Mamdani and New York City's Rebuke to White Nationalism

MAGA's bs pitch that has attracted the centrists, the rationalists and the middle that voted for Trump is fundamentally white nationalism. It's what they air on the podcasts. It's the Bell Curve fans, the tradmoms, the "realism" pitch that has been underlying much of the Trump campaign and his time in office. It's why it seems so normal to the leadership of The Heritage Foundation to talk about the reasonableness of Nazi Nick Fuentes.

Of course they don't call it something so divisive, instead the GOP is all about Christian nations, about how people don't get along with The Other. It's about failure of everyone else to integrate into "American culture" or "The West". It's about calling people terrorists, job-stealers and un-american. It's bullshit, but decades of bullshit "scientific" racism, "scientific" sexism and the march of the Great Replacement bullshit into the mainstream has made it palpable.

Yes, in 2020s America the question of 'should America be a nation for the christian whites' (whatever the fk that means) is a water cooler issue, a dinner table issue. Trying to get you to question if multicultural America ever really worked is the aim of the modern right wing project.

The thing is: the diverse America did work, it does work, and--even more threatening to the right wing establishment and the "reasonable centrists" then his socialism--the functioning, thriving, multicultural nature of Mamdani's campaign is a threat to the entire false ground-truth the MAGA movement is trying to manufacture.

MAGA runs on the threat of "we need our own nation because we just can't get along with The Other" but New York City disproves this again and again. Adams ran on exploiting the racial divide and Cuomo is running on gutter racism now, leaning into the Fox version of New York City that needs a hard man to make hard choices to clean it up. (But we know what "clean it up" means in this context don't we. Catch the sound of the racism dog whistle.)

But the Great Replacement is a lie. The accusations of multiculturalism's failure is a lie. And there's no better proof of this than New York City and Mamdani's campaign.

The historical context is crucial. Immigrant women have always been the quiet architects of change in New York City. In the early 20th century, Jewish and Italian garment workers—many of them teenage girls—led strikes that reshaped labor laws. Chinese immigrant women in Chinatown organized tenant associations that forced the city to confront slum conditions. Puerto Rican and Dominican mothers in the Bronx built tenant unions during the 1970s housing crisis. Caribbean women transformed the city's care economy. Beginning in the mid-20th century, thousands of Jamaican and other Caribbean women found work as home health aides and domestic workers. Their advocacy ultimately shaped the nation's first Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights in 2010.

New York City proves that the MAGA platform and all its "hard-man-reasonable-racism" is a lie. We are the melting pot. We are the proof that working together with no one othered is the greatest way to success.

There's no replacements, no other, no "integration". There's us, living together, working together. Thriving despite endless attacks by people who desperately don't want to acknowledge we exist--because our very existence proves that their rhetoric is all lies. We are New York City.

⁠Mamdani's rise proves that grassroots organizing led by working-class immigrant women can redefine political power in New York. These aunties—often overlooked and underestimated—built a candidate from the ground up, mobilizing a multiracial coalition that understood identity through shared struggle rather than ethnicity alone.