Commission Six Eight
Covering today's politics and current events through the lens of history and the Bible.
Commission Six Eight
Voters Stayed Home, The Far Left Showed Up, And New York Chose A Socialist
The map lit up blue, but the story behind it is all about motivation. We unpack why Democrats surged in Virginia and New Jersey while many right-leaning voters stayed home, and how a late media turn on government shutdown blame shaped momentum. Then we zero in on New York City’s most disruptive choice: a democratic socialist platform promising city-owned grocery stores, higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and a sweeping rent freeze paired with a huge public housing push.
I walk through the economics in plain language: razor-thin grocery margins that limit savings even under public management, mobile capital that can exit a high-tax city overnight, and housing controls that spook investors and shrink future supply. We connect these proposals to real-world outcomes and historical case studies from the USSR, Cuba, and Venezuela—not as scare tactics, but as cautionary examples of how distorted incentives can empty shelves, weaken services, and burden the middle class when the tax base leaves. If you care about affordability, jobs, and opportunity, these tradeoffs matter.
This conversation isn’t doom and gloom; it’s a roadmap. Political overreach often triggers a course correction, and we outline how a disciplined, solutions-first approach could set the stage for a national shift by 2028. That means credible candidates, serious cost-of-living answers, and a renewed focus on education, faith, and community. We close with a call to pray for our cities and leaders, to teach the next generation why freedom and responsibility go together, and to stay engaged. If this resonated, share it with a friend, subscribe for Friday’s interview with Adam Johnson, and leave a review so more people can find the show.
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You are listening to Commission 68.
SPEAKER_00:It is Wednesday, November 5th in the greatest country on earth. I'm your host, Randy Millette, and this is Commission 68. Today we are talking about last night's election results, the future of New York City under a democratic socialist. And as always, we're gonna see what the Bible has to say about it. So let's go. Last episode, I told you that I had booked a guest while I conducted that interview. It was with Adam Johnson, also known as the Lectern Guy. That episode is going to be dropping on Friday, and it's one that you're not going to want to miss. We had a great conversation. He told his story about January 6th, and that episode is going to be available here wherever you get your podcast in audio form, but it was also in video form, and it's going to be available on my YouTube page. So that's coming out Friday. Make sure you catch that one. Also, don't forget to send us a text, give us feedback on the show, go follow me on X, and also help us get the word out. If you're enjoying the show, send it to a friend, post it on social media, and help us keep growing. Okay. Remember, remember the 5th of November, or in this case, the 4th of November. Last night we had major elections in Virginia, New Jersey, uh, New York City, all of which we saw Democrats win in sweeping fashion. So, so what does this mean? Is the red wave over? Has Trump's influence diminished? Are people fed up with the government shutdown? Who's getting blamed for the government shutdown? Uh, what does the future look like for these areas? Well, let's start with the government shutdown. Now, in the beginning weeks of the government shutdown, the Republicans and Trump were not getting the blame. Uh, even among independent and some Democratic voters, polls showed us that they were n they were mainly blaming Democrats for the government shutdown. But my first clip, I'm gonna play you from CNN's Jake Tapper, who even he is surprised when he explains that the sentiment has seemed to be shifted from blaming Democrats for the shutdown to now blaming Republicans and Trump. So listen here.
SPEAKER_01:I have a lot of thoughts on everything about what you just said. Well, but let me let's go back to the issue about the government shutdown. Um historically, Republicans have been the ones that have caused the shutdowns. Right? I mean, they're the ones, and I'm only specifically talking about whether or not they vote to fund the government when it goes to the House, when it goes to the Senate. Democrats are the ones that are not voting to fund the government. Now, I understand why they're doing so. They're doing so because of health care and they want to fight and they want Republicans to negotiate, et cetera, et cetera. The messaging by Democrats around the shutdown has been sharper than I've than I've seen Democrats on any issue in a long time. They have convinced voters, Democratic voters and independent voters, that it's the Republicans' fault. Um, and just on the numbers that might not be actually accurate. Well, in terms of who's voting to open the government and who isn't.
