Another day, another blow to Zohran Mamdani’s carefully airbrushed image as a herald of the post-woke, post-racialist Left. Yesterday, the X account Libs of TikTok revealed that Cea Weaver, Mamdani’s newly appointed tenant-protection tsar, has equated homeownership with “white supremacy”. The obvious implication is that private property must be abolished on anti-racist grounds.

In 2019, Weaver wrote on her since-deactivated Twitter (now X) account: “Private property including and kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building’ public policy.”

That statement was left out of a glowing write-up of Weaver and her work published in today’s New York Times, which mostly discussed landlord abuses in places such as Brooklyn. On his first day in office, Mamdani himself, accompanied by Weaver, visited a rent-stabilised studio unit in Flatbush, where he inspected a cracked floor and other telltale signs of disrepair (the complex is owned by the Pinnacle Group, which declared bankruptcy last year).

Neglectful landlords are indeed a scourge of the Gotham housing market. That’s even if upkeep is at times hindered by government-imposed rent ceilings and lopsided laws that make it all but impossible to evict tenants who don’t pay rent, as the industry insists. Tackling such landlords is one thing, but it’s quite another to frame all homeownership as a form of racism, as the new tenant tsar has.

In New York, a third of African American families and a fifth of Hispanic families own their homes, according to the city’s Commission on Racial Equity. Many more people of colour aspire to ownership, and the city boasts plenty of black and brown landlords. Are these homeowners and would-be homeowners engaged in white supremacy?

It’s the sort of nonsense that used to float about in Left-wing circles during the era of “peak woke”, roughly between the second half of the first Trump administration and the early Biden years. But then this sort of absurdity began to wane — especially with Trump’s second election victory, which saw him garner votes from just under half of Hispanic men. Mamdani did as well as he did, in part, by playing down woke themes and focusing relentlessly on the cost-of-living crisis confronting new migrants and educated white citizens alike.

But since his election, there have been dispiriting signs that he plans to govern as a classic Left-wing racialist. Hiring Weaver — a member of his inner circle, per the Times — is Exhibit A. Her rhetoric is nothing short of a kind of latter-day “socialism of fools”. That was how the German socialist leader August Bebel characterised antisemitism, himself crediting the Left-wing Austrian politician Ferdinand Kronawetter with the phrase.

Instead of analysing unjust economic systems, antisemitism (and all forms of racialism) blames one racial group: as if, for example, industrial bosses a century ago needed Jewish inspiration to lord it over their workers. Or, in this case, as if lousy landlords aren’t to be found in non-white countries or among minorities in white countries. If he wants to be taken seriously as a model of how the Left can win in the post-2024 environment, Mamdani would do well to part ways with Weaver.

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Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It

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