Ken Griffin, speaking at the Milken Institute conference this week, told CNBC’s Sara Eisen that he has watched New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax video three times, that it went from creepy to frightening on repeat viewings, and that the explicit targeting of named individuals with their home addresses displayed has caused him and his New York partners to conclude they need to double down on Miami rather than proceed with the six-billion-dollar development at 350 Park Avenue they had been planning. Griffin cited the murder of the United Healthcare CEO, which occurred just a few blocks from his own residence, as context for why he views rhetoric that targets wealthy individuals by name and address as genuinely dangerous rather than merely obnoxious.
Jeffrey Tucker, founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and senior economics columnist for the Epoch Times, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to discuss the broader implications of that dynamic and the accelerating deterioration of major blue city governance.
Tucker said the pattern Griffin is describing, elected officials using public platforms to target wealthy individuals by name and location while a subset of the population has concluded that political violence against people they deem class enemies is morally justified, represents a genuinely new and frightening development in American political culture. He said the United Healthcare CEO assassination was paradigmatic in that it was celebrated rather than universally condemned by significant portions of the online left, and that the arsonist who started the Pacific Palisades fire was reportedly inspired by that killing. He said he has friends who run podcasts with substantial audiences and who have begun hiring personal security details when they travel, that conferences of moderate size are budgeting for security as routine practice, and that a recent Federalist Society event at UCLA featuring a Department of Homeland Security lawyer was taken over by law students whose ambition is to become officers of the court. Cancel culture, he observed with dry accuracy, was at least civilized in the sense that its primary weapon was public shaming rather than physical harm.
He said the labeling dynamic compounds the danger, because once a national media outlet describes an organization as MAGA-aligned, regardless of whether the characterization is accurate, it effectively makes that organization a legitimate target in the moral universe of people who have persuaded themselves that violence against Trump-aligned figures is justified resistance. He said Brownstone Institute has been described that way despite being genuinely independent and having published substantive criticism of Trump administration policies, and said there is nothing to be done about it once the label is applied.
On the broader question of blue city governance, Tucker said he lives in New England and watches with sadness as a region of genuine historical beauty, cultural richness, and institutional depth drains itself of enterprise energy through relentless tax increases, regulatory expansion, suppression of school choice, and now the kind of explicit class warfare rhetoric Mamdani represents. He said the people running these governments have no incentive to reverse course because the productive citizens who would pay the political price of further deterioration keep leaving, taking their votes with them, while the remaining electorate rewards the same policies cycle after cycle.
Griffin’s comments about Miami reinforced what Tucker called an unmistakable verdict from the market. When Griffin moved Citadel from Chicago, there was internal debate about whether New York or Miami was the right destination. He said the Mamdani video removed any remaining ambiguity about that choice, telling his New York partners in his own words that he wants to be in a state that embraces business, education, personal freedom, and the opportunity to live the American dream. He is now building a larger office tower in Miami than originally planned, while the New York development remains, in his words, a point of discussion rather than a commitment.
Tucker closed with an extended recommendation of Devil Wears Prada 2, which he called an outrageously perfect satire of contemporary corporate life. He said the film captures the modern reality that no company is really run by its nominal leadership anymore but is instead simultaneously governed by three layers of authority: a human resources bureaucracy that has subordinated every professional judgment to liability management, advertisers whose preferences overrule editorial and creative decisions, and the private equity debt holders who actually own the enterprise and whose consultants arrive to impose metrics that have no relationship to the actual work being done. He said the film illuminates the complete absence of culture, beauty, experience, or human dignity in the world of levered capital, and that it inadvertently makes the case that the decadence on display at events like the Met Gala, where a fifteen-million-dollar actress wore a dollar bill over her mouth as commentary on wealth inequality, increasingly resembles the performative excess of the Capitol in the Hunger Games while most of the country struggles to pay its bills.
He said the stock market’s continued ascent in the face of consumer data showing seventy percent of Americans having difficulty paying their bills and underlying economic indicators that do not justify the valuations represents a disconnect that nobody can explain and that carries unpredictable political consequences for whenever the gap between the financial economy and the lived experience of most Americans finally closes.