The Bigots in Mamdani’s Midst

By Noah Rothman

Friday, December 19, 2025

 

The abrupt resignation yesterday of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s Director of Appointments, Catherine Almonte Da Costa, has been applauded even by the Democratic Socialist’s detractors. At least Mamdani is listening to his critics, they contend. It’s cold comfort, though, to take solace in the vigilance of Mamdani’s skeptics. Had they not noticed or failed to make a sufficient stink about Da Costa, she might have slipped under the radar. Indeed, we have ample evidence to conclude the offenses that resulted in her abdication were precisely why she was selected for her role in the first place.

 

You see, Da Costa spent the better part of a decade indulging her own bigotry. But it was the sort of bigotry that is the height of fashion among the socialists rising to positions of prominence in one city after the next. She came up in an environment that encouraged her to think prejudiced thoughts, write the negative stereotypes that haunt her imagination down, and publish those thoughts with the perfectly rational expectation that she would be rewarded for them. Indeed, she was!

 

Da Costa shook her head at the “Money hungry Jews” in her midst. She thrilled at the prospect of being promoted to work “alongside these rich Jewish peeps.” She called the Far Rockaway train “the Jew train.” She mourned America’s political culture, which she attributed to the racial characteristics of its leaders. “For so long, power has been in the hands of men and/or white people,” she mused. “It has brought us ruin.” And it’s high time that “ruin” was apportioned out to its authors. “It’s important that white people feel defeated,” she wrote.

 

Her record of advocating full-throatedly for a program of negative discrimination against the ethnicities and creeds she believes have benefited unduly from societal privilege is voluminous. All of this is only scandalous because the wrong people were privy to it and appropriately scandalized by it.

 

“These statements are not indicative of who I am,” De Costa said in a statement announcing her resignation. “As the mother of Jewish children, I feel a profound sense of sadness and remorse at the harm these words have caused.” Her anguish may be genuine. Her embarrassment almost certainly is. But the contrition comes too late.

 

Perhaps De Costa just wasn’t properly vetted by the Mamdani team. Maybe the vetting process was light and perfunctory. Neither possibility is especially exculpatory, but nor are they the most likely explanations for this failure of oversight. It cannot be ruled out that the myriad evidence of De Costa’s prejudice was simply unremarkable.

 

After all, De Costa joined a transition team that included Sharif Ahmed and Hannah Towfiek, two executives with the Muslim American Society of New York — an organization with organizational links to the Muslim Brotherhood and which has itself been designated a terrorist outfit by the United Arab Emirates.

 

De Costa served alongside Lumumba Bandele, an organizer with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, who “spearheaded” efforts to free Black Liberation Army figures from prison and who published messages of support for Hamas’s atrocities on the day they were committed — October 7, 2023.

 

Waleed Shahid, a figure on Mamdani’s committee on community organizing, has a “track record of mocking Jewish outlets,” according to the outgoing Eric Adams administration, and he, too, found a lot to like about the Al Aqsa Flood operation even as the slaughter was ongoing.

 

“Israel’s military aggression is not self-defense,” declared a committee on arts and culture member, Jenna Hamed, just one day after Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza began (nearly three weeks after the 10/7 massacre). “They are exploiting the grief of the October 7th events to justify their murdering and destruction in Gaza, the same way they exploited holocaust grief to justify the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their land in 1948.”

 

Given what she and so many of her colleagues represent, De Costa’s resignation under pressure provides no solace. And it all flows from the preferences of the mayor-elect himself, who has shown a near-religious commitment to the lies about the Jewish State preferred by the Democratic Socialists of America and their Islamist allies.

 

De Costa’s resignation does not mitigate the problem represented by the mayor-elect’s prejudices and those for which his transition team selects. It only alerts us to the scale of the problem.