A masked woman stands up at a housing event in Zohran Mamdani's New York and declares that "eviction is violence," making the landlord the new enemy and the tenant, the victim. The government, she insists, must step in and make the tenant whole, permanently, because paying rent has apparently become optional and collecting it has become a crime. It is a jarring scene and it is also not a fluke. It is the loudest, ugliest expression of a project that has been building in this country for two decades: convince Americans that ownership is a fantasy, that debt and. . .


