Same Old Situation

Theater kid or not, Zohran Mamdani is a socialist first and foremost

My friend Scott Greer—very smart, tall too—has described Zohran Mamdani, the current favourite to win the New York mayoral race, as a “theater kid socialist.” I think this is an apt coinage, one that cuts straight to the absurdities of the man-child and those who support him. Even so, we should be in no doubt: This is a dangerous person. Dangerous for New York, and dangerous for America too. Everything we know about him we know already from countless socialists who’ve come before.

This never ends well.

Greer predicted two years ago that the future of leftism in America would be a combination of anti-white racism and socialism that he dubbed “American Chavism,” after Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Latin America’s premier white-person-hating socialist. The difference, it turns out two years later, is it’s not a big hulking Latin American strongman that’s fronting American Chavism—it’s irony-soaked, bratty nerds and hipsters, masters of clapbacks and social-media self-marketing. Theater kids.

America’s most prominent theater kid socialist is, of course, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but Zohran is already giving her a run for her money. He’s a genuine nerd by birth—the son of a world-famous academic who has written, among other things, about the Rwandan genocide—and when he’s not making outrageously anti-white statements on his social-media, he’s making equally disgusting, simpering posts about performing cunnilingus on his Jar Jar Binks-looking wife during Ramadan.

Everything about his campaign and self-presentation is filtered through the many, many lenses of social media. The whole thing has been about as self-referential and as irony-driven as any knowing parody of Bushwick hipsterdom, with ride-along interviews on the subway L-train conducted by insufferable faggots who buy all their clothes from thrift stores and sport tattoos that would disgrace a truckstop bathroom stall.

It’s no surprise, then, that for all his anti-white hatred and his use of the poo-coloured language of “global intifada,” Mamdani’s most important demographic is not non-whites or immigrants. He’s got some support from recent immigrants, for sure, but Stephen Miller’s claim that Mamdani’s victory is the result of “unchecked migration” requires some clarification. Unchecked migration has changed New York and America beyond recognition in recent decades, nobody could deny that, and it’s obviously responsible for wholesale shifts in attitudes about the nature of America and the desirability of continuing the Founding Fathers’ experiment in self-government as conceived. But this still doesn’t adequately explain why it’s white college-educated Millennials and Zoomers who are Mamdani’s—and AOC’s—strongest soldiers.

Unlike his fellow Indian Vivek Ramaswamy, who basically appears to believe anything that will help him get ahead—advocating one day for blowing the lid off the Great Replacement, the next for repopulating America with an infinity of H-1B hires, simply because Americans watch too much Saved by the Bell and have too many sleepovers—Zohran really is a true believer, it seems. Both of his parents are leftist true believers as well, even though his father was subject to a nasty bit of race-based dispossession himself. In 1972, he was kicked out of Uganda by Idi Amin, along with all the other Indians, who were far too successful for the banana-munching dictator’s liking.

I said “even though” there, but maybe that’s the wrong qualifier. Because maybe the credo quia absurdum est of leftism, the true test of belief in the face of encroaching reality, is to suffer the negative results of the policies you support and continue supporting them anyway. Idi Amin banished the hated Indians of Uganda because they were too successful, just like Lenin and Stalin obliterated all the kulaks because they were too successful, and in both cases disaster followed—yet, instead of revolting, the true believer digs in to an even deeper disavowal of the truth.

The “theater kid socialist” tag is good, like I said, but we shouldn’t let it distract from the fundamental truth this isn’t a variant of socialism Mamdani is proposing. It’s just socialism, plain and simple, and it always amounts to the same thing. Some sub-types, like Fanonism, derived from Franz Fanon’s 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth, bring out the biological, anti-white basis of modern socialism more strongly, but they’re all just riffs on the same diabolical, discordant tune.

The Bolsheviks opened the prisons in 1918 and in every town and city they “liberated” during the bloody Russian Civil War, and Zohran Mamdani would do the same today. He’s said he believes violence, at least in the guise of violent crime, is an “artificial construct,” and apparently doesn’t want anyone to go to prison. Otherwise, I think he very clearly believes in the reality, even the desirability, of violence. Watch a video of him shedding fake tears about the racism he’s endured, or read a few of his decade-old tweets about how the mere sight and sound of white people inconveniences him, then tell me he wouldn’t round up his enemies—principally white people—and put them in camps if he could. You can’t, not with a straight face and a good conscience.