The People's Guide to Mamdani, Part One

Who he is and where he comes from

In June, Zohran Kwame Mamdani won the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York, leaving America one election away from placing a literal socialist who condones Islamic terrorism in charge of its largest city. And yet remarkably, not even his political enemies on the right seem to understand why this is a problem.

It’s not, as some say, because Mamdani is Muslim. Nor, as others claim, because he’s an African immigrant. If you truly consider Mamdani a threat, bigotry of this nature is frustrating to witness because it only gifts him the luxury of dismissing his critics as racists, as indeed a disturbing number of them so clearly are, while dragging the conversation away from the specific harms he’s likely to inflict. End Wokeness, for example, an account with 3.7 million followers on X, recently wrote that New York is “fcked” because its next mayor will be a “radical Muslim socialist from Africa who only got citizenship 7 years ago.”

But what’s most upsetting about this accusation is the thought that it might hold currency with a modern American audience or, for that matter, a non-trivial number of people anywhere on the internet because not only is being an African Muslim not a strike against you, but getting citizenship almost a decade ago should be a mark in your favor. Indeed, the only concerning aspect of the allegation is that he’s a “radical Muslim socialist,” although even this needs unpacking because just as critics fault him simply for being Muslim, they also fault him simply for being a democratic socialist, and that’s not the problem. Bernie Sanders is a democratic socialist yet Vermont has the nation’s highest quality of life, third-lowest crime rate, highest electoral integrity, and most craft breweries. Plus, Sanders is consistently ranked the most popular senator in America. Though I admit, “highest quality of life” and “most craft breweries” is technically listing the same thing twice.

So yes, a lot of the negative things being said about this candidate are ignorant or bigoted, leaving open the question of just how concerned we should actually be with the prospect of Mayor Mamdani. And the answer is, we should be extremely worried. But at the same time, America would be a better country if more political candidates took a page from his playbook. Or rather, his manifesto.

The Mamdani Manifesto

In order to understand Mamdani, we have to take a careful look at where he comes from and who his parents are. But first, let’s address the allegation that he’s “a literal socialist who condones Islamic terrorism.”

In 2021, Mamdani spoke at a conference for the Young Democratic Socialists of America, in which he discussed the basic tenets of the party, but emphasized that in addition to short-term political goals, the DSA has a broader vision. “It is socialism that we are fighting for,” he said, describing it as “a journey that should begin as soon as possible for every single person in this country — and in this world.” He added that certain socialist ideas, such as canceling student debt, already enjoy broad support in America, “but then there are also other issues that we firmly believe in, whether it’s BDS or whether it’s the end goal of seizing the means of production, where we do not have the same level of support at this very moment.”

The term BDS refers to the Palestinian movement to boycott, divestment from, and sanction Israel, founded by a Palestinian activist who clearly wants nothing to do with Israel yet married an Israeli, immediately moved there, and got his degree from Tel Aviv University. As for “seize the means of production,” this is a Marxist expression that originally referred to workers taking control of oppressive factories and farms. Of course, the means of production today include aerospace factories, semiconductor plants, and corporate gas pipelines. So instead of farmers running a farm, we’re talking about the far less realistic scenario of welders running an undersea pipeline.

But if Mamdani’s goal is the expropriation of private assets such as factories and farms for collective or state ownership, then he isn’t talking about the democratic socialism that Sanders wants — the kind that produces Spotify, H&M, IKEA, and all the other modern marvels of Scandinavian life, never mind the fact that Nordic countries aren’t actually socialist. Rather, he wants America to belong to a much smaller club, given the fact that only eight countries have ever fully seized the means of production for more than a few months: the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, Ethiopia under the Derg, and Albania under the dictator Enver Hoxha.

I don’t want to push this point too hard when

Olivia Reingold

at

The Free Press

has already covered it better than anyone, having read all 16,100 of Mamadani’s tweets in a piece titled after one of his posts that pretty much says it all, “Capitalism Is Theft.” Here’s a selection from the opening passage:

In tweet after tweet, he calls for the end of the free market, for defunding the police, and for dismantling the prison system, which he describes as the “carceral state.” He champions communism (at least in one jokey photo), stans anti-Israel activist Linda Sarsour, calls cops “haram” (the Arabic term for forbidden under Islamic law), and insists that New York should look more like socialist Vienna.

