Most of us heard the comments by New York City’s new mayor about replacing individualism with collectivism. I touched on that a bit in an earlier post today.
Let’s just say I’m less than thrilled to hear someone openly saying such a thing in 2026 America and not being booed off the stage. He not just said it, but said it in an inauguration speech that was applauded.
He doesn’t like individualism because, as individuals, people are resistant to the socialist order he wants to inflict not just on New York City, but the rest of the nation. The thing you need to understand is, as America’s 1st Freedom editor Frank Miniter notes, armed citizens are the individualists he despises so deeply.
In his inauguration speech as the new mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani said, behind his characteristically easy smile, “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”
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This line was also a rebuke of the Second Amendment in general and of lawfully armed citizens in particular.
To become a rugged individual, an American comprehends that the restrictions on government power inherent in the U.S. Bill of Rights protect our individual rights. Such a person is a citizen who works to overcome obstacles, gets dirt under his or her nails, shrugs off all those who say they can’t achieve their goals, grows calluses on their hands but not their hearts, has the fortitude to help those in need but is still resolute enough not to let themselves play the part of Boxer in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, perhaps carries concealed in order to defend themselves and others until help arrives and so, in sum, tries to be a citizen others can count on.
To Mayor Mamdani, armed citizens are in the way of his ideology. He does not want rugged individuals in our society; he wants disarmed denizens powerless in his “warmth of collectivism.”
Collectivism is inherently tyrannical and, because of that, it’s inherently anti-gun. If people can fend for themselves, they won’t need the state to take care of them.
However, when the state takes care of people, it also has the power to tell you what you can do in every other part of your life. Many of us refer to it as the “Nanny State” because it acts like a parent who is telling you what to do and what not to do, even though it didn’t give birth to any of us. Guns get in the way of that because, as armed citizens, we can resist in ways that go beyond protests in the streets that can be safely ignored. We can resist the arrests that typically follow protests that go beyond what can be ignored.
Like we’re seeing in Iran. Like we saw in Hong Kong a few years ago. Like we’ve seen the world over.
Just as many quip that we are the carbon the environmentalists want to reduce, and probably quip accurately, we are the rugged individualists that Mamdani despises. We stand as a wall against what he’d like to see implemented throughout the nation. We can oppose not just his policies, but the police state he would need to enforce them.
In other words, he is the epitome of what our Founding Fathers were worried about, and we’re the reason the Second Amendment exists.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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