Darrell Castle talks about the 250th Birthday of the U.S. Marine Corps, the NYC mayoral election held last Tuesday, and how a self-described socialist won the election.

Transcription / Notes

THE MARINE CORPS LIVES FOREVER

Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. This is Friday the 7th day of November in the year of our Lord 2025. Next Monday the 10th of November is the 250th anniversary of the birth of the United States Marine Corps, an organization that I served with for four years more than 50 years ago. The title comes from a belief drummed into our heads back then, Marines live and they die but the Marine Corps lives forever.

I am not going to spend this entire report taking you down memory lane because there are just too many bad things to talk about. This Report that I do each week is in a way a journey through the sewers of the world. People often ask me why don’t you ever talk about any good news and my answer is, because I just don’t see any. Often, good news is in the eye of the beholder and it depends, to quote an old saying, on whose ox is being gored. The point is though that someone’s ox is always being gored and politics seems to be the art of making it the other guy’s ox.

I wonder if other people with military experience remember it the same way I do. I remember mostly the pleasant times of friendships with my buddies, of sitting in bars with them all over the world. When I served in the Marine Corps the number of Lieutenants was very small so you could walk into a military bar anywhere in the world and odds are you would see someone you knew. We all had the same thing in common and that gave us purpose and camaraderie. That’s what I remember most of the time and I forget the moments of sheer terror and extreme boredom that went along with it.

I take great pride in my Marine Corps service and in its 250-year existence. I guess its one of those, you had to be there kind of things, but this 250th reminds us that next 4th of July will be the 250th anniversary of the United States. That’s right the Marine Corps existed before the country a fact that was pounded into us by our leaders in the early days. Those are some of the things I remember as I look back over more than 50 years but now it’s time to move back into the real world of today.

  Sometimes even the real world doesn’t seem real or we might say that can’t be real and with AI you never know for sure. We try one fantasy and when it fails we try another. We use one imaginary problem to escape from a different problem that perhaps was not a fantasy but was caused by reliance on a fantasy. For example, last Tuesday New Yorkers tried to escape from one of those fantasies by embracing an even more toxic fantasy. Time will show the results but if history is any indicator the results will be horrendous. That is the result history has given each and every time populations have tried to indulge in the New York fantasy. Yes, the people of New York elected a self-described socialist as their mayor. The race was not very close and Republican Curtis Sliwa did not get enough votes to deny the second-place candidate the race, but Andrew Cuomo lost despite spending more than $65 million. He did not have the message and New Yorkers apparently are tired of the same old corrupt politicians so they voted for a new George Sorus funded candidate.  Yes, George, it seems, owns a lot of American politicians.

I obviously don’t know the mind of each individual New York voter but apparently Mamdani found his appeal among the young and that generation, the one coming behind my daughter voted him into office. That generation knows they are struggling and they know that what they were promised turned out to be a fantasy that could not deliver anything but promises. Go to college using debt to obtain a meaningless 4-year degree and have a pretty good middle class job which doesn’t provide nearly enough to live in this new credit-based economy, especially in an expensive Democrat city.

These young people know that the average age of first-time home buyers is now 38 years old and that is the generation ahead of them not their generation. So, they are struggling and the promises they have relied on, the promises that gave their parents a good life are just not there for them. No matter what happens with interest rates, and despite the efforts of the federal government to stimulate the economy with more debt it just gets worse because debt is the economy and debt is toxic. They turn to a man who is basically foreign to all those promises because he comes from a different place and he is backed and funded from different sources that, in my carefully researched opinion are intentionally destructive.

He has a different answer for them and his solution is very simple. Why has no one before him thought that these problems could be alleviated by just making some things free. City run grocery stores should solve the high cost of food, right. What about the cost of running perhaps the world’s biggest public transportation system, and the cost of using public transportation. Pretty simple, just make it free along with free childcare and we can reduce rent with a rent stabilization freeze. Now, we know from experience that rental real property will not be maintained or upgraded because landlords can’t raise rent to cover it, but oh well.