Given all this, calling him a socialist might be unfair because the evidence is starting to suggest that’s he actually a communist who simply pretends to be a democratic socialist because he knows it’s more politically palatable to New York voters. He also appears to be dancing the same little dance when it comes to his Islamic faith, presenting himself as a fun-loving moderate. So then, what about the claim that Mamdani condones terrorism? Here’s

Jonathan Chait

on the matter:

Zohran Mamdani’s opponents paint him as a dangerous radical. The young, socialistic candidate for New York City mayor wishes to dispel that perception—in some ways. Last week, he appeared on a podcast with The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, a former Republican and the sort of moderate Mamdani knows he needs to win over, or at least neutralize, if he is to carry this week’s Democratic primary. As Miller presented a litany of concerns about Mamdani’s plans to freeze stabilized-housing rent, establish city-run groceries, and other offenses against Econ 101, the candidate expressed a willingness to hinge his policies on outcomes and abandon his plans if they failed.

But when Miller asked Mamdani about the pro-Palestine slogan “Globalize the intifada,” the candidate’s pragmatism and intellectual humility evaporated. “To me, ultimately, what I hear in so many is a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights,” he said.

Mamdani may sincerely believe this, as do some of his supporters. But he then delved into the semantics of intifada, citing the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s use of the word as the translation of “uprising” in an Arabic version of an article the museum published about the Warsaw Ghetto. This comparison, to a Jewish armed rebellion against the Nazis, hardly dispels concern about the incendiary implications of the slogan. If the intifada is akin to the ghetto uprising, then it is a call for violence. If its theater of operations is global, then it is necessarily directed against civilians. Days before the Democratic primary, when Mamdani appeared to be gaining momentum, the controversy about his comments on Miller’s show dragged the race’s focus back to the Middle East, a subject that Mamdani has not emphasized in his campaign. Yet this debate has largely missed the significance. What makes the slogan so disturbing in an American context is not the intifada bit. It’s the globalize part.

The phrase “globalize the intifada” refers to the Palestinian intifada, or “uprising,” against Israel. The First Intifada, from 1987 to 1993, began when an Israeli trucker crashed into several parked cars, killing four Palestinian workers. Palestinians, who claimed the crash was a deliberate attack, protested, rioted, barricaded the streets, threw stones, burned tires, and flung petrol bombs at Israelis. The Second Intifada, from 2000 to 2005, began when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem. Though his visit was peaceful, Palestinians at the Temple Mount threw stones the following day over the Western Wall in an attempt to murder Jewish worshippers. Israeli forces fired tear gas and rubber bullets at the mob. Palestinians rioted, shot people, fired rockets into Israeli towns, carried out suicide bombs on buses, in cafes, in nightclubs, at markets, and so on.

What does the term mean today? It’s kinda complicated. The original meaning of intifada is “violent uprising” but, like jihad, the word is sometimes used in a metaphorical sense. In a piece titled, “In the face of genocide, the intifada must be globalized,” writers for the Social Science for Humanitarian Action Platform define intifada in BDS terms, urging readers to pursue a kind of moral intifada against Israel through boycotts and sanctions. Other sources speak of pursuing an “intellectual intifada.” And yet, the Austria-based Ramadan News Network described the Capital Jewish Museum shooting in May, in which a pro-Palestinian terrorist murdered a young couple, and which I wrote about here, as a “tangible embodiment of ‘globalizing the intifada’.”

So yes, it’s a complicated term in the sense that it gets used in a variety of ways, some of them horrifically offensive, others that carry a positive connotation. But that’s also true of the word nigger, and yet you don’t find politicians throwing that word around because the moral analysis around using such terms is just not that fucking hard. No matter how many Muslims use the phrase in a non-genocidal sense, that does not remove the original connotation. Add to this the fact that it matters who is saying the words. Whether you are white or black should impact how and when you utter a slur against black people that is dripping with the blood and history of slavery in America, or whether you should choose to ever do so at all. Similarly, when it comes to terms like from the river to the sea or globalize the intifada, it actually matters if the speaker is a Christian, a Jew, or a radical leftist Muslim. And the reason that it matters is because it not only carries different connotations as a result, but also different denotations within these groups, meaning that when a woke socialist Muslim says from the river to the sea, they either don’t know what river or what sea, as my friend

Konstantin Kisin

famously highlighted, or they do know and they mean it and are using it as code.

