Category: Zohran Mamdani
Mamdani claps back at Musk over criticism of FDNY chief pick
New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani (D) on Saturday rejected Elon Musk’s argument that his appointment to head up the Fire Department of New York (FDNY) is inexperienced. “Experience does matter, which is why I appointed the person who spent more than 30 years at EMS. You know, the workforce that addresses at least 70% of…
MAMDANI SCRAMBLES: City Hall Jobs Still Empty Days Before Takeover: Report
Sounds like Zo still has some work to do… According to a New York Post report, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is racing the clock to fill top City Hall jobs — with just days to go before he takes office.
‘Money hungry Jews’: Mamdani appointee abruptly quits after her anti-Semitic online posts resurface
An appointee for New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, abruptly resigned after the Anti-Defamation League of New York and New Jersey exposed her past anti-Semitic social media posts.
On Wednesday, Mamdani announced that Catherine Almonte Da Costa would be his director of appointments.
‘As this has become a distraction from the work at hand, I have offered my resignation.’
The ADL responded to the nomination by highlighting Da Costa’s numerous anti-Jewish online comments.
“Her social media footprint includes posts from more than a decade ago that echo classic antisemitic tropes and otherwise demean Jewish people. … We appreciate Da Costa has relationships with members of the Jewish community, but her posts require immediate explanation — not just from Ms. Da Costa, but also from the Mayor-Elect,” the ADL wrote.
The ADL continued, “Vetting the appointment of city leaders will be Ms. Da Costa’s responsibility and the Jewish community deserves to know: 1) Were these comments previously identified by the Mayor-elect’s team? If so, why were they excused? 2) What will be the policy of the new Administration if comments like these are discovered during the vetting process?”
The ADL’s post included screenshots of three X posts from Da Costa’s account, which has since been removed.
RELATED: Mamdani dares ICE to come get him — and throws the Constitution in the trash
Zohran Mamdani. Photo by ANGELA WEISS / AFP via Getty Images
“Money hungry Jews smh,” Da Costa apparently wrote in January 2011 on then-Twitter, presumably using an abbreviation for “shaking my head,” an expression of disapproval.
“Woo! Promoted to the upstairs office today! Working alongside these rich Jewish peeps,” she apparently wrote later that year.
“Far Rockaway train is the Jew train,” a third post read from June 2012.
In 2020, Da Costa posted anti-cop sentiments, calling for the defunding of the New York Police Department by $1 billion in the upcoming fiscal year to “get cops out of our schools & subways,” the New York Post reported.
L to R: Zohran Mamdani, Jahmila Edwards, Catherine Almonte Da Costa. Photo by ANGELA WEISS / AFP via Getty Images
Da Costa announced her resignation on Thursday, following the resurfaced posts.
“I spoke with the mayor-elect this afternoon, apologized, and expressed my deep regret for my past statements,” Da Costa said. “These statements are not indicative of who I am. As the mother of Jewish children, I feel a profound sense of sadness and remorse at the harm these words have caused. As this has become a distraction from the work at hand, I have offered my resignation.”
In a separate statement, she contended that her “tweets from well over a decade ago … do not in any way, shape, or form reflect who I am or my views and beliefs today.”
Mamdani called Da Costa’s past remarks “unacceptable,” adding that the posts “absolutely do not represent him or the values of his administration.”
“Catherine expressed her deep remorse over her past statements and tendered her resignation, and I accepted,” he added.
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Socialism didn’t win New York. Marketing did.
I oppose Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic Socialist agenda. But if Republicans are serious about winning elections next year and in 2028, they need to take a hard, unsentimental look at how he just won one of the most consequential mayoral races in the country.
This was not an ideological earthquake. New York did not suddenly “discover” socialism. What happened was a marketing and mobilization breakthrough. Mamdani’s campaign understood attention, simplicity, participation, and distribution better than anyone else in the race.
Republicans often confuse seriousness with stiffness. Mamdani showed that message discipline does not require lifelessness.
Joe Perello, the city of New York’s first chief marketing officer, noted in PRWeek after Mamdani’s victory that the campaign did more than communicate a message. It built an engine that converted online engagement into real-world turnout.
“For marketers and strategists alike, the implications are clear,” Perello wrote. “Growth hacking, iterative testing, and data-driven amplification can convert digital sentiment into real-world behavior. In Mamdani’s case, that meant converting hearts, clicks, and hashtags into ballots.”
Here is the part many on the right do not want to hear: Mamdani did not spend his time lecturing working-class voters about the virtues of socialism or defending failed economic theory. He focused on immediate, kitchen-table concerns and paired them with simple, slogan-ready answers.