SPEAKER_00:So you have the network that is the unofficial mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, even them admitting that the shutdown is not the Republicans' fault. It's the Democrats who were voting no and keeping the government shut down. Now, of course, he's going to admit this um last night after all the polls close because, you know, God forbid you dissuade someone from voting blue. But even the esteemed Jake Tapper admits that he is surprised that the Democrats were able to package their messaging in such a way uh to blame Republicans for keeping the government shut down when they're the ones continuously voting no against the CR, which we talked about episodes ago. So even though that may be the case, I personally do not believe that the government shutdown was the main contributing factor to the Democrats sweep last night. In my opinion, the main reason, uh excluding New York, which we're gonna talk about New York in a second, but the main reason for the Democrats sweep last night was mainly because MAGA stayed home. Right? We know that election results uh correlate to voter turnout, and voters turn out based on their motivation. MAGA was not motivated. Who was motivated? Uh the far left. Not even the centric left, the far left was motivated. The people whose uh SNAP benefits are running out, the people who are blaming Republicans for the shutdown, the people who are never Trumpers, the people who tune in day in and day out and day out and hear that Republicans are Nazis, that Trump is Hitler, right? That's the base that was motivated. Now, historically, when we see such a large mandate like what happened in the 2024 election, you'll see the losing party move back toward the center to try and win back independent voters and have the pendulum start to swing again in their favor. Last night that is not what happened. Uh, that's not the democratic message that they're putting out. In fact, instead of moving more centric, they went further left than we could possibly imagine. New York City elected a socialist Democrat. He's a socialist. I believe he's a communist. He's skipping socialism and going straight to communism. We're going to talk about that soon. But I want to start with Virginia. Virginia has an interesting rule when it comes to electing governors. The rule is that an incumbent can't run again. Now you can have a governor serve two terms, but they can't be consecutive terms. So Glenn Yunkin, whose approval rating, he enjoyed an approval rating as high as 59% before leaving office, uh, was not allowed to run for a consecutive second term. Therefore, we had Spamberger versus Earl Sears. Spamberger, obviously, the Democrat running against Republican Winsom Earl Sears, who was lieutenant governor under Glenn Yuncan. And although Abigail Spencer won with 57% of the vote, she actually received fewer votes than Donald Trump did from the state of Virginia in 2024, which he lost. He did not win the state of Virginia, but received more votes than the winning Democrat candidate for governor. So, like I said, voter turnout and motivation. Who were the motivated voters? It wasn't MAGA. MAGA stayed home. Also important to note, Jay Jones was elected as the Attorney General, who was caught in that Texan scandal where he was calling for uh or hoping that his opponent's children would die. And Virginia elected his first ever Muslim woman as lieutenant governor. Then we saw New Jersey elect Mikey Sherrill, Democrat, a woman governor, who she was involved in a scandal at the U.S. Naval Academy, a cheating scandal where she wasn't allowed to walk the stage. That came out a few months ago during her campaign. And of course, New Jersey ignored that because we know that New Jersey is unofficially the sixth borough of New York City, which brings us to the biggest election of the night and possibly the biggest most surprising election of American history, where New York City, the biggest city in the country, elected a Muslim Democrat socialist, Zoran Mandami. Now, before we get into New York, let's go back to New Jersey for a second because I think New Jersey, the problem with the Republican race in New Jersey is that they ran a poor candidate. Republican Jack Chitterelli, although he was endorsed by Trump, he's lost three times. This was his third time losing a governor's race. And Republicans, especially MEGA, are sick of voting for losers. They're sick of voting for losing candidates. You know, the days of um Pat Buchanan running again or Bob Dole running again are over. You know, Ross Perot. We're not doing that anymore. So again, motivation, voter turnout. People weren't going to turn out to vote for Jack Chinarelli for a third time. So we saw what happened in New Jersey. Now, let's get to New York City.
SPEAKER_04:I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older. I am Muslim. Or as we say, I'm still in winning anaminkum wai laikum.
