It’s not bad at all … if you’re a Republican, or if you don’t live in New York City. Or Chicago. Or Los Angeles. Or … well, practically everywhere the Democrat Party competes.
After running their strategy of being the I Hate Trump Party and losing the election despite two solid years of lawfare to kneecap Donald Trump, one might have expected some change in direction among Democrats. Nope — they’re still obsessed with Orange Man Bad, and Zohran Mamdani played the one note Democrats know to perfection in the mayoral primary. Now that Mamdani has run the Biden/Harris playbook and won, suddenly the Dem ‘establishment’ is ‘panicking,’ according to Axios, and for good reason:
Many Democratic leaders and donors are panicking about Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old democratic socialist who won the party’s nomination to be the next mayor of New York City.
Why it matters: Establishment Democrats looking to recover from 2024’s losses fear Mamdani could hurt the party’s brand nationally — while young progressives believe his formula could spread beyond New York.
Could spread beyond New York? Baby, it already has. Mamdani is not a unique pioneer in the wilderness of extreme-Left politics. To some extent, he’s a Johnny-come-lately. Unrepentant Castroite Karen Bass got elected mayor in Los Angeles three years ago despite her mourning the death of brutal dictator Fidel Castro as “Commandante El Jefe” six years prior (link has since expired after Bass left the House). Bass spent the 1970s working for the Castros in Cuba’s Venceremos Brigade, which she attempted to describe in 2020 as something like Habitat for Humanity with only a soupçon of Fidel worship. Nor was it only a momentary fling; Bass did that eight different times, and returned to Cuba on several occasions after that.
Only in 2020, when Bass ended up on Joe Biden’s Veepstakes shortlist for exactly the reason we’d expect, did she start to softpedal her Castro worship. She told the media that her thoughts on Castro had “developed over time,” but not developed enough to avoid the weepy tribute to Commandante El Jefe in 2016. That “development” took place in the short period between Joe Biden’s interest in her potential as a running mate and the selection of Kamala Harris instead.
So what kind of mayor did Bass turn out to be? Well, she globetrotted while Los Angeles burned, won’t lift a finger to let the victims in the Palisades and Alta Dena rebuild their private party, all but incited riots targeting ICE agents attempting to serve judicial warrants on criminal illegal aliens, and only acted to contain anti-Semitic violence at UCLA and other areas of LA during pro-Hamas protests because Joe Biden finally called it out after a few months.
What about Chicago? The Windy City elected Brandon Johnson on his socialist platform after apparently deciding that Lori Lightfoot was neither incompetent enough or extremist enough. Johnson had some of the same ideas that Mamdani has floated in the primary: government grocery stores, taxing the rich, pretty much the entire slate including the pro-Hamas propaganda. Remember this from two months ago today?
Chicago – “Destroy Israel” and “Make USA Jew Free” were scrawled across a sign at Argyle & Clark.
Meanwhile, Mayor Brandon Johnson posed with CAIR, proudly wearing a keffiyeh – a symbol appropriated to promote violence against the Jewish people.
Disturbing, @ChicagosMayor. pic.twitter.com/ztAchgnCSf
— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) April 24, 2025
The Chicago chapter of the Council on American–Islamic Relations posted a picture of Johnson with its executive director, Ahmed Rehab, at an event to mark Arab Heritage Month. In it, Johnson, who was elected in 2023, is wearing a black-and-white keffiyeh.
“Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (appropriately) commemorated Arab Heritage Month this week. Arab Heritage should be honored and celebrated,” Rabbi Ari Hart of Skokie Valley Agudath Jacob Synagogue wrote on Facebook. “But would it not be possible [to] commemorate Arab Heritage without wearing the symbol that millions of Jews around the world saw worn to celebrate the murder, rape and kidnapping of October 7th?”
Johnson used the same dodge as Mamdani did, who insisted that “intifada” means something like the assertion of rights. Jonathan Chait called shenanigans on that in The Atlantic this week, and warned that it pointed to a radicalization of American politics on the Left:
Mamdani may sincerely believe this, as do some of his supporters. But he then delved into the semantics of intifada, citing the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s use of the word as the translation of “uprising” in an Arabic version of an article the museum published about the Warsaw Ghetto. This comparison, to a Jewish armed rebellion against the Nazis, hardly dispels concern about the incendiary implications of the slogan. If the intifada is akin to the ghetto uprising, then it is a call for violence. If its theater of operations is global, then it is necessarily directed against civilians. Days before the Democratic primary, when Mamdani appeared to be gaining momentum, the controversy about his comments on Miller’s show dragged the race’s focus back to the Middle East, a subject that Mamdani has not emphasized in his campaign. Yet this debate has largely missed the significance. What makes the slogan so disturbing in an American context is not the intifada bit. It’s the globalize part.
An unfortunate spillover effect of the war between Israel and Hamas is its extension into U.S. politics. If we are heading toward a future in which even candidates for local office in the United States run on their position toward the Middle East, American politics will come to resemble that intractable conflict. The pluralist alternative is to confine conflict over Palestine and Israel to any national elected office that could have actual influence on U.S. foreign policy. Everybody needs to be willing to live with a mayor who does not share their personal solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Exactly, except Chaitr gives too much credit to the idea than Mamdani, Johnson, and the Squad think intifada means anything else than terrorism. They know exactly what it means, and they intend to globalize and localize it in order to impose their will on their subject populations. Bass was well on her way in doing that the past few weeks in Los Angeles, calling out activists for ‘street action’ against federal law enforcement. The vice-mayor of Cudahy is the reductio ad absurdum of that same impulse, calling out her “cholos” in the vicious 18th Street gangs to violently protect their “turf.”
Democrats are right to panic, but not because Mamdani gives a skewed impression of what Democrats are. Mamdani is merely the latest example of exactly who Democrats are. They have become the party of radical Marxists, now ready to commit violence to seize power after infiltrating the institutions of the republic to access it. Anyone shocked by this simply hasn’t paid attention.
What will the Democrat establishment do about it? I’d bet they try to get Eric Adams across the finish line as an independent, but that may not be enough to stop Mamdani and the socialist revolution that Democrat elites have nurtured for decades in Academia. The masks are slipping, and there’s little they can do to distract from it now.
