The Democrats pretend to have the solution to poverty—socialism—but the Republicans have a living example of how to overcome poverty—Vice President J.D. Vance—who achieved success in life with the help of family members such as his grandmother, when his mother was hooked on drugs and his father had essentially abandoned him. “I’m all you got,” his grandmother told him.

Vance, rather than Trump, should be on the front lines of this debate. Trump, after all, is a billionaire who was born into wealth. He understands economics but lacks personal credibility on the matter of overcoming poverty.

Vance’s background, documented in his book (and the movie) Hillbilly Elegy, should replace rabid socialist Michael Harrington’s influential book, The Other America, as required reading. Vance’s life story can serve as the playbook for challenging the socialist narrative. Vance is the prime witness of how Big Government cannot replace a coherent and stable family structure. He is a hero to those of us not born into wealth and power.

Harrington was a founder of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the group taking the City of New York and the nation by storm with plans for free food and heath care, as DSA member and mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani promises to “seize the means of production,” which characterizes the communist approach.

The purpose of socialism is to grow government in power and authority over us. Karl Marx, the father of communism, called for two things—the abolition of private property and the abolition of the family—in his quest for "scientific socialism." All we are then left with is government.

Michael Harrington, by the way, abandoned his religious faith, whereas J.D. Vance embraced his.

Vance vs. Mamdani

Vance was born in Ohio and spent time in eastern Kentucky, where he was brought up in an environment where industrial jobs were few. Vance understands how families need stable structures, free from so-called international "free trade" policies that can produce “deaths of despair” from poverty and drugs. (For more on the subject of free trade vs. fair trade, see free vs. fair trade 101 at fairtradescmpaigns.org. See also Vance on China issues, on YouTube.)

For “progressives,” like Mamdani, the answer is domestic production of mind-altering drugs like marijuana, to make compliant voters easy to manipulate. In 2024, City & State New York magazine reported that Mamdani “enjoys cannabis personally.” The putrid smell of legal pot permeates New York City.

As a result of legal and illegal drugs in New York City, New York Rep. Ritchie Torres, a Democrat, has demanded action against an open-air drug market in the commercial sector of the South Bronx, New York, and has called for its permanent dismantling. He says, “Why should the people of the South Bronx be forced to see drug addicts injecting themselves with fentanyl in the presence of their children – all in broad daylight?… The State’s do-nothing approach and the City’s ad-hoc approach has led to a game of whack-a-mole in which the NYPD temporarily removes the open-air drug market, only to see it re-emerge almost overnight.”

For many in New York City these days, the smell of dope, crime, rats, and filthy streets are regular impediments to an ordinary life. One recent visitor to the city commented, “Literally had to wear wading trousers to make my way through the streets of human waste.” One resident told me, “Everything outside of the Upper East and Upper West Side of the city [is] s**t holes.”

Socialism will not solve any of these problems.

For that reason, Vice President Vance must now step forward with the facts of life about how to escape these conditions. The solution is capitalism, not socialism, and the return of traditional family values.

Why the Left hates Vance

The liberals hate Vance, a former Marine who used the G.I. Bill to attend Ohio State University and became a Yale Law School graduate, because they hate white working-class Americans. These are the people who voted for Trump and want to escape Democrat-controlled cities.

Mamdani is the claimed half-black socialist mayoral candidate in New York City who was born into wealth and power. He attended private school through eighth grade, then the “elite” Bronx High School of Science before graduating from a private college, Bowdoin College. A blatant racist, Mamdani now wants to “shift the tax burden” to “richer and whiter neighborhoods.”

His father is the Indian-Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani, and his mother, Mira Nair, is a millionaire film maker. He says he was born in India; his family then moved to Africa; and then to the United States.

His false claim to be half-black was revealed by the New York Times, a development that embarrassed the socialists backing him for mayor. He used the half-black claim to try to get into Columbia University but ended up at Bowdoin College, a private liberal arts college in Brunswick, Maine, where he started a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and studied the writings of Angela Davis, the former Communist Party USA official once honored by East Germans.

In addition to being “black or African-American,” he also claimed to be half Asian and now says he is an “American born in Africa.”

The lies about his upbringing have been cited by Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital, who commented, “Mamdani comes from a culture that lies about everything. It’s literally a virtue to lie if it advances his Islamist agenda. The West will learn this lesson the hard way.”

His Islamist agenda is driven by the same ideology dominating Iran.

Looking at Mamdani’s background and his transformation into a communist/socialist with anti-American views, columnist Wayne Allen Root believes there are legal grounds to revoke his American citizenship.

The press in far-away India is having a field day with his claim to be a Shia Muslim, a minority in Hindu-dominated India, one whose religious ideology drives the aggression of Iran’s Ayatollahs.

In addition to this identity problem, some Muslims here and abroad do not like his affinity for "queers.”

Mamdani’s family life

Mamdani has an unusual personal life and suddenly became married when running for mayor, after several years as an assemblymember in the New York legislature. People magazine reports that Mamdani “kept the details of his romance fairly private” and married Rama Duwaji, a Syrian artist, in early 2025 at the City Clerk’s office, or so he claims.

The mystery of Mamdani is not unprecedented. Before he emerged on the scene, New York City had a mayor—Bill “Red Bill” de Blasio—who was born Warren Wilhelm Jr. Our investigations showed that his notes on his involvement with the communist-sponsored Nicaragua Solidarity Network included the words, “End world capitalism and replace it,” and next to de Blasio’s initials are the words “democratic socialism.”

De Blasio’s support for communist regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua, and his embrace of Islam as an emerging political force, were highlighted by the New York Times, but he won anyway, setting the stage for Mamdani’s rise to power.

De Blasio’s personal life was strange, to say the least. He married a black woman and former lesbian, Chirlane McCray, and they had two children together. They eventually “separated” but did not divorce.

During college, McCray had lived in an enclave known as the Combahee River Collective, which had issued a “revolutionary” 1977 statement calling for “the liberation of all oppressed peoples” and “the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy.”

Perhaps this is Mamdani’s manifesto as well, with a touch of radical Islam mixed in with Marxism. Anyway, the mystery of Mamdani’s true identity must be solved before he is elected and rams government-owned grocery stores onto the people, producing more poverty, not less, and leading to more misery.

To begin with, let us figure out whether Mamdani is truly an American and lied on his naturalization application and whether he should thus be deported. We cannot afford another Obama—who ran for office with a phony Social Security number—even on a local basis, because Mamdani is backed by the same forces aligned with the “Bolshevik Bernie” brand of “democratic socialism.”

Taking on this socialist onslaught is a role for Vice President Vance, who has the credentials to challenge the basic tenets of socialism.

It is time for Trump to step aside in this debate and let Vance take the lead in a Reagan-style manner that emphasizes the differences between communism and freedom.