City Hall is just a Linda Sarsour's Democratic Muslim Club Now

Based on reporting by the Washington Free Beacon, February 2026 & Our Archive

Before we talk about who's running New York City right now, we need to talk about how Linda Sarsour became Linda Sarsour. Because she didn't fall out of the sky. She was built. Funded. Positioned. And the story of how that happened starts at a closed-door conference at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Washington, DC, in November 2016.

Days after Donald Trump won the presidency, George Soros and his Democracy Alliance — a network of left-wing billionaires and mega-donors who've steered over $600 million into progressive infrastructure since 2005 — gathered for an emergency strategy session. The original agenda had been built around a Hillary Clinton victory. Now they needed a new plan. Soros spoke. Nancy Pelosi showed up. Elizabeth Warren showed up. Keith Ellison showed up.

And Linda Sarsour showed up.

She was fresh off hijacking the Women's March — a genuinely organic movement of millions of women that Sarsour and a handful of other organizers muscled their way into leading, turning it into their personal brand vehicle. Within months, the March would be engulfed in accusations of anti-Semitism so severe that Jewish women stopped participating and Sarsour and her co-chairs would eventually be forced to step down.

But in November 2016, none of that had detonated yet. Sarsour was riding high. She'd inserted herself into Black Lives Matter after Ferguson. She'd positioned herself as a feminist icon despite advocating for sharia law. She'd been named a White House "Champion of Change" under Obama. And now she was sitting in a room full of billionaires plotting "full-on trench warfare" against the incoming president.

By March 2017, Sarsour was back at another Democracy Alliance conference, this time on a panel called "Fueling and Sustaining the Progressive Resistance." Same donors. Same closed-press rules. Same agenda: funnel money into activist infrastructure and build a permanent resistance machine.

This is where Linda Sarsour got her wings. Not from the streets. From a ballroom full of billionaires at a luxury hotel.

The Grift Resume

Once Sarsour had the donor network behind her, the pattern became unmistakable: find a cause, attach herself to it, redirect the energy (and frequently the money) toward her own orbit.

After Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston in 2017, Sarsour tweeted out a "Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund" link asking her 230,000 followers to donate. Except the money didn't go to hurricane victims. It went to the Texas Organizing Project Education Fund — a political organizing group backed by SEIU and MoveOn.org. The fund's own Facebook page said donations would be "used to organize in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey." Not rescue. Not rebuild. Organize.

Before that, she raised $162,000 to repair vandalized Jewish cemeteries in St. Louis, Chicago, and Rochester. The cemeteries reportedly never received the money. She raised funds for a supposed Muslim hate-crime victim that police later determined was not a hate crime at all.

Each time the same playbook: find pain, create a fundraiser, redirect the cash, call anyone who questions it a racist.

Meanwhile, Sarsour called her "mentor" Imam Siraj Wahhaj — one of the unindicted co-conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. She publicly called for "jihad" against Trump. She compared Zionism to white supremacy. She supported Louis Farrakhan. She defended convicted terrorist Rasmea Odeh. She branded CNN's Jake Tapper an "alt-right" ally for questioning her.

This is the woman who co-founded the Muslim Democratic Club of New York in 2012 with three other people: Faiza Ali, Aliya Latif, and Ali Najmi.

All three of them now hold senior positions in Zohran Mamdani's city government.

The Takeover

Mamdani became mayor in January 2026. And one by one, the MDCNY co-founders started getting keys to the building.

Aliya Latif — now executive director of the Mayor's Office of Faith-Based Partnerships. Her first move was urging city clergy to resist federal immigration enforcement at an interfaith breakfast. On social media, she's reposted accusations of Israeli "genocide" and signal-boosted support for Marcellus Williams, a convicted murderer who stabbed a St. Louis reporter forty-three times. She calls Sarsour her "right hand," her "sister," and her "seeker-mother."

Faiza Ali — now commissioner of the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs. She spent four years at CAIR's New York branch — the same CAIR whose national leader said he was "happy to see" the October 7th massacre, and which has been designated a foreign terrorist organization in Texas and Florida. During her CAIR years, Ali championed the Ground Zero Mosque and defended a CAIR chapter leader who compared Hamas rocket fire to "a woman punching her rapist."

Ali Najmi — now heading the Mayor's Advisory Committee on the Judiciary, meaning he'll help select the judges who sit on New York City courts. He's publicly praised Sarsour and called criticism of her "slander and falsities."

Three out of four co-founders of Sarsour's club. All in positions that touch faith, immigration, and the courts. The only one missing is Sarsour herself.

But she doesn't need a title. She already told you why.

"It's Muslim Money"

At CAIR events during the 2025 mayoral race, Sarsour bragged openly that she convinced CAIR's political arm and a CAIR-endorsed super PAC to back Mamdani.

Her exact words: "The story is not just that it's random that Zohran ascended to this place. It's Muslim money."

After he won, she declared that anti-Israel extremism "actually sends you to City Hall." Then she promised to hold Mamdani "accountable" and vowed she wouldn't let him "do whatever the hell he wants."

That's not endorsement language. That's ownership language.

And the appointments confirm it. Beyond the MDCNY founders, Mamdani also hired Alvaro Lopez — a former Democratic Socialists of America official who called people who ripped down Israeli hostage flyers "heroes" — as his Brooklyn borough director. He hired Drashti Brahmbhatt, who led a campus divestment campaign against Israel at Brown, to handle his 100-Day Planning.

And in perhaps the most brazen move of all, Mamdani fired Rabbi Moshe Davis from the Mayor's Office to Combat Antisemitism and replaced him with a left-wing activist who bashes Israel. The rabbi said he believed he was dismissed for being a "proud Jew" who supports Israel.

The anti-Semitism office. They fired the Jewish guy running it.

The Machine

On October 7, 2023, while Israel was still identifying the bodies of 1,200 murdered civilians, MDCNY put out a statement complaining about elected officials showing too much compassion for the dead. They called it "75 years of Israeli occupation" leading "us to this moment." They shared the hashtag #NotOnOurDime — Mamdani's own bill.

That was the organization. Those were its values. And every single one of its founders, except the one who brags about bankrolling the mayor, now holds a senior city government position.

This didn't happen by accident. This is years of infrastructure — from the Soros-funded Democracy Alliance conference where Sarsour got connected to billionaire donor networks, to the movement hijacking that built her brand, to the fundraising grifts that kept the machine oiled, to the CAIR money that installed a mayor, to the appointments that filled City Hall with the roster.

It's architecture. It's deliberate. And eight million New Yorkers are living inside it.

They never do when the blueprint is showing.

Original reporting by the Washington Free Beacon, February 2026