Zohran Mamdani is a dangerous man. He may not look like it—unless you count having a stupid face as a sign of malevolence—but now, as the saying goes, he has said the quiet part out loud. And it’s not the obvious part. It is not the Israelophobia per se, or the soft “civilizational” neo-Jihadism he represents, not the ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, not the “free buses/free rent”-socialism that he explicitly wants to establish, though all of these are irrevocably linked to it.
First, some background. It has been said before, in endless Substack threads and X posts, mostly by older Jewish and non-Jewish New Yorkers, that Mamdani is a dangerous man for Jews in NYC—which has been countered by claims that he was just a “poseur”, that no real danger would emerge from him for Jewish life in NYC, that he was only “critical of Israel”, as his remark “when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF” suggested. After all, the Israel thing does not really concern New York City, and Mamdani himself made clear that he makes policies for New Yorkers, not the Middle East.
And yet, the very first executive act Mamdani committed after his inauguration was to revoke his predecessor Eric Adams’s executive orders that sought to protect Jewish life in the city. Adams, confronted with levels of antisemitic/anti-Zionist hate and pro-Islamist hysteria that no mayor had faced before in the recent history of New York City, home to the largest Jewish population in the world outside of Israel, had issued several executive orders in September 2024, including the order adopting the International Holocaust Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, and Executive Order 61, establishing NYPD-guaranteed protest-free zones around houses of worship, as well as two anti-BDS orders. By revoking these orders, Mamdani has now officially condoned what happened at Park East synagogue in November 2025 becoming daily reality: for observant Jews to be humiliated and screamed at on their way to and inside their synagogues. By revoking these orders, Mamdani also facilitates the denial of the antisemitic character of acts of violence against Jews. And by revoking Adams’s anti-BDS orders, Mamdani encourages the view that Israel, and by extension, “international Jewry”, is to be the sole scapegoat for the downfall of humanity, and if not humanity, then for the perpetual victimhood status of Palestinians and everyone who on whatever grounds identifies with them (including New York’s upper middle class elite school students, who form a vital part of Mamdani’s constituency). It seems therefore that, contrary to public assurances, the Jews and their relation to Israel rank very high in Mamdani’s list of political priorities. This is not at all an aside to Mamdani’s “democratic-socialist” spiel. Rather, the “democratic-socialist” spiel seems to be an aside to Mamdani’s explicit “anti-Zionist” reconfiguration of NYC’s political landscape, opening the scope for condoning explicit acts of anti-Jewish discrimination.
Contrary to public assurances, the Jews and their relation to Israel rank very high in Mamdani’s list of political priorities. In fact, the “democratic-socialist” spiel seems to be an aside to Mamdani’s explicit “anti-Zionist” reconfiguration of NYC’s political landscape, opening the scope for condoning explicit acts of anti-Jewish discrimination.
All of this comes to the surprise of absolutely no one who has been a vigilant observer of Mamdani’s career, such as an anonymous author on Substack who goes by the name of “The Golden Pill” and who has traced Mamdani’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood:
“In the United States, the Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has emerged in recent years as the leading American Muslim civil rights organization and lobbying group. Evidence that CAIR was founded by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee in the interest of establishing an American “official organization for political work” to represent “the political aspect to support the cause politically on the American front” has been cited in recent efforts in Congress to designate CAIR as a foreign terrorist organization along with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Investigations into the Muslim Brotherhood have long revealed a web of global Islamic connections. Hamas was founded as an offshoot of the group. When the Muslim Brotherhood began its ‘Palestine Committee’ in the 1990s to support Hamas financially and politically, it established the Holy Land Foundation as its fundraising arm. In 2008, the famed ‘Holy Land five’ leadership of the group were convicted of numerous charges, including conspiring to provide material support to a designated terrorist organization, Hamas.
Mamdani has come under fire for a song he recorded in his previous career as a rapper under the name Mr. Cardamom, in which he sang the lyrics, ‘My love to the Holy Land Five you better look ‘em up’.
In the weeks leading up to Mamdani’s mayoral win, American Muslim activist Linda Sarsour, stated that the Unity and Justice Fund PAC, which is the CAIR super PAC, was the largest institutional donor to the pro-Zohran PAC in New York.”.
