Michael Goodwin: Mamdani and his DSA cronies are fueling a racial rift within the already fractured Dem party
The explosive charge by a black politician that Mayor Mamdani and his socialist army are guilty of “white supremacy” reveals another front in the war for New York launched by the radical left.
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“White supremacy comes in all forms,” Queens Borough President Donovan Richards posted on social media.
He also referenced a well-known quote from the late Malcolm X about “dangerous white liberals.”
At heart, the issue boils down to political power, who has it and competing visions for how it should be used.
A major flashpoint is that Richards is a career pol who has consistently advocated for expanded black and Latino ownership of private homes as a means of creating intergenerational wealth.
That’s totally at odds with the views of Mamdani’s agenda, and especially his top housing aide, Cea Weaver, who has made comments about housing that are beyond bizarre.
She once celebrated the government’s “sacred right to seize private property,” called homeownership “racist” and said it is “a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building’ public policy.”
Dems under attack
In one of his many warnings about the excesses of the Mamdani machine that drove him from City Hall, former Mayor Eric Adams weighed in on the topic.
He correctly noted on X that “Homeownership is how immigrants, Black, Brown, and working-class New Yorkers built stability and generational wealth despite every obstacle. You have to be completely out of your f***ing mind to call that ‘white supremacy.’ ”
The spark for Richards’ latest comments is a growing resentment among the black political establishment that it is losing its hold on power and influence to the DSA, which, a 2021 survey found, is 85% white.
The group used its superior organizational skills, mostly in gentrifying neighborhoods, to turn out their voters and successfully knock off a slew of congressional and Albany Dems in last month’s primaries.
The coup alarmed the entire party, but black and Latino officials especially see themselves as under attack.
(Republicans are such an insignificant factor in the city’s political landscape that nobody blames them!)
State Attorney General Letitia James, although she had supported Mamdani’s election last year, pounced on the primary results to accuse him and the radicals he supported of being ignorant of the racial and social history of the neighborhoods they would be representing.
“Some of the candidates he has supported do not understand the politics of New York City, the cultural differences from district to district, have not been part of the history and the struggle of some of these districts, and are relatively new to the body politic,” James said on CNN about the primary results.
By then, housing ownership was already a racial flash point under Mamdani.
‘Unfair system’
It first arose in February, when he threatened to raise all city property taxes by nearly 10% if Albany did not hike income taxes on wealthy New Yorkers and big corporations.
The outcry was especially sharp in Cambria Heights, a suburban-like neighborhood in southeastern Queens near the Long Island border that is home to numerous black and other nonwhite families.
Many own their homes and some also own rental units.
Richards called the proposed tax plan a “nonstarter” and said at the time that he told the mayor as much.
“Under no circumstance should we consider balancing our budget on the backs of working-class New Yorkers, especially seniors on fixed incomes and workers who keep our city running,” he said in an interview.
A black homeowner named James Johnson, who attended a Cambria Heights protest aimed at Mamdani, was quoted in The Post as saying: “You screamed affordability. You ran on it. You said affordability, affordability, affordability . . . And the first thing, not even three months into your administration, into your term. You wanna hit us with a 9.5% property tax increase? Not happening.”
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Another resident, Darryl Smith, added, “You keep raising the taxes, you’re gonna run us out of here. Where are we gonna go?”
The sentiment was widely shared in white liberal political circles as well, with Council Speaker Julie Menin rejecting the mayor’s property tax threat.
Signaling that it would be dead on arrival, Menin said, “We cannot be raising property taxes 9.5% on the backs of small property owners, small business owners, black and brown communities throughout our city.”
Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso agreed: “This would only make an unfair system worse and hit black and brown communities hardest.”
Gov. Hochul, fearing she would be blamed for any tax hikes in an election year, satisfied Mamdani’s need for quick cash by shipping him billions in state money.
Power play
A key aspect of the racial heat is timing.
The surge of mostly white socialists comes as black politicians have reached the height of their political power in the city and state.
Adams, the city’s second black mayor, was forced out after a single term by Mamdani’s followers.
Meanwhile, the leaders of the state Assembly and Senate, Carl Heastie and Andrea Stewart-Cousins, respectively, are black.
Hochul’s running mate this year is Adrienne Adams, a former speaker of the City Council and the first black woman to hold the post.
Other top black officials include Attorney General James and the city’s public advocate, Jumaane Williams.
An additional front in the rising racial antagonism is that DSA members have been sharply critical of Hakeem Jeffries, the Brooklyn pol who, as House minority leader, is the first nonwhite official to hold the top leadership spot of either party in either chamber.
As if to rub salt in black wounds, many socialist newcomers are calling for him to step down, and threatening to remove him if he won’t go voluntarily.
It’s a Tehran Death Trap
A troubling report in The Washington Post paints a bleak picture of President Trump’s options in Iran.
It finds, “Analysts at American spy agencies have concluded that Tehran and Washington are, for now, stuck in an indefinite limbo between peace and war.”
The newspaper says the report was written primarily by the CIA, whose analysts “underscored the Tehran regime’s staying power despite the loss of many of its top leaders and much of its military hardware to U.S. and Israeli attacks.”
The finding reflects what has surprised me most about the war. The regime’s willingness to accept so much pain and destruction defies logic — and Western assumptions.
The only explanation that makes a whit of sense is widespread in Israel: that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is a Shia Islamist cult of martyrdom.
Controlled by psychopaths, it tortures and kills resisters and aims to impose its fanatical will on the region, and then the world, no matter the cost.
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Only death will stop them.