If you don’t already know the word, you may want to stick the term taqiyyah in your back pocket for future reference. This is the concept in Islam of concealing your true beliefs, often to avoid persecution but also, some would argue, to incept and subvert a non-Muslim society. Or as the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping once said, 韬光养晦 tāo guāng yǎng huì, which is popularly translated as, “Hide your strength, bide your time.” But a more literal, and more accurate, translation would be, “Hide your light, nurture it in darkness.”

So Mamdani is being profoundly dishonest, or more likely he is simply profoundly obtuse, pretending that the phrase is nothing more than an expression of human rights without uttering so much as a word of acknowledgment about the primary meaning of the term. And yet, of course, we can rest assured that he knows better than to say a black woman is “sassy” or that a black man is “articulate” or that a trans woman is a “he,” and we can rest just as comfortably assured that the reason he wouldn’t misgender a trans person is because he probably considers it a kind of violence. But unlike an intifada, that would be just words.

What makes this scandalous remark even worse is the fact that the progressive left constantly tells us we should not, for example, use the word nigger because of its violent history and because black people find it so offensive and hurtful. This is such an important formula in progressive moral reasoning that situations are often shoe-horned into this structure. For example, rather than building an argument against misgendering trans people based on respect, progressives instead argue that misgendering is wrong because of its violent history and because trans individuals find it so offensive and hurtful. Yet when it comes to Jews and the phrase globalize the intifada, this reasoning is nowhere to be found. And that’s not an accident.

Mamdani may be running on a woke socialist platform, but he’s riding a wave of anti-Israel as well as antisemitic sentiment, all while defending wink-wink genocidal rhetoric about Jews, as well as an over-correction to Trump’s re-election and the general appeal among certain left-wing voters of having a mayor whose primary qualification is that he’s brown. Apparently, woke New Yorkers are so thrilled with the notion of a brown pro-Palestine socialist mayor that they’re willing to completely overlook his rather significant flaws, and I’m speaking here of the kind of flaws that the left counts as a cancellable offense. Yes, the radical left, notoriously quick to cancel or exile anyone who fails its purity tests, is seemingly just okay now with Jewface. As

Olivia Reingold

writes:

Mamdani is also facing new questions about a post on his account on X from last December. He wished his followers a “Happy 3rd night of Hanukkah from Astoria and Long Island City” by posting a video of Indian performers covering the holiday tune “Hey Hanukkah.” In the clip, four bearded men—two of whom wore curly-haired wigs and were identified in the video as the Geeta Brothers—sing in Punjabi accents while spinning dreidels.

But it gets so much worse, because not only is Mamdani guilty of mocking Jewish culture, he’s also a complete hypocrite. Reingold continues:

Online commenters were quick to point out that Mamdani’s post seemed to betray his own stance against cultural appropriation. In 2014, he hosted an event on the appropriation of Native American culture as a student at Bowdoin, an elite private institution that costs more than $93,000 a year to attend. At the event, one student admitted to her “hurtful” decision to wear Native American garb for Halloween, according to the college newspaper. Since then, Mamdani has continued to hammer against cultural appropriation, posting to X in 2021 that his “culture is not a costume.”

The problem, then, is not so much that Mamdani is a socialist, but that he is to socialism what the Hawk Tuah Girl is to feminism. Bernie is the Old Guard revolutionary grandpa who wants Scandinavian-style social democracy, while Mamdani is the millennial vanguard TikTok theater kid who’s more fluent in meme culture than New York politics. He’s pro-BLM riots, pro-trans, pro-Palestine, pro-police abolitionism, and pro-DEI. In short, he’s woke as fuck. And his social justice stupidity extends to pledging $65 million for trans healthcare, and not only being pro-BLM, but openly in favor of the George Floyd riots, commenting on businesses being burned in the Minneapolis riots:

While politicians & pundits condemn the uprising in Minneapolis from TV studios thousands of miles away, those at the center of it - even those who are hurting - understand why it’s happening.

And why it has to happen.

Black + brown solidarity will overcome white supremacy.

By the time Mamdani posted this, the city of Minneapolis had suffered an estimated $500 million of damages to 1,500 properties, 604 arrests, 164 arson attacks, and two riot-related deaths. Even Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who refuses to cooperate with what he calls the “modern-day Gestapo” that is ICE, finally decided to drop the hammer on these animals by activating the National Guard in the largest deployment since World War II. But Mamdani doesn’t care, because he knows posts like the one above will garner tons of likes. Even his socialism feels like a painted-on, half-baked, virtue-signal. As John McWhorter recently remarked, “It’s dorm-room socialism. Because he’s 7.”

