Sharp Left Turn

America's Big Apple spoils in a most disturbing manner

Happy November, everyone!

This week, as North America was plunged into an early Arctic blast, Middle Tennessee was treated to a rare November snow flurry, an unwelcome reminder that winter is indeed coming.

Equally frigid was the message sent last week by the voters of New York City. After years of struggling with astronomical and seemingly extortionate housing and transportation costs, New York voters, led by the city’s disaffected youth, made a leap into the unknown by electing Zohran Mamdani, a formerly unknown Democratic Socialist New York State Assemblyman to the office of Mayor of the world’s economic and financial capital. What made Mamdani’s election so shocking was his political stance that only a decade ago was too far-left for a country whose identity was for decades intertwined with anti-communism in a city whose identity is likewise intertwined with global capitalism. For those of us concerned with the economic success and public safety of our financial capital, this development is unsettling at best.

The Big Apple has gone rotten.

First, a little introduction to the man only three years older than this writer. Zohran Mamdani was born in Kampala, the capital of the African nation of Uganda to ethnic South Asian parents. His father, Mahmood Mamdani, was a leftist academic expert in postcolonialism born in Mumbai. Zohran’s middle name, Kwame, was a tribute to Ghanian socialist Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana who was ousted in a military coup in 1966. The family relocated to New York when Zohran was seven, and the family settled in Morningside Heights, home to that now infamous institution known as Columbia University. Instead of Columbia, Mamdani earned his degree in Africana Studies (yes, somehow that degree exists) from Bowdoin College in Maine in 2014, where he founded the Bowdoin chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and regularly agitated the school to boycott and divest from Israel.

After becoming ever more involved in his political activism, Mamdani was elected to the New York State Assembly in 2020 representing the Queens district of Astoria. Astoria, the childhood home of entertainment icons Tony Bennett and Christohper Walken as well as fireman Bob Beckwith, known for standing next to President George. W Bush in the ruins of the World Trade Center, has been transformed into a world tour of ethnicities, especially from the Middle East. When he announced his campaign for mayor last year, Mamdani was considered a long-shot. Instead of Mamdani, the overwhelming favorite appeared to be controversial former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, a man who resigned in disgrace in 2021 yet was attempting what would have been one of the most spectacular political comebacks of all time. Of course, neither Cuomo nor the pundits had any idea of the political earthquake that was about to rock The Big Apple.

What was once Cuomo’s race to lose turned into a massive political upset when Mamdani, consistently trailing in the polls, came out on top in the primary election in June. From then on, Mamdani led every single poll, and ultimately triumphed again with more than one million votes, an outright majority and breaking records in New York’s typically low-turnout municipal elections. Mamdani’s victory was a clear indication of the shifting winds of urban politics in the United States. While large cities like New York, Chicago, and Boston have for generations been governed by the traditional machine and retail politics embodied by Andrew Cuomo, a new generation of radical, left-wing community activists like Mamdani and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson have taken their place. In New York’s case, how did Mamdani, such a radical outsider, pull off such a spectacular upset against the ultimate insider? The answer is simply one word: housing.

If one looks at the demographic statistics, there was little difference between how New Yorkers voted by race and income. Instead, the strongest correlation was age: while Cuomo won 57% of New Yorkers 65 and older, Mamdani achieved an astonishing 75% of the vote among those under 30. And I get it. If you’re a young person trying to survive in one of the most expensive cities on Planet Earth, of course you’re going to be attracted by utopian promises of rent control, free public buses, free childcare, and state-subsidized grocery stores. For these Gen Zers, most of which were born outside of New York City or even have a foreign family background, this platform is hardly subversive and dangerous— it’s survival. When the median rent of a one-bedroom apartment is $4,400 per month, compared to Dallas’ $1,450, Nashville’s $1,580, or even pricey San Francisco’s $3,510, no wonder young people, locked out of homes their parents could once afford, will grasp for anything to ease the burden, even a radical socialist like Zohran Mamdani.

Mamdani’s ideology has often been misinterpreted by outside observers. Some will say he’s a communist in the direct school of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. Others, more implausibly, will say he’s secretly an Islamist, despite his Syrian artist wife who has certainly never covered her head in her life and his openly pro-transgender ideas. While not fitting in neatly with these well-known subversive philosophies, there are plenty of red flags among Mamdani’s associates. The most glaring to me is the mayor-elect’s association with Siraj Wahhaj, a US-born, Brooklyn-based imam declared an “unindicted co-conspirator” of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Wahhaj was a man who not only defended the terrorists behind the attack, but he also called the FBI and CIA the “real terrorists” and even went so far as to support a “non-violent” jihad in the city of New York. That Wahhaj is even a free man, let alone posing for pictures with the next Mayor of The Big Apple is appalling. No decent individual should have anything to do with Siraj Wahhaj.

No, the correct diagnosis of Mamdani’s worldview is a phenomenon I would call Third-Worldism. Originated shortly after World War II by Afro-Frenchman Frantz Fanon and manifested by the Algerian War of Independence, as well as by Egyptian strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Palestinian cause, Third-Worldism, also known as anti-colonialism, is a dogmatic anti-Western ideology who rejected both the West as well as Soviet Communism. The goal of modern anti-colonialism is total economic and political liberation from oppression of former colonies in the so-called Global South, and one of its central tenets has always been a hatred of the US and Israel. While it appeared that anti-colonialism faded away after the end of the Cold War, the Palestinian cause, and the proliferation of anti-colonial academics like Mahmood Mamdani on university campuses around the world kept it alive. For people like his son Zohran, despicable individuals like Siraj Wahhaj are not terrorists who seek to dismantle all that is good about Western Civilization, they are fellow soldiers in the quest to liberate the oppressed from fundamentally unjust systems.

No wonder Zohran Mamdani was so popular among New York City’s ever-growing foreign-born, Non-Western population. Differences of opinion regarding homosexuals are a mere footnote in the greater mission of global liberation.

Since Zohran Mamdani became the favorite and ultimately, and unfortunately, won the New York City Mayoral election, numerous AI images have appeared on social media depicting a dystopian New York City where homosexuals are thrown off roofs, Jews are persecuted, and even the Statue of Liberty has her face concealed under a burqa. Even though I deeply disagree with everything Zohran Mamdani represents and promotes, this sort of nightmare future is not likely to happen. For one, Mamdani has so little administrative experience, preferring activism, that it seems unlikely that the mayor-elect will build a strong team dedicated to implementing a revolutionary program. Furthermore, the mayor will also be constrained by the State of New York, especially on the tax front, as well as the Trump Administration. In the case of the latter, a confrontation, fireworks and all, is inevitable. For the former, Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul, if only to save her own skin lest wealthy New Yorkers move elsewhere, will likely block attempts to “soak the rich.”

After all, if the biggest taxpayers leave The Big Apple, who’s going to pay for all those utopian promises? Crickets.

Even if those AI-fueled Middle Eastern dystopias never come to pass, the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of America’s largest city and financial capital is a highly disturbing development. His resume shows a man deeply committed towards a radical worldview few Americans, even his own supporters, understand in full— a philosophy that in my opinion is hostile to the very foundations of Western Civilization. Such is the price to be paid for the anger and desperation of New York’s aggrieved and marginalized. And I have to admit, less than a quarter-century after the epoch-defining September 11 Attacks, to see the very city so brazenly attacked elect a mayor with sympathies towards the attackers is a brazen slap in the face to all those who paid the ultimate price on most terrible day.