Hi everyone,
As New York City closes in on Election Day, Democratic Socialist frontrunner Zohran Mamdani has been banging the drums of Islamophobia. On Friday, he delivered a press conference, taking no questions, where he spoke directly to the 1 million Muslims in New York, telling them he was not going to hide his Muslimness and neither should they.
He explained that his "aunt" was afraid to ride the subway after 9/11 because of fears she would be harassed for wearing her hijab. On Monday, he had to clarify that it was not his aunt but his father's cousin, and then complained that even asking the question of whether or not it really was his aunt—after internet sleuths discovered that his only aunt was living in Tanzania and does not wear a hijab—was Islamophobic.
Mamdani told the story of how as a school boy his teacher took him aside after the terrorists took down the World Trade Centers and said that he might get bullied because of his faith. He praised her for her compassion, but never had any examples of actually getting bullied for his faith. He became an American citizen when it became expedient for his career to do so, at age 27, and not before, yet he complains about having been allegedly racially profiled by the TSA when coming back and forth to the US.
This is a man who lures people in with his smile, his polite manners, who appeals to the over-educated creator class in New York City because they feel that supporting him makes them morally good people. They don't look past the banners, they don't dig past the vibes, they just roll with it because it makes them feel morally superior.
The other side of his support is essentially foreign born. It's not the native New Yorkers, in either case, who are backing Mamdani. The creative class is mostly imported from across the country and the world. The foreign born asylum seekers and refugees, also, have poured in from everywhere else. They don't view America as something established, something to come be part of, but as something to rearrange until it suits them.
And Americans have done such a great job of suppressing an American identity that we're willing to just let it all go, watch it get conquered as our culture dies, just so we're not called names like colonialists, racists, Islamophobes. There is no morality in identity. Mamdani and his socialist contingent are playing New York, and it's the nation that will suffer for it.
Libby