A Look into the Mind of the Mamdani Marxist

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, January 06, 2026

 

Zohran Mamdani is not bereft of schmaltzy euphemisms for “collectivism.” He chose to use that word during his inaugural address — one that conveys not nebulous communitarianism but expropriation, kommunalka, purges, and gulags — deliberately when he favorably contrasted the Soviet theory of social organization against America’s misplaced faith in individual liberty.

 

Mamdani knows what he’s doing, and he has surrounded himself with like minds. The socialist mayor of America’s most capitalist city brought with him into power avaricious malcontents who view the state as a mechanism to engineer a dramatic social leveling. But while they talk a good game about uplifting denizens of America’s lowest economic stratum, what really gets their juices flowing is the prospect of meting out pain to the people they detest.

 

Mamdani was already forced to cut loose one of his appointees — his erstwhile director of appointments, Catherine Almonte Da Costa — in part because of her ill-considered decision to write down and publish the fashionably bigoted sentiments that enthuse her fellow leftists. Along with a litany of anti-Jewish statements, Da Costa mused about the earthly utopia that might be if “men and/or white people” were stripped of power. “It’s important that white people feel defeated,” she wrote.

 

That expression of a common sentiment on the far left found its way to audiences that were skeptical of the premise — e.g., anyone outside the Democratic Socialist information silo — so Da Costa had to go.

 

But the mayor’s appointments director was hardly the only figure within Mamdani’s politburo who has expressed racial hostility of the sort that progressives do not recognize as bigotry. Cea Weaver, the mayor’s director of the revivified Office to Protect Tenants, is another figure in the mayor’s orbit who exemplifies true socialist values. For evidence of that, we need look no further than her enthusiastic support of the oppression of white people based solely on their accidents of birth.

 

A woman of remarkably shallow thought, Weaver spent the years in which she was being groomed for public service posting onanistic meditations on the joy she would derive from meting out a comeuppance to those with the wrong skin color. The best way to do that would be to deprive them of their most potent weapon: the fruits of their own labor.

 

The Washington Post editorial board offered a brief selection of Weaver’s greatest hits:

 

On a recently deactivated Twitter account, New York’s new tenant tsarina posted in 2021 that rent control is “a perfect solution to everything” and bragged that it’s “a more effective way to shrink the value of real estate” than zoning restrictions. In 2018, she wrote: “Impoverish the *white* middle class. Homeownership is racist / failed public policy.” The same year, she said, “there is no such thing as a ‘good’ gentrifier” and described gentrification as “part of a centuries long process of white supremacy.” She also called to “elect more communists.”

 

And make no mistake: Weaver’s fanatical chauvinism most certainly does inform her policy preferences. “Seize private property!” wrote the figure who will be charged with making New York City property owners’ lives as miserable as possible. “Private property including any kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy.”

 

There you have it. White people, in her view, benefit from unearned societal dispensations and jealously steward their ill-begotten power. That power is located in the private property they own and the rights to it secured by the Constitution. Therefore, a moral theory of social organization would dispense with trite Lockean ideals like natural rights, property ownership among them — restoring the monarchical conception of rights as beneficence that flow from or can be cut off by an absolute sovereign. Weaver imagines herself if not the avenging angel of collectivist retribution at least an agent of one.

 

This is a revealing look into the psyche of the typical barista socialist — one that explains why communist societies quickly dispense with the notion that political power is justly derived from the consent of the governed.

 

What really enthuses them isn’t worker solidarity, trade unionization, “free” transportation, or any of the other gimmicks that help sell socialism to the public. What gets them out of bed in the morning is the opportunity to hurt people — plural, of course, because they do not see individuals as individuals. Rather, they are representative of groups, classes, tribes — nameless avatars that stand in for the stereotypes that haunt socialist imaginations. They are jealous and covetous. They are consumed with status envy. They are illiberal by any common definition of the word.

 

The horror that accompanies this glimpse into the Democratic Socialist worldview is leavened some by the expectation that the self-styled communists in control in New York are about to encounter the banalities of governance, and they are certain to hate it. Neither the mayor nor his functionaries are engineering a revolution. They’re managing the competing interests of the various constituencies that have been quarreling over the city’s turf for generations.

 

If they give short shrift to property owners, Mamdani’s Marxists will not enjoy the gratitude of the renters and transients. They’ll be criticized for the ensuing housing shortage and, with universal rent control, rapidly deteriorating quality of the properties on offer. They can implement “free” busing (provided the rest of the state is inclined to pay for services they do not access), but they will have to contend with the angry taxpayers who resent the degree to which city transportation services devolve into rolling homeless shelters. They can rail against the rapacious managers of capital, but they’ll suffer the consequences when the sources of city revenue opt to work remotely from less hostile climates. They can go to war with the city’s police department and its allies, but they’ll soon learn what Bill de Blasio, David Dinkins, and John Lindsay discovered the hard way: Mayors come and go, but the NYPD is constant.

 

Governing New York City bears no practical resemblance to an exercise in free association at an Oberlin College freshman seminar. Municipal governance is practical, mundane, and painfully unrewarding — particularly for those who enter local service possessed of contempt for the principles of American governance.

 

Too intellectually lazy to be effective and too self-assured to realize it, the Mamdani-era experiment in bringing Marxist-Leninism to NYC is bound to fail — yes, again, for those who need a refresher. But the rise of this cohort has been edifying. It has revealed how much contempt the far left has for the enlightenment principles on which this country was founded, and it demonstrates for all who are willing to see it that the left’s commitment to anti-racism masks their toleration for the right kind of prejudice.