City of Unity. Enemies List Included.

New York's unity candidate has a list. It's not a guest list.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani's Department of Finance published a list of hundreds of thousands of New York property owners who might be subject to his new non-resident "pied-à-terre" tax — a public, searchable roster the New York Post promptly dubbed the "enemies list." The pitch was that the tax would hit only ultra-expensive, usually-empty luxury homes owned by non-residents: Russian oligarchs parking tens of millions on Billionaire's Row, that sort of thing. The actual list, per the Post, swept up huge numbers of ordinary full-time New Yorkers, including one-bedroom condo and co-op owners nowhere near the $5 million threshold Mamdani keeps repeating — because the implementation crew decided the tax should reach co-ops and condos starting at $1 million.

Here's the part that turns a bureaucratic rollout into a punchline: the publicity served no administrative purpose. The city was already mailing the owners directly, asking them to clarify whether they qualified — and, crucially, to file for an exemption post-haste if they wanted to avoid falling afoul of the Department of Finance. The public list existed only to name and shame. As the Post's editorial board put it, it was "a kind of one-stop class-warfare shopping list," published by an administration whose national DSA co-chair, Megan Romer, explained on Fox News Sunday that the movement wins "by making conditions so intolerable to the ruling class that they would rather give in to our demands than live with the disturbance we cause."

A judge thought so too. Ahead of an Aug. 31 hearing, Judge Wayne Ozzi ordered the city to take the list down — derailing, at least for now, what the Post called "the most outrageous part of the rollout." The city's own data had quietly narrowed the actual target pool to around 17,000 properties, meaning the published database of hundreds of thousands of names was, per the reporting, roughly 95% wrong.

None of this is out of character. Mamdani campaigned on "eat the rich" energy, appointed his own loyalists to the Rent Guidelines Board to push his signature rent freeze, held "ripoff hearings" the Washington Examiner described as de facto show trials for property owners, and in May had the city restrain funds directly from two landlords' bank accounts to pay for building repairs. The pied-à-terre list is simply the same instinct, committed to a spreadsheet and posted online.

Unity, it turns out, is a group project. The enemies list was the attendance sheet.

Sources: New York Post, "Mamdani's 'enemies of the people' pied-à-terre tax list is no joke" (July 27, 2026); New York Post, "Judge squelches Mamdani's 'enemies list' — but the socialists have still put you on notice" (Aug. 10, 2026); Washington Examiner, "Mamdani's war on New York landlords and its socialist endgame". Evidence Locker entry: meme-mamdani-unity (dormant until post goes live).