In a shock to precisely no one, freshly minted New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new administration is turning out to be a parade of lunatics, from white people-hating commies to anti-Semites and baby-voiced theatre kids. In other words, exactly what Mamdani promised!
As a former New York City resident, as well as a former New York City government employee, I feel personally connected to these ongoing developments. I watched the encroachment of woke ideology into the city’s white-collar class, first with scepticism, then with real alarm, before I left government altogether in 2013. Having lived in the leafy neighbourhoods that are now ground zero for the most extreme forms of neo-Maoism, Mamdani’s performative hipster communism and the antics of his appointees are not all that surprising to me. Still, this parade of totalitarian midwits is really something to behold.
Let’s start with the most egregious example: a woman by the name of Cea Weaver, named last week as the executive officer of the mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. It turns out that Weaver really hates private property, especially – though not exclusively – when it is owned by white people.
‘Seize private property’, she tweeted in June 2018. ‘Private property including any kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy’, she added in August the following year. In 2021, during a video call with fellow members of NYC Democratic Socialists of America, Weaver advocated for the expropriation of property from her fellow New Yorkers. She predicted that private property would be treated ‘as a collective good towards a model of shared equity’. This ‘will mean that families, and white families especially, but some POC families who are homeowners as well, are going to have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have’. Good luck convincing the hard-working black and Hispanic family homeowners out in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island that they should ‘have a different relationship’ to the homes they broke their backs to purchase.
Hilariously, Weaver’s college professor mother owns a beautiful $1.6million home in Nashville. So she will be safe from any NYC-based expropriation programme.
Her remarks were not merely some youthful indiscretion. As recently as October 2025, Weaver was advocating using New York City public schools as ‘sites of resistance’ and ‘networks of defence’ against ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). To me, it sounds like this pallid, wannabe Lenin wants New York City schoolchildren barricaded behind their desks taking pot-shots at federal agents.
I’m not sure what tricks Weaver thinks she has up her sleeve with regards to expropriating the property of New Yorkers, but according to Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney-general for civil rights at the US Department of Justice, she has another thing coming. ‘Just because you’re white doesn’t mean you have fewer rights in this country, we all have equal rights in our country’, said Dhillon in a recent interview. ‘We will not stand for New York City violating any federal law whatsoever. They should be on notice, they are on high scrutiny.’
If anyone is wondering why the Trump administration, despite its many controversial actions and public statements, still has a devoted base, it is because ordinary people understand the threat that crazy white-lady ideologues like Weaver pose to their very existence. As it stands, Trump and his people are the only ones willing to stand up to these cranks.
Coming in second to Weaver in terms of bitter resentment toward fellow New Yorkers, we have Catherine Almonte Da Costa. Da Costa was, for a brief, shining moment, Mamdani’s director of appointments. Sadly, her own appointment was rescinded by the mayor after her old social-media posts were brought to light.
In one 2011 tweet, she complained about ‘money-hungry Jews’. She also boasted that a 2011 promotion would have her ‘working alongside these rich Jewish peeps’. After Trump’s 2016 election, she wrote that ‘it’s important that white people feel defeated’. Mamdani himself deemed her comments ‘reprehensible’.
Another appointment that raised eyebrows was Rachel Griffin Accurso, otherwise known as ‘Ms Rachel’, a megastar on children’s YouTube. A member of Mamdani’s inaugural committee, she is a perfect fit with his millennial base, who manage to be both frivolous while also siding with aggressive and dark political causes. Ms Rachel not only sings the alphabet in an unnecessarily squeaky voice, while hopping about in overalls. She also ‘sneaks in political themes – invariably leftists ones’. This includes a ‘nonbinary’ puppet character (‘their’ name is Patches), celebrating LGBT Pride, and posting what the New York Post describes as ‘Hamas-aligned talking points’.
It seems that for Mamdani and his comrades, identity is an ideological weapon – a tool to bash ordinary Americans, of all colours and ethnicities, who they feel are beneath them. In the hands of the new mayor, multiculturalism does not mean racial equality or harmony. Rather, it is little more than an excuse for his appointees to tout deeply offensive and discriminatory ideas and views.
Then again, perhaps I’m being too harsh. It’s entirely possible that this bunch of overgrown theatre kids will do an excellent job running one of the world’s most complex and important cities. What could possibly go wrong?
Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here.
