Help us end the radical brainwashing of our future leaders. So let's get right into it. Joining me now for a packed hour, we have Wall Street Journal editorial board member Alicia Finley, The Fixer host on Fox, Marcus Lemonis, NYC councilwoman and immigrant from the Soviet Union Inna Vernikov, and United Refining Company chairman and CEO, as well as Red Apple Group chairman and CEO John Catsimatidis. Great to see you all. Thank you for being here.
First to you, your family came to escape Marxism. Now you're living in a capitalist city that has a Marxist mayor. How does that make you feel?
Oh, it's absolutely devastating. Families like mine escaped socialism and communism. The former Soviet Union was a communist country, and we fled here in the 80s and the 90s for capitalism, for the free market economy, for the American dream. This is the country. This is the place where our parents taught us. If you work hard, you could be anything you want to be. And that's exactly what happened. We came here. We didn't speak English. We had to get accustomed to a new country, to a new life, to a new language. We became doctors. We became lawyers. I'm a member of the government in the largest city in the world. And the idea that everything that we escaped is coming here is absolutely unbelievable.
We should mention, by the way, that you're in a very rare conservative enclave, or at least more conservative than most of New York, where a lot of former residents of the Soviet Union live. So that reflects your opinion, and I assume the people that live in your community as well.
Oh, my constituents are absolutely devastated. We all feel the same way about this.
John Catsimatidis, for those who don't know you, you're in a lot of different businesses, oil, grocery stores, etc. How does a business person do business with a Marxist mayor?
It's going to be more difficult. We are hoping that Governor Hochul, who is the current governor, is tough enough to lean on him to make sure he does the right things. Then we have President Trump, who's one tough guy, and he has said to me and has said to people that the fact is that federal funds will keep moving to New York. But I suggested to him, maybe put a monitor in to make sure the money is spent properly and doesn't go poof. By the way, we saw that in the 1970s, there was the MAC Commission, a commission that monitored very closely the budgets as New York was essentially going bankrupt.
Is it a similar thing that you want to impose now?
Well, I told President Trump, I said to him, my recommendation is let the people of the city of New York and the state of New York should not suffer. It's to make sure the money is spent properly, is the proper situation, and the money should keep flowing. But you should have somebody in there that you trust to oversee it.
Marcus, the fact that the focus is on New York is because it's such an extraordinary situation. The city of capitalism with a Marxist mayor. But this kind of movement you see happening all over America. You've got businesses all over America. How is middle America responding to all this?
I think the one thing that we have to think about as we sit here today is that affordability is an issue everywhere. It is not just in New York City, from Seattle to Minneapolis to Chicago to wherever it may be. But I have a high level of confidence, and you probably would expect me to say this, that capitalism will always win out and that the idea of socialism is, in my opinion, a good experiment.
But you say that we're just going to experience it for the first time. What's going to happen?
It exists everywhere. It exists everywhere. This idea that people want things for free and don't want to work for it exists everywhere.
But Alicia, it hasn't existed in the Democratic Party everywhere. And that's the question. Democrats are now clasping hands with Marxists like Mamdani. I just want to play a little bit from Governor Kathy Hochul about a week ago when she fully endorsed Mamdani. Play that tape.
Take that energy, that passion, and take it into 26 so that we can take back the House of Representatives, take the Senate and we take back America. Thank you Queens. Thank you, New York. I love you guys.
There was the shot there, the hands raised in the air. So has socialism now become a platform of the Democrat party?
Well, I think the party is moving in that direction. But you have to actually look at some other places in the country where it's moving in the opposite direction. I would point to San Francisco, where you have a mayor, Daniel Lurie, who has struck a decidedly different tone, has positioned himself more as a moderate and is trying to tackle the city's problems, homelessness, the cost of living, and has actually tried to welcome businesses, suggested lowering tax rates. And you look out in LA and you have Mayor Karen Bass, who has been an abject failure, but it looks like the city is actually moving the opposite direction, may elect a reformer. Austin Beutner, a former LA Unified superintendent, a very pro-business background is mounting a formidable challenge. So what you see is in many cities around the country, when they swing left, they tend to swing back right. And so I think and you also saw, by the way, on the New Jersey and Virginia races, they elected moderate Democrats, at least Democrats who campaigned as moderate and in fact were not radical.
We've seen it not only in cities in America, but we've seen it in countries, too. I mean, Bernie Sanders is always talking about how he'd like to be like Sweden, socialism. Well, Sweden, the Swedish socialists were on the run recently because the fact that their system wasn't working out so well. They haven't veered all the way to the conservative side, but they've certainly dropped a lot of their socialism.
Well, that's right, they've privatized a number of businesses, deregulated their telecom sector, reduced their tax rates. They are still very high. And they've, oh, by the way, they've also have vouchers, private school vouchers. They in some ways they're actually more of a market system than the US is.
