adminNew York Democrats are trying to pull a conservative news outlet off the screens in the back of taxis, and patriotic Americans should be alarmed. Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal has publicly urged Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Taxi and Limousine Commission to force Curb to drop Newsmax from Taxi TV, calling the network “not a credible news source.” This is raw political pressure to silence a viewpoint that millions of Americans choose to watch.
This demand reeks of the same cancel-culture playbook we’ve seen time and again: when the left cannot beat ideas in the marketplace, they use government to erase them. Curb and the TLC have made clear that the Taxi TV content is reviewed for compliance, that riders can mute or turn screens off, and that the programming running in taxis is standard news segments rather than opinion programming. If the city starts dictating which lawful newsrooms may reach passengers, it isn’t just Newsmax on the chopping block — it’s freedom itself.
Make no mistake, this isn’t a small local squabble; Curb’s platform reaches roughly 15,000 screens nationwide and about 9,000 here in New York City, which means political operatives want to control millions of impressions. Newsmax’s one-minute updates are short, straightforward news bites that travelers can opt into or ignore, and yet elected officials are demanding they be censored. That’s not protecting the public from “misinformation,” it’s protecting their own echo chamber.
Mayor Mamdani, who was sworn in on January 1, 2026, campaigned with progressive and socialist backers and now faces a test of whether he will defend basic free-speech principles. The borough president’s letter, sent on January 21, asks the mayor to suspend Curb’s partnership unless the company caves to political pressure — a dangerous precedent for every vendor and small business operating under city permits. If Mamdani allows this, he will have signaled that his administration sees political dissent as a regulatory problem to be quelled rather than a healthy part of civic life.
Conservative lawmakers and local riders are already pushing back, correctly calling this attempt what it is: censorship and viewpoint discrimination. Elected Republicans like Rep. Nicole Malliotakis and civic activists have slammed the move as overreach, noting that if a rider doesn’t want to watch a conservative outlet they can simply turn the screen off — that decision should belong to consumers, not to politicians with vendettas. New Yorkers who value liberty should stand with them and reject any official effort to pick winners and losers in the media landscape.
City Hall and Curb must refuse to become instruments of political purges, and every New Yorker who believes in free speech should make their voices heard. Demand that the TLC enforce neutral standards, not partisan litmus tests, and remind elected officials that the right response to disagreeable viewpoints is more speech, not silencing. The road from banning a network in taxi cabs to banning dissent everywhere is short — and conservatives will not stand by while our freedoms are quietly stripped away.
