“Jewish Lightning”
Those of you who are regular readers know that I consider myself to be a Catholic Zionist.
I am unapologetically supportive of the Jewish people and unapologetically opposed to antisemitism—by which I mean Jew-hatred, not whatever semantic dodge my pro-Hamas interlocutors are trying to run this week. Yes, I’m aware that some Jews are European. No, that does not make antisemitism any less real. That argument reflects either a stunning ignorance of history or a willful distortion of it—often both.
That said, I also have a sense of humor, and I hope my readers do too. So forgive me for the title of this essay.
“Jewish lightning.”
The term has always struck me as darkly amusing—not because of its ethnic-slur origins (which I reject), but because it points to something very real: the absolute conflagration produced when inane left-wing policies collide with economic reality.
And that brings us to New York.
The Last Time New York Tried This
Between roughly 1968 and the early 1980s, New York City—particularly the South Bronx—was consumed by what the FDNY later called the War Years.
At its peak, the Bronx was experiencing nearly 40 fires per day. Over 80 percent of the housing stock in some neighborhoods was destroyed. Entire communities were wiped off the map.
This was not an accident. It was not spontaneous. And—despite what the media claimed at the time—it was not caused by residents “burning their own neighborhoods.”
It was arson for profit, of more aptly, prevention of loss.
Landlords, facing collapsing rents and hostile city policies, discovered that their buildings were often worth far more burned down than standing. Under the state-mandated FAIR Plan (Fair Access to Insurance Requirements), insurers were forced to cover properties in “high-risk” neighborhoods—often at wildly inflated valuations.
A building worth $5,000 on the open market might be insured for $250,000.
Do the math.
Enter Marvin the Torch
So landlords hired professional arsonists—known as torches—to “sell the building to the insurance company.” One of the most notorious figures of the era was a man known as Marvin the Torch, who specialized in burning tenement blocks.
The result was what the country watched live during the 1977 World Series, when a camera panned across Yankee Stadium and captured an uncontrolled fire raging in the background.
“The Bronx is Burning.”
They wrote a book about it.
Somebody should send a copy to Mad-Mani to put beside his copy of Das Kapital.
Historians now describe this period using a newer term: brownlining—a perverse evolution of redlining, in which insurers, regulators, and city planners collectively created incentives that made destruction more rational than preservation.
Recent documentaries and scholarship now make the same point: the system rewarded arson.
Why I’m Bringing This Up Now
Because New York has just elected Zoran Mamdani.
And because his ideological circle is openly questioning—indeed attacking—the very concept of private property.
One of Mamdani’s close ideological allies (whether through appointment or alignment—this deserves continued scrutiny) has publicly argued that:
Private property is a form of racism
Ownership represents “white oppression”
Society must transition from private ownership to “shared property”
This transition will disproportionately harm white people—and that this is a feature, not a bug
These are not fringe Tumblr posts. This is the language of people who expect to govern.
Now ask yourself a very simple question:
What do you think that does to property values?
When Owners See the Writing on the Wall
Property owners, as a rule, are smart. Certainly smarter than Marxists.
They understand incentives. They understand risk. And they understand when the political class is preparing to expropriate them—slowly or all at once.
If you believe that private property is illegitimate, if you intend to regulate returns into oblivion, if you signal that ownership itself is morally suspect, then rational owners will attempt to exit.
But what happens when there is no greater fool to sell to?
That was the problem in New York in the 1970s. Nobody wanted to buy buildings in the Bronx or Brooklyn. Manhattan held up longer, but even there values stagnated under the weight of ideology.
And when you can’t sell…you call Marvin the Torch.
That is what “Jewish lightning” was really about—not ethnicity, but policy-induced arson.
The Manhattan Problem
Mamdani and his Bolshevist band dream of “affordability” in Manhattan.
This is lunacy.
Manhattan is one of the most valuable pieces of real estate on Earth because it is scarce, because it is central, and because it has been the nerve center of global capitalism for over a century.
You cannot make Manhattan “affordable” without destroying the very revenue base that funds New York City and New York State:
Property taxes
Sales taxes
Financial-services income
Destroy those, and there is nothing left to tax.
Which is why the next step is always the same.
Mamdani will do to NYC what Maduro did to Venezuela.
The Billionaire Fantasy
Look to California.
Progressives there are now flirting with a one-time 5 percent tax on billionaire net worth. It polls well. It sounds painless. “Eat the rich” always does.
The CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang, may be wealthy—and perhaps benevolent—enough to shrug and write that check.
Most will not, even if they did, a one-time levy does not replace permanent revenue losses from capital flight.
New York billionaires will not protest. They will not riot.
They will move.
To New Jersey.
To Florida.
To Texas.
And suddenly the tax base is gone.
Watch the Skies
The so-called “Jewish space lasers” were, of course, a fever dream—courtesy of Marjorie Taylor Greene and the internet’s collective loss of sanity.
But Jewish lightning?
That was real.
And if you see the horizon of New York glowing again—if you see once-valuable properties mysteriously burning because they are worth more destroyed than owned—you will know exactly who to blame.
Not the landlords.
Not the insurers.
Not the residents.
But the ideologues who decided that capitalism itself was the enemy.
That’s just common sense.
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