Gazillionaire Bill Ackman says that he is “gravely concerned” by the possibility of Zohran Mamdani getting elected mayor because rich people are going to flee New York and the city will become “economically unviable.”

Paul Krugman says this kind of talk is nothing more than “hysteria” from “the moguls of madness.”

I know Krugman only won the Nobel Prize in Economics while Ackman is a rich Trump supporter whose major achievement is getting the first black woman president of Harvard fired, but who are you going to believe?

But here’s the really creepy thing about Ackman’s position. According to Forbes:

Hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman said he and his wealthy associates are ready to pour “hundreds of millions of dollars” into the campaign for an aspiring politician looking to position themself on the national stage: “The risk/reward of running for mayor over the next 132 days is extremely compelling as the cost in time and energy is small and the upside is enormous.”

You got that? Ackman and his rich friends are willing to fund anyone they think can bring down Mamdani and the pitch is, hey, with our money, it won’t cost you a lot of time and energy to bring down Mamdani, and maybe you’ll get yourself to be famous enough to use the mayoral campaign as a stepping stone to a higher office.

Just 132 days of cruising around in a fancy car, paid for by us, talking shit about a man who has earned the support of hundreds of thousands of voters with the help of more than 40,000 people knocking on doors and making phone calls and donating their sweat and labor for months, doing, you know, democracy? Low risk, high reward.

Frank Capra couldn’t have scripted a better movie. Zohran is Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur combined. Ackman is Claude Rains, who played the smooth-talking, silver-haired corrupt senator, and Edward Arnold, who played the thug running the Taylor machine, combined.

We know who wins in the movie. It’s up to us to turn fantasy into fact.