The poisonous identitarianism of Zohran Mamdani

Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old self-described socialist, won the 2025 Democratic mayoral primary for New York City last week. He is now odds-on to become the Big Apple’s next mayor.

Born in Uganda to Indian parents, Mamdani moved to the US as a child and became a naturalised citizen in 2018. His rise has been rapid. Until relatively recently, most New Yorkers had never heard of him.

He’s now being lauded as a social-justice visionary by everyone from AOC and Jeremy Corbyn to countless airhead celebrities. But if we dig a little deeper into Mamdani’s recent past, it turns out he is not quite the political saint his cheerleaders are making him out to be.

Let’s start with the rap track he released in 2017, called ‘Salaam’. A paean to ‘growing up Muslim in New York’, ‘Salaam’ also provides Mamdani with the chance to express his ‘love’ for the ‘Holy Land Five’. This is a reference to Shukri Abu Baker, Mohammad El-Mezain, Ghassan Elashi, Mufid Abdulqader and Abdulrahman Odeh – the five heads of the now defunct Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development who, in 2008, were convicted for channelling millions of dollars to Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organisation in the US.

There’s plenty more where that came from. What about Mamdani’s response to Hamas’s pogrom in southern Israel on 7 October 2023? On 8 October, the day after hundreds of mostly Israeli men and women had been raped and killed by Hamas, he posted a tweet criticising Israel’s supposed ‘apartheid and occupation’. Or what about his defence of the cry to ‘globalise the intifada’? Where most Jews understand it to be an incitement to racist violence, referencing terror attacks on Israelis, Mamdani has implausibly claimed that it captures ‘a desire for equality’.

Mamdani has parrotted all the most fact-lite tenets of identitarian progressivism. At the height of the BLM-fuelled panic around racism in 2020, he fanned the flames. He called explicitly for the police to be defunded. And we all know how that ended: with a sharp rise in violent crime and fatalities within the black community. Mamdani also pushed to abolish certain standardised high-school tests on the dubious grounds that they’re racist. He has spent years complaining about white privilege (naturally). Bizarrely, he also seemingly changes his accent depending on who he’s talking to, putting on a more Middle Eastern-sounding accent when addressing Muslim voters. (This is a longstanding trend in progressive circles, whereby hyper-privileged radicals adopt different accents when addressing different ethnic groups.)

The hypocrisy here is striking. Mamdani’s loudest cheerleaders are elite-left progressives, the same people who’ve spent over a decade crusading against largely imagined forms of bigotry in the tolerant West. Yet point out that the man they’re backing for NYC mayor has proclaimed his ‘love’ for men who raised funds for the genocidal anti-Semites of Hamas and they brush it off without a second thought. These are people who insist that everything from microaggressions to mere ‘silence’ constitute literal violence – yet they have no issue with their guy defending a blood-curdling slogan like ‘globalise the intifada’.

Mandami’s primary victory suggests that woke is far from dead. Yes, cultish and censorious leftism has taken a battering. The more pearl-clutching, superficial elements of the woke movement certainly seem to be in retreat. But the Israel-hating, identitarian core is alive and even flourishing in the West’s major cities.

The significance of Mamdani’s ascent extends beyond New York. It provides a glimpse of the broader direction in which the left appears to be heading. For all that he’s hailed as a moral visionary, he’s firmly wedded to some of the most toxic orthodoxies of contemporary progressivism. That is bad news for New York and beyond.

Max Klinger is a lawyer and political analyst. Find him on Substack here. Follow him on X: @MaxE2review.