism. Whether Americans choose to reassert those principles will determine if this moment becomes a turning point or a point of no return.

For the sake of Gen Z and those who follow, restoring that shared center is essential.

Like ancient Troy, America’s gates were not breached; they were opened from within.

It is through that open gate that the mayor’s rise must be understood. His victory is a warning not only for New York but for the entire country. Foreign adversaries may exploit our divisions, but the deeper danger is internal: the nation’s universities, media and cultural elites abandoned their identity and mission, creating the very vulnerabilities our enemies now weaponize. A nation that teaches its heirs to resent their inheritance will eventually watch them give it away.

The responsibility to repair this lies with liberals and Democrats willing to confront the extremism they once indulged. Should moderate liberals regain their footing, they will find natural allies in conservatives who still believe in the West’s core principles—giving America one final chance to right the ship.