The Brooklyn I loved would never have elected Zohran Mamdani

I was working at the Brooklyn Army Terminal. I remember the smell of 9/11, the smoke, the chaos, the surgeons and EMS workers doing everything they could to save lives that could not be saved. That smell stayed with me. I smelled it again twenty years later, after Hamas massacred innocent civilians on October 7, 2023. The stench of human cruelty does not change. It only reappears when we stop recognizing evil for what it is.

Here is what I have learned watching this city for the last two years. Jihad does not always show up with a suicide vest and a detonator anymore. Most of the time, it shows up with a clipboard. It infiltrates institutions quietly, advances Islamist priorities through the language of civil rights, and reshapes Muslim political influence in the West one school board, one city council, one congressional primary at a time. It works by capturing the minds of the young and turning them into instruments to dismantle the society that gave them a platform.

Mamdani himself is one man. He is the visible part of a much larger machine. The real danger is the network of radical ideologues he has staffed, endorsed, and protected, who will still be in power long after he is gone, carrying out the same mission with or without him. That mission has never been about building America. It is about hollowing it out from the inside, while telling it to you is justice.

The New York I knew was wild, gritty, passionate, explosive and messy. It was never hateful.

Multicultural events celebrated what made New York great: its differences, its shared humanity, and its pride in one another. People who disagreed on everything political could still share a stage, a parade, a meal. Linda Sarsour, now a symbol of division and radicalization, once seemed like a partner in dialogue and an ally in the belief that coexistence was possible. That New York has disappeared. The Democratic Party has disappeared.

Here is what changed. Not the rhetoric. The bodies.

On May 21, 2025, a gunman shot two Israeli embassy staffers to death outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, shouting "free Palestine" as he was arrested. Eleven days later, a man with eighteen Molotov cocktails and a homemade flamethrower attacked a weekly walk for the Israeli hostages on Pearl Street in Boulder, Colorado. He told police he wanted to "kill all Zionist people." He burned a dog and twelve human beings, one of them a Holocaust survivor in her eighties. Karen Diamond died of her injuries three weeks later. The judge who sentenced her killer to life plus 2,128 years called it what it was: an act of terror against an entire community.

Then, on December 23, 2024, a 27-year-old Floridian armed with a suppressed AR-15 drove to what he believed was an AIPAC office in Plantation, Florida, intending to kill the Jews who worked there. He told the FBI he wanted to "make a change" to the "status quo." His own family turned him in. A federal grand jury indicted him this June, on June 18, the day before Mamdani's allies swept three congressional primaries in this city.

That is the timeline. A museum. A pedestrian mall. An office park. Eighteen months. Three separate men, three separate cities, the same target, the same language, the same word: Zionist, used the way a slur is always used, as a way to aim hatred at a people while pretending it is aimed at a policy. None of these men ever met Zohran Mamdani. They did not need to. The permission structure was already built for them, brick by brick, panel by panel, hashtag by hashtag, long before any of them picked up a weapon.

That some Satmar groups would even consider supporting the man whose movement built that permission structure is not a footnote. It is a measure of how far the city has drifted from basic moral clarity.

Now read the document itself. It tells you exactly what this is.

The DSA's new platform, "Workers Deserve More," was finalized this month by the organization's National Political Committee. Page two is where the mask comes off. The platform does not name its enemy as a particular cop, a particular judge, a particular president. It names the enemy as "the entire anti-democratic structure of our society." Its stated goal is not a policy fix. It is to "transform society," "draft a new constitution," and "create a democratic socialist republic." The document is explicit that this requires "building a new society from the ground up."

After that, the platform offers the familiar wishlist: a 32-hour work week, free education from pre-K through college, universal health care, social housing, universal rent control, a guaranteed right to counsel for tenants. Even these are framed as partial. The platform says some of them might be won under the current system, but "complete victory" requires the new society it describes on page two. The rent check is bait. The constitution is the catch.