The mother

His mother, the filmmaker Mira Nair, grew up in a Hindu family in Odisha, Eastern India, the daughter of a government officer for the Indian Administrative Service, which is one of the most prestigious and competitive civil services in India. Indeed, IAS officers generally belong to the educated elite or upper-middle class and tend to move in influential social circles among senior bureaucrats and cultural tastemakers.

As the daughter of an IAS officer, Nair grew up as a member of India’s elite, moved to America, went to Harvard, studied sociology and environmental film, married a white man, and started making a series of documentary films — one about Indians on the streets of Old Delhi, one about an Indian newspaper dealer in the New York subways, one about female strippers in Mumbai, and one about laughter yoga.

During this time, she married her producer, the Jewish photographer Mitch Epstein, who had studied under Garry Winogrand, the greatest American street photographer of all time, and you can clearly see Winogrand’s influence on Epstein’s work. Winogrand was known for capturing spontaneous moments of American street life. His frames that were famously busy, layered, full of visual surprises at the margins, and narratively open-ended or incomplete. Epstein was more composed in style, but he hit all the major marks, and you can see his Winograndian fingerprints all over Nair’s work. The only difference is, instead of the American social landscape, Epstein and Nair give us the Indian social landscape. And indeed, her work is at its best when she is exploring Indian and Indian-American identity.

Then she started making feature films. In 1983, she made, and Epstein co-produced, one of my favorite Indian films, Salaam Bombay!, about children in the slums of Mumbai, which won the prestigious Caméra d’Or at Cannes and received an Oscar nomination for best foreign film. But by 1987, the couple divorced. Epstein later blamed racism. Her 2001 film Monsoon Wedding took home the Golden Lion, the highest prize at the Venice Film Festival and one of the highest honors in cinema. The film had arthouse depth and mainstream appeal, paving the way for works such as Crazy Rich Asians with its family drama and opulent wedding as cultural spectacle.

In 2004, she directed an adaptation of Vanity Fair, which was well-reviewed but a flop, followed by an adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, a lousy Amelia Earhart biopic, and an awful adaptation The Reluctant Fundamentalist. In 2016, she made a Disney movie titled Queen of Katwe, about the Ugandan chess prodigy Phiona Mutesi, who only has a peak Elo rating of 1774 but all the top Africa chess players are white males like Bassem Amin, who has a peak Elo of 2633 or Ahmed Adly at 2640. The highest ranked female African player is Shrook Wafa at 2203 and her sister Shahenda Wafa at 2175, but they’re no black. Jesse Nikki February, what a great name, has a rating of 2052, but she’s a white South African. Tuduetso Sabure has a rating of 2075 and is a black African grandmaster.

In the decade since her Disney flop, she had completed two projects: a British miniseries based on Vikram Seth’s novel A Suitable Boy, to mixed reviews, and one episode of the American TV series National Treasure: Edge of History, based on the National Treasure film series starring Nicholas Cage. The only other thing I would mention here is that she does have a history of making mildly off-putting remarks about white people. For instance, when asked why her film Mississippi Masala with Denzel Washington had no white people in it, she said, “Sure, all the waiters in the film could be white,” and laughed.

The father

In 1991, a few years after leaving Epstein, Nair married Mahmood Mamdani, the son of Gujarati Muslims born in present-day Tanzania, who himself grew up in Kampala, Uganda. Thanks to the Kennedy Airlift, a U.S.-funded scholarship program that brought hundreds of East Africans to study in the United States and Canada between 1959 and 1963, Mamdani was one of 26 Ugandan students selected. He earned a degree in political science from the University of Pittsburgh.

In March 1965, he took a bus from Pittsburgh to Montgomery, Alabama, where he took part in a civil rights march, was jailed, and later visited by the FBI. He earned his master’s in political science from Tufts University and obtained his doctorate from Harvard where he wrote in his thesis that the coup of Idi Amin, the genocidal psychopath who kept his enemies heads in his freezer and chopped up his own girlfriends, “represented the failure of the governing bureaucracy to transform itself into a bureaucratic petty bourgeoisie.” If you didn’t recognize it, that’s the roughly same logic Hamas supporters use to blame Israel for October 7. It’s not the brutal, attacking force that is to blame. They are merely responding to their own oppression. Rather, the people they slaughtered are to blame for not having adequately adjusted their society, which usually means becoming more socialist. Additionally, he refers to peasants as “kulaks,” the old Soviet slur for wealthy peasants, and uses the word “comrade” at least twice a page. He also describes World War II as “the second imperialist war.” To repeat, he sees the West as the bad guys in World War II.