SPEAKER_00:All right, so this is the future of New York City. I'm going to read to you straight from Zoran Mandami's website things that he campaigns on and policies that he wants to implement, right? I'm not going to go down a conspiracy theory road or say, you know, this is what I think he's going to do or he's a Muslim. I'm just going to read you what he says. All right. And we're going to look at how these policies have been implemented before in other countries under communist socialist rule and the results. All right. The first one, city-owned grocery stores. Establish a network of publicly run grocery stores to provide affordable food by cutting out private profits, eliminating rents and taxes for these operations, and using wholesale purchasing. This aims to address food insecurities for low-income New Yorkers by shifting from corporate subsidies to public alternatives. All right, city-owned grocery stores. First of all, these can't just pop up overnight. The amount of money that they're going to have to spend to get this operation going, that aside, what are city-owned grocery stores going to do? It sounds great, right? And his base, he tapped into the affordability problem, the affordability crisis in New York City. And he established his base, his voter base, who were angry about the prices, right? Who can't afford to live there. And that's what he ran on. So the first one, City Own grocery stores. If you know someone who owns a grocery store, ask them the profit margin, right? We're all familiar with profit margin. They have to pay for the groceries, uh, grocery stores more than really more than any other operation I can think of, the amount of waste that they have to factor in, their profit margins are so slim that it averages about 1.6%. So in a perfect world, if city owned grocery stores operated without any problems, without any waste, and everyone used them, the best case scenario is that your groceries would be 1.6% cheaper. Alright, that's with no problems whatsoever. 1.6% cheaper. But besides the fact that the government ruins everything it touches, he didn't mention the fact that now he's going to be undercutting private-owned grocery stores. So while he claims to be making the city more affordable for its citizens, he's literally putting, attempting to put a big portion of them out of work. Alright, so let's move on. Heavy taxation on the wealthy and the corporations for redistribution. Okay, he wants to, according to his website, he wants to impose a 2% flat tax on income over$1 million to target the top 1%, right? We know the Democrats, the socialist communists, they love this. Right? This is straight out of the Marxist playbook. This was what the Bolshevik revolution was all about. He wants to raise the corporate tax rate to 11.5%, generating billions to fund universal public services like free childcare and housing. Mandami has explicitly stated that he does not believe billionaires should exist. I guess that doesn't count the billionaires that donated to this campaign, but he doesn't believe billionaires should exist, right? So he wants to tax uh the wealthy and big corporate businesses to generate, like he said, generate billions of dollars to fund universal public services, right, for the middle class. Again, sounds great, especially if you're not a billionaire, if you're not wealthy and you live off of government subsidies, right? This sounds like a utopia, and that's what communism does. Communism sounds like a utopia to the have nots. However, what's gonna happen in a city like New York City who has Wall Street and has a New York Stock Exchange, and it literally is great because of the money that it generates and the billionaires that it produces, the millionaires and the billionaires, right? What's gonna happen once you decide to target them? It's already, right now, the highest tax city in the country. And now we're gonna increase taxes even more on the wealthy. They're gonna leave. The wealthy are gonna leave. Because this is not the Soviet Union where they built a wall. Well, why do you think they built a wall? Why do you think the Soviet Union had to build a wall to keep its people in? Because they were taxing them to death and they were starving them from the inside out, right? So if in the city, in New York City, the people who have the means, the people he wants to tax to fund for everybody else, the people who have the means, they're out. They're already gone. Consider it done. Just 20 years ago, you had to be present in the New York New York Stock Exchange, and that's why they had stockbrokers. That's not the case anymore. You can run a hedge fund from the moon if you wanted to. These people don't have to live in New York City anymore. They're living in New York City for the lifestyle. They're living in New York City to be close to other like-minded billionaires, successful people on Wall Street. That's gone. They're leaving. They're not gonna sit there and be taxed to death, they're not gonna be penalized for being rich. So then let's ask ourselves what happens once all the billionaires leave? Once all the people that you have funding your communist utopia leave and you can no longer tax them, where are you gonna generate the income for all these public services? Tell me. It's