Zohran Mamdani’s Rise Spotlights Ugly Right and Left-Wing Racial Politics
AP Photo/Heather Khalifa
Zohran Mamdani is the prohibitive frontrunner in New York City’s mayoral race, and his rise has kick-started national conversations about policy, how to win elections in the digital age, and the state of America’s cities.
It has also shone a spotlight on increasingly common forms of right and left-wing racial politics.
In the worst corners of the Right, it was, as a matter of course, Mamdani’s Muslim faith that inspired the bile.
“24 years ago a group of Muslims killed 2,753 people on 9/11,” observed Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk. “Now a Muslim Socialist is on pace to run New York City.”
“Zohran ‘little muhammad’ Mamdani is an antisemitic, socialist, communist who will destroy the great City of New York. He needs to be DEPORTED. Which is why I am calling for him to be subject to denaturalization proceedings,” tweeted Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) before touting a letter addressed to Attorney General Pam Bondi calling for the same.
And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) posted a picture of the Statue of Liberty clad in a burqa.
These weren’t critiques of Mamdani’s ideas, rhetoric, or even radical Islam; they were vitriolic attacks that targeted him on the basis of his identity and his identity alone. Worse yet, they were not so much dog whistles as they were bites out of a whale in shark-infested territory — evil designed to inspire more evil.
Sadly, though, Mamdani himself has embraced his own brand of morally backwards racial politics.
On his official campaign website, the young upstart boasts about his plan to “Stop the Squeeze on NYC Homeowners,” and address a “deeply inequitable system, using the full power of the mayor’s office to both address the system directly and working with legislators at the state level to win necessary reforms.”
And how, pray tell, would he do that? By “shift[ing] the tax burden from overtaxed homeowners in the outer boroughs to more expensive homes in richer and whiter neighborhoods.”
Mamdani goes on to identify a point of legitimate debate: assessment levels in the city can’t increase by more than 6% per year or over 20% over a five-year period. There are doubtlessly many reasonable arguments to be made for Mamdani’s position.
So why did he choose to tout the one about taxing “whiter neighborhoods” at higher rates? Is that really the principal benefit of his proposal? Does Mamdani believe that his supporters will view it as such? Is he right about that?
In any case, it doesn’t speak well of the candidate that he would resort to such a tactic. And it speaks even more poorly of his opinion of his target audience. Are they really so resentfully simple that they would be enticed by the promise of racial punishment?
Mamdani’s fervent embrace of radical progressive racial orthodoxy is also observable in his approach toward the world’s only Jewish majority state. He has gone to bat for the chant “Globalize the intifada!” — a rather cut-and-dried glorification of waves of anti-Israel terrorist attacks — said he would arrest the Israeli prime minister if he visited the city, and dodged questions about whether Israel should exist as a Jewish state, like they’re bullets.
Of note: Mamdani’s father, a professor at Columbia University, has stated outright that it ought not exist as such, and his mother, a filmmaker, signed an open letter calling on the Israeli actress Gal Gadot to be uninvited from this year’s Oscars and refused to attend an Israeli film festival.
A totalizing worldview that holds that certain disfavored groups — Whites, “Zionist” Jews, etc. should be punished — would appear to run in the family. It’s the worst kind of crazy, campus ideology brought to life in the form of a man poised to move into Gracie Mansion sooner rather than later.
If there’s a silver lining to any of this, it’s that neither Mamdani’s advocates nor his detractors can deny the ugly elements of their coalition staring back at them in the mirror.
God willing, they’ll be compelled to reject them.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