Is this, then, where Mamdani’s chief danger lies? One could argue that this only concerns Jews. If you’re a Christian, a Buddhist, an agnostic, why should it trouble you? There is some truth in this, of course. But the greater danger Mamdani represents is on a slightly different plane. One which concerns not only Jews, but Catholics, freemasons, Buddhists, and Muslims as well. It concerns the working poor as much as Lower Manhattan socialites. It concerns bus drivers as well as hedge fund administrators. It concerns everyone.
And this is where his January 1 inauguration speech comes in, a speech that, for those old enough to remember, oscillates between the ominous paternal murmur of Ayatollah Khomeini and the German Democratic Republic’s Erich Honecker’s forlorn attempt to summon a sense of solidaristic salvation in cozy images of dachas, the uniformed Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend), and collective farms. Dense with appeals to self-infantilization and carried by a swell of sentimental images of solidarity that reek as foul and fake as those of Mamdani’s authoritarian historical predecessors’, the speech stood out for one sentence. It may have been short, but it held tremendous programmatic leverage:
“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism”.
Mamdani, like those on the left who so readily gave up their basic individual rights and liberties and welcomed state overreach during Covid, finally emerges as the spokesperson for the Left’s Omnicause: collectivism. Collectivism is the core program, the real ambition, the differentia specifica of the current iteration of leftism. It easily marries the repressiveness of political Islam—a modern ideology born in the 19th century—with modernity’s most authoritarian political and economic system, socialism, or—which is the same thing—fascism. The appeal to collectivism strives to eradicate the very idea of the individual, which has been the political subject of all liberatory political programs since the Enlightenment, and it seeks to cut that idea’s deep roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition. It intends to make unpalatable every association with autonomy, liberation, even happiness, and turns the idea of “human rights” so often evoked in Mamdani’s circles into a bizarre caricature.
The appeal to collectivism strives to eradicate the very idea of the individual, the political subject of all liberatory political programs since the Enlightenment.
Civilizational-foundational values such as freedom, which is always individual freedom (there is no such thing as “collective freedom”, if the individuals in a group are unfree), the critical intellect, and the trust that we should have in each other, as well as the trust in ourselves as autonomous human subjects, are nothing but an abomination for Mamdani and his willing subjects. The “abomination” that is freedom, the “scandal” that is the human as self-thinking subject, the “disgrace” that is the refusal to serve the conformist God, is now officially declared the doctrine of this new collectivist movement, which seems to be gaining broad acceptance with disquieting speed. In the place of individual freedom, the State shall move: a complete disenfranchisement program for the legal and political rights of the individual, who is simultaneously asked to leave his critical thinking at the door (but kindly and with full solidarity). And yes, it’s everything that historic figures of the left such as, Karl Marx, Bertolt Brecht, Rosa Parks, or Martin Luther King Jr. ever fought against.
Mamdani’s team of socialist “rebels” forges ahead, animated by a stale pioneer spirit that would have made Ceauçescu and Castro envious. Footage has emerged of Cea Weaver, now Mamdani’s “tenant director”, declaring: “We’ll transition from treating property as an individual good to a collective good”. White people especially, as she assures us, will be impacted. Expropriation, Soviet-style, is no longer a crazy idea on US soil. In fact, Mamdani’s team steps into action as the politically correct wing of the most powerful assembly of economic players in the world, the World Economic Forum, whose “You will own nothing and be happy” already pushed for a collectivist ideology for the 21st century. Alas, Klaus Schwab’s bland Germanness was a bit too on the nose. Wrong credentials. For selling totalitarianism with a human face to mainline leftists, you need the exotic guy.
Mamdani’s team steps into action as the politically correct wing of the World Economic Forum, whose “You will own nothing and be happy” has already pushed for a collectivist ideology for the 21st century.
Naturally, in our meme-infested culture, Mamdani’s “nice, warm, fuzzy feeling” of collectivism did not go unanswered. But the serious nature of the joke cannot be pushed aside. If another state-led collectivist disciplinary machinery takes root, and then gathers speed in our already vulnerable post-liberal political landscape—whether it is bio-politically motivated, as during Covid or the assisted suicide-debates, or simply motivated by a now pervasive nihilist collectivist moral readiness to open violence — it is the disavowal of individual agency and autonomy and the embrace of Mamdani’s Huxleyian program what will have made the new barbarism possible. Mark my words.
