There have been various versions of the quote falsely attributed to Winston Churchill, which is usually expressed thusly: “If you’re not a liberal when you’re young, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re old, you have no brain.”
Mind you, it sounds like something Churchill might have said, but pretty much every reliable source — including the International Churchill Society, which I’d assume knows about these things — has called it fake. Nevertheless, the sentiment is apt: When you’re young, you expect the world to be given to you because you’re special. When you’re old, you suddenly discover that a bunch of randos want what you’ve worked for because those faceless randos labor under the misapprehension that they’re special.
From all indications, New York City is poised to elect a man who has never grown up and believes the same things as a privileged adult that he believed as a privileged undergraduate.
There are plenty of problematic positions that Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has taken, especially when it comes to treating the state of Israel as the city’s obstreperous sixth borough and his apparent willingness to use race as a cudgel, with a promise to increase the budget for preventing “hate violence” (quite broadly defined in his platform) by nearly nine times what it currently is.
Mamdani is 33 — not old, but hardly young. Yet, his positions on both Israel and race relations seem to have carried over from his days at Maine’s prestigious Bowdoin College, where pieces he authored for the student paper carry the same stench of radicalism his campaign currently exudes, only with a more refined odor to it.
According to Fox News, Mamdani authored 32 pieces for the school paper, the Bowdoin Orient, between 2010 and 2014. Two in particular — one on a proposed academic boycott of Israeli interests and scholars, another one on white privilege — might as well have been Ctrl+V’ed into his campaign website.
In a 2014 piece, he criticized Bowdoin president Barry Mills for not signing onto a proposed Israeli boycott.
This academic and cultural boycott aims to bring under scrutiny the actions of the Israeli government and to put pressure on Israeli institutions to end the oppressive occupation and racist policies within both Israel and occupied Palestine.
To date, Israeli academic institutions have been notoriously silent with regards to the daily oppression of their Palestinian counterparts. No Israeli university has actively or publicly opposed the occupation. Israeli universities give priority admission to soldiers, discriminate against Palestinian students, and have developed remote-controlled bulldozers for the Israeli Army’s home demolitions.
Are you markedly different from your college years?
Lastly, Mills regrettably makes no mention of Palestinians or Palestine. The call for the boycott comes in response to more than 60 years of Israeli colonial occupation of Palestine. When Mills speaks of the “free exchange of knowledge, ideas, and research, and open discourse” in academia, he does so while privileging partnerships with Israeli institutions over basic freedoms for Palestinians, including the rights to food, water, shelter and education, which many Palestinians are denied under Israeli rule.
Mamdani was the co-president of Bowdoin’s Students for Justice in Palestine — and during his time with that organization, The Free Press reported in a profile piece in April as his poll numbers were in the ascendency, his behavior left an unpleasant taste in the mouths of many students who felt his actions bordered on outright anti-Semitism. A snippet:
During the 2012 war in Gaza between Hamas and Israel, a Bowdoin alumnus who was active in J Street U—a progressive pro-Israel group on campus—told me that Mamdani allowed SJP to meet with his organization for a “productive discussion.” But then Zohran and his co-founder instituted a policy of “non-normalization,” he said. In other words, all engagement with pro-Israel groups was off the table.
“We were pretty disappointed because we thought we were actually getting somewhere,” the alumnus said. “And then they axed it.”
Another former classmate told me he asked Mamdani if he would help organize a music festival between SJP and J Street U. “He was very flippantly like, ‘No, absolutely not.’ And at the time, I was like, ‘Wow, what an a**hole.’”
It’s worth noting that the outlet also asked Mamdani and his campaign twice whether he supported Israel’s right to exist without getting an answer in the affirmative. It was only after the piece was published that the campaign gave a third answer: “Yes.”
He’s since polished this up a bit, telling Stephen Colbert on election eve, “Yes, like all nations, I believe it has a right to exist — and a responsibility also to uphold international law.” Given that he believes international law allows him to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the warrant of an international court that doesn’t have jurisdiction in New York City and that the United States is not a signatory to, that’s one heck of a qualification.
Onto white privilege, which Mamdani said was “characterized by many things, primarily its lack of acknowledgement.” He was responding to an individual who had an issue with the school paper basically saying it wanted to stop more white male writers from contributing opinions. Someone took issue, and Mamdani decided to upbraid them.
White males are privileged in their near-to-exclusive featuring as figures of authority in print, on television and around us in our daily realities.
We, the consumers of these media, internalize this and so believe in the innate authority of a white male’s argument and the need for its publication. So, white privilege is both a structural and an individual phenomenon, the former propelling the latter. Therefore, even when the individual is silent, the structures continue to exist and frame our society through their existence.
Somewhat ironically, Mamdani seems to have lied about his race to rid himself of what academia considers privilege; while most Asian students are generally lumped in with whites in the undesirables pile in the college admissions sweepstakes, Mamdani listed himself as “Black or African American” because, despite the fact he’s 100 percent ethnically Indian, he was born in Uganda and spent the early years of his life there and in South Africa. This might explain why he got into a prestigious liberal arts college despite having middling SAT scores for elite postsecondary institutions.
And what is he supporting now? More or less the same thing, which is why self-flagellating privileged whites are basically Mamdani’s base. They’ll vote for him, and they’ll jump up and down in elation at the thoroughly soy victory parties for the socialist candidate. Just don’t expect them to give up their laptop-warrior jobs or their trust funds.
This is the secret to Mamdani: He never grew up. He may be a refined Peter Pan, but he still lives in the Neverland of academia. If he were a private individual, that’d be his problem. Alas, he wants to force his youthful delusions on the 8 million residents of a very corporeal, very troubled city. Those who cast their vote for him can’t say they weren’t warned.
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