Zohran Mamdani, before becoming the Democratic candidate for mayor of America’s most populous city, voiced notions that can only be viewed as radical. ‘Queer liberation’ accompanied by police defunding and prostitution legalization were among his fervent beliefs, a sentiment echoed in his Twitter feed from 2020. This also included derogatory remarks against the New York Police Department, claiming it to be racist, along with calls for the removal of a Christopher Columbus statue. Mamdani even supported a boycott and divestment from Israel, among other provocative views. This newcomer to politics in 2020 proposed an array of concepts more radical than basic socialism, going so far as to advocate for the complete outlawing of billionaires.
Mamdani’s leap into politics did not hinder him from marching to the beat of his party and half of social media, fervently chasing the fringe left. These days, conventional Democrats, wrestling with their nominations in NYC, seem eager to gloss over these inflammatory tweets. They suggest that this was simply a product of 2020—a time of high tensions from the COVID-19 lockdowns, remote schooling, and the omnipresent fear of a deadly virus. Yet, these excuses fail to justify Mamdani’s actions and offer an incomplete understanding of the extreme left directions in 2020.
Mamdani, in 2020, posted a summarized version of the notorious Tenet from the Communist Manifesto: ‘Each according to their need, each according to their ability.’ He propagated the notion that New York City was in dire need of a Communist mayor. While his left-wing contemporaries busied themselves with statue toppling and violent protests, Mamdani shamelessly shared a photograph of his middle finger aimed at a statue of Christopher Columbus. Such a gesture not only mocks history but also encapsulates his broader crusade against colonialism.
Among Mamdani’s posts, however, the most outlandish ones had an ‘intersectional’ theme. ‘Intersectionality,’ a concept peddled by academics to build unity among liberal activists, was gaining popularity in 2020. Simplified, one can state that ‘All struggles are the same struggle’ sums up intersectionality. Mamdani, through his tweets, attempted to entwine ‘queer liberation’ and anti-Israel sentiment, coining the phrase ‘Queer movements & movements for racial justice know: no one’s free until we’re all free.’
Another gem from Mamdani’s intersectional Twitter posts reads, ‘Queer liberation means defund the police,’ apparently asserting that ‘the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.’ His views on transgender ideology, even by left standards, were quite extreme. Frequently using the term ‘queer’ to simultaneously represent gay individuals and transgender sex workers, he aggressively contended that men could become women merely by identifying as such.
Adherence to whimsical gender ideology, along with disdain for the NYPD, rejection of Christopher Columbus, and wholehearted embrace of anticolonialism, hardly seems like the trajectory that will unify NYC. A significant argument posited in Mamdani’s favor is that his views simply mirrored the mainstream rhetoric of 2020. But with candidature like his, one wonders if 2020 formed the zenith or nadir of left-wing radicalism.
To fully understand the implications of Mamdani’s radical ideas, it is crucial to examine the broader spectrum of democrat behaviors and liberal institutional actions from 2019 to 2023. One instance is the ludicrous assertion by former Vice President Kamala Harris, during her 2020 Democratic presidential nomination run; she advocated for the provision of taxpayer-funded sex-change surgeries for transgender illegal immigrants in prisons. This strange and extreme idea originated from an American Civil Liberties Union survey.
The preceding years saw every person on the left of center—former President Joe Biden included—insist on calling Hispanic people ‘LatinX,’ raising a few eyebrows. Concurrently, professional journals and government agencies started adopting terms such as ‘pregnant people,’ ‘birthing persons,’ and ‘chest feeding’ in a bizarre attempt to annihilate sex differences.
Democrats began their events with land acknowledgements, a large number of county governments dismissed George Washington, and Rhode Island revised its name due to poorly understood woke justifications. Media outlets, sympathizing with Biden’s preposterous claim that abortion opposition was a white supremacist idea, spun wild conspiracy theories.
Equally distressing was corporate America’s alignment with Biden’s assertion that Georgia’s election law—which increased voter turnout, particularly among Black citizens—was a modern manifestation of a Jim Crow law. The Major League Baseball followed suit, moving its All-Star Game out of Atlanta to register its protest.
The summer of 2020 saw the New York Times publishing an op-ed from Senator Tom Cotton. He called for the national guard to curb riots. Instantaneously, the paper’s staff initiated an online chant: ‘Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.’ This strange message attempted to paint differing opinions as perilous, thus circumventing the protection of free speech.
Between 2019 and 2023, a crucial factor driving woke hysteria and censorship was the distortion of reality through manipulated information. Both tech platforms and the mainstream media conceded to the growing demands for censorship. The editors who had run Cotton’s op-ed were driven out of the New York Times. The stage was set for any views leaning towards the right as unethical, pushing the perceived center far to the left.
The intersection of COVID-19 fear, the public’s outrage over Floyd’s demise, Trump’s polarizing politics, and a locked down, deranged NYC presented the perfect backdrop for Mamdani’s politics. Herein lies the answer to why his views appear so incredulous. Nonetheless, these factors alone cannot fully explain the public behavior of figures like Biden, Harris, and Mamdani, or that of corporate America.
Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State, branded Trump an ‘illegitimate president’ with no repercussions. This unfounded aggression deepened over four years to find new outlets in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The lockdowns provoked fear among people, driving them toward the extremities as they navigated through unverifiable internet narratives.
In the grotesque aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, just as the lockdown-induced public madness peaked with the summer’s arrival, this confluence of factors acted as the fuel for the extreme left. However, this does not provide an adequate explanation for the extreme actions by Biden, Harris, Mamdani, and the rest of corporate America. The key ingredient was the unchecked censorship that unified and emboldened the Left to veer even further to that side.