The Far-Right's Violent, Hateful Reaction To Mamdani's Victory

After the Muslim, democratic socialist candidate won the NYC Mayoral Primary, reactionaries exploded in a fit of hateful rage. They revealed exactly who they are.

Those of us on the left finally got some good news last week. Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic Primary for New York City Mayor. With this he cleared a major hurdle to leading a city the size of a small country. Mamdani is not a typical candidate. He is young, Muslim, and openly a socialist. Opposing him was noted establishment sex pest Andrew Cuomo. The entirety of the system, powerful Zionists, Bill Clinton, rich donors, and the majority of the mainstream media jumped in to support the ex-governor and crush Mamdani’s candidacy. Still, he emerged victorious.

This was a victory for socialism, the poor, the left, Muslims, immigrants, marginalized people, and the LGBTQ community. A true grassroots campaign, Mamdani ran on a platform of freezing rents, free buses, using a community safety department for mental health emergencies rather than the police, and free childcare. He was notably pro-Trans at a time when much of the mainstream media and Democratic establishment is wrongly labeling that a political liability.

This victory was a rejection of the feckless, do-nothing Democratic Party. Their failure to oppose Israel, pack The Supreme Court, meaningfully oppose the rise of the far-right, and pass substantial legislation have greatly contributed to our current national misery. Mamdani represents everything they are not, someone principled who may actually put up a fight. I remain deeply skeptical of electoralism, and I believe strikes, community self-defense, and mass organizing remain our best path forward. Still, it never hurts to have a friend in the right places. Perhaps more revealing than the win is the right’s reaction to it.

This turn has sent them into absolute apoplexy. It demonstrates a truth of current American politics many liberals are unwilling to face. The people on the other side are not your countrymen who have a disagreement with you. They are hardcore bigots who wish to destroy who they deem their enemies and commit wanton acts of horror.

To these, the American fascist base, the thought of a Muslim being elected to high office causes a rage that is hard for the egalitarian minded to comprehend. Far-right parties around the world have made Islam a hated scapegoat for decades. It’s an animating force for reactionaries from the U.S. to Europe. They found fertile land in cultures polluted with post-9/11 panic and bigotry. Media and entertainment stereotypes depicting the religion as a faceless, exotic boogeyman tilled the ground long before the towers fell. The right-wing media ecosystem hammers this home constantly, Muslims are dangerous, Muslims are terrorist, Muslims mean to hurt you, Muslims will take your freedom. This cohort wasted no time in the wake of this election.

I want you to keep in mind these are not marginal figures. Laura Loomer is an extremely influential conspiracy theorist and internet troll who has acted as a close advisor to Trump. Charlie Kirk runs the prominent conservative youth organization Turning Point USA in addition to having the 18th ranked news podcast on Spotify and over 5 million followers on X. Steven Crowder has over 5.5 million subscribers on YouTube and nearly 2 billion views. These are important, mainstream voices on the American Right.

Their invocation of 9/11 is not surprising. After the attacks there was an upsurge in Islamophobic attacks. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Booth Gunter and Caleb Kieffer wrote,

“Ann Beeson wrote last week of how the anti-Muslim backlash that followed 9/11 ushered in an era of executive overreach and a broad range of government abuses – such as racial profiling, warrantless wiretappings, illegal detentions and secret deportations – perpetrated in the name of keeping our country safe from terrorism.

But also arising from the ashes of 9/11 was a far-right anti-Muslim movement fueled by bigotry and the supercharged nativist rhetoric that followed the attacks. This movement was led by activists who portrayed Muslims in general as potential terrorists and trafficked in dark conspiracy theories about Islamist extremists secretly infiltrating the government and the U.S. legal system under assault by Sharia law.

Ironically, a number of those anti-Muslim leaders were the ones who later infiltrated the government as President Donald Trump welcomed movement leaders into his orbit, appointed its staunchest allies to high-level national security and advisory positions and issued executive orders to implement a Muslim travel ban.

It is little wonder then that these snakes invoke the attacks. They use the hatred they’ve so carefully stoked to gin up a panic around Mamdani. They are using New York’s collective trauma to falsely paint him, a well-meaning social democrat, as some kind of deadly threat. It is a direct attack on his race and religion, a very overt and old school exercise in American racism. The Zionists have taken notice.

