Thread by @johnkonrad

I disagree completely — and that’s strange, because I think the reason Thomas Massie is getting flak is the same reason Mamdani won.

I’m a New Yorker. I’ve seen every layer of this city — the grit of the Bronx and the glass towers of Midtown, the preachers and the traders, the liberals and the cops. My wife and I logged more than ten years in New York’s colleges; I even attended the same ultra-progressive gifted high school as Lina Khan. At one point, debates couldn’t even happen unless I showed up — because without me, there was no one to take the conservative side.

I’ve lived among the poorest in the Bronx, where my mother worked as a nurse in the projects — and I’ve sailed with Manhattan’s elite.

My grandfather was a Methodist minister. My father, a devout Catholic. My godfather is Jewish. I worked for an all-Hindu company in India and an all-Muslim one in Boston. I’ve read every sacred text — not because I wanted to prove any of them right, but because I wanted to understand why so many people are willing to die for an idea.

And I learned early what ideas can cost.
My father died from Agent Orange when I was a kid — a casualty of both Communism and our own government’s incompetence. Since then, I’ve spent a lifetime studying how nations rise and rot. I’ve worked with people from every end of the spectrum — from one of the most liberal senators in America, Mark Kelly, to the Heritage 2025 team — all trying to rebuild the same sinking ship.

So enough about me. Let’s get to the heart of it. 1/4

https://x.com/johnkonrad/status/1986120515472228783

The Real Divide Isn’t Left vs. Right — It’s Chaos vs. Order

Trump won in 2016 — and again in 2024 — for the same reason he lost in 2020.

It’s the same reason de Blasio failed where Bloomberg thrived.

The same reason Rudy Giuliani could command a city, and Mamdani could win one.

This isn’t about Epstein, or Israel, or inflation. It’s about order and following a systemic plan.

Giuliani tore corruption out of New York. Bloomberg tore sloth out of its bureaucracy.

Trump in 2016 promised to bring in the “best and brightest” to drain the swamp — but by 2020 those “best and brightest” had revealed themselves as the swamp itself.

Chaos killed him. He was fighting an internal battle and didn’t have a plan for the next four years.

Americans want a plan, preferably an extreme plan because we all know centrist plans won’t work today

Trump came back in 2024 not with slogans, but with Project 2025 (and several other great plans) — a blueprint to re-engineer the American machine. Ruthlessly. Without taking prisoners.

De Blasio and Biden failed not because of ideology — but because of entropy. No plan. No structure. Just drift.

Mamdani won because he has a plan — to dismantle capitalism and replace it with Communism.
And he’s backed by sharp minds like Lina Khan, who see not markets or morals, but systems. Systems to be broken and rebuilt. 2/4

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The Dangerous Beauty of the Blueprint

I loathe Communism. I’ve read Marx, Lenin, Mao. I know the language, the promises, the poison. It is evil.
But it is also efficient — frighteningly efficient — at one thing: systematically destroying existing orders.

That’s the common ground between MAGA and Mamdani.
Both movements are fueled by disgust — with corruption, with waste, with the permanent class of parasites who run Washington and Wall Street alike.
Both sides want to burn the rot out of the system.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth: many on the Left quietly admired Trump’s first promise to “drain the swamp.” And many on the Right today secretly respect Mamdani’s willingness to wield a scalpel — or a hammer — where others use talking points.

Because deep down, we all know it: the system is broken.

And broken systems don’t reform — they collapse or get rebuilt.

MAGA offers a drastic rebuilding. Communism offers a total barn fire we can rebuild from. 3/4

Two Plans, One Fire

For MAGA, the blueprint is Project 2025 and a complete unrelating restructuring of government

For the Left, it’s Communism rebranded.

Both are movements of architects with axes — one shouting “Drain it!”, the other “Burn it!”

Both will fail for the same reason: the Deep State, that vast self-defending organism of bureaucracy, will smother anything too radical to control.

But the winner of the next major election will be whoever gets closer to that plan. Whoever does more to destroy the grift and government bottlenecks and waste.

Problem for us is it’s a lot easier to destroy one city and show progress than restructure a federal government.

That’s why to win we need to be bolder, move faster, fire WAY more people, and go further than ever.

If we don’t communism will win the 2028 election because Mamdani will show he CAN destroy huge swaths of government and the average voter won’t care that it’s on a much smaller scale.

Americans want people with the guts and the plan to tear the old system out, root and branch — and build something clean in its place.

That’s the battlefield now. Not Left vs. Right. Not Capital vs. Labor.
It’s Engineers vs. Decay.

And whichever side can wield the axe with purpose, not chaos — that’s the side history will remember.

P.S. that’s the chess border: the winner is whichever side can take more government pieces off the board. The QUEEN piece in this game are immigrants. Mamdani got them to the polls.

All of this is not critical of Trump for the simple reason he spend YEAR 1 closing the border and is deploying ICE to move on the queen. But he has to captivate that queen and put YEAR 2’s focus on a FULL drain of the swamp…

Do that and maga will win the midterm and can YEAR 3 restructure a new lean mean government and YEAR 4 reindustrialize and supercharge the economy

Those are the stakes.

And I pray to JESUS the communists do not win because America is strong enough to survive and rebuild after both plans… but communism cannot destroy (and later rebuild like china and vietnam did) without mass pain, suffering and death.