When Reihan Salam was 19, someone held a knife to his throat in front of his parents’ house in Brooklyn’s Kensington neighborhood. “The mugger stole my Harvard library card, an issue of Granta, and approximately $11,” he recalls. The police—“incredible, compassionate, competent”—were there within minutes. “There wasn’t much they could do, but they were responsive, and reassuring.”
It was a “defining experience” for Mr. Salam, now 46: “It’s not quite right to say I was mugged by reality. I wasn’t a bleeding-heart liberal before it happened. But it certainly made me recoil from the antipolice left.” It made him aware of “the fragility of civilized life” and inspired “gratitude for the decency and work ethic of the police.”
Since 2019 Mr. Salam has been president of the Manhattan Institute, America’s pre-eminent free-market think tank that specializes in urban policy. The institute once had insider cachet as the brain trust for Mayor Rudy Giuliani (1994-2001). Today, with socialist Zohran Mamdani in Gracie Mansion, it is on the front line of opposition, battling to counter what Mr. Salam calls the mayor’s “punitive egalitarianism.”