The strong showing by socialist candidates in New York’s Democratic primaries on Tuesday echoed a warning Charlie Kirk made in 2020.
Candidates backed by socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani won several major Democratic primary contests Tuesday night, including races against incumbent Reps. Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat.
A third Mamdani-backed candidate also won a primary for a congressional seat where the sitting congresswoman is not seeking re-election, according to CNBC.
At the state level, Democratic socialist Aber Kawas also won her New York state Senate primary. Kawas has previously blamed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on “capitalism and racism, and white supremacy.”
Darializa Avila Chevalier, who defeated Espaillat, has called for abolishing prisons, legalizing prostitution and drug use, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and ending U.S. military support for Israel. She has also called the United States “a f***ing disgrace,” according to the New York Post.
The Post reported that Tuesday’s socialist gains in New York were driven in large part by younger voters.
That trend is not new. In January 2020, I interviewed Kirk after a YouGov/Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation poll found that 70 percent of millennials said they were either “extremely likely” or “somewhat likely” to vote for a socialist candidate.
“I’ve been signaling this alarm bell for years,” Kirk said at the time. “And in fact, I’ve been wrongly accused of being an alarmist when I say that many young people are advocating for socialism. And it’s growing quickly.”
“And now I don’t think people are challenging me on that anymore,” he continued. “But it’s because I’ve been seeing it brewing up on college campuses, and I’ve seen kind of the clueless coalition of professors and students build an alliance to advocate for these horrendous ideas that will really wreak havoc on our country.”
Kirk also predicted that socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York would not remain an isolated figure in Congress.
“I’ve told people she’s going to multiply in Congress,” he said. “There are hyper-entitled, clueless millennials that are ready to undo every piece of true progress that our country has made over the last 200 years, just because they think a professor has told them something different. And it’s a very scary direction our country could take if we embrace people like that.”
Tuesday’s results suggest that Kirk’s warning was not misplaced. The three Democratic socialists who won in New York City are running in deep-blue districts and are likely to win their general election races in November.
Kirk said there were two simple questions that could help young people think more clearly about socialism.
“You ask the question to a student, ‘Do you trust the government?’ Traditionally, their answer will be, ‘No, I don’t trust the government. The government’s horrible,’” he said.
Then, Kirk said, he would ask a follow-up: “Then why do you want to make government bigger?”
If the student answered that they did not want bigger government, Kirk would reply, “Then you’re not a socialist.”
He said the entire exchange usually took about 15 seconds.
“The entire premise should be about trust of government,” Kirk said. “Students don’t like government. They don’t like politicians.”
But Kirk believed many young people had been persuaded to see socialism as a form of liberation.
“Students think they’re advocating for freedom when they advocate for socialism,” he said. “I know that might sound bizarre, but that’s the messaging campaign that the Marxists have undertaken.”
I discuss Kirk’s views on socialism in greater depth in the newly released 2026 edition of my book, “We Hold These Truths: The Two Beliefs That Still Hold the Power to Transform the Nation and the World.” In the book, I also examine why Kirk viewed Christianity as a powerful answer to socialism.
Kirk almost certainly would have had plenty to say about Mamdani’s call to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”
The same 2020 YouGov poll found that only 57 percent of millennials believed the Declaration of Independence better guarantees freedom and equality than the Communist Manifesto. By contrast, 94 percent of the Silent Generation said the Declaration was superior. That generation lived through some of the most dangerous years of the Cold War.
Kirk’s explanation was blunt.
“We don’t teach history,” he said. “This is all because of our schools. Schools are the number one reason why this is all screwed up. My parents’ generation — and they’ll be the first to admit it — totally screwed this up.
“They sent my generation to leftist indoctrination factories that teach kids to hate our country, and they are wondering why this is going in the wrong direction.”
