Commentary Culture Investigations

For contrast, the timing couldn’t have been better. Two of the most prominent New Yorkers this week released documents outlining starkly different visions of America’s future and perceptions of its past.
After reading New York City’s 375-page “Preliminary Racial Equity Plan” issued by the city’s 34-year-old socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and then reading the 48-page annual shareholder letter from the 70-year-old CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, it’s hard to believe that the two men are describing the same planet, let alone the same country and city.
Both men are racing to define America’s past in its 250th anniversary year. For Dimon, a big danger is that Americans lose faith in our country. “While we should acknowledge America’s flaws, they should not be used to pull apart our country. We need to believe in ourselves and get back to work, not tear each other down,” Dimon writes.
For Mamdani and his “Mayor’s Office of Equity and Racial Justice,” a big danger is overlooking what the report calls “historical harms” and how “New York City’s past is deeply intertwined with the structural racial inequities experienced by its communities of color.”
“New York’s history has been one of colonization, exploitation, and racial oppression. The land New York City stands on today once belonged to the Lenape people, who were forcibly displaced through settler colonialism. From the era of Dutch colonization to modern times, systemic racism has shaped the experiences of Black, Indigenous, Latine, Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, and other communities of color,” the Mamdani report says, explaining, “This plan uses the gender-neutral term ‘Latine’ when referring broadly to communities and identities. However, many historical documents and data sources (including those referenced in this plan) use binary gender classifications and terms such as Latino/Latina or Hispanic (often used interchangeably). Those labels are retained when quoting or citing those sources. In specific historical contexts, these terms are used because it reflects the terminology of the time.”
(More succinctly, gender-fixated policymakers have started using the made up word “Latine” instead of previously trendy “Latinx,” which many Latin American people found offensive.)
Mamdani’s racial equity plan offers an oversimplification of what happened to the Lenape people; one of their chiefs, White Eyes, spoke to the Continental Congress in 1776, seeking a strong alliance with the Americans, and also in 1776, the Continental Congress proposed a text to communicate to White Eyes “to convince you that we wish to advance your happiness, and that there may be a lasting union between us, and that, as you express it, we may become one people.” The letter went on, “We wish to promote the lasting peace and happiness of all our brothers, the Indian nations, who live with us on this great island. As far as your settlement and security may depend upon us, you may be assured of our protection. We shall take all the care in our power, that no interruption or disturbance be given you by our people, nor shall any of them be suffered, by force or fraud, to deprive you of any of your lands, or to settle them without a fair purchase from you, and your free consent. If contrary to our intention, any injury should be offered to you by any of our people, inform us of it, and we shall always be ready to procure you satisfaction and redress.” That’s not to deny that some Americans and the American government did terrible things to many Native Americans; it is to say, though, that to sum it all up as “colonization, exploitation, and racial oppression” is an example of ideological negativity defeating empirical curiosity.
Mamdani and Dimon offer different views not only of the past history but also of the best course for current and future policy. Dimon talks about “our country’s values” and lists among them “free enterprise,” “self-reliance,” and “freedom of religion,” three terms that do not appear at all in Mamdani’s document.
Both documents quote the Declaration of Independence and what Walter Isaacson calls the Greatest Sentence Ever Written. Dimon quotes the full sentence, splitting it into two: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” “That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Mamdani’s document eliminates the “Creator” and leaps immediately into denouncing America for profiting from slavery: “A country that proclaims ‘all men are created equal … with inalienable rights … life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ in its Declaration of Independence, is also a country which greatly profited off practices and systems of slavery, since the founding of settlements and colonies in the 17th century.”
Both documents denounce bigotry, but there, too lies a contrast. Dimon writes, “We should fight blind ideologies, like anti-Semitism, and any form of racism however and whenever it rears its ugly head.” Mamdani’s 375-page document makes no mention of anti-Semitism and in fact seems to bend over backward to omit it. A “historical timeline” that is part of the mayor’s plan mentions 2001 as the year when a “‘War on Terror’ ushered in an era of mass surveillance and profiling of Arab, South Asian, and Muslim communities.” It also mentions what he calls the 2017 “Muslim Ban,” when “the Trump administration restricts entry into the U.S. from several Muslim-majority countries, sparking mass protests across the nation for being discriminatory and anti-immigrant.” There’s no mention on the timeline of the 1991 Crown Heights Riot in Brooklyn, which at the time it occurred was the worst outbreak of anti-Semitic violence in contemporary American history.
Both documents discuss regulations. Dimon writes, “Some politicians think that all regulations are good — the more the better. Given that many of these politicians come from the blue side of America’s red-blue divide, I think it’s more appropriate to call excessive regulation ‘blue tape.’” Mamdani gestures in the direction of reducing regulations and easing permitting requirements for small businesses. Yet in practice the “goals, strategies and indicators” outlined by the mayor—more than 200 goals, more than 800 strategies, and more than 600 indicators—are just another extra-large roll of blue tape.
