US citizen Zohran Mamdani moved to the United States when he was seven years old and has spent the last two decades becoming more New York than arguing with a pigeon over bagel crumbs. He’s an elected assemblyman, a tenant rights organizer, and now a mayoral candidate who speaks in complete sentences and believes rent shouldn’t cost more than elective surgery. And for this, the far right wants him deported. Not debated. Not disagreed with. Deported. Because nothing screams “land of the free” like threatening to expel someone for suggesting the MTA shouldn’t feel like a haunted rollercoaster. The New York Young Republican Club, which functions less like a political organization and more like a failed satire of one, formally urged Donald Trump to revoke Mamdani’s citizenship using the Communist Control Act of 1954. This is not a joke. This happened in the United States in the year 2025 while everyone was still pretending the Constitution had any structural integrity left. These guys skimmed every page of American history and somehow landed on “just scream communist and hope it works.”
And it’s not like Mamdani is some scandal magnet. He’s not getting indicted for campaign finance fraud, or taking unreported gifts from billionaires, or getting caught in sex scandals, or bringing guns to schools, or refusing to concede elections. Those headlines belong to George Santos, Clarence Thomas, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Donald Trump. Mamdani’s crime, as far as they are concerned, is asking why working people in the richest city in the world are still living paycheck to paycheck while real estate developers name buildings after themselves like they’re claiming territory in a video game. He said housing is a right, and they heard that as a declaration of war.
But this was never about laws or policies. This is about maintaining the illusion. The illusion that citizenship means security, that America is a stable place to exist, that participation is permitted as long as it is decorative. Mamdani breaks that illusion simply by showing up, clipboard in hand, ready to write actual legislation that makes life less miserable for people who do not own media companies or second homes. His presence is treated like an infection, something that must be contained before it spreads to the part of the population that still thinks landlords are job creators and billionaires are proof that God loves capitalism.
They do not want to revoke his citizenship because he is dangerous. They want to revoke it because he is effective. He makes the system look negotiable. That is his real threat. He is a walking contradiction of the idea that immigrants should be grateful, that Muslims should stay quiet, that socialism is some exotic European fever dream. He talks about rent caps and childcare and the value of human life and suddenly the same people who cried about cancel culture are writing open letters asking for his existence to be voided like a parking ticket.
This country loves permanence right up until someone asks for permanence they cannot control. Then suddenly citizenship is not a right, it is a subscription, and if you say the wrong thing it gets canceled with no refund. Mamdani is not playing their game and that is why they want him gone. Not out of the race, they want him completely out of the country. Not because they think he cheated, but because he specifically followed every rule they wrote and still came out with something better than what they were selling. They cannot beat him. So they want to erase him. That is not democracy. That is panic in a flag costume.
The panic over Zohran Mamdani did not stop at calling him a communist. That was just the warm-up act. What came next was a firehose of lazy Islamophobia dressed up as public concern. The second he started winning, the right didn’t just question his policies, they tried to turn him into a threat to national security. Laura Loomer accused him of supporting Hamas. Charlie Kirk called him a terrorist sympathizer in between pretending he knows what zoning laws are. Donald Trump Jr. essentially tried to link rent control to jihad, which would be hilarious if millions of people did not take him seriously despite the fact that he speaks like a man who took too many pre-workout supplements and read a Facebook post out loud. This is not policy disagreement. This is American racism on autopilot. It does not even pretend to do the work. It just hits the same buttons. Muslim. Brown. Disagreeable. Therefore, foreign enemy.
You can be born in another country and live here longer than some congressmen have had working frontal lobes, but the moment you start to change the script instead of reading it, your existence gets recategorized as suspicious. These people are not asking questions in good faith. They’re lurking in a civic panic mobile, clutching their pitchforks like clipboards, desperate for any excuse to scream treason at a guy who made them feel vaguely uncool. If Mamdani had stuck to ribbon cuttings and shaking hands with people holding oversized checks, they would have nodded politely and moved on. But instead, he opened his mouth and said things like maybe rent shouldn’t require a GoFundMe, and maybe the bus shouldn’t feel like a punishment for not owning a BMW. That alone sent them rummaging through his old rap tracks like suburban dads trying to find contraband in a teenager’s sock drawer, convinced they’d uncover a terror plot buried between metaphors and beat drops.
