Zohran Mamdani and the Politics of Hypocrisy

Alfred Lela

Having lived in the United States for nearly a decade, I know the country well enough to recognize that Zohran Mamdani — beneath his charisma and populist rhetoric — embodies hypocrisy. 

Mamdani’s central claim, repeated in his victory speech, that he is “the mayor of immigrants,” rests on a false premise. America does not need to be reminded that immigrants built it. No one in the United States — least of all Donald Trump — has spoken against immigration itself. What some Americans oppose is illegal immigration, the entry of those who commit crimes or arrive as part of criminal contingents from abroad.

There is no anti-immigrant prejudice in America because the country was founded on a compassionate Christianity that welcomes the stranger while expecting hard work, ethics, and loyalty to the language and flag of the nation. America is great not because immigrants founded it, but because immigrants embraced the single truth of the Constitution — that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, and that the pursuit of happiness is a distinctively American promise.

No president, party, or political doctrine has ever repudiated those founding principles.

As for Muslims, Mamdani may speak with more authority, but his privileged background, however, undermines his rhetoric of grievance. The son of a Muslim family that found success in academia and film, he is proof that the so-called “exclusive America” has always rewarded merit, regardless of color, creed, or origin.

Yet America, a country founded by Christians who fled persecution — often from other Christians — has every right to preserve its civilizational roots. The principle works both ways: just as Americans are told not to teach democracy to Arabs in the Middle East, Muslims in America might be reminded that they cannot expect to install Sharia law, even within their own communities. Fair is fair.

Mamdani’s third line of defense — multiculturalism — is equally false and aggressive. In his circles, multiculturalism has become a code word for blaming the West, Christianity, and the values that shaped its cathedrals, universities, theaters, books, and graves. It pits instinct against institution, and in that unequal fight, the instinctive response of the majority is inevitable. You cannot condemn it for defending itself.

The other minority Mamdani defends — sexual and gender minorities — is even more ideologically fraught. The modern Left has traveled from Simone de Beauvoir’s “second sex” to a “third sex” of post-Marxist, post-revolutionary, post-sexual thought. It has deconstructed the personae sexuae only to elevate a “sexual character” — not a person — that demands unconditional recognition and moral immunity from scrutiny. What it criticizes in the two sexes, it claims as a privilege for itself.

This “third gender,” shielded and sanctified by the radical Left, has fractured two of America’s most essential institutions: the family and the school. What children are taught in the morning — that it’s perfectly fine to be “different” or “trans” — often collides with what they learn at home from parents who come from the two original sexes and two millennia of civilization.

That fracture, not the traditional family or religion, is what has produced today’s cultural confusion — not the America of the Founding Fathers that Mamdani and his allies denounce.

Mamdani has thus become a kind of monarch of hypocritical minorities — coalitions that demand equality but interpret it as domination. Their union has produced a fragile, artificial majority in New York, nothing more than a short-lived moral apartheid.

This unholy alliance of minorities that sanctify their impulses and act as if they were the majority is the true distortion of their supposed triumph. It does not resolve the dilemma of the American or global Left, which remains unsolvable because it seeks meaning in what is unnatural — and because it insists on playing God.

Marxism failed once as an ideology; it will fail again in this new guise. Mamdani is not the explanation of this failure — only its latest symptom.