Good morning:
On Saturday in New York City, two men —Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi—allegedly attempted to throw two homemade improvised explosive devises at protesters outside Gracie Mansion, the residence of Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Thankfully, the bombs, which contained Triacetone Triperoxide, a highly volatile homemade explosive that has been used in successful IED attacks elsewhere, did not detonate.
In the aftermath of the attack, the men expressed allegiance to ISIS and one of the men allegedly told officers that the pair wanted the attack to be more deadly than the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, which killed three people and injured more than 500. Federal prosecutors have charged both men with attempting to provide material support to ISIS, using a weapon of mass destruction, and criminal counts including the possession and transportation of explosives.
As New York City’s first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani has unique credibility to speak out against Islamic extremism. And as the nation’s most prominent Muslim he can do enormous good in encouraging comity and friendship among Muslim and non-Muslim Americans. But by his delay in acknowledging Saturday’s incident as an attempted terror attack, and by failing to mention the extremist ideology behind it, he failed that test, writes MI president Reihan Salam in The Free Press.
Saturday’s attack also highlights the problems with Mamdani’s relationship to NYPD officers, writes fellow Rafael A. Mangual in City Journal. The city got lucky this weekend. But New Yorkers cannot continue to rely on luck. Protests and other large gathers, Mangual writes, are targets for terrorists and other violent criminals that need an appropriate police presence. Was there a threat assessment conducted prior to the protest? Where were the bomb-sniffing dogs? Why were plainclothes police officers not in the crowd?
New York is likely to be a target in the future for other extremist threats, especially with the ongoing war on Iran, writes City Journal contributing editor Judith Miller. Her interviews with police and terrorism experts reveal that “NYPD’s intelligence analysts have been scanning city streets, bridges, subways, transportation hubs, and other sensitive infrastructure, with drones supporting security efforts from above. Intelligence analysts have also focused on steps to protect the city’s power grids and water infrastructure. K-9 units have been deployed in Times Square and other popular sites.”
The stakes could not be more serious. Earlier this month, a lone gunman wearing a shirt with the Iranian flag and in possession of photos of Iranian regime leaders in his home killed two and wounded 14 in Austin, Texas. Earlier this week, a crowd of New Yorkers barely escaped the same fate.
Elsewhere in this newsletter, fellow Ken Girardin writes about New York State’s dangerous greenhouse gas reduction targets, vice president of External Affairs Jesse Arm breaks down the results of a new poll of Democrats, and the Research team published a new paper on college athletics, by Andrew Perloff.
Continue reading for all these insights and more.
Kelsey Bloom
Editorial Director
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Do Democrats Want to Be “Normal”? Survey Analysis of Today’s Democratic Coalition
By Jesse Arm | Manhattan Institute
“The Democratic coalition is best understood as three blocs. The largest bloc—Moderates—hold middle-of-the-road views across many of the most contentious issues in national politics, including immigration, crime, transgender policy, and DEI. A second bloc—Progressive Liberals—leans left but remains closer to the party’s institutional mainstream. A significantly smaller but distinct third bloc—the Woke Fringe—takes consistently maximalist positions on issues and is disproportionately young and conspiratorial.
“Across issue areas, the coalition’s preferences tend to reflect this structure. …
“The political implication is straightforward: activist politics often speaks for the most ideologically intense voters, but on many issues, the majority view within the coalition is that of the Moderates—often alongside black and Hispanic voters—rather than the party’s most activist faction. The Woke Fringe, however, may still exert outsized influence in low-turnout primaries and online discourse. Because this group is younger, it represents a plausible source of future ideological change inside the party, even if it is not the median position today.”
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New York City’s Mayor Can’t Give Muslim Extremists a Pass
By Reihan Salam | The Free Press
“Zohran Mamdani is the most prominent observant Muslim in American life. He has made his religious identity a central part of his political identity, and he has vowed not to ‘bite his tongue’ in the face of Islamophobia. That gives him unique credibility and authority to speak out against the chauvinism, extremism, misogyny, and racism that exist within Muslim communities. …
“Mamdani could be the leader Muslim Americans actually want, one who sees Muslims not as perpetual victims of white supremacy but as a vibrant, pluralistic community that has the strength to face its own internal challenges. …
“By raising the alarm about Islamophobia while strangely downplaying the threat posed by radical Islam, Mamdani inadvertently fuels the social friction he decries. His reticence reflects the common progressive assumption that speaking candidly about Islamist violence is somehow offensive to Muslims.”
