The New York City business community – including the likes of Jamie Dimon and David Solomon – could learn a thing or two from Joe Sweeny.
The 36-year-old lawyer and social media influencer – who lately has teamed up with independent journalist Nick Shirley to create a series of viral videos chronicling the ills of the Big Apple welfare state – is planning a Saturday morning rally in an iconic downtown Manhattan enclave that has been plagued with street peddlers, rampant crime and drug use.
Shirley – who uncovered the abuse of taxpayer money funding immigrant day care in Minneapolis including the infamous “Quality Learing Center” – will live-stream the event beginning at 9 a.m. in the vicinity of Broadway and Canal Street in the heart of Chinatown, while Sweeny will snap before and after photos of graffiti-smeared storefronts getting cleaned up.
Sweeny – a native of NJ, who now lives just blocks from the alleged combat zone – is willing to do what honchos of the business community haven’t: Directly confront Mamdani-ism and expose its dysfunction.
As reported on these pages, Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan and Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, as well as other business leaders have curiously cozied up to Mamdani of late, in a series of meetings with the lefty mayor.
That’s even as Mamdani is attempting to take a welfare state of a city even further to the left with a Third-Worldism that is brazenly anti Israel. He’s promoting free buses, government-run groceries and even government takeovers of rental properties, all paid for with higher taxes so he can instill “the warmth of collectivism” on New Yorkers.
Sweeny says he could get up to 300 people depending on the weather, including local landlords, residents and shop owners. GOP gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman, challenging Kathy Hochul, will attend and deliver remarks, his office confirms.
The busy intersection is a hot spot of migrants selling counterfeit goods on the sidewalk; it was targeted last year in a raid by Immigration Enforcement Agents who arrested nine men some of them allegedly in this country illegally and several of them with criminal records, according to news reports. But after the raid, the migrants returned, Sweeny says.
The open-air market blocks foot traffic to stores, many of which have been forced to close down, Sweeny tells me. The boarded up storefronts are covered with graffiti that Sweeny and his team plan to fix this weekend, filming, he said in an email to participants “time lapse videos from above to show the before and after.”
Sweeny says that his clean-up volunteers will “move to four selected sections in this vicinity where we’ll have contractors, paint rollers, paint buckets, gloves, and ladders to totally repaint and repurpose huge swaths of the property that this unchecked chaos has permitted to become totally defaced and overrun by folks openly breaking the law, without paying a dime in taxes, 365 days a year.”
A spokesman for Mamdani had no immediate comment.
Sweeny is weighing his own political ambitions. He said he’s possibly eyeing a run for mayor in 2029 to combat the socialism and decay that Mamdani has brought to the city through weak law enforcement and an expanded welfare state that protects migrants at the expense of taxpayers.
Mamdani won the mayoralty with just over 50% of the vote but Sweeny says there’s now “a silent majority of New Yorkers who detest what Mamdani is doing” and he plans to “lead the resistance against Mamdani.”