Is halal food expensive? Make it cheaper. Struggling to get to work? Free buses. Grocery bills too high? Government-run grocery stores.
He took Bernie Sanders’ 2016-era talking points and filtered them through a polished, Obama-style optimism that voting-age New Yorkers were willing to engage with.
Most voters do not have the time — or patience — to think through how these promises would actually work. They just want to hear that someone intends to make their lives easier.
As Citizens Alliance CEO Cliff Maloney observed during Mamdani’s surge in the polls, the public’s lack of understanding about how government operates — and how socialism consistently fails — created the political environment Mamdani exploited. He did not create that environment. He mastered it.
Republicans’ digital blind spot
For years, Republican campaigns have treated digital media as messaging rather than infrastructure. Social platforms are used as megaphones for press releases, fundraising tools, or dumping grounds for cable-news clips. The underlying assumption is that persuasion happens elsewhere — on TV, at rallies, through mailers — and that digital simply amplifies those efforts.
Mamdani reversed that logic. Social media was not an accessory to his campaign. It was the campaign.
His approach drew praise even from outlets like the Guardian, where journalist Adam Gabbatt noted that Mamdani “has won social media with clips that are always fun — and resolutely on-message.”
His team treated TikTok and Instagram like serious growth channels. Short videos were not vanity content; they were experiments. Different neighborhoods, different faces, different tones, different pacing. What held attention? What sparked comments? What traveled across boroughs? Each post generated data, and each data point informed the next iteration.
This was politics run as a full-funnel acquisition strategy. Awareness led to engagement. Engagement led to identification. Identification led to turnout. Republicans can mock the aesthetics, but the mechanics work.
Energy is a signal
One of the most underrated elements of Mamdani’s campaign was how it looked. He was constantly in motion — walking Manhattan, running a marathon, bouncing between boroughs. Rarely behind a lectern. Rarely static. Always visible.
That energy communicated youth, optimism, and confidence in the same way John F. Kennedy outperformed Richard Nixon on television in 1960. A similar contrast appeared in 2024, when Donald Trump’s unscripted, high-visibility media strategy stood in sharp contrast to Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’ tightly controlled appearances.
The predictable response on the right is dismissal. ‘That’s just TikTok nonsense.’ ‘Our voters aren’t like that.’ Those excuses are comforting — and dangerously wrong.
In an age of low trust and low information, energy reads as competence. Movement suggests effort. Visibility substitutes for familiarity. Mamdani’s omnipresence created the impression — fair or not — that he was accessible and engaged with everyday life.
Republicans often confuse seriousness with stiffness. Mamdani showed that message discipline does not require lifelessness.
RELATED: When Bernie Sanders and I agree on AI, America had better pay attention
Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images
From supporters to fans
The most uncomfortable lesson for traditional campaigns is that Mamdani did not just mobilize voters. He activated fandom.
Much of the campaign content that flooded social media did not come from official accounts. It came from supporters remixing clips, creating fan art, cutting moments to music, and sharing them within their own networks. The campaign made Mamdani easy to clip, easy to celebrate, and then got out of the way.
Wired magazine described it as a rare case of participatory political culture usually reserved for celebrities.
This matters because peer-to-peer persuasion scales faster and carries more credibility than anything a campaign can manufacture. Fan-made content travels further, feels more authentic, and costs nothing. Republicans, by contrast, tend to over-police their messaging, choking off organic enthusiasm in the name of control.
Younger voters understand fandom instinctively. They grew up online. Mamdani did not lecture them about politics; he gave them something to belong to.
The wrong reaction
The predictable response on the right is dismissal. “That only works for Democrats.” “That’s just TikTok nonsense.” “Our voters aren’t like that.”
Those excuses are comforting — and dangerously wrong.
Trump understood this dynamic in 2024 when his campaign was largely shut out of legacy media. Figures like Charlie Kirk reached millions of Gen Z voters by blending serious political content with the humor and energy of youth activism.
Algorithms do not have ideologies. Participation is not a left-wing monopoly. Visibility, simplicity, and community are not progressive inventions. In a low-information, high-attention environment, the side that understands distribution wins.
The real danger is not Mamdani’s policies alone. It is a Republican Party that keeps confusing being correct with being effective.
RELATED: How anti-fascism became the West’s civil religion
Blaze Media Illustration
What Republicans should learn — now
First, treat digital as organizing, not advertising. Stop thinking in posts and start thinking in systems. How does attention become action?
Second, simplicity wins. Republicans often pride themselves on being right — and then lose because they are incomprehensible. Clarity scales. Long explanations do not.
Third, loosen control. Let supporters remix, clip, and share. Reach matters more than perfect phrasing.