According to the New York Times, Dimon is a registered Democrat who tacitly supported Kamala Harris. But he hasn’t been shy about criticizing Democrats as sometimes “intensely stupid.” He recently told Axios that the business community had “overdone DEI in a lot of cases.” He’s also open-minded about the new Great Migration.  In another recent interview, at the Hill & Valley Forum, with former congressman Mike Gallagher, now at Palantir, Dimon said, “Our head count in Manhattan when I got to JPMorgan was 35,000 and now is 26,000. Our head count in Texas started at 11,000, now it’s 33,000. … People vote with their feet.”
Mamdani, by contrast, looks backward, focusing on select grievances which he seeks to remedy with “equity.” He and his cohort portray American history as a tale of imperialism and oppression. His friends at the Times even sought, in 2019, “to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”
These dueling visions—grievance versus optimism—will likely define the debate about America’s future. As Dimon put it, they aren’t totally mutually exclusive—acknowledging America’s flaws doesn’t prevent celebrating America’s ability to fix its flaws and believing in its continued capacity for self-improvement. Yet Mamdani—the son of a Columbia professor full of criticism of settler colonialism—generates doubts about whether New York City will be at the lead of America’s next 250 years or, instead, will be undermining it. Those of us in the optimism camp have some confidence that, regardless of New York City’s role, America will net out as it has over the past 250 years, as a kind of miracle.
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Residents of the Marylander Condominiums could be evicted any day after a federal judge rebuffed a last-ditch effort to halt the proceedings, putting the future of the condo in jeopardy as a nearby homeless encampment is allowed to stand.
The decision comes after Prince George’s County, Md., a Democratic stronghold in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., deemed half the units “unfit for human habitation” due to damage allegedly caused by the encampment, which the county tolerated for more than two years. When a state judge authorized the county to evict the residents of those units, the condo filed a lawsuit in federal court requesting a preliminary injunction. But federal district court judge Ajmel Quereshi denied the request, citing precedents that limit federal judges’ oversight of state courts.
He also argued that the county’s interest in keeping buildings up to code could outweigh the interests of residents facing displacement—even though it was the county’s own policies that allegedly caused the code violations in the first place.
“While the Plaintiff has a legitimate interest in ensuring that the unit owners it represents remain in their residences, the County also has a legitimate interest in ensuring that its residents reside in buildings that are fit for human habitation,” Quereshi wrote in a March 27 order. “Were the County not to enforce its housing provisions, residents would be subject to the desires of landlords, as well as condominium associations, who may provide substandard housing to individuals who cannot afford other options.”
At a March 23 hearing on the pending evictions, the county said that it would begin forced evacuations within two weeks if Quereshi gave the greenlight. The timeline suggests that residents could be removed at any time, though the county’s appetite for further coercion remains an open question.
Phil Dawit, the managing director of the condo’s property management firm, Quasar, said the sheriff’s office had not yet physically evicted residents. Instead, the county appears to be pestering owners in the hopes that they will leave voluntarily, in one case calling a resident 10 times before he finally agreed to leave, according to Dawit and to Beverley Habada, a member of the condominium’s board.
The Prince George’s County Sheriff’s Office told the Washington Free Beacon that “no date has been set” for the evictions, but declined to comment on other steps that had been taken to encourage residents to leave.
Meanwhile, the encampment has continued to encroach on the property. When Quasar repaired a hole in the fence that vagrants had been using to access the complex, residents of the encampment began using ladders and downed trees to bypass the barrier, according to photos shared with Free Beacon.

Such intrusions were a major factor in a state judge’s decision to place the condo on fire watch in March. County officials argued that the vagrants had a habit of starting fires around the property and could mess with an electrical installation that the condo had set up after individuals from the encampment allegedly vandalized the boiler room, leaving half of the complex without heat and reliant on space heaters. The installation was necessary, property managers said, because the space heaters kept overloading the condo’s grid.
Though Quereshi denied the condo’s request for a preliminary injunction, he did not grant the county’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, which describes the encampment as a “state-created danger” and demands $100 million in damages. The allegations center on the county’s policy of delivering food to homeless encampments, including the one behind the Marylander, even as police warned that such deliveries would “incentivize the unhoused population to return.”
The county has also refused to guarantee a loan to the complex to fix the heat. And it is now attempting to place the property into receivership, a move the lawsuit suggests is intended to capitalize on rising property values generated by a nearby light rail project.
“The County’s actions have been the moving force that has decimated a deteriorating community and has expanded economic opportunities not for persons of low and moderate income, but for drug dealers, pimps, and developers,” the lawsuit reads. “Whatever remains … will be fed to developers, who will grind what survives down to the pittance they might be paid to leave.”
The Office of the Prince George’s County Executive did not respond to requests for comment.
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