The next mayor of New York City is almost certainly going to be a naturalized citizen who has expressed hatred and disdain for America. Zohran Mamdani is the consummate, calculating striver of the post-national era, someone who belongs nowhere and is loyal to no nation. He does not identify with this country’s heritage or traditions in any way—indeed, he feels entitled to overturn the practices of his adopted country in the name of global “democracy.”

Former generations of Americans would have considered his views disqualifying. Mamdani is a member of that portion of millennials who revered Barack Obama as the quintessence of “hip” and imbibed deeply from his poisoned well of wokeness. Like Obama, Mamdani had a similar nomadic upbringing and clearly wants to suggest the same charismatic, cosmopolitan vibe Obama once used to lead America astray.

Like Obama, Mamdani has been called a radical Islamist or jihadist by right-wing Boomers and neoconservative publications, but the charge was never plausible against the obviously atheistic Obama, nor is it a fitting criticism against  the zippy socialist from Queens. Mamdani wants to make New York City a “sanctuary city” for “gender-affirming care,” those clamoring for an assortment of supposed LGBTQIA+ rights, and abortion on demand. I am no expert on Islam, but that sounds pretty haram.

Mamdani’s religious commitments are very much in doubt. Like Somalian refugee Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a progressive often labeled a jihadist by critics, he harbors hostility to Israel not from the point of view of faith, but because of his anti-Western perspective, which sees the Jewish state as part of a colonial “white” hegemony.

It is fair to say that Mamdani grew up steeped in the regressive mindset of the Third World. His father, Columbia professor Mahmood Mamdani, has written about the supposed evils of colonialism and nationalism. His mother, a renowned movie director, once said that her son “is at home in many places” and that “he thinks of himself as a Ugandan and as an Indian.”

In his youth, Mamdani expressed alienation and anger toward white society and said he felt more at home in Cairo than in the United States. His views have remained fundamentally the same. As a mayoral candidate, Mamdani has called for taxing white New Yorkers more to pay for his redistributionist agenda, a startlingly hateful and divisive racial policy that would have been unthinkable in the recent past.

With somebody like Mamdani, we could have guessed some of the details about his life that have emerged during his candidacy. . We could have guessed that during the George Floyd uprising he sided with the rioters, and photographed himself giving the middle finger to a statue of Christopher Columbus. Or that he has a habit of ostentatiously eating rice with his hands. Or that he lied about being black to get into Columbia University (he still didn’t get in). 

When caught in this deception, Mamdani responded with the sophistry typical of his class: He practically bragged that his Third World essence is too complex to be labeled by our inferior Western categories. The flip side of this claim, of course, is that Western culture is dull and monochromatic, a common sentiment among today’s diversifying young population, among whom the ultimate insult, it seems, is to label something “white.” It is doubtful that Mamdani will pay a penalty for his affirmative action scandal, given the widespread fakery practiced by the liberal striver class. And while it is not politically correct to say, Indian culture is notorious for widespread acceptance of this kind of dishonesty. (For more on this, watch this Chronicles interview with Jayant Bhandari.)

Many on the right have tried to account for Mamdani’s rise by blaming the white professionals who rent in Brooklyn and Queens, but there are not many whites in the city left to blame. The population is only about 30 percent white. The coalition that Mamdani built was diverse: While his message was broadly economic and populist, he made clear identitarian appeals, such as adopting the Gaza struggle as the city’s own and speaking in foreign languages to voters. He won Latinos and Asians, both groups that have been touted as the right’s new allies against woke-ism. The GOP’s much ballyhooed multi-racial working class has become the right’s new obsession, but that is exactly the coalition Mamdani was able to assemble in New York.

The need to blame whites for the rise of figures like Mamdani is becoming somewhat of an unhealthy reflex on the right. Mamdani’s phenomenon is only possible because of the great wave of mass immigration that brought him and his family here. We should not be surprised to see more Mamdani clones cropping up in other cities in the future. The best insurance policy is to keep our borders closed to those parts of the world that do not readily blend well with ours… if the point of no return has not already passed.