Zohran Mamdani

Zohran Mamdani’s presumptive victory will make history: if elected in November, he will become New York’s first Muslim and first Indian-American mayor. Powering his win in the Democratic primaries was a massive surge of young, urban, progressive voters changing the city’s political future. But beneath the energy and hope lies something more troubling: a generational embrace of a politics of entitlement, poised to undermine not only the city’s finances but also the values that have historically bound together American civic life. The city’s youth voting base turned out in force: voters aged 18–29 gave Mamdani the win.

American politics is often reactionary. Barack Obama rode the dip of the 2007-2008 financial crash, but after eight years of neoliberal slog Middle America chose Donald Trump to extract the globalist cancer from their venerated land. The Democrats staged a counterattack in the 2018 midterms, thrusting names like Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into the spotlight. A reaction to a reaction to a reaction. And right on time, now that Trump has returned to office, a new breed of even more radical young Democrats is on the ascent. Democratic New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is committed to radical socialism and will likely be enthroned as America’s most powerful local executive in November thanks to a tide of support from the young, wealthy and highly educated.

On Monday night, New York City golden boy Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor, tweeted, after the terrifying gun attack on Park Avenue, “I’m heartbroken to learn of the horrific shooting in midtown and I am holding the victims, their families, and the [New York Police Department] officer in critical condition in my thoughts. Grateful for all of our first responders on the ground.” He also sent special condolences to the families of Didarul Islam, the Bangladeshi immigrant and NYPD officer who died in the attack. But there’s a reason Mamdani was holding NYC in his thoughts and not giving a press conference on the ground: He’s at his family’s luxury compound in Uganda, where he’s summering after getting married there a couple of weeks ago.

Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has declared that in his New York City, buses will be free, childcare will be free, rent will be frozen and government-run grocery stores will light up the crime-riddled horizon. Cockburn thinks current Mayor Eric Adams, now running as an Independent, must have read Zohran's free-stuff-for-New-Yorkers list and spotted a hole: WiFi. In a press conference yesterday, Adams was joined by the city's office of Housing Preservation and Development to announce their new $3.25 million plan to provide free WiFi to low-income New Yorkers in 35 government-subsidized buildings. "Liberty Link will deliver free and low cost internet to 2,200 households across the Bronx and Upper Manhattan. . . . Today, we're bringing Section 8 online," the Mayor said.

“The old ways of doing business just aren’t cutting it” for the Democratic party, the New York Times wrote. Democrats are acting like a bloated, out-of-touch corporation that has no idea why it’s bleeding customers. The Times article talks at length about several PACs, activist groups and nonprofits that are trying to inject fresh ideas into the Democratic machine. These ideas add up to: knocking on doors and creating targeted digital ads. One functionary from a group called Priorities USA says that he wants the group to function “more like a venture capital firm, making a number of smaller bets on a wide range of initiatives and funding only the best performers – and using the incubation process as a way to learn about what works and doesn’t.

Voters often pay a premium for socialism. It’s the modern-day equivalent of free-range eggs or an electric car. Zohran Mamdani, a self-described “democratic socialist,” embodies that premium. In New York’s Democratic mayoral primary election, he got blown out of the water with lower-income voters – but won overwhelmingly with young, white, college-educated idealists desperate for the revolution. He would be the furthest left mayor New York City has ever seen if elected in November. While his policy prescriptions – city-run grocery stores, higher taxes on the wealthy and a diminished police presence – are radical proposals, it is his deep devotion to socialism that truly defies convention. There is no question that Mamdani loathes the West.

Zohran Mamdani is defensive about his faith and has maintained that his culture is “not a costume.” Why then, New Yorkers might wonder, does he not extend this courtesy to others? In December, he shared an Indian dance video about Hanukkah by comedy group the Geeta Brothers who performed behind a menorah, spinning dreidels, while singing Hey Hanukkah. The Punjabi track features lyrics: tera dreidel bara ghummay (your dreidel spins a lot), taazi roti kosher howay (let’s have fresh kosher bread), with a repeated chorus of mombatiyan, which means candles. Mamdani also wished his followers a merry Christmas using a video for the Geeta Brothers’ Jingle Bells track where the group woos a woman.

When Zohran Mamdani applied to Columbia University in 2009, he checked both the “Asian” and “Black or African American” boxes on his admissions form. He wasn’t lying – technically. Born in Uganda to Indian parents, Mamdani said he was trying to express his complex heritage. But in a recent interview with The New York Times, he admitted something telling: he doesn’t consider himself black.That admission, buried beneath the usual progressive buzzwords about “nuance” and “complexity,” should be a wake-up call for anyone still defending race-based admissions in elite education. Mamdani didn’t cheat the system. He played by its rules. And that’s exactly the problem.

California is catching the deregulation bug. The state legislature has apparently realized that people need houses too, and sometimes the endangered insects have got to go. On Monday, Gavin Newsom signed a bill streamlining permitting for building projects mired in environmental review.  About time, says Cockburn. Consider for a moment the California High-Speed Rail, a project to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles, which has yet to emerge from environmental clearance despite starting in 1996. The budget has multiplied, in the meantime, from $30 billion to $100 billion. The segment just from San Francisco to San Jose, where the train would use pre-existing Caltrain rail, almost limped across the permitting finish line in 2021.

Zohran Kwame Mamdani, having secured the Democratic nomination for New York City mayor, is in the national spotlight. At the age of 33, he ran as a Democratic Socialist having previously held elected office as a New York State Assemblyman. He has no record of significant achievement in other walks of life. He composed and produced rap music, but to no acclaim. The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is a non-profit organization (501(c) 3) that does not endorse political candidates or parties, and in this respect we take no position on Mr. Mamdani’s candidacy. That matter will be decided by the voters of New York City this November. We do, however, take special interest in Mr. Mamdani’s educational background.

Within weeks of launching his campaign to be mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani declared that he was also running to be the first South Asian mayor. He began aggressively courting this demographic, which accounts for around five percent of the city’s population, as well as the seizable total Asian population of almost 15 percent. Mamdani reached out to the desi community with the help of the Indian subcontinent’s great unifier, Bollywood. The Hindi film industry that even those who don’t speak the language in South Asia can relate to. He used a 1980 Bollywood song "Meri Umar Ke Naujawano", roughly translating to "my fellow youngsters", to explain the NYC’s ranked choice voting system using popular desi drink, the lassi, as prop.

As I write, the time is 10 p.m. in New York City and the temperature is hovering somewhere around unbearable. It’s a nice respite from the 100 degrees the city hit on Tuesday afternoon, as voters flocked to the polls to cast their ballots in an unusually heated mayoral primary. Polls closed at 9 p.m., and a town famed for its impatience was given the gift of a clear front-runner. Improbably, against all odds, all common wisdom, the vast majority of polls and even the betting markets, the night ended with Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old state assemblyman and proud “Muslim democratic socialist” as the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor. “I’m very proud of the campaign that we ran,” Cuomo told his supporters as Mamdani’s lead proved insurmountable.