Finally, build communities, not just campaigns. Email lists decay. Ad budgets run out. Communities endure.
The bottom line
I do not agree with Zohran Mamdani’s politics, and I do not want his policies implemented anywhere. But ignoring how he won would be malpractice.
He demonstrated how power is built today — not through party machinery or television dominance, but through attention, participation, and relentless simplicity. Republicans can learn from that reality, or they can keep losing to it.
Disagree with his ideology. But study his marketing. Ignore the lesson at your own risk.
Mamdani dares ICE to come get him — and throws the Constitution in the trash
New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani calls himself a “Democratic Socialist,” but he clearly doesn’t support the cooperative federalism that keeps American democracy functioning.
Just weeks after projecting a diplomatic, moderate tone during an Oval Office visit, Mamdani issued a message that should chill any American who values the rule of law. Responding to a recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid in Chinatown, Mamdani in a video urged illegal aliens to “stand up” to federal agents by exploiting every legal loophole to stall enforcement.
Mamdani’s encouragement mirrors the toxic doctrine of states’ rights absolutism that fueled the nation’s march toward civil war.
“We can all stand up to ICE if you know your rights,” he declared, offering a tutorial on how to shut doors in agents’ faces, demand endless clarifications, and film operations to disrupt them.
This is a blueprint for openly defying federal authority, wrapped in the rhetoric of righteous resistance. As a self-avowed Democratic Socialist who promised to “fight back” against ICE and labeled the agency a “reckless entity,” Mamdani reveals a contempt for constitutional order that has moved from fringe to mainstream on the American left.
The peril in this rhetoric is not theoretical. While the circumstances differ, Mamdani’s encouragement mirrors the toxic doctrine of states’ rights absolutism that fueled the nation’s march toward civil war. In the 1850s, leaders of the nascent Confederacy preached nullification — the idea that states could ignore federal laws they deemed unjust, particularly those touching slavery.
South Carolina’s 1832 Ordinance of Nullification, defying federal tariffs, was a dry run for the secessionism that exploded in 1861. Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens later declared in his “Cornerstone Speech” that the Confederacy rested on the principle of state sovereignty over federal authority.
Fast-forward to Mamdani’s New York, a sanctuary city where local laws are exalted above national ones and illegal aliens are coached to treat ICE as an invading force. This reckless approach can only ratchet up tensions, increasing the likelihood of violent confrontations and accelerating the erosion of our constitutional order.
This isn’t rights protection. It’s the resurrection of a philosophy that once split the nation in two. The Civil War claimed more than 600,000 lives because defiant states elevated their local priorities over the union’s supremacy. Mamdani’s sanctuary-state playbook risks igniting a similar dynamic — one resisted arrest at a time.
The hypocrisy is glaring. For nine years, Democrats and their media allies branded Donald Trump a “threat to democracy,” insisting that “no one is above the law.” Nancy Pelosi tore up his State of the Union address on camera, declaring his actions an assault on the Constitution. Chuck Schumer warned that Trump’s border enforcement would “Balkanize” America.
Yet when Mamdani — a rising progressive star — directly subverts federal immigration statutes, the same chorus falls silent. No calls for indictments. No panic-stricken editorials about authoritarianism.
Democrats declared Trump’s alleged election interference a constitutional crisis. But Mamdani’s defiance goes straight at the Supremacy Clause, which makes federal law the “supreme law of the land.” By elevating New York’s sanctuary policies and restricting cooperation with ICE to only 170 “serious crimes,” Mamdani is not safeguarding democracy. He is undermining it.
America’s founders envisioned a balance: states as laboratories of democracy but always subordinate to the union’s paramount authority. Sanctuary cities flip that design on its head. Once New York shields violators of immigration law, copycats are inevitable. What happens when California nullifies EPA emissions rules? Or Texas ignores ATF gun tracing? Or Florida decides federal taxes are optional?
Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images
Localized resistance metastasizes into a patchwork of fiefdoms where the law becomes whatever the local politician decrees.
Mamdani’s vision, if replicated, promises rapid national deterioration: a swelling illegal population operating in the shadows, strained public resources, and cities like New York — home to at least a half-million illegal aliens — functioning as de facto no-go zones for federal agents.
Progressives who cheered Mamdani’s victory must reckon with the monster they helped unleash: a leader who cloaks defiance in compassion while sowing the seeds of anarchy. American federalism depends on shared laws, not selective compliance. If New York wants to lead, it should honor the union that made its success possible — not mimic the Rebels of 1861.
Otherwise we’re not securing the nation. We’re dismantling the house that stands between order and oblivion.