And now we have the spectacle of elected officials, conservative pundits, and Twitter cosplayers suggesting that because he disagrees with Israeli military policy or supports Palestinian self-determination, he should not be allowed to run for office in the United States. That is the level of civic literacy we are dealing with. Say the word Gaza and suddenly your citizenship is up for review. Not because you broke a law. Not because you posed a threat. But because you articulated a view that made someone in a flag tie feel personally unsafe.
They are not trying to remove Mamdani from office. They are trying to remove the idea that someone like him could belong in the first place. This is not political opposition. This is cultural rejection. The kind that hides behind legal arguments but smells unmistakably like fear sweat and old nationalism. They do not want to beat him in a debate. They want to unwrite him. They want to Photoshop the country back to a version where people like him only existed on the other side of a drone strike.
There is no logic here. There is only muscle memory. Attack. Other. Repeat. This is the reaction of a political movement that does not know how to win without shrinking the field. If you cannot defeat your opponent, redefine the contest so that he is no longer eligible to play. That is what this is. Not a debate about democracy. A panic attack from people who never expected it to apply to anyone they could not pronounce. They do not fear Zohran Mamdani because of what he believes. They fear him because he refuses to shrink. Because he wins. Because he speaks plainly and unapologetically and sounds like the future they keep trying to unplug.
The people calling for Zohran Mamdani to be deported are not having a political disagreement. They are having a collective nervous breakdown in public. These are not arguments. These are tantrums with press credentials. They see a guy who understands how a city works, who speaks clearly, who listens to tenants instead of donors, and they react like someone just spray painted Marxist poetry on their boat shoes. Every time he opens his mouth and says something useful, like maybe buses should not cost more than lunch, they hear the soundtrack to the end of their fantasy. A fantasy where political power always comes wrapped in a familiar face and never asks uncomfortable questions about who owns what.
They are not afraid he is wrong. They are afraid he is right. They are afraid that someone with a name they cannot pronounce without getting nervous might actually fix something. They are afraid of competence in the hands of someone they cannot imagine golfing with. So they do not debate him. They do not challenge him on facts. They fall back on the same worn-out routine, tossing around words like terrorism and foreign influence the moment they feel outsmarted, hoping it sounds spooky enough to make some cul-de-sac in Long Island drop their wine glass. This is not a plan. It is muscle memory. The kind that kicks in when thinking becomes too hard.
They pull out his rap lyrics and read them like a jury in a fake trial, hoping to find something they can twist into a threat. They accuse him of sympathizing with groups he has never supported and say it loud enough that facts stop mattering. They treat his presence like a virus that needs containment. And what is he actually doing during all this? Talking about rent. Talking about transit. Talking about the cost of living in a city that increasingly feels like it was designed by landlords who hate joy. That is the real crime. He is making sense. And when a person who makes sense enters a system built on delay and dysfunction, the whole machine starts to shake.
This is not about Zohran Mamdani as a person. This is about what he represents. A future that does not wait for permission. A political voice that was not created in a think tank or tested in a donor meeting. He is what happens when someone refuses to play the part written for them. And that refusal is treated like a threat. Because it is. Not to the country. Not to democracy. But to a very fragile idea of who gets to matter. He refuses to shrink. He refuses to apologize. And they cannot stand that. Because every moment he remains visible, their grip on the story gets a little weaker.
The reason they want him gone is simple. He does not flinch. He does not bend. He does not play scared. And that makes him dangerous. Not to safety. Not to order. But to the lie that people like him should only speak when spoken to. He speaks anyway. And they hear that as defiance. But it is not defiance. It is clarity. The kind of clarity that makes cowards piss patriotic red white and blue down their pant leg while calling it a stand for American values.
Great piece. The oligarchy is petrified of him because he speaks the truth. Even worse for our Felon-in-Chief, NYC is extremely receptive to his message - and rightly so.
Good article my friend.