“Queer liberation” through defunding the police and legalizing prostitution — that was Zohran Mamdani’s inspiration before he became the Democratic nominee for mayor in America’s largest city.
Mamdani, in his Twitter posts in 2020, also called the New York Police Department racist, demanded a Christopher Columbus statue be torn down, advocated a boycott of and divestment from Israel, and plenty more.
Mamdani had just entered electoral politics that year, winning a seat in the State Assembly. He ran on a slate of issues far more radical than opening a socialist grocery store or outlawing billionaires. Mamdani joined most folks in his party and on his half of social media in a frantic race to the Left.
Today, as mainstream Democrats try to come to terms with their New York City nominee, some wave away those old tweets — that was 2020, after all, and everyone was doing it.
Move on from the overheated talk in 2020, come the cries from the center-left.
After all, tensions were high. Trump was running for reelection, folks were locked down, their schools closed, and fears of a deadly virus were high. George Floyd’s death, beneath the knee of a police officer, seemed not only tragic but depraved.
The extraordinary circumstances of 2020 help explain why so many people went so mad. But these explanations don’t excuse Mamdani and don’t quite add up to a full explanation for the Left’s 2020-ness.
Mamdani’s posts
In 2020, Mamdani, who, according to the media fact-checkers, is definitely not a communist, tweeted a slightly abridged version of the most famous tenet from the Communist Manifesto: “Each according to their need, each according to their ability.”
Mamdani also argued that New York City needed a communist as mayor.
While the Left was busy rioting and tearing down statues, Mamdani posted a picture of his middle finger (clad in a plastic sanitary glove, for fear of COVID, presumably), flipping off a statue of Christopher Columbus, with the caption, “take it down.”
This was part of a broader crusade against colonialism, which peaked in 2020. In that milieu, Mamdani celebrated himself as a Ugandan national.
But Mamdani’s wildest posts were his “intersectional” ones.
“Intersectionality” was big in 2020. Academics peddled the idea to foster solidarity among left-wing activists. “All struggles are the same struggle” is one slightly simplistic summary of intersectionality.
On Twitter, Mamdani tried to tie together “queer liberation,” and anti-Israel views, writing “Queer movements & mov[e]ments for racial justice know: no one’s free until we’re all free.”
“Queer liberation means defund the police,” now a classic in intersectional Twitter posts, reads like woke Mad Libs.
Here, the would-be mayor asserts flatly that “the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.”
Mamdani went even further than most on transgender ideology. His constant use of the word “queer” was meant to encompass both gay couples and transgender prostitutes. He was relentless in his insistence that men become women when they identify as such.
Being 100% on board with gender ideology, hating the NYPD, hating Christopher Columbus, and going all-in on anticolonialism hardly seems like the slate of positions that will bring NYC together. But back in 2020, it kind of sounded normal.
2020 was a wild time
One defense of Mamdani is that back in 2020, lots of people were talking that way. It’s true, in a sense. The year 2020 probably (hopefully) represented the most extreme end of left-wing radicalism. Look beyond Mamdani at what other Democrats and liberal institutions did from 2019 to 2023.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris, while seeking the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, stated that she supported taxpayer-funded sex-change surgeries for transgender illegal immigrants in prison. That’s stupid and extreme, but remember that Harris didn’t make up this idea: She was responding to an American Civil Liberties Union survey that asked specifically about that topic. This was a pillar of “civil liberties,” apparently.
Everyone left of center, including former President Joe Biden, were calling Hispanic people “LatinX” because the words Latino and Latina are gendered. This was a particularly cringey contribution to the effort to abolish sex differences.
Government agencies and medical journals began using the phrases “pregnant people” and “birthing persons” instead of “pregnant women” and “mothers.” “Chest feeding” replaced “breast feeding.”
Democrats opened their events with “land acknowledgements.” County governments were canceling President George Washington. Rhode Island changed its name for historically illiterate woke reasons.
Major newspapers started running totally insane conspiracy theories echoing the Biden line that opposing abortion was somehow a white supremacist idea.
Corporate America went along with Biden’s claim that Georgia’s election law — a law that ended up increasing turnout, especially black turnout — was modern-day Jim Crow. Major League Baseball, to protest this law, moved its All-Star Game out of Atlanta.
As part of the post-Floyd “racial reckoning,” Robin DiAngelo, an obvious grifter, became a cause célèbre in respectable circles, and employers and universities began requiring her White Fragility alongside the work of Ibram X. Kendi. Unhinged conspiracy theorist Taylor Lorenz was hired up and celebrated by the New York Times and the Washington Post. Election denier Stacey Abrams became a hero for the news media and the Democrats.
How did things get so wild? The obvious factors were Trump, COVID-19 and the resulting lockdowns, and George Floyd’s death.
Most of the Left never accepted Trump’s 2016 win. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called him an “illegitimate president,” and she suffered no repercussions for it. Cable news spun a conspiracy theory that Russia had stolen the election for Trump. This madness just built up over four years and found new outlets.
The pandemic terrified people, and the lockdowns drove them mad. Separated from real-world contact with friends, neighbors, classmates, and colleagues, Americans went down internet rabbit holes, which led to extremism.
George Floyd was killed in a particularly gruesome way, just as the lockdowns had fried most of the public’s brains and just as the weather got hot.
But Floyd, lockdowns, and Trump aren’t sufficient to explain the extremism of people such as Biden, Harris, Mamdani, and corporate America. The key ingredient was the censorship.
‘Misinformation’ and ‘Harm’
In Summer 2020, when the New York Times ran an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) calling for the national guard to suppress riots, the paper’s staff began a mantra online: “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.”
It was bizarre; no serious person believed that running the op-ed put black New York Times staff in danger. The odd wording was an attempt to recast the opinions they disliked as dangerous, placing them outside the protections of freedom of speech.
Governments, media outlets, and social media companies used a similar justification for suppressing all sorts of opinions on COVID-19, including valid observations about the efficacy of the vaccines and possible side effects. The New York Times sang the praises of the platforms that censored “dangerous” opinions or observations.
Liberals started peddling the idea of “stochastic terrorism,” arguing that, say, criticizing transgender ideology would stoke readers or listeners into murdering transgender people, and so criticizing transgender ideology should be considered incitement.
The outlets and tech platforms all went along with the censorship. The New York Times drove out the editors who ran Cotton’s op-ed.
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This censoriousness was a central factor in the woke mania of 2019 to 2023. The tone was set that right-of-center views were out of bounds, which moved the apparent center far to the left. The Left’s success at censoring their opponents emboldened them to tack further left.
It was in this milieu — locked down, COVID-19-fearful, Floyd-furious, Trump-deranged New York City — that Mamdani first laid out his political worldview. No wonder it’s so insane.
