Stop Pleading for Your Wealth: A Moral Case Against Mamdani’s Attacks
Citadel CEO Ken Griffin is courageously fighting a “creepy” campaign to tax his wealth, but his defense inadvertently lends support to Mamdani and his socialist supporters
In a video post, New York mayor Zohran Mamdani singled out Citadel CEO Ken Griffin as the target of the new luxury home tax.1 Griffin courageously responded calling the video stunt “creepy,” “weird,” and “frightening.”2 While pushing back, however, there is a subtle way in which Griffin and others who rightfully stood up for him inadvertently endorsed Griffin’s attackers.
Griffin is right to be alarmed. New York is where Blackstone executive Wesley LePatner was fatally shot, and where many, including the mayor’s own campaign director, celebrated the killing of Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare.3 For the mayor to gleefully boast “We’re Taxing the Rich” in front of a private residence of another financier just blocks from Thompson’s murder scene is to put a target on Griffin’s back for another monster to aim at.
As an act of admirable defiance in such a violent climate, Griffin threatened to halt a $6 billion development project and pivot his firm’s expansion to Miami, a city he says “embraces business” rather than “redistributed handouts.” Additionally, Griffin and editors at The Free Press andThe Wall Street Journal who came to his defense, appealed to Griffin’s track record: the companies he built, number of jobs he created, level of taxes he paid, and philanthropy he provided to NYC charities.4,5
The combination of vindicating Griffin’s wealth and threatening to withdraw it from Mamdani’s hands is a good start. So is equating Mamdani’s “tax the rich” rhetoric to a racial slur, as Steven Roth of Vornado did.6
But the message should have been less compromised and more proudly defiant. Listing Griffin’s “contributions” to the city to justify Griffin’s freedom to build and enjoy his wealth only bolsters Mamdani’s case. The need for such “contributions” is the idea the socialist mayor and his supporters rely on to stigmatize the rich. It is even worse to explicitly endorse him, as Roth did when he said that Mamdani’s leadership, with a few tweaks, “could make this great city even greater.”
Griffin’s accomplishments, such as the wealth he created, careers and trade he facilitated, are crucial to his defense as evidence of his personal productive virtue. They show he truly has earned his wealth. Roth drew attention to this by calling Griffin the “epitome of the American Dream.” That is the correct attitude. But it’s only correct in the true meaning of the American Dream as encoded in the Declaration of Independence. The right to the pursuit of happiness means individuals have a moral right to live, produce, and keep the property they earn for their own sake. They do not have to justify their existence by their service as a piggy bank for the needs of others.
If Griffin and his supporters want to mount a principled defense and rally supporters to their cause, especially while celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration and its ideals, they need to stop giving material and intellectual bribes to thugs who oppose the values this country was built on.7
Philosopher Ayn Rand argued that evil gains power only because the good appeases it and willingly accepts the role of its servant. When Griffin and his defenders say that what makes him good is his “contributions” to the city, and when Roth endorses the “young, smart and energetic” socialist, all of them validate their mortal enemy as having moral goals worth pursuing. They surrender their right to keep their wealth and accept the socialists’ demand to seize it, merely disagreeing on “fair” proportions. Rand called this terrible error “the sanction of the victim.”8
Rand dramatizes the error in her novel Atlas Shrugged. Only as long as the industrialist Hank Rearden accepts that his duty is to sustain his family can they continue milking him. Only as long as Dagny Taggart keeps working sleepless nights can her brother James, along with his cronies, continue looting and distributing the benefits of the railroad Dagny’s effort alone keeps afloat. But Dagny and Rearden eventually discover that the only way to bring the end to their enemies is to stop abetting them. Griffin needs to learn this lesson from Atlas Shrugged: he too is a victimized producer who needs to withdraw his sanction from vicious looters like Mamdani.
But unfortunately Griffin did not offer Atlas in his defense. Instead, he offered to distribute George Orwell’s Animal Farm to New York ninth graders. Like many others, Griffin confuses the novella with an educational tool against socialism. But Orwell was a self-proclaimed socialist, and Animal Farm is at best a critique of Stalinism, which Orwell saw as a corrupt perversion of the noble crusade for socialism.9,10 By recommending it, Griffin grants another moral sanction to the crusade for expropriating from those with ability in favor of those with need. That is a crusade that would put an end to the American Dream.
If business leaders like Griffin truly wish to defeat the ugly campaigns to stigmatize the rich, they must first withdraw their sanction of the ideas that empower their destroyers. They must stop justifying their wealth by reference to how much of it the producers give away and start asserting their right to keep what they earn as a matter of individual right.
As a first step, Griffin should rescind his recommendation of Animal Farm. Instead, he could support distributing Rand’s short, fictional work — the 1938 novella Anthem (for which a distribution system to high schools is already in place).11 It is a story that celebrates the moral independence of the individual and the right of each person to live for his own sake.
Only when producers stop begging for permission to exist can they finally strip the power from the “creepy” and “frightening” attacks on their achievements.
NYC Mayor’s Office, “Happy Tax Day, New York. We’re taxing the rich.” YouTube, April 15, 2026.
John McCormick and Will Parker, “Ken Griffin Says New York Doesn’t Welcome Success Under Mamdani,” Wall Street Journal, May 5, 2026.
Matthew Xiao, Top Aide to NYC Mayoral Candidate Mamdani Lauded UnitedHealthcare Killer: ‘Looking Forward to Driving Down Mangione Avenue’,” The Washington Free Beacon, June 24, 2026.
“Mamdani: Scapegoating the Rich Won’t Fill a $5.4 Billion Budget Hole,” The Free Press, April 18, 2026.
“One of ‘the Rich’ Answers Mamdani’s Insult,” Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2026.
Dana Rubenstein, “In Attack on Mamdani, Vornado Chief Likens ‘Tax the Rich’ to Hate Speech,” The New York Times, May 5, 2026.
America at 250, The Free Press.
Ayn Rand, “The Sanction of the Victims,” November 21, 1981.
George Orwell, “Why I Write,” The Orwell Foundation.
Wad Holloway, “A Preface to Animal Farm,” The Australian Legend, January 9, 2024.
Free Novels for Students, Ayn Rand Institute.
Image credits: Griffin: Fabrice Coffrini / AFP / via Getty Images; Mamdani: Spencer Platt / via Getty Images
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Half the battle is not taking socialists and communists seriously or giving them the time of day. Envy is the number one trait of the Marxist and instead of aspiring to build wealth and build their own lives as enlightened individual citizens, Marxism preaches victimhood and that the only way you can prosper is to take from others without earning anything.
You don’t give Marxists any opening to push their poison on people; you need to always be on the attack and never letting up. Use media to make your points about how corrosive Marxism is, use humor and jokes to make Marxists look stupid (this worked in the eastern bloc since communist countries criminalized telling jokes), and also ensure real consequences when Marxists make threats and pass laws that do not benefit you. Like a virus, Marxism needs an ideal environment to spread and destroy; if you care about the future of the free market and the hope of citizens working as free individuals and creating wealth, do whatever it takes to keep Marxism down. The future of the free world could depend on it.
Excellent. Recently reread Animal Farm because my memory of it was fuzzy. It's deeply disappointing.