 How do we pay for all of it. Well, that is simple too we just take the money from the rich and give it to the poor so that makes the new mayor a kind of modern-day Robin Hood. There are problems out there in this economy that will be solved one way or another. If they are not solved through some type of action, they will solve themselves in some version of collapse. The fantasy of everything free will not solve the problems I am talking about because this economy is based on credit and debt and that is getting out of hand. Everything free is the opposite of the correct solution which is to pay down debt or at least do something to stop or even slow down its increase.

I don’t see any evidence of that solution being tried in fact it just gets worse and worse. Delinquencies in debt are rising rapidly, in auto, credit card, and student loan debt. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, delinquencies hit a record $18.4 trillion in the 2nd quarter of 2025. The national debt hit $38 trillion which causes strain across the economy as service on all that debt puts downward pressure on our standard of living. So, those are a few of the problems that confront the general government and now confront the people of New York City.

The new mayor makes it very clear that he wants to be a national figure by declaring war on Donald Trump and by making his successful campaign about Trump. He seems to have convinced his supporters that there is a vast pool of money and they are not getting their share and that is because of greed. If the people who control the vast pool of money were not so greedy and so selfish then they would release the money so the New York voters could have their financial problems relieved by getting things they used to pay for free. All this greed seems to make the new mayor very angry and he finally revealed that anger in his victory speech.

He seems to be an egalitarian as well, this mayor, because he intends to cancel New York’s school programs for gifted students. So, the gifted students will join all the others at the bottom so we can’t have meritocracy whereby a young person is able to achieve all that a free society allows. Instead, your gifted child will be confined with all the non-gifted ones hopefully in the middle, but more likely at the bottom. If that is your message, Mr. or Ms. politician, apparently those at the bottom and in the middle will support you in large numbers.

There is a possibility that this socialist victory in New York City will turn out to be a positive for Republicans nationwide. The new mayor sees himself as a national figure as I said and that might not be such a bad thing. The Democrat victories which seem so significant are concentrated along the coasts and in the large Democrat cities. In other words, this self-described socialist mayor obviously made significant inroads with his audience and his message resonated with them. On the other hand, it’s the same audience and doesn’t indicate any new trend. This new mayor then, is the new face of the Democrat Party and we will see how that plays outside the coastal Democrat strongholds.

The elite of the current Democrat Party don’t want this socialist as their new face, but he claims it anyway so they spend time distancing themselves from him after he won. The Republicans should learn from this because the message is that people are concerned about bread-and-butter issues, literally. Sometimes the elite in Washington seem unable to relate to ordinary people who care more about the cost of ground beef than what new missile the Chinese are testing. The government shutdown which is interfering with food stamps is a good example. People are dependent on them and can’t seem to live without them since most of their lives have been spent eating food courtesy of other taxpayers.

I’m just saying that the current officers of our government in Washington have not taken advantage of what the Democrats have done. My message might be, they admit they have forced this government shutdown to obtain political leverage so they get their leverage and you don’t get food. The people on the other side of the politics of the new mayor need to understand that there are legitimate reasons why people voted for him and those reasons should be addressed. It’s not much different from when Trump was elected and instead of asking why, and what are the voters concerned about, Democrats developed only one message. Trump is bad, he’s a racist, he’s a fascist and other than that we have nothing to say. So, the millions who voted for him have no concerns worthy of being addressed just like our new mayor. If Republicans want to succeed perhaps they should find someone capable of addressing and refuting his policies.

Finally, folks are the voters who elected Donald Trump irredeemable fascists whose views are not worthy of consideration. Are the voters who elected Mamdani crazy Neo-Marxists who represent a coming insane generation and are therefore too crazy to hold serious opinions. No to each question, but I do predict the election of the new mayor will end in socialist disaster and the slide into the abyss of our once greatest city will accelerate. However, the future looks bright for real estate agents in Florida and Texas.

At least that’s the way I see it,

Until next time folks,

This is Darrell Castle,

Thanks for listening.