gonna come from the middle class. Who voted you in under the premise that they were gonna be the receivers of these benefits, not the providers? Alright, next one rent freeze and massive public housing expansion. Do you know when Mandami said this and he announced his campaign? Real estate investors in New York City that had buildings under contract. So when you buy a building, just like when you buy a house, you put it on the contract and you have to give earnest money deposit. And we're talking about massive buildings worth millions and millions and millions of dollars. So their earnest money deposit, a very substantial amount of money. They have real estate investors who forfeited their earnest money deposit and pulled out and said we're not buying here, just in case he wins, because that's how dangerous they knew this was going to be. Rent freeze and massive public housing expansion. Immediately freeze rents over 2 million stabilized apartments and triple production of union-built, rent-stabilized affordable housing to 200,000 units over 10 years using public funds. This includes taking over neglected properties from bad landlords and reforming zoning to prioritize public needs over private development. Find me a real estate investor that's going to work under those conditions. Knowing that his rent's going to be frozen, he's not going to be able to increase rent in order to keep up with the cost of money. When you buy a building like that and you borrow money from a bank, it's on an adjustable, a three to five year adjustable rate mortgage. Not a 30-year fixed rate. You don't get that in commercial. It's three to five years, which means you have to increase rent in order to keep up with the adjustable rates. He just took that away from every investor. That means he pushed every private sector, market, real estate investor out of the city, which means if you visit New York City, all you're going to be able to see is all the public housing. That's what's going to happen. This isn't an experiment. These are proven failed policies that New York City just voted in. Alright, we're going to take a break. When I come back, uh we're going to go through and look at how these policies failed. I'm going to go through the Soviet Union. We're going to look at Cuba, Venezuela. This again, this is not an experiment. This is proven. Let's take a quick break. We'll be right back.
SPEAKER_02:You are listening to Commission 68.
SPEAKER_00:Under the USSR's command economy, state-run grocery stores like those in Moscow exemplified the breakdown of central planning. By 1990, footage and eyewitness accounts revealed supermarkets with nearly bare shelves, stocked only with basics like vinegar or canned goods, while essentials like meat, dairy, and fresh produce were scarce or non existent. In Cuba, from the 1960s to present day, Cuba's state-controlled rationing system has distributed subsidized food through government stores since the early days of Fidel Castro's revolution. While it initially mitigated post-revolutionary chaos, mismanagement, and external factors like the Soviet subsidy cutoff in 1991, led to severe gaps. Citizens often received just a fraction of caloric needs with stores frequently out of rice, beans, eggs, and oil. I have a friend who went on a mission trip to Cuba and preparing for his arrival, his host went weeks or months without eating breakfast and saving up eggs and coffee just so that he could feed the missionaries breakfast when they got there. And they were only there for like seven days. They got something like uh one and a half eggs a month. All right, let's look at Venezuela starting in 2010. Venezuela's nationalized food production and distribution placed supermarkets under state oversight. This led to notorious scenes of empty aisles and Caracas stores by 2015, where hyperinflation price controls and expropriations of private farms caused shortages of staples like cornmeal, milk, and toilet paper, items that decayed on shelves due to overproduction and unneeded goods. Government run stores became symbols of the crisis with people queuing for hours to find nothing, exacerbating malnutrition and prompting a mass exodus. And this is just one of his policies. Again, this is not an experiment, people. This is proven. This is proven failure. All right, let's talk about the rent freezes. We already saw what the rent freezes are doing to real estate investors. They're leaving New York, but this was done before by the Bolsheviks, by Stalin, and Mao in China. It started with rent freezes and then it turned into complete government ownership of all property. So you live in government-owned buildings. You don't own your house, you don't own property anymore. There's no private ownership. It's all owned by the government. So Midami's first step is freezing rent and then building public housing. If allowed to continue, this will eventually turn into no private ownership whatsoever. So you're going to be forced to have your family living in public housing owned by the government. Alright? That leads us to public ownership and expanded state services. The high taxation of the wealthy is an exact replica of the Bolshevik emphasis on state-funded public services. And Mao did this in China under the Cultural Revolution