Zohran Mamdani's rise should teach NYC's non-radicals to invest in the long game
Now that tossing $25 million into last-minute spending to promote Andrew Cuomo failed utterly to stop pro-Intifada, anti-cop socialist Zohran Mamdani from winning the Democratic mayoral primary, perhaps New York business leaders will finally realize that political 'investment' requires an eye on the long game, and fostering an entire infrastructure that can produce credible centrists candidates.
'Crying over Mamdani is, as they say, a bit rich when it comes from the rich,' snarked The Post's Charles Gasparino, since the 'city's business class sat idly by' as the local left grew ever more powerful.
New York magazine's Errol Louis was even more on-point: 'The same people dumping millions into last-minute attack ads should have been investing time and money to recruit, educate, and encourage young leaders.'
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Dumping a ton of cash in at the last minute can work when it comes to passing or defeating a single bill, or influencing any particular government decision — but altering the political climate requires steady attention and investment.
'The city's business community,' writes Gasparino, 'is the most politically neutered class of people I have ever met.'
Partly that's just fear of sticking your neck out; partly that so many think of themselves as 'liberal' or 'progressive' without ever noticing how drastically the meaning of those labels has shifted; partly the knowledge deep down that they just don't understand how politics works.
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And a 'go along to get along' mindset in a Democratic Party-dominated city and state has resulted in very little pushback as the hard left came to dominate that party.
The political-talent pipeline in this town is no longer about community-based clubhouses; it's about social-service nonprofits and public-sector unions that feed off the taxpayers on a scale that dwarfs Tammany Hall's wildest dreams.
Each in his own way, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg were political unicorns — Rudy rising to prominence as a federal prosecutor; Mike popping in with a huge fortune that still wouldn't have won him office except for the crisis atmosphere in the immediate wake of 9/11.
And all through the 20 years of their mayoralties, the left has been creeping up from the bottom of city government, gaining City Council seats once held by moderates, with every successive borough president, comptroller and so on steadily more progressive than the last.
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Meanwhile, supposedly 'nonpartisan' reforms — taxpayer funding of campaigns; the 'ranked choice' voting rules — further added to insiders' advantages, making it that much harder for fresh faces and voices to break in unless, like Mamdani, they had the support of a political machine like the Working Families 'Party' or the Democratic Socialist apparat.
Building such infrastructure takes years; interests that feed off the public put in the time, talent, care and effort to do it.
Hiring an expensive consultant for a single campaign can't match those results.
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Even if the city and the business community somehow dodge the Mamdani bullet this fall, the left will keep coming back, ever stronger, unless and until the folks that get fed off of start doing 'political investing' for the long term.
That means finding and fostering young political moderates, supporting institutions (even, yes, the city's near-extinct Republican Party) that will oppose the left on a million minor battles that never make a single headline — and not thinking you can fix things by paying attention at the last minute.
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Many people are wondering how Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old socialist Muslim who wants to defund the police, globalize the intifada, and destroy capitalism, has emerged as the Democratic Party's nominee for New York City mayor, with leaders like former President Bill Clinton fawning over him. To understand Mamdani's political ascent, you have to trace the red-green-blue spider's web that brought him here. This isn't a complete map — I've written a book, "Woke Army: The Red-Green Alliance That Is Undermining America's Freedom," to document that story — but it is a snapshot of key turning points over two decades of strategy, narrative manipulation, and activist training. A critical moment traces back to a Friday night in 2008, according to investigative reporting I've done at the Pearl Project, a nonprofit journalism initiative. It reveals how socialists (red) and Muslims (green) seized the Democratic Party (blue) over a long 20-year campaign. At 9:28 p.m. on Dec. 12, 2008, former ACLU civil rights lawyer Ann Beeson sent an email to former Clinton administration senior advisor John Podesta. "Hi John," she began. Beeson was executive director of U.S. Programs at George Soros' Open Society Foundation, where she said she oversaw $150 million in annual grants to "promote human rights, social justice and accountability nationwide." In her email, publicly discussed here for the first time, Beeson wrote, "I'm writing to follow up on one topic we discussed — what the incoming Administration could do to address domestic national security policies and practices that unfairly target Muslim, South Asian, and Arab communities in America." She attached a memo from Farhana Khera, then executive director of Muslim Advocates, a group based in San Francisco, and Aziz Huq, then the director of the "liberty and national security project" at the William J. Brennan Center for Justice, both Open Society "grantees." As a former Wall Street Journal reporter who has investigated the convergence of radical leftist politics and Muslim political activism for decades, I have followed a paper trail of tax returns, grant lists and confidential memos, and this email represented the culmination of a decades-long