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Dark Days Loom for New Yorkers as Climate Law Promises Blackouts, Cost Hikes
By Ken Girardin | New York Post
“Gov. Kathy Hochul has spent much of her 4¹/₂ years in office facing a time bomb left by her predecessor: drastic, legally binding greenhouse gas reduction targets that the state has no practical means of meeting.
“The 2019 Climate Act requires New York to cut greenhouse gas emissions by about one-quarter from that year’s levels by 2030. The state has made little progress toward this goal, in part because officials shuttered New York’s largest nuclear power plant in 2021.
“The law remains on the books, and its defenders balk at revision. If Hochul can’t persuade them to change it, Albany’s green dreams will cause harsh conditions in the Empire State — steep electric bills, green-energy boondoggles and rolling blackouts. …
“The most ominous (problem)— and least visible — is the growing risk that New York City might have difficulty keeping the lights on as soon as June.”
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Was a Bomb at Gracie Mansion Zohran Mamdani’s Wake-Up Call?
By Rafael A. Mangual | City Journal
Saturday’s “attack … illustrates the problems with Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s hostility to policing protests.”
There are “problems with Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s past discomfort with—if not explicit opposition to—how the NYPD polices protests. The Left has criticized the use of policing and surveillance assets for crowd control. Mamdani has long been a proponent of dismantling the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group (SRG)—which the city formed to respond to ‘citywide mobilizations, civil disorders, and major events with highly trained personnel and specialized equipment’— particularly because of how it has responded to protests. …
“At a Monday afternoon press conference, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch did tell reporters that SRG was near the protest ‘in a backup capacity’ and that they were deployed to the scene ‘as soon as mayhem ensued.’ But why weren’t they deployed earlier? One suspects a connection to Mamdani’s dislike of the unit.”
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Could Iranian Terror Strike the U.S.?
By Judith Miller | City Journal
“In Austin, Texas, at 2 a.m. on March 1, the day after the U.S. and Israel launched their joint assault on Iran, a lone gunman wearing a shirt bearing an Iranian flag design and reading ‘Property of Allah’ opened fire on the city’s main nightlife strip, killing two and wounding 14. …
“For years, the U.S. intelligence community asserted that Iran and its proxies were unlikely to conduct terrorism in the U.S. That complacency ended in 2011, after Iran tried to assassinate Adel al-Jubeir, then Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the U.S., in a popular D.C. restaurant. Since then … Iran has been tied to 27 plots in the U.S., all of which have been thwarted. …
“For now, however, many terrorism experts are most focused on the possible threat to New York—home to some 1 million Jews and 800,000 Muslims. After condemning the attacks on Iran, Mayor Zohran Mamdani assured New Yorkers that they would be protected.”
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Checkbooks vs. Textbooks: Big Money and the Crisis in the College Sports
By Andrew Perloff | Manhattan Institute
College athletics are enormously popular, generating roughly $19 billion annually and breaking television-rating records. But in a new Manhattan Institute report, Andrew Perloff argues that the foundation of college sports is increasingly unstable. Recent legal and policy changes—including court rulings that paved the way for name-image-and-likeness (NIL) compensation, along with relaxed transfer rules—have created a new marketplace for college athletes. While these changes have expanded opportunities for players, they have also accelerated an arms race for talent and revenue among universities.
As a result, the gap between wealthy “power-conference” programs and smaller schools has grown wider than ever. Rising player compensation and escalating spending threaten the financial viability of nonrevenue sports and even entire athletic departments at smaller institutions. Legal pressure to classify athletes as employees or allow collective bargaining could fundamentally alter the relationship between athletics and higher education.
Perloff argues that preserving college sports will require structural reform. Policymakers and universities must adapt the system to its new economic realities—through mechanisms such as revenue sharing, new regulatory frameworks, or collective bargaining—while maintaining the connection between college athletics and the academic institutions that host them.
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