BAD APPLE? Mamdani Taps Ex-Con Rapper Who Served 7 Years for Armed Robbery for Criminal Justice Adviser: Report
More fireworks — and City Hall hasn’t even changed hands yet.
New X post from Zohran Mamdani has even conservatives nodding in approval, but are they duped?
On November 29 — Small Business Saturday — New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani slapped a new caption on a five-month-old campaign video pledging to boost NYC’s small-business ecosystem with massive deregulation measures, leading some conservatives to applaud the socialist as more based than they originally thought.
In the clip, Mamdani vows to “make it faster, easier, and cheaper for small businesses to get started and stay open” by cutting fines and fees by 50%, expediting permits and applications, appointing a “Mom and Pop czar” to fight bureaucracy, and increasing funding for small business programs by 500%.
This kind of red-tape-slashing, deregulatory rhetoric is something you would normally hear from Republicans or maybe an old-school Democrat, but to hear it from a self-described socialist is truly an anomaly.
Or is it?
John Doyle, BlazeTV host of “The John Doyle Show,” says these conservatives praising Mamdani’s small-business plan have had the wool pulled over their eyes. Mamdani doesn’t care about small business; “he is simply rewarding his foreign base.”
For starters, the massive increase in small-business funding, Doyle reminds, is simply “redistribution of wealth from the whiter neighborhoods.”
“I’m quoting Mamdani, who wanted to raise taxes specifically on the whiter neighborhoods … to pay for these handouts,” he says.
But the more important issue is who these small-business perks are intended to benefit. It’s not native New Yorkers; it’s the foreigners who “elected him to office,” says Doyle.
In response to the people who foolishly think that Mamdani’s small-business plan reveals he’s maybe not the stark raving mad Marxist we thought he was, Doyle tweeted the following:
Because NYC’s business marketplace is one of the most saturated and competitive in the nation, “who is moving to New York and starting businesses?” Doyle asks. “It’s obviously foreigners.”
Deregulation for Mamdani, he argues, isn’t about helping businesses; it’s about lowering the standards — “cleanliness standards, worker hygiene standards, temperature control, food safety standards, inspections, record-keeping” — to turn NYC into the kind of third-world slum his voter base came from.
“That is what is going on here,” he declares.
“You have to be 200 IQ enough to understand that in this instance, deregulation is actually Marxist in nature.”
To hear more of Doyle’s fiery take, watch the episode above.
Want more from John Doyle?
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NYC councilwoman lays into ‘rich,’ ‘entitled’ Mamdani voters as mayor-elect plans to leave homeless encampments alone
The incoming socialist mayor of New York City says that he will end the clearing out of homeless encampments in the city once he enters office.
Zohran Mamdani made the comments during his “Hot Chocolate, Frozen Rent” event in Manhattan on Thursday, where he posited that homelessness is a result of “political choice.”
‘Radical left communists would rather the homeless freeze to death on the streets, live in tents without showers food or medicine than make sure they have PROPER housing.’
“If you are not connecting homeless New Yorkers to the housing that they so desperately need, then you cannot deem anything you’re doing to be a success,” he said.
“We are going to take an approach that understands its mission is connecting those New Yorkers to housing, whether it’s supportive housing, whether it’s rental housing, whatever kind of housing it is,” he added. “Because what we have seen is the treatment of homelessness as if it is a natural part of living in this city, when in fact it’s more often a reflection of a political choice being made time and time again.”
Republican NYC Councilwoman Inna Vernikov torched Mamdani over the announcement.
“The radical left communists would rather the homeless freeze to death on the streets, live in tents without showers food or medicine than make sure they have PROPER housing and mental health treatment which many of them desperately need,” said Vernikov.
While the mainstream media has tried to mischaracterize Mamdani as moderate, he has previously posited that the government might need to ban private property in order to address the housing crisis.
RELATED: Actor Jon Voight calls on Trump to ‘terminate’ election of Mamdani in NYC
“Mamdani voters are rich entitled liberals who never have to struggle and who believe that leaving the homeless on our streets in their tents is also appropriate PUNISHMENT for our ‘intolerant and racist’ neighborhoods,” Vernikov continued. “BRACE YOURSELVES.”
Mamdani shocked many when he won the Democrat nomination in the mayoral race despite being vastly inexperienced to run the massive city. At least one liberal commentator has compared him to Jesus Christ and Martin Luther King Jr.
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If conservatives will not defend capitalism, who will?
In the aftermath of Zohran Mamdani’s electoral victory earlier this month, it became clear that socialism is a greater threat on the left than ever before. It is also clear that the GOP could no longer coast along by proclaiming, “Vote for us because he’s a socialist,” assuming that people would forever have a knee-jerk reaction to that word.