where his ideology drove resource allocation. The taxation angle nods to the class struggle. But there's not going to be a class struggle once the upper class leaves. The taxation that would have applied to the upper class is now going to trickle down to the middle class, and they are going to have to fund all these government subsidies. Now, this is not supposed to be a doom and gloom show. So what hope do we have? You know, what do we make out of this? What happened last night? I posted this on X last night, and then I saw a similar uh headline by the Wall Street Journal this morning. What I said on X was tonight's election results, I posted this last night, tonight's election results just put a Republican in the White House in 2028. And I believe that. The Wall Street Journal said this morning that Mandami was a gift if Trump opens him carefully. And I'll tell you what that means and what I meant last night. This experiment, which we know it's not an experiment, it's proven failure. This failure is gonna push the pendulum back towards the right. Alright, the Democrats made a mistake. They went as far left as possible, they didn't try to pull independence, they activated a base that was staying out of the polls. They went as far left as possible, and they're establishing communism in New York City, and this is gonna backfire if we do it right. If the Republicans do this right. Now, unfortunately, for the people of New York, I have listeners in New York, believe it or not, for the people who live in New York, unfortunately, you're gonna have to go through the winter so that the country can experience the spring. Alright? The country's still in good shape at the moment. Trump's economic plan is working, the tariffs are working, Trump's foreign policy is working. Unfortunately, for President Trump and for the Republicans, it takes a lot longer to fix something than it does to tear it down. While President Trump is still rebuilding after four years of the autopen, the radical left activated the frustration over affordability, and that's what we saw last night. However, what happened last night is going to lead the pendulum, it's gonna cause the pendulum to swing back to the right, and it's gonna put a Republican back in the White House in 2028. But to my Christian listeners, you need to pray. We need to pray for the people in New York. We need to pray for, we need to pray for this country, we need to pray for our city, we need to pray for the city that you live in. You need to when you travel and you go to a different state, pray for that state. When you go to a different city, pray for that city. Pray for its leaders, pray for the citizens. Pray that God opens the eyes of the people. Pray revival. Let's pray revival into every corner of this nation. Pray for the youth. There is a war for the children of this country. There is a war for the youth of this country, and both sides are fighting, and it's going to determine the future of what happens in America. All is not lost. This was not a defeat. This was an awakening. Now is not the time to throw in the towel. Now is the time to double down. We double down as Christians. We double down as ambassadors of the Almighty. We are the carriage that carries the king. Everywhere that we go, we proclaim God's sovereignty over that area. We proclaim God's sovereignty over America. We are not beholden to the policies of communists in New York. We are not beholden. We are not sentenced to live under destructive, failed policies. Elijah had to live through a drought, but God provided for him and caused a raven to bring him food while he sat under the juniper tree. Jehovah Jared is my provider, but we have to do our part. And our part is to educate the youth of this country. Our part is to educate people on the dangers of communism. Our part is to intercede for this country and not rest until there's a revival. So thank you guys for listening. Make sure you tune in Friday to hear my interview with Adam Johnson, the lectern guy. Make sure you share the show with a friend. Help us get the word out. And I pray blessings. Blessings over you and your family. I pray God blesses you coming in and you going out. I pray peace, power, and prosperity. Remember, you live in the greatest country on earth, and it's up to you to keep it.
SPEAKER_02:This has been Commission 6.8.
SPEAKER_03:I invite you into the roller coaster ride of my life in the award-winning book for such a time as this: how I navigated the world of multifamily real estate to close my first deal, and how you can too. From the very first page, you'll dive into the raw emotions of ambition and resilience, facing one crushing setback after another. Yet, through each trial, I discovered new depths of determination and learned invaluable lessons in negotiation and perseverance. This isn't just a story about overcoming financial hurdles, it's about the profound personal growth that comes from navigating life's toughest challenges. It's about faith, family, and the unwavering belief that setbacks are not the end, but the beginning of something greater. For such a time as this, how I navigated the world of multifamily real estate to close my first deal and how you can too. By award winning author Randy Millette. Available on Amazon.