There isn’t a breeze in sight. The air is stuffy, muggy, thick enough to chew. Lady Liberty still looks beautiful with the sun on her copper facade, and I won’t complain about a sunny day, no matter how hot it gets. But today there’s something heavier than the humidity hanging over the city. For some New Yorkers, there’s a looming, crushing sense of guilt, stickier than the air itself.
Because they haven’t turned their AC up to 78 degrees.
Why would anyone willingly suffer through a muggy apartment when they could enjoy the start of Fourth of July weekend in a crisp 68-degree living room? Because the socialist, terror-sympathizing, former-failed-rapper mayor of New York City told them not to. For the good of the very warm collective.
“Set your AC to 78 degrees,” he says. Because “a stable grid means the AC stays on, and lives are saved,” he says. Translation: sweat now, comrade, so YOU [insert Sophia Cunningham pointing meme] don’t overheat the cooling system and kill grandma.
That’s eerily reminiscent of French health officials last week, instructing the elderly and sick to essentially stick their heads in ice buckets and sip cold soup rather than run an air conditioner. I made fun of France for sounding like the third world. I didn’t expect the third world to make it to New York City this fast.
It’s the same degrowth logic wearing a different accent. Paris told its sick and elderly to suffer through the heat for the sake of the planet. Mamdani is telling everyone else to suffer through it for the sake of the grid. Different continent, same underlying belief: your comfort is negotiable, and someone else always gets to decide the terms. Today it’s your thermostat. Tomorrow it’s your grocery cart, your car, your lightbulbs. The mask doesn’t come off all at once. It slips one degree at a time.
Last week, I went nine days without AC. It hovered between 78 and 80 degrees, and it was unbearable. Now the mayor of a city of eight million residents is scolding those same residents into voluntary suffering and harm, fresh off a campaign that promised prosperity, rainbows, and abundance for all. Nothing to see here, folks. Just a full-fledged Islamic socialist chipping away at the freedoms and comforts we hold dear, one thermostat at a time.
Utopia was supposed to be air-conditioned.
Mamdani blames the power grid, apparently so fragile that if all eight million New Yorkers don’t sweat through their Alo yoga pants and Wall Street suits in togethership, the whole system goes dark.
And what made the grid so fragile in the first place? Horrendous Democrat energy policy, three decades in the making. New York banned hydraulic fracking despite sitting on massive Marcellus Shale reserves, in the name of eliminating gas use. It didn’t eliminate anything. It just made the state import the energy it refuses to drill for itself. Environmentalists celebrated the closure of Indian Point, a nuclear plant that once supplied roughly 25% of New York City’s electricity. The grid never recovered. Then came the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, mandating 70% renewable energy by 2030 and leaning on unreliable sources like solar and wind. Less efficient. More expensive. Exactly the recipe for a grid that buckles the moment July shows up.
Naturally, the socialist mayor isn’t offering practical fixes like drilling, fracking, coal, or nuclear power. That would be radical. Instead, he’s threatening you with thermostat mandates and doubling down even when his proletariat complains.
A commenter on my recent video mocking Mamdani for this wisecracked that Texas has also asked residents to set their AC to 78 during extreme heat waves. Sure. But Texas asks because it regularly hits triple-digit heat that sends demand through the roof, even with a grid that actually builds power plants and lets markets work. Mamdani is asking because years of green policy, championed by his side, shuttered reliable nuclear capacity and choked off gas, leaving the grid with paper-thin margins. Now ordinary New Yorkers get to roast while the system he inherited, and never intends to fix, tries to catch up.
Mamdani handed us this layup himself the moment he swore to strip away your individuality in exchange for warm, collective security. That cozy collectivism now looks like a forced, hellish scarcity. The cozy collectivism he promised now looks a lot like forced, hellish scarcity. That’s the trick with socialism. It’s always sold as a group hug and delivered as a group sweat.
You can’t say every wise soul in history didn’t warn you.
“Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy,” said Winston Churchill.
That quote could be on a welcome mat outside Mamdani’s front door. A door I’d bet good money leads to a home that isn’t sitting at 78 degrees.