You Don't Mess with the Zohran

The NYC mayoral primary shows Dem old guard is on life support and losing to leftist "populists." But this left-wing populism looks like straight up communism. The fate of NYC hangs in the balance.

About 14 years ago, New York City and I had a really bad break-up. To this day, if I’m forced to return to its rat-riddled streets, there are whole neighbourhoods that I cannot approach without bursting into tears. Haunted corners. Tragic buildings. Over a decade after moving away, I’m still mad at New York City.

So I might be experiencing a teeny bit of schadenfreude over the victory last Tuesday of one Zohran Mamdani in the primary race for mayor. As in, ‘oh, your new girlfriend is a total psycho?? How terrible for you.’

But mostly, I am aghast.

In the goofy movie Don’t Mess with the Zohan, Adam Sandler plays an Israeli super soldier called Zohan who, after a successful run defeating goat-herding Arab terrorists in his home country, goes to New York City to pursue his actual dream, being a women’s hairdresser. He ends up in a diverse neighbourhood in Queens, where he seduces lots of old ladies until he finds his one true love. But oh no! She’s Palestinian! Her brother is the most wanted Palestinian terrorist! But this is New York City where everyone loves hummus, and a decent hair cut matters more than ethnic hatreds. So the Jews and the Arabs reconcile. It’s a dumb movie full of crass jokes and crude stereotypes, but I love it.

How funny then that New York Democrats have just chosen a young man with an almost identical name — Zohran — who also has lots of charm and a big dream, to be their candidate for mayor (the general election will be in November.)

Unlike Zohan, Zohran Mamdani (pictured above) is not funny at all.

But this is 2025, and this is not your grandfather’s Democratic Party. Beneath Mamdani’s upbeat social media posts lurk disturbing Communist delusions, packaged in woke platitudes. And he certainly won’t be making peace with any Israelis anytime soon.

Mamdani is a 33 year old state assemblyman, Queens resident, and the child of an Oscar nominated film director and a Columbia University professor of Indian-Ugandan heritage and Muslim faith.

“Queer liberation means defund the police,” he wrote on Twitter in 2020.

And this: “Violence is an artificial construction.”

He wants to white people to pay higher property taxes.

He wants to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu.

And of course, he also wants to open a network of government-run supermarkets, because I guess he took a look at the filthy New York City public transportation system and thought, ‘we should do this, but with food!’

This young man’s support among certain New Yorkers is huge, and many are saying his victory in November is all but assured. How is this possible in the city of global finance? The city famous for the neighbourhoods bustling with hard-working immigrant shop-keepers, the bastion of Jewish culture, where no one cared what you thought, as long as you didn’t walk too slowly or block traffic? What happened to that New York City?

Woke happened. And the many conservative commentators who are getting worked up about his Muslim background are missing the more accurate diagnosis: the transnational cultural elites, born out of liberal values, have officially soured on those values and gone full Commie.

Mamdani’s upbringing as a globetrotting culture worker is something that I am well familiar with — because I am one too. New York is full of such people, and that used to be partly what made it great. When I lived there we had friends who were Persian, Moroccan, Kenyan, Senegalese. Second generation Indian, Irish, and Italian American, Jewish and Puerto Rican. I say this not to burnish my libtard, Affluent Liberal White Woman credentials, but to say that New York was in fact a successful experiment in multiculturalism. People came to New York from all over the world — to work. To achieve. To be among other people of the same mindset.

And it still is, to some extent. But among the white professional managerial class the baseline assumptions have changed. Where there once was a friendly egalitarianism and good natured banter, it seems that now there is cloying regard for “the other” and a deep loathing, among whites, of self and of country.

Mamdani is not the American Ayatollah about to usher in sharia. He is more reminiscent of the many left-wing, idealistic young Iranians who made common cause with the Shia fundamentalists in order to overthrow the Shah. Only to find themselves, not in a socialist and egalitarian paradise with all its attendant pleasures of the flesh, but a Shia theocracy where many of the idealistic students were hanged from cranes and disappeared into torture dungeons.

In an interview with Megyn Kelly this week, Charlie Kirk focused on Mamdani’s religion and said we need to stop bringing people into the country who are incompatible with liberalism. I would counter: this IS liberalism. This, along with total intolerance of dissent and a deep distrust of their fellow countrymen, is what contemporary liberalism is. There is no other kind that holds any sway, at this point.

Mamdani is a product of cultural elite liberal multiculturalism. He is the wet dream of the progressive Millennial. Not only is he a social justice crusader, but his wife, Rama Duwaji, is a “visual artist” whose work “centers on pro-Palestinian, Arab and female identity themes, showing burka-clad women crushed under rubble or keffiyeh-clad protesters being pinned down by police.”

These two could not be more on trend. She grew up in Texas in a Syrian family who now lives in Dubai. She went to art school and they met on dating app Hinge. Mamdani’s famous mother made inspiring movies about third world street urchins and his father lectured in resistance to colonialism from the comfort of the Upper West Side. In other words, they are all the absolute epitome of rootless cosmopolitans: offspring of third world elites-turned-American emigrés. I’ve met many people like this before. They are very charming dinner party guests.

This makes them incredibly appealing to white, USA-born Americans who share all their views and lust after their exotic backstory. The Affluent White Liberal experiences huge guilt and self-hatred for the accident of being born in the greatest, most free place on earth, and so maniacally tries to cleanse themselves of that original sin through acts of political self-harm.

The good news about Mamdani’s primary victory is that it shows the Democratic Party is in deep shit. The old guard are completely flummoxed by the slick young zealots who they raised, coddled and promoted. They are now being eaten by their young, and this primary election was the perfect example of that. Without any apparent political connections, Mamdani defeated the scion of a New York political dynasty, Andrew Cuomo.

My history with New York goes back long enough that I actually remember the night Andrew Cuomo’s father, Mario, won his first term as governor in 1982. I was a second grader living in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which at that time was a deeply uncool blue collar neighbourhood dominated by working class, white ethnics. Our neighbours across the street were an Italian-American family that ran the laundromat where we washed our clothes. I was in their home the night Mario won the race for governor, and the family was jubilant, bursting with pride.

Decades later, his son Andrew would lock Covid patients in nursing homes, killing many old people. Then he had to resign over sexual harassment allegations. The Democrats saw fit to run him anyway. The Millennial and Gen Z, far-left, heavily educated, Democratic base — many of whom live in the trendy neighbourhoods of Manhattan and Brooklyn — soundly rejected him.

But it remains to be seen whether or not the rest of the city, in the outer reaches where the blue collar still population lives, are going to let this chipper young Communist take over. Very tellingly, Mamdani failed to win over working class African Americans, who have been increasingly siding with Trump.

This story matters because it is a bellwether for the transformation of the Democrats and the American liberal-left. They are calling it left-wing populism, and saying it is just what the doctor ordered to counter Trump and MAGA.

But left-wing populism, so far, looks like straight up communism. If you step out of the toxic media bubble the progressives live in, you quickly realise that right wing populism, on the other hand, looks not like fascism but common sense democracy. Hopefully the non-college educated voters of New York will save the city. If not, New York might never be the same.