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Posted on 11/05/2025 7:38:26 AM PST by MtnClimber
On October 26, Zohran Mamdani held a rally at Forest Hills Stadium—a venue that sits right across the street from my apartment. It was hard not to despair as tens of thousands of New York’s most caffeinated and clinically unstable activists flooded my quiet, tree-lined Queens neighborhood like a swarm of earnest locusts. I decided to treat the ordeal as fieldwork. Stepping outside with what I told myself was a neutral disposition, iPhone Notes app at hand, I talked to his devotees, observed their rituals, and tried, against all odds, to understand what gospel this man was preaching that could make the lunatic faithful sing.
The rally was a fever dream straight out of a left-wing Reddit thread. The air buzzed with the kind of hysteria you get only when politics becomes therapy. Graying baby boomers in anti-Trump T-shirts held up signs warning of encroaching fascism, while a cluster of Orthodox Muslim men sat stoically behind gender-indeterminate DSA members, each sporting the standard-issue nose ring like a badge of moral clarity. I even clocked a man in his 50s wearing a “MAGA for Mamdani” hat. It felt like the entire American political spectrum had collapsed into one anti-Israel, quasi-antisemitic ouroboros of incoherence.
Forget, for a moment, Mamdani’s absurd and self-canceling politics—a tangle of Third Worldist pseudo-communism, performative Islamist radicalism, and the sort of NGO-scented global liberalism that flatters itself as rebellion—and just look at him as a man. As a personality. And ask yourself, sincerely: What is it they see in him?
That personality, once confined to a single high school archetype, the class president from Alexander Payne’s brilliant satire Election, has metastasized into a generational condition. It’s now the default mode of the millennial liberal—aged 27 to 34 in 2025—whose youth was spent on the carousel of unpaid internships, social-media “activism,” and the slow-motion heartbreak of unmet expectations. Nothing worked out for these people. Every ideal curdled; every victory dissolved into irony. When rebellion finally beckoned, it too betrayed them—exposing itself as another corporate internship in moral outrage. Zohran is their avatar, their vindication, their revenge: the student-body president triumphant at last, holding the world that denied him his gold star hostage in a permanent assembly.
To understand why he’s winning—and why he’ll keep winning—you have to understand this creature of thwarted ambition, whose politics are not born of conviction but of resentment, who has mistaken vengeance for virtue and failure for depth.
Those unmoved by Mamdani’s curated aura and contrived political chic—myself among them—detect something creepy about the man. There’s the affectation: that perpetually forced grin, cartoon gopherlike in its falseness; the chameleon accent that shifts with the crowd; the photo ops designed to inflate his credibility as a “representative minority.” Time and again, he’s managed to tell extravagant lies while performing moral superiority—apparently unaware that he’s become a parody of champagne communism itself. He sermonizes about the struggles of the working class while neatly sidestepping the truth that his father is a celebrated academic, his mother a feted (if terminally dull) indie filmmaker, and that he, by all accounts, has never worked a day in his life.
Standing there that afternoon, surrounded by his admirers, that falseness felt contagious. The crowd seemed to mirror him—feigning belief rather than feeling it.
The image that stuck with me most was a wiry young man representing the Communist Party USA, stooped and spectral, his face half-swallowed by an N95 mask and a keffiyeh. In his hands, a dog-eared pamphlet bearing Malcolm X’s face and the headline: “You Can’t Have Capitalism Without Racism.” In that one image was the whole absurdity of the Zohran movement—2020 pandemic paranoia colliding with George Floyd-era moral absolutism, racial grievance wedded to radical chic, gender ambiguity mingling with anti-American resentment and antisemitic contempt, and a heavy, choking perfume of identity politics. It was ideology as collage—farcical, self-contradictory, and utterly sincere.
There was a low, electric hostility in the air that I’d never quite felt at a large-scale left-wing rally before. During Bernie Sanders’ two doomed presidential runs, his mass gatherings, though equally sprawling and ideologically diverse, carried a strange buoyancy. You could feel hope in the air, even if it was naïve or doomed. The Sanders crowd wanted to believe in something.
Zohran’s rally was darker, tighter, more revanchist. Every chant had a serrated edge to it. The few counterprotesters who had shown up—some waving Israeli flags, others muttering slogans about free speech or border security—weren’t just heckled; they were treated as existential threats. This was a movement pulsing with resentment.
The movement, as I witnessed it in the flesh and fumes, can be divided neatly into three species:
1. First, there are the Trump-deranged boomers—at war with their televisions, convinced that every policy disagreement they have with the right is a prelude to fascism. With little to no understanding the peculiar politics that Zohran represents, they half-heartedly support him as a pure rejection of everything that Trump represents.
2. Then come the freshly arrived ethnic migrants, the outer-borough faithful who see in Zohran a patron saint of paperwork and public housing, the one guy who might keep the system from eating them alive. Their enthusiasm is earnest, but transparently self-serving.
3. And finally, the upper-middle-class ultraleftist millennials and late-zoomer transplants—the Brooklyn and Astoria set who confuse their failure to land a six-figure media job with being “working class.” They speak fluent jargon and nurse artisanal grievances, dreaming of revolution between sips of $7 cold brew. They are in charge.
I spent the day drifting through the crowd, talking to people as they queued up to hear Zohran, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Bernie Sanders deliver their gospel. Between the drum circles and the vape clouds, I managed to single out three individuals who, in their own strange ways, embodied each of the three factions of his devotees. With each of them, I laid out my terms: I wasn’t there to argue politics or ideology. I wanted to understand what, exactly, they saw in Zohran Mamdani.
The most civil and coherent exchange of the day came courtesy of Kate Kohli, a representative of the Working Families Party—a textbook case of the Trump-deranged boomer subspecies. She spoke with the earnestness of someone who still believes politics is a moral calling, not a lifestyle brand. Though she was far from enamored with Zohran himself, she laid out her party’s reasoning with surprising candor. The WFP’s endorsement, she said, wasn’t so much about his policies as about his aura—his uncanny ability to galvanize the young and alienated voters the organization had long since lost touch with.
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We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” - Former CIA Director William J. Casey
These people always appoint crooks to their cabinets. That’ll provide some comic relief.
What Werner Deblaio was about
Wasn’t funny. Stole billions.
All this is planned, a focus-tested socially engineered mirage while those behind the scenes actually pull the levers of power.
The city council and state legislature write the laws and pass the budgets.
Sounds like the only common ground is the lack of belief in anything resembling truth.
Marking.
There was once a little guy out of Austria who went pretty far with the same schtick who also said horrible things his adoring crowds blithely nodded along with...
Cult of Personality.
Depressing report, but I certainly was happy to read such excellent writing. Very little of such these days. Thanks for posting.
Cult of Personality.
“Ask not what your country can do for you!”
(Play it, Vernon!)
That was an interesting read that I had to delay - thanks for posting.
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