Last week I reflected on my visit to Hagia Sophia — once the largest church on Earth, now a battered mosque/museum in Muslim-occupied Constantinople:
I couldn’t help feeling as I tramped through the place as if I’d returned to the home my ancestors had built, only to find that some drug cartel had captured ir and covered the walls with gang signs and graffiti. Nor could I help wondering if similar buildings in Paris, Vienna, and Rome will in 100 years or fewer be likewise mutilated in the service of a false warrior creed.
When it comes to the place I love the most, my native New York City, I’m afraid we won’t have to wait 100 years. The place is on the brink of ruination right now with its upcoming mayoral election. The Democratic primary, which has been de facto decisive in that deep-blue city for the past 20 years, offers two frontrunners who are almost equally loathsome. The winner will likely coast into the mayor’s office, trouncing a courageous and worthy Republican, Curtis Sliwa, in the general election. The contest between these two leading Democrats could serve as a microcosm of everything wrong with Western civilization, as I’ll explain.
The New York Post reports:
Lefty upstart Zohran Mamdani has leapfrogged over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the city’s ranked choice Democratic primary for mayor, according to a stunning new poll released Monday.
In its hypothetical initial round of voting, Cuomo’s lead shrinks to 3 percentage points, with 35% of likely Democratic voters supporting him compared to 32% for Mamdani and 13% for city Comptroller Brad Lander, the Emerson College Polling/Pix 11/The Hill survey found.
City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams follows with 8%, Scott Stringer 3%, and 5% split between candidates Zellnor Myrie, Whitney Tilson, Jessica Ramos and Michael Blake, with another 4% undecided.
Who is Zohran Mamdani? From reading his biography, you might think he’s a fictional character, a nasty caricature of a multicultural radical in an apocalyptic satire by an embittered exile from New York (like me). He checks so many boxes on the woke bingo card that it’s hard to believe. Here are a few highlights of the man who might very well take over the city once run by Rudolph Giuliani:
A practicing Muslim who detests Israel.
A self-described “democratic socialist.”
An immigrant from Uganda.
The son of an Ivy League professor/indie filmmaker.
A one-time hunger striker who protested on behalf of NYC cab drivers.
As CNN reports, Mamdani “also moonlighted as a rapper under the stage name Mr. Cardamom rapping about chapati, an Indian flatbread.”
Mamdani wants to banish police from high-crime areas — in the name of anti-racism, of course:
Zohran Mamdani thinks the NYPD should be removed specifically from high-crime areas.
He says that as mayor, he’d replace cops with social workers–and turn the subway into a network of homeless shelters.
— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) June 23, 2025
Mamdani is also keen on chemical castration for the kiddoes:
Zohran Mamdani wants to spend $65M on trans medical treatment — including for minors — if elected NYC mayor https://t.co/kSGPjEq32q pic.twitter.com/PIKp5RD7WK
— New York Post (@nypost) June 23, 2025
Government Food Stores and Abandoned Apartment Buildings
Mamdani’s signature campaign promise is to end hunger by opening government-run grocery stores. (In my mind, I can already smell them: urine, old sweat, and despair.) He would legally “freeze the rent,” crippling the housing market and setting New York City on the trajectory to become a hollowed-out ruin like poor Detroit. He’d offer free buses and free government childcare to millions of welfare recipients and illegal immigrants on the backs of whatever working citizens are left behind after the rest have fled to the suburbs.
Again: I’m not making any of this up.
What’s fueling Mamdani’s success? In part, it’s “luxury beliefs” — virtue-signaling stances that help people show their high status among our cognitive elites:
Luxury beliefs in action:
“Cuomo leads Mamdani among voters without a four-year college degree 61% to 39%, while Mamdani leads Cuomo among college-educated voters 62% to 38%.” pic.twitter.com/NSK4ysX6vl
— Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson) June 23, 2025
I’ve analyzed White Guilt in such terms here before:
White Guilt is about white people and their feelings about themselves, and about other white people they either envy and want to imitate, or despise and want to disavow. I’ve joked here before that White Guilt is a powerful sunblock: the whitest product on the market, which will bleach your skin till you’re practically an albino. …
Racial self-hatred, like watercress sandwiches and badminton, is a phenomenon of white elites alone. People who are desperate to join those elites or pretend to themselves that they’re already among them cultivate White Guilt and prance around with it like a peacock’s glittering tail….
[I]f you’re a class-obsessed, social-climbing white person and want to make it perfectly clear to everyone that you’re not some white-trash MAGA neanderthal, strutting around with shiny White Guilt feathers protruding from your tail is a surefire way to signal that.
The same dynamic applies to left-wing Jewish voters in New York City who will vote for Mamdani in order to stamp their anti-Zionist cards and distinguish themselves firmly from those low-status Orthodox Jews who support Israel and have loads of (ew!) children.
More Than a Status Symbol: A New Post-Christian Creed
But of course there’s more to the politics of White Guilt than mere status signaling. We see in the new, race-Marxist Left a genuine hatred for a people and their past — the people who founded America and mostly populated it throughout its history. And something more: a prophetic/messianic promise that if this wicked race can be dethroned, stripped of its privileges and largely replaced by foreign colonists — after the final solution to the whiteness problem — a new shining society will rise from the ruins: a gorgeous mosaic, a multicultural Utopia of economic equality and sexual liberation. A favela on a hill.
That’s heady stuff, intoxicating even. Of course it’s poisonous nonsense, and wherever such ideas have been tried (South Africa, Zimbabwe, Minnesota) the result has been nothing but ruin, chaos, and eventual ethnic cleansing. But the gleam, the promise of something radically new and different, is enough to send hordes of college-educated voters, fully ignorant of history, thundering to the polls to claim their piece of that rainbow-striped future. That’s how leftist parties in Britain, France, and Germany win as well.
You Can’t Beat Something with Nothing
And the leading alternative to Mamdani is also typical of what’s happening worldwide: Andrew Cuomo, a weary, unprincipled failure as New York’s governor, who was turfed out in a “Me Too” sex scandal. His most memorable achievement in office? Grandstanding on TV daily throughout the COVID panic, locking down the state, and dumping COVID patients in nursing homes — thereby killing thousands of Korean War veterans, grandmas, and other helpless citizens. In compliance with COVID panic protocols, these people were denied visits by family, last sacraments from pastors, and even Christian burial. They were bagged as medical waste and incinerated anonymously — like unborn babies from abortion clinics. Cuomo is also a huge, huge fan of exterminating them through all nine months of pregnancy.
In other words, Cuomo would fit in perfectly as the leader of most conservative political parties in Europe. Everyone to the right of his positions has already been censored, surveilled, or prosecuted by European governments as an “extremist.” Such political contests aren’t between those who’d save the West and those who’d destroy it. They’re fought between those who’d let our civilization die of neglect and those who want it euthanized ASAP.
The sad thing is that if I still lived in New York City, I’d register as a Democrat and vote for Cuomo to stop Mamdani, in the belief that Cuomo has already killed most of the people he’s likely to — whereas Mamdani’s toll of death and destruction still lies ahead of him. I’d actively campaign to Make New York Less Terrible Again.
Such are the electoral choices citizens are facing all across what was once called Christendom. Only a full-scale revival of genuine faith, guided by reason and prudence and brashly unashamed of our civilizational past, can beat back this wave of ruination and hate. Maybe there’s still enough time, and enough grit, left in the West to survive. We must, in the words of another New York politician, “Fight, fight, fight!” But that will avail us little unless we also pray, pray, pray.
John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.
The post The Dismal Race for NYC Mayor Exposes the Death Spiral of the West appeared first on The Stream.
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