The Time to Stop Mamdani Was 30 Years Ago
Growing up, as I did, during the George W. Bush presidency, I couldn’t have guessed that my elementary school would turn majority-Hispanic by the time my first child was born.
My childhood understanding of politics was limited to the notions I was bombarded with in social studies classes. Namely, the importance of racial justice, the civil rights movement, and the (supposed) saintliness of Martin Luther King, Jr. Like many people my age, the first distinct political event that I can recall is 9/11. I remember watching from my classroom as the towers burned. The cast of characters from that event loomed over my consciousness in the ensuing years: Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein made their way into my childhood roster of villains with funny names.
The likely first Muslim mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, is a few years older than me. But his experience is obviously quite different from mine, and from that of millions of native-born Americans who are troubled by his inexorable rise to power. To Mamdani, the victims of 9/11 are not the people who suffered harrowing deaths in those towers, but those who became targets of “Islamophobia” in its aftermath. To many people, it is a jarring thought that a man with such a distorted view of New York City’s darkest hour will soon be its mayor.
Born in Uganda to globe-trotting Indian parents and only naturalized in 2018, Mamdani is a different type of New Yorker from “America’s mayor” Rudy Giuliani, or Mamdani’s 2025 rivals, Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa. They are all ethnic Europeans but with the distinct accent and mannerisms characteristic of America’s largest city. To Cuomo and Sliwa, Christopher Columbus is a great figure worth celebrating. Mamdani, as Cuomo was careful to tell voters in one of the televised debates, gave Columbus the middle finger during the “racial reckoning” of 2020.
Mamdani belongs to a generation of leftist politicians with tenuous ties to the nation they inhabit and would presume to rule. Mamdani, at least according to his mother, is “not American at all.” To his credit Mamdani has charisma, which sets him apart from more openly antagonistic figures like Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who is practically a walking advertisement for closed borders. Mamdani’s parents came to the United States legally in 1998, although their move clearly did nothing to inculcate a sense of loyalty or national pride in them or their then-seven-year-old son.
Demographic change has transformed America since the immigration reforms of the 1960s. The Trump administration is now trying to play catch up for decades of mistakes, and is facing serious obstruction carrying out promised mass deportations. ICE’s activities have sparked a street war with fifth columnists, many from Latin America (the same people touted as “natural conservatives” by acolytes of George W. Bush). Yet Trump’s support among Hispanics has fallen sharply since January, despite the hullabaloo about Trump’s gains with Latinos in 2024.
The time to stop Mamdani’s rise was long ago—long before the people who would take over New York City, my hometown on Long Island, and countless other localities across America had the chance to “decolonize” America. A perfectly good date to stop Mamdani would have been Sept. 12, 2001, when the nation had more goodwill and unity than it had ever had, or would have, in decades. Instead of cracking down on immigration, however, the George W. Bush administration created a huge police state to investigate its own citizens, scolded Americans about the dangers of “Islamophobia,” launched pointless wars, and handed the White House to Barack Obama—Mamdani’s prototype. Like Obama, Mamdani has pretended to be racially inclusive, while holding onto deep racial grievances toward white, Western civilization, which find expression in his racist, anti-white tax proposals.
The conservative media have largely shied away from attacking Mamdani as a product of mass immigration, instead focusing on his extreme ideology and perceived soft spot for jihadism. The latter charge, at least, is certainly an exaggeration of his political views. Mamdani is a hard-left faculty lounge progressive, not an Islamist. In any case, he need not be a secret suicide bomber to destroy New York City, which had been dying a slow death long before Mamdani even became a citizen.
Mamdani’s all-but-certain mayoralty should give pause to those who view Trump’s unlikely re-emergence as proof that the insanity of the woke era is over. Far from it. The demographic coup carried out against America ensures many years of trouble ahead.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/the-time-to-stop-mamdani-was-30-years-ago