Unsurprisingly, Mamdani isn’t very smart either. When experts in related fields have taken a look at his work, let’s just say they haven't been very impressed. In 2018, for example, Anthony James Joes, professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and the director of its international relations program, had this to say in his crushing review of Mamdani’s thesis:

The opacity of the price is matched by the paucity of relevant data. Nor are key terms defined. The book calls to mind nothing so much as that musty smell arising when one opens those old works from the 1930s that “analyze” world events from the official Stalinist viewpoint. Mamdani has given us a Marxist study of Ugandan politics, but not a good Marxist study. His “objective historical analysis” is neither very objective, historical, nor analytical.

In short, Mamdani believes we must think of ourselves not as Catholics or Italians, but primarily in economic terms, and we must choose the correct terms, and of course, these terms are drawn from Marxist theory, and each class must agree on their group’s ends, as a group. So if you are black, you need to think like a black person and act like a black person. This is how you end up with politicians saying ignorant things about how if you don’t vote for them, you’re not really black. This is also how you end up with the idiotic practice of capitalizing “Black,” because it is treated as a political identity rather than a physical trait like skin color. In other words, Mamdani took the Indian caste system and combined it with Marxism. That’s like taking shit, realizing it’s not fit for consumption, and so mixing it with puke.

When the Soviet-allied Idi Amin rose to power, Mamdani happily took a teaching assistant role at Makerere University in Kampala. But he was expelled later that year by Amin himself due to his ethnicity. Before the year was out, Mamdani had fled as a refugee to Britain. He later taught at universities in Tanzania and South Africa.

But it gets even worse than this. Because he has embraced both caste thinking and Marxism, he views everything in terms of identity groups, even far more deeply than a woke American can conceive. Here is Mamdani speaking at a panel discussion:

When the Allies defeated the Nazis and went into Eastern Europe, they began to create pure nations, to ethnically cleanse Eastern Europe of Germans and move them back into Germany. One crime doesn’t wipe out another. A Christian nation-state decides to cleanse it of all religious minorities, Jews and Muslims particular, and at the same time launches a colonization experiment — the discovery of the Americas. I argue that nationalism and colonialism are not two different things. America is the genesis of what we call settler-colonialism and the American model was exported all around the world. In America, you have two kind of minorities that have run the course of the history of the modern America state — the American Indian and the African American. Each has a different significance for our contemporary era. The American Indians were the people on that land when the settlers conquered it. First, let’s try to eliminate as many Indians as possible. This was the first record genocide in modern history. Then with the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln generalized the solution of reservations. They herded American Indians into separate territories. For the Nazis, this was the inspiration.

Let’s clear up some of his lies. The Allies political project was never to turn Germany in to a pure nation, nor did the Allies begin to create pure nations after the war, nor did the Allies ethnically cleanse Germans back into postwar Germany. Rather, at the 1945 Potsdam Conference, the Allies authorized the “orderly and humane” transfer of millions of ethnic Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary back to their homeland. The main initiators of these expulsions were the local governments of those countries, who had suffered brutal Nazi occupation and wanted security from future German claims of revanchism by creating ethnic homogenization to avoid the kinds of tensions Hitler had exploited. Additionally, Poland needed land for all the Poles displaced from the east when the USSR annexed it. So the Allies did not seek to create racially pure nations. Rather, those nations sought to remove the threat, didn’t bother to separate good from bad Germans, and the Allies signed off on it.

He believes “nationalism and colonialism are not two different things” yet he also supports Palestinian nationalism without considering it colonialism even though Palestinians are originally Arabs who colonized the Jewish region known as Palestine.

In other words, to paraphrase a bitter rant I saw on X, Mamdani’s dad had his assets seized and was deported from an African nation for not being black. He came to the United States where he was able to become a citizen, live freely, and teach at a prestigious Ivy League university. Then, he used his elite social position to lecture American students about how the U.S. is evil and racist.

Okay, that’s about enough on Mamadani’s parents. Next, we’ll look at his plans for a revolution in New York and ask, to quote Vladimir Lenin, what is to be done?