Page three is where the radical demands stack up without apology. Under the section on ending mass incarceration, the platform calls for demilitarizing police, stripping police unions of power, and redirecting police and prison funding toward other ends as explicit steps toward "abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state." Its foreign policy section reads exactly like the anti-imperialist wing that wrote it: defund the Department of War, end all foreign wars, close every overseas base, end military and economic aid to Israel, recognize what it calls the Palestinian people's "right to resist" occupation, and name Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state.

It calls to end economic sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran in the same breath it calls to defund the American military. Then immigration: abolish ICE, end all detention and deportation, legalize migration, grant amnesty to every undocumented person regardless of status, end visa caps entirely.

Page four is the part that should be on every front page in this city and is not. Under a section the platform calls "A Real Democracy," it calls to abolish the Electoral College and replace the president and the Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by, and subordinate to, Congress. Under "A Democratic Congress," it calls to scrap the two-party system entirely, expand the House, impose proportional representation and ranked-choice voting on every election in the country, and abolish the United States Senate. This is not a wishlist anymore. This is a demolition plan for the constitutional order, with the wreckage relabeled "a real democracy."

DSA's own people know exactly how this lands. Candidates have been coached that "abolish the Senate" is an obvious line of attack before anyone else even raises it, which tells you the organization understood the liability before the public did. The right response to that coaching is not sympathy. It is a question, asked directly and asked often: do you support it or do you oppose it? Which parts? Will you say so on the record?

Because they cannot have it both ways. They cannot run on the DSA endorsement, take the DSA volunteers, use the DSA's tenant unions and ceasefire committees and field operation to get elected, and then act baffled when someone asks whether they actually believe what the organization that elected them just wrote down on paper. Every DSA-backed official and candidate in this city, starting with the three who just won their primaries, owes New Yorkers a straight answer. Not a dodge about the platform being aspirational. Not a deflection to housing costs. A straight answer.

Three of this movement's candidates won their primaries on June 23. Brad Lander unseated a sitting congressman in a race fought explicitly over AIPAC money and Israel. Claire Valdez beat the Brooklyn Borough President and used her victory speech to call for abolishing ICE and freeing Palestine in the same breath. Darializa Avila Chevalier, who has told reporters she believes all deportations are wrong without exception, beat a five-term incumbent by fewer than three thousand votes. None of them will lose in November. The infrastructure that delivers a Pemberton or a Soliman every few months and the infrastructure that just delivered three congressional nominations are not separate things. They are upstream and downstream of the same river.

Mamdani will not be mayor forever. That is exactly the point, and exactly the danger. The DSA does not build campaigns around one man. It builds cadre. It trains organizers, runs them through tenant unions and ceasefire committees and Assembly races, and moves them into permanent staff positions long after the cameras leave. Long after Mamdani is term-limited or has moved on to whatever comes next for him, the people he is training right now will still be sitting on city council, in Congress, in agency leadership, holding a platform that already told them what the final destination looks like. The machine outlives the man by design.

When Mamdani stands on a stage and weaponizes family stories to justify what he is building, I think of mine. My grandfather. My father. The smoke over lower Manhattan. The sand in Israel. None of it was rhetoric. It was a body count, and the body count did not stop in 2023. It is still running.

A Mamdani win, and now a Mamdani sweep, asks a question of all of us. Has Rome fallen? Have we grown so numb that we elect, and now re-elect by proxy, a movement that puts "abolish the Senate" and "draft a new constitution" in writing on page two of its own platform, while the streets it organizes keep producing men with rifles and Molotov cocktails who use its language to justify killing Jews? The Brooklyn I loved would never have allowed it. The New York I believed in, diverse, tough, compassionate, built to work with individual communities rather than against them, would never have stood for it.

But that is the test now. History does not repeat itself quietly. It roars, if we let it.

And no one is blander than Brad Lander, the man the machine just sent to Congress. He calls it coalition. It is surrender dressed up as sophistication. Appeasement is not a strategy.

It never was. Every rose has its thorn. With this platform, the closer you look, the more obvious it becomes there are a lot more thorns than petals.