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Former U.S. Senate candidate and immigration attorney Peter Lumaj fled communist Albania decades ago to find freedom and opportunity in America.
Now, fresh off Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral primary win, Lumaj is warning that ideas touted by the far-left progressive could lead the U.S. down the same slippery slope.
“I’ve seen that movie before, and I don’t like the ending of it…” the Connecticut conservative told “Fox & Friends First” on Wednesday.
“This guy openly wants to promote communist values in our country, and this is not compatible with the foundation of this country when he wants to have command and control over the economy, forced redistribution of property. These are things that have been tried in Eastern Europe. They were tried in the Soviet Union. They’re being tried in Venezuela, Cuba, you name it, and they are a complete failure.”
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Lumaj tacked on a final warning: “We must not allow this to spread in the United States because this is not American at all.”
In 2021, Mamdani urged attendees of the Young Democratic Socialists of America winter conference not to compromise on goals like “seizing the means of production.”
“Right now, if we’re talking about the cancellation of student debt, if we’re talking about Medicare for all, these are issues which have the groundswell of popular support across this country,” Mamdani said in a video to conference-goers.
“But then there are also other issues that we firmly believe in, whether it’s [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions] or whether it is the end goal of seizing the means of production, where we do not have the same level of support at this very moment.”
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Lumaj told “Fox & Friends First” co-host Todd Piro that hearing Mamdani talk about “seizing the means of production” brings back horrible memories of Albania.
“You cannot have socialism without brute force of the government,” he warned.
“In order for you or someone to implement those policies, you’re gonna have to use the government agencies to do that. You’re going to have to use force to do it. When communism took over Albania, and they dispossessed people from their property, they had to use government agencies to do this. They had to arrest people, they had to torture people, they wound up killing people, including my own father, because he would not comply with the requirements or the demands of the communist regime, and this is a very dangerous thing to bring to the United States.”
President Donald Trump has publicly taken hits at Mamdani since his upset win over former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary, calling the AOC-endorsed progressive “a 100% Communist Lunatic” in a Truth Social post last week.
Trump has since doubled down on the rhetoric.
When asked by NBC’s Kristen Welker if he is a communist, Mamdani succinctly replied on Sunday, “No, I am not.”
“I have already had to start to get used to the fact that the president will talk about how I look, how I sound, where I’m from, who I am, ultimately, because he wants to distract from what I’m fighting for. And I’m fighting for the very working people that he ran a campaign to empower that he has since then betrayed,” he added.
Fox News’ Alec Schemmel contributed to this report.
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