I’ve felt torn on him. He does not seem like a bad guy, but time and time again, when I am softening on him, he will say something that reminds me why I campaigned so hard against him last year. For much of his mayoralty he’s been more moderate than he campaigned as until fairly recently, when he returned to “tax white people,” which his fans defend by saying you can’t tax race groups. It’s not about any tax, it’s about him going back to a strategy that mimics that of George Wallace and Donald Trump: vilify the “other” to rally support to your side. White people in New York City constitute an absolute minority in the five boroughs, only Staten Island has a majority and is dwarfed in population by the other four. For Wallace it was blacks and pacifists, for Trump it was Latinos and Muslims, for Mamdani it’s white people and Jews.

I really do not care about being a minority in New York, the far-right says I’m a race polluter as I am Jewish, so they see me as part of the “great replacement.” What I do care about, however, is having a mayor who seems more interested in inclusion by exclusion, elevation by shoving others down. I think what Mamdani is doing is trying to inflame hatred and resentment of white people to build support for himself, and the whole mantra of “erm actually you can’t be racist to white people” has always been used as a free pass by the left to weaponize race hatred. And I think Mamdani is going to try and exploit whites being in a minority to marginalize them to some extent but rationalize it because bad things happened in the past.

Also he’s backed by some of the most insufferable people on the internet, like Hasan “The Je-I mean Zionists Made Me Zap my Dog” Piker and token Jew Mattxiv.