One issue that defined New York’s mayoral race — and increasingly politics throughout the country — is affordability. For millions of Americans, affording rent, groceries, health care, and a home seem further out of reach than ever before. The issue has been winked at by politicians across the spectrum for years around election time with precious little results to show for it.
Explaining to voters why they are wrong — or even worse, outright dismissing their concerns — has never worked politically, and that is not going to change now.
We have largely reached a point where this can no longer be avoided: We are now seeing regular releases of ever-worsening economic figures. The median age for all U.S. home buyers is 59 — a staggering statistic by itself, made even worse by the fact that it is up from just 28 back in 1991.
And it is not just that people are getting priced out of home ownership — rents have gone up astronomically over the past decade, leading us to a situation in which the American consumer is clearly struggling to get by. From credit card debt at record highs with seriously delinquent accounts hitting 12%, the highest since 2012, to auto repos matching 2009 levels, it is pretty clear that the consumer is maxed out.
Looking around at how conservative pundits spent the last few weeks talking though, you would not know it at all. You would be forgiven if you thought they had just come off a huge electoral victory. Conservatism simply cannot reduce itself to being the worst caricature of cold elitism that turns a blind eye to the very real economic struggles many in the country are facing.
Ben Shapiro kicked things off after suggesting to young people that they simply should not live in places like New York City, criticizing the idea that someone would deserve to live where they grew up and where job opportunities are heavily concentrated.
That same week, Donald Trump opened a rift within his own base — a rare sight for sure — in an interview with Laura Ingraham over the issue of H-1B visas. When she pushed him on his stance, saying that we have “plenty of talented people here,” he interrupted with, “No you don’t, no you don’t.” Instead of focusing on how to make American workers more competitive through better education or training, the message heard by many was that Americans were not up for the job.
Worst of all may have been Dinesh D’Souza, who felt the need to weigh in on Vivek Ramaswamy’s meritocratic education reform by essentially race-baiting, saying: “How ironic it will be if a brown American like Vivek actually helps to fix education and raise the prospects of white kids, while all the professional whiteys on X continue their idle boasting.” Whatever the merits of education reform, mocking struggling Americans — especially through whatever “professional whiteys” is supposed to mean — is not doing anyone any favors.
With approaches like these from the right, who needs the left anymore? It took Ramaswamy’s opponent in the Ohio gubernatorial race, Amy Acton, all of 24 hours to put together an ad saying that Ramaswamy thinks “Ohioans are lazy and mediocre. He’s wrong.” It practically wrote itself.
Arguments like these from conservatives do more damage to the defense of capitalism than attacks from socialists ever could and are totally disconnected from what free markets actually are. Capitalism has delivered more prosperity than any system in human history, and it is not even close — but it did not get there by running on the platform of saying, “You’re too poor to live where you grew up, our country isn’t talented, move aside.”
New York City is famous throughout the world because it is the city where generation after generation of people who wanted to work hard could go and make something of themselves. Nobody I have seen on the right is asking for a luxury life handed to them on a silver spoon while they sit on the couch. They are frustrated by the fact that the world seems to be increasingly out of reach for them.
The only person in the GOP who seems to be able to see this, I’m horrified to say, appears to be Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), who spent the last few weeks getting attacked for acknowledging that many “young adults are barely making it” and accusing Trump’s allies of gaslighting Americans about the cost of living. On Saturday, she posted on X: “My heart is with Americans who struggle to afford life in America today.”
To her credit, she has been consistent in prioritizing cost-of-living issues — something that has become far too rare in the GOP since Donald Trump took office. She has taken the lead in warning that health insurance premiums would double for millions of Americans — including her own adult children — when enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies expire, while Republican leadership has largely sidestepped the problem.
RELATED: Mamdani sells socialism — and Republicans peddle the Temu version
Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
We on the right have long embraced a tougher-love approach that certainly includes prioritizing a strong work ethic, and nobody needs to give that up. But that is not the issue here at all — Ben Shapiro’s comments are not directed at people who do not want to work; they are directed at and felt by those who do work and still cannot afford many basic things that previous generations took for granted.
Explaining to voters why they are wrong — or even worse, outright dismissing their concerns — has never worked politically, and that is not going to change now. Support for capitalism has now fallen to 54% overall, with Democrats preferring socialism 66% to 42%.
Peter Thiel’s now-viral email from 2020 captures exactly what is underlying this shift:
From the perspective of a broken generational compact … when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time … if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.
He was right then, and he is right now. The only thing left to be seen is whether the right will wake up to that reality before it is too late.
If this month’s performance is any indication, I am not holding my breath.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