Prominent far-right group Betar USA has fed the Trump Administration lists of people it feels should be deported, leveled threats against activists, and tweeted they “demand blood in Gaza.” The fact they’re fearmongering about the presence and prominence of Muslims is predictable. Their whole purpose going back a century has been to defend the Zionist project. Israel is an apartheid state, deeply discriminatory against even its own Arab citizens. This is a nation currently committing genocide, and the constant defense of it involves dehumanizing Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims be it through denial or celebration of their suffering. The mental gymnastics needed to justify the unjustifiable morph into a broad ideology of hatred. When Betar sees Muslims in New York advocating for Palestinian freedom it sees a threat to be eliminated. They lie and say calls for resistance and solidarity are direct statements murderous intent. They signal to their followers that they are in mortal danger as anyone conceiving of justice, no matter how reasonable, rises to power. This is the eternal, tormented logic of the colonizer, freedom for the oppressed means death for the oppressor. It’s untrue now just as it was in South Africa, but that doesn’t stop fascists from continuing to perpetuate the myth. Given this climate of propaganda, it’s little wonder that someone can get an eye watering million views for a hate tweet threatening genocide. It’s a hatred that is being repeated over and over again across rightist propaganda channels.

All of these posts share a distinct sort of bigotry. They engage in Islamophobia and xenophobia. They paint that which is foreign as threatening. Kirk’s meltdown is especially telling. When he says, “debate me on the merits, don’t just throw out petty thought terminating cliches,” he is really seeking to defend his own view of himself. People like him know they are engaging in hate speech and discrimination. They simply think it is justified because of their contempt and suspicion for those they look down on. They want to remain in their own minds good people while doing something awful. This is why they hate being called racists/bigots/fascists while advocating those very ideas. Demanding the silencing of hurtful criticism while engaging in rancid, critique worthy behavior is the bigot’s version of having your cake and eating it too. As Kirk and Miller are integral parts of the Maga machine this rhetoric is also a means of motivating and justifying the Administration’s current attempt at ethnic cleansing. Something they are deeply committed too, as they hate and fear a change towards an egalitarian nation they don’t like or understand. They also profit off this hate agitprop, and a whole constellation of grifters has come up to peddle it.

Ian Miles Cheong is one such sewer troll. There is something to be gleaned from his posts. They represent a sort of inverse intersectionality, a right-wing confluence of hatreds. All that they see is threatening is connected to everything else. Where they falsely see foreigners as threats to their safety, so to do they see Black people. They think feminists, women, and LGBTQ people are coming to destroy their masculinity and rob them of their manhood. They wish to play on as broad and baked in a set of societal prejudices as possible to try and motivate their followers to turn on Mamdani and his supporters. Their hatreds are divorced from reality. There is no basis for defending some fictional, aggrieved, straight white man. It has everything to do with maintaining hierarchies from which they benefit.

Conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec’s tweet is more worrying. The book he’s referencing is his 2024 tome “Unhumans,” co-written with Joshua Lisec. This bit of red baiting is one of the most overtly fascist publications in recent memory. It explicitly renounces democracy, praises dictators like Pinochet, and calls for violence against leftists. These are the mad ravings that are now mainstream enough in right-wing discourse that they earn not condemnation but reward. They are quickly becoming universal. Perhaps no one represents this lean into violent, white Christian nationalism than Matt Walsh.

Walsh is the type to proclaim himself a Christian and use the bible like a knife to slash at the minority groups he despises. Racist, homophobic, and transphobic to the core, this employee of Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire currently has the 20th rated news podcast on Spotify and millions of YouTube and X followers. His invocation of the Great Replacement Myth is an overt admission that he is a white nationalist. His hateful posts are all in line with that project. He wishes to see a United States where people like him dominate culturally, politically, socially, economically, and demographically. There is no room for acceptance or equity in this scheme, no place for those who are not part of his exclusive club. This notion of an elect people who represent the real nation and must be on top of the hierarchy is the fascist idea of the volk. His hatful, untrue bile regarding Transgender people is part of this campaign. It fits in with the aforementioned idea of broad hatred under inverted intersectionality and stands in a long fascist tradition of persecuting anyone outside the cis-heteronormative paradigm. His invocation of war is not a joke. That is what he wishes for. People like him want violence. At the heart of every suite and tie fascist and alt-right internet troll is a gutter klansman, eager for their torch and rope.

My point is this, take them seriously. I’m glad Mamdani won, but the reaction to that victory shows electoralism alone will not save us. We are not facing friends and neighbors with whom we have good natured disagreements. We are facing hateful, radicalized, well organized extremists who wish to strip us of all their sacred rights and freedoms and enact violence upon our bodies. They revel in cruelty and vicious contempt. My advice, get organized. Find a community of like-minded anti-fascists and form a network that can be relied on. Join unions and progressive organizations. Practice mutual aid, protest, organize and participate in strikes, particularly the general one planned for 2028. Prepare and practice community self-defense. Learn all the skills needed to protect yourself and those around you. Do not comply with the regime, and do not give in to fear. Realize who you are facing, what they mean to do, and act accordingly. These are tough times, but the Mamdani victory shows us there is hope even in the face of a violent and fanatical enemy. They can be beaten if we stand together and fight back.