Homicidal Empathy Is The Purest Possible Expression Of Third World Socialist Praxis
Letting the homeless 'choose' to freeze to death is a typical example
In 2022, Mayor Eric Adams made a concerted push to get the homeless into shelters whenever the temperature dropped to dangerous levels. Public officials would move people indoors whether they wanted to go or not. People with severe mental illness and dementia, two comorbid conditions of homelessness, can be very resistant to such help, for they are not rational. Thus the Adams administration solved a humanitarian crisis with just enough bullying to get everyone inside, where it was warm.
Among the first moves of the new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, was to ditch this sensible policy for one of gentle persuasion. In the new regime, no one can be forced indoors. People who want to stay outside in subzero weather can do so because they have freedom in Mamdani’s New York. After all, we must be compassionate to people who prefer living in the streets or under the overpass or in Central Park. We cannot be mean by telling them what to do. That would be authoritarian, literal Nazi stuff.
The result was of course inevitable. As of this weekend, a record cold snap has now killed at least 20 homeless people in New York City. The New York Times has published an obituary for them. Several eyewitnesses describe efforts to convince these unfortunates to do the right thing for themselves when that is exactly what they were least able to do in their conditions. One might read this as a tragic accident, an unintentional tragedy brought about by a well-meaning liberal. However, it has to be understood as what it really is: the praxis of Third World socialism.
Mamdani is not a moron. He knows damn well that many homeless people are simply not going to be persuaded, will choose instead to freeze to death. Mamdani is a Third World socialist, however, so saving their lives was never the point. Being a victimhood class in the ideological matrix of postmodern Marxism, the homeless are useful as a dependent class. Mamdani is training the homeless of New York to depend on him and his administration for all their needs. The ones who choose to live free can die for all he cares.
In recent times, the phrase ‘suicidal empathy’ has named the phenomenon of leftist ideas that present themselves as empathic, and therefore morally righteous, while recommending ludicrous solutions to alleged problems. For example, the progressive leftist argues that undocumented criminal aliens are worthy of respect and protection, even when the alien kills them. As we have seen, this type of ‘activist’ can become so fixated on their own righteous crusade to liberate the criminal illegal alien that they get themselves killed — for ‘empathy’.
Mamdani has taken it further. Homeless people freezing to death by the dozen is the next level of Third World socialist redistribution theory in practice, what Marxists called ‘praxis’. Watch now as the All-Union Mamdanist Communist Union of Youth blames the Four Olds for insufficient shelter funding: the taxpayer killed these people, so we all have to pay. Fifty, sixty frozen corpses in the streets of the five boroughs is a pittance of a price to pay for the property seizures that will ostensibly be justified by the need to address the emergency.
When the homeless are installed in their free apartments, goes the thinking, then they will obviously choose to vote for Mamdani, or the next Democrat, so they can keep their free apartments. Dependency is the entire point. Homeless people are not people, to Zohran Mamdani, despite his rhetoric of inclusion. They are a political class to be fostered, organized, and exploited. This is the essence of Third World socialism. Next, we must kill the landlords out of empathy for the homeless: homicidal empathy.
First, they came for the frozen homeless, and I said nothing, for I was not a crazy bum. Then they came for the landlords, and I said nothing, for I was not a property owner. Then they came for the billionaires, and I said nothing, for I was not a billionaire. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.
I am not being unjust when I compare the New York City of Mamdani to an urban cesspit of the Third World. I am being descriptive, diagnostic. Consider the example of South Africa, where the ANC, the African National Congress, has one-party control of the state. ANC is in fact the former Communist Party of South Africa. Now in its fourth decade of rule, the ANC has transformed the country into a squalid mess.
As Vincent Deboni, a South African expat, explained to me in an interview last year, the ANC government ignores environmental health threats because the resulting victim classes are useful. Children of poor, Black families often contract the bilharzia parasite, a trematode worm of the Schistosoma genus, from gathering contaminated water. Endemic to the country, it is effectively treated with a relatively inexpensive drug called praziquantel. The ANC prefers to leave the contamination alone and treat the child in order to foster dependency.
The ANC are “creating an entire subculture of victimology, or of dependence, that requires the state to provide grants, or pensions, or disability as you would call it in America”, Deboni told me. “Once someone is in that deprived and disabled category, the victim class, it’s very difficult to climb out of it.” Once you are on the dole, getting off the dole becomes hard. “And then they’ll go around talking about how they’re going to implement new policies to try and lift these people out of poverty.”
Mamdani is not ashamed. He is not confused. He understands exactly what he is doing. He will cry on cue, feign anguish, and then turn on a dime to blame capitalism for his intentional failures. For his next trick, Mamdani will make the lights go out in the middle of summer, probably a record heat wave, and then blame capitalism.
That is not a rhetorical attack, by the way. The South African model is very informative for our understanding of what comes next. In recent years, increasingly frequent blackouts have inspired a ‘red gold rush’ by copper thieves. Eskom, South Africa’s electrical utility, “reported 771 transformer failures linked to vandalism and illegal connections in the first nine months of 2025, representing a 20% increase over the same period in the prior year.”
Copper theft now costs South Africa almost $440,000,000 a year. Criminal syndicates bribe officials, who replace the stolen parts with cheap Chinese materials, increasing the insecurity of the grid. Knock-on effects include industries that cannot sustain themselves, solar farms that cannot produce power, and declining international investment. To the ANC, none of this is actually bad, because it makes South Africans even more dependent on the state.
Right on cue, the bluest cities of America are now seeing a spike in copper theft, too. “The Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting was unable to provide the total number of outages caused by wire theft among the 225,000 streetlights it operates citywide”, Michael Corkery reports for The New York Times.
Biden infrastructure projects helped drive up the cost of metals in a tight copper market. “In interviews, elected officials and police officers across the country said that they did not recall another time when public property like bridges, telecommunication cables and hydrants had been targeted by thieves at such a large scale.” Quoted in the article are Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, and Melvin Carter, the mayor of St. Paul, both amazed at the amount of theft in their jurisdiction.
But this is not amazing if you understand the praxis of Third World Marxists in the age of globalization. The Second World, the communist world, largely failed when the Soviet Union collapsed and China became capitalist. That Second World has rebuilt and sustained itself, however, and its praxis continued in the developing world as the First World forgot the horrors of ideological communism.
Zohran Mamdani represents the failure of First World socialism, which had at least the virtue of some technocratic capacity. His arrival in American politics is the blossoming of Third World socialism in the Democratic Party of the United States of America, and frozen homeless people are simply one of the many cultural enrichments his leadership will bring to New York, and sooner than you think.