Thread by @JewhadiTM

The competition, then, was stiff — until New York City Mayor de Blasio blew them all away. He wins first prize by vowing womb-to-tomb handouts and a permanent push for more free stuff.

Appearing well-rested from months of doing nothing, de Blasio lapped the competition with three days of come-and-get-it giveaways. First he vowed free health care for 600,000 New Yorkers, half of them here illegally.

Next came a plan to force private employers to give nearly all workers 10 paid vacation days a year.

Then, in his State of the City speech, de Blasio secured victory by making even more promises, such as seizing private apartment buildings from bad landlords, and laying out a vision for a city that would bury capitalism.

A red-diaper baby himself, the mayor declared a total class war: “Brothers and sisters, there’s plenty of money in the world. There’s plenty of money in this city. It’s just in the wrong hands.”

There was also this grievance-stoking pander to the people: “You’re not living the life you ­deserve. And here is the cold, hard truth — it’s no accident.”

It’s “An agenda that’s dominated our politics from Reaganomics to the Trump tax giveaway to the wealthy and corporations.”

Finally, a tease about a glorious future in Havana-on-the-Hudson: “This country has spent decades taking from working people and giving to the 1 percent.”

“This city has spent the last five years doing it the other way around. We give back to working people the prosperity they have earned. And we are just getting started.”

The only thing missing was a forced singalong to the socialist anthem, “The Internationale.”

In normal times, over-the-rainbow rhetoric could be dismissed as window dressing. But these days, Democrats, raging at Trump and emboldened by Bernie Sanders’ campaign in 2016, are deadly serious about a hard left turn.

Even with the total collapse of Venezuela before their eyes and the undeniable horrors of life ­under communism and socialism, American leftists are no longer embarrassed to espouse ideologies that have failed miserably every place they’ve been tried.

De Blasio has no chance of being president in 2020. He’s lazy, corrupt and incompetent, and New York is in obvious decline under his “leadership.” But that makes him all the more dangerous.

Having little power and no clear future, he has nothing to lose. He can be reckless with both his rhetoric and city finances because his main goal is influencing his national party’s tenor and direction.

And so, for one week at least, de Blasio takes the cake as the most radical Democrat in America. These days, that’s quite a feat.