ideological drive that began with Muslim international students arriving in the U.S. in the 1960s, not just to study, as my father did at Rutgers University, but to lay the institutional groundwork for political Islam, or Islamism, in the United States. By the 1980s, they had established a strategic base at 500 Grove Street in Herndon, Va., later investigated by the FBI for alleged ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, both groups seeking to destroy Israel and America and build a global caliphate. The transformation accelerated after December 2005, when Muslim governments convened at an "Extraordinary Islamic Summit" of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. There, they launched a campaign to weaponize the term "Islamophobia" to silence critics of extremist Islam. American Muslim leaders seized the moment to re-engineer the national security narrative, using American philanthropic networks, like the House of Soros, as a Trojan horse to racialize Islam, frame Muslims as the "oppressed" and embed illiberal ideologies within America's liberal institutions, including the Democratic Party. By January 2008, with Soros pumping money into Barack Obama's presidential campaign, his philanthropy staff launched a "National Security and Human Rights Campaign" with D.C.-based Atlantic Philanthropies, committing at least $20 million to "dismantle" Bush-era counterterrorism policies. One grantee, the Proteus Fund, based in Waltham, Mass., ballooned in revenue from $9.5 million in 2008 to $73 million in 2023. Soros dollars flowed to groups including Muslim Advocates, the Brennan Center, the ACLU and many others who set their sights on targets, including the New York Police Department. Today, Mamdani says he wants to "defund the police." A Pearl Project analysis of 38 documents detailing the operations and funding of the National Security and Human Rights Campaign revealed the coordinated efforts of progressive and Islamist activists to reframe post-9/11 narratives. The aim: clear the path for red-green candidates like Mamdani. Muslim Advocates grew nearly 10-fold, from $76,331.03 in annual revenues in 2005 to $992,892 in 2023. The Brennan Center's revenue exploded from $6.6 million to $57.9 million during the same period. Soros soon funded a new "Security and Rights Collaborative" at Proteus Fund to "restore civil liberties and human rights lost in the name of the 'war on terror.'" Headquartered in a one‑story building off Research Drive in Amherst, Mass., the new "collaborative" was run by Shireen Zaman, a Muslim activist previously at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a Washington, D.C., group tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. Their focus: America's "Muslim, Arab and South Asian community," called "MASA." Zaman now works at the Ford Foundation. Their strategy went beyond policy to narrative warfare. Starting in late 2008, Soros pumped some $20 million into a "fieldwide communications hub" to arm Muslim groups and leftist media allies with messaging tools. The recipient: ReThink Media, a nonprofit in Berkeley, Calif., co-founded by "progressive" political operatives Peter Ferenbach and Lynn Fahselt, then a consultant to Democratic donors, including Open Society, Proteus Fund, Ploughshares Fund, Carnegie Corporation, Piper Fund, Atlantic Philanthropies, and others "progressive" donors that have since pumped money into ReThink Media. ReThink Media became the loudspeaker for the red and the green. Last year, Proteus Fund paid ReThink Media $643,000 as a "communications consultant." Soros also backed Media Matters, run by ex-conservative-turned-Democrat David Brock, to shape media narratives about Muslims attacked by Republicans. Over the years, ReThink Media has hired and trained alumni of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, including staffers Zainab Chaudary and Corey Saylor, to promote an "echo chamber" for liberal groups. One narrative: Muslims were under attack in the West, and the Democratic Party would defend Muslims. This storyline took hold in the post-Obama political landscape. In late 2010, Open Society staffers in Beeson's U.S. Programs division distributed an internal memo, "Extreme Polarization and Breakdown in Civic Discourse," announcing they were giving Podesta's Center for American Progress $200,000 for a new "Examining Anti-Muslim Bigotry Project" that would "document structures underlying the Islamophobia movement." The memo detailed plans to do "opposition research" on groups like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Middle East Forum, which track Islamic extremism. The project description noted that "progressives were caught off guard" earlier that year when New York City residents opposed the building of a "Ground Zero mosque" near the site of the former World Trade Center. "Progressives" were in "urgent need of high-quality opposition research so that they can switch from playing defense to develop a proactive strategic plan to counter anti-Muslim xenophobia and to promote tolerance," protecting "progressive counter-terrorism policies," they wrote. In another part of the memo, the authors detailed that Open Society was providing a "seed grant" to "New York Neighbors," a group that had hosted then-Rep. Keith Ellison, a Muslim American Democrat from Minnesota, and others for a "dignified candlelight vigil" on 9/11, that "provided the press with images of a diverse group of mainstream ordinary Americans committed to tolerance." The next year, the Center for American Progress released "Fear Inc.," a report co-authored by two Pakistani American Muslims, Faiz Shakir and Wajahat Ali, smearing national security experts as "Islamophobes" and portraying criticism of Islamist extremism as bigotry. Al Jazeera heavily promoted the report. Shakir later became presidential campaign manager to Democratic Socialists of America Sen. Bernie Sanders and co-founder of Justice Democrats, a Democratic socialist group that Sanders established, later propelling Muslim politicians Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar into Congress and now supporting Mamdani. In 2016, as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour stepped forward as a surrogate for Sanders. As Trump won the Republican nomination, Iranian-American eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam funneled $500,000 through Democracy Fund Voice, a political arm of Democracy Fund Inc., into ReThink Media's "Security and Rights Collaborative" to "respond to escalations of anti-Muslim bigotry." The fund hires Arabella Advisors, which Atlantic magazine described as the "Left's Dark-Money Manager, giving it $678,750 in consulting fees at last count. In Brooklyn, Sarsour rose to lead Democratic "resistance" to then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. SAhe was heralded by the New York Times as a "Brooklyn homegirl in hijab," the headscarf Muslim women sometimes wear to protect their "honor," according to fundamentalist interpretations of Islam. Sarsour launched MPower Change under the umbrella of another big-money Democratic-aligned donor, NEO Philanthropy Inc., to advance "Muslim Power." She hired Yasmine Taeb, the "first Muslim woman elected to the National Democratic Party," according to her official bio, and got at least $260,000 in seed money, some of it from the House of Soros's Proteus Fund. Curiously, Open Society now backed PR campaigns by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, once named an unindicted co-conspirator in a trial, U.S. vs. Holy Land Trust, that convicted five Muslim men from the network at 500 Grove Street for terrorism financing. They gave $140,000 for its California chapter for "community safety workshops," $73,610 to its Texas chapter for a "Report Hate" campaign and at least $376,010 for "safety workshops" and PR. In Canada, Nakita Valerio, a writer at the Alberta Muslim Public Affairs Council, wrote about "implicit Islamophobia," tapping "research on implicit bias" compiled by the Open Society Foundations. These ideas, shaped through critical race theory, merged with the narrative-building efforts of Soros-backed groups to portray Muslims as perpetual victims. By 2017, with Trump in office, past and present grantees of the National Security and Human Rights Campaign escalated anti-Trump protests. ReThink Media issued messaging like "#NoBanNoWall" that the Council on American-Islamic Relation, Muslim Advocates, Sarsour and others echoed. The Brennan Center tweeted: "#MuslimBan tarnishes American image as land of optimism & opportunity." Groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and MPower Change circulated amicus briefs, petitions and social media campaigns like #RegisterMeFirst to stoke fears of a fictional Muslim registry. At the street level, the new red-blue-green alliance built up steam, with Sarsour and a cast of political operatives embedding themselves in racial "justice protests," chanting "From Ferguson to Gaza." This alliance isn't just policy and politics. It is street-level activism. According to our research at the Pearl Project, groups like Emgage, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and others that received Soros money teamed up with the Democratic Socialists of America, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, CodePink and Democratic Party operatives, including Indivisible, and others, to flood American politics with anti-Israel protests. With Trump's 2024 win, they have pivoted in an alliance of red-blue-and-green to also protest Trump, billionaire Elon Musk and Musk's electric vehicle company, Tesla. At a June 14 #NoKings protest, teachers' union president Randi Weingarten railed against Trump on center stage as red-blue-green protesters in the crowd chanted to "globalize the intifada," wearing t-shirts for the Democratic Socialists of America, emblazoned with their jingle: "SOCIALISM BEATS FASCISM." On June 22, Muslim Advocates shared a social media post from The People's Forum, a self-declared Marxist 501(c)(3) nonprofit in New York City that promotes the propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party, this time celebrating Columbnia University anti-Israel protest leader Mahmoud Khalil's release from detention. This year, the Council on American-Islamic Relations directly contributed to Mamdani's political rise through a new political action committee – the Justice and Peace Fund – quietly giving him $100,000, helping legitimize his platform within a national strategy to embed red-green candidates into the Democratic mainstream. This isn't incidental. It's coordinated. Through two decades of funding strategy, narrative manipulation and activist training, the red-green alliance – with a vital blue thread – has redefined the Democratic Party. It doesn't merely tolerate the red-green alliance. It foments it. The receipts, nonprofits and political candidates like Mamdani are only the beginning. This network has trained a well-funded pipeline of red-green political operatives to be blue and take over the Democratic Party. Fast-forward to election day in New York. Shakir, co-author of Fear Inc., shared Sanders' message – "Let's elect Zohran the next mayor of New York." After Mamdani's win, Shakir posted a message: "Fight oligarchy." On cue, his Fear Inc. co-author Ali scolded "some in the Democratic establishment" for allegedly leveling "Islamophobic smears against Mamdani." Sarsour, who once led the Women's March and launched MPower Change, campaigned for Mamdani. She appeared on the Qatar-funded Al Jazeera TV station to crow: "It was us New Yorkers — New York Democrats — that demonstrated what the Democratic Party truly needs." This isn't a fluke. It's a blueprint. Through two decades of patient investment, narrative shaping and activist grooming, the red-green alliance — with the Democratic Party as its vehicle — has transformed American politics. The party no longer resists this movement. It accelerates it. The receipts, nonprofits, and candidates like Mamdani are only the beginning. A well-funded pipeline of red-green operatives now wears blue, ready to take over.
