The Dangerous Performance of Zohran Mamdani

By KJ Freeman

I first became familiar with Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign after noticing a wave of nightlife gentrifiers rallying behind him—a transfer of boomer political cachet into the hands of the very people who commodified and sold off New York under the guise of creativity and culture. Mamdani embodies a central contradiction in the city’s political theater: both the millennial displaced by rising costs and the gentrifier who helped inflate them. His appeal is symptomatic of a political moment where disillusionment with establishment liberalism meets the desperate hope that a new class of careerist “leftists” might salvage what’s left of the city.

His performative radicalism functions as a balm—soothing the guilt of anti-Zionist Jewish Americans eager to separate themselves from the genocide in Palestine, and reassuring exhausted liberals who long for a symbolic break from the failures of the Eric Adams administration. But symbolism, in this case, masks complicity. It’s an unabashed optimism rooted in the belief that the cultural class of aging millennials—figures like Hasan Piker, who doesn’t even live in New York—can leverage their influence through endorsements and social media spectacle to shape electoral outcomes without materially engaging the communities they claim to represent.

This is not grassroots. This is branding.

Beyond the cringe Disney-style rap videos, Mamdani’s campaign is riddled with contradictions and risks that only the privileged can afford to overlook. It echoes the same aestheticized liberalism that enabled the rise of corporate Democrats—a politics more invested in optics and proximity to power than structural change. His eagerness to posture as all things to all people results in a flattening of stakes. And in the process, he’s willing to make rhetorical compromises that endanger the very communities he claims to protect—particularly Muslim Americans, whose lives are not a bargaining chip for political legitimacy.

What’s most dangerous about Mamdani isn’t just his willingness to perform progressivism; it’s the way his campaign reveals the collapsing boundary between influencer culture and electoral politics. His rise signals a shift where ideological rigor is substituted with virality, and strategic ambiguity becomes a campaign strategy. The city doesn’t need another hollow progressive who knows how to play the part. It needs protection—from opportunists, from spectacle, from those who sell revolution as branding.

Zohran Mamdani’s declaration that, if elected mayor of New York City, he would arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in compliance with the International Criminal Court is not just legally incoherent—it’s politically irresponsible. The ICC holds no jurisdiction in the United States. The U.S. is not a signatory to the Rome Statute. The enforcement of international warrants falls to federal authorities, not municipal governments. This isn’t a matter of radical courage. It’s theater.

New York City is not just a liberal metropolis—it is a hub of Zionist political infrastructure. It houses the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, including a significant number of active and former IDF soldiers. That infrastructure is backed not only by community sentiment but by networks of private security, state-aligned donors, and intelligence-adjacent nonprofits. These forces are deeply embedded in both public and private institutions throughout the city. To threaten the symbolic arrest of Netanyahu without any actual mechanism for follow-through doesn’t challenge these systems—it provokes them without consequence to the one making the provocation.

The consequences are displaced elsewhere.

Statements like Mamdani’s do not occur in a vacuum. In the current climate—where Tel Aviv is under attack, Iran is retaliating, and war looms—the idea of a Muslim elected official targeting an Israeli head of state becomes ammunition for reactionary backlash. Mamdani may be seen as courageous to his base, but to those with power, he becomes a cipher through which broader anxieties about Muslims, Palestinians, and immigrants are projected. He opens the door for increased NYPD surveillance, for intensified media fear-mongering, and for Muslim New Yorkers—who already live under suspicion—to be cast as threats to civic order.

Mamdani’s own proximity to power protects him. Muslim cab drivers, deli workers, undocumented halal cart vendors, do not have press teams or political allies. They do not get to “clarify” in the aftermath. They are simply left exposed.

The claim also betrays a fundamental misreading of how state violence operates. The American left is still addicted to the idea that political statements, if bold enough, can substitute for strategy. But there is no strategy here—no city-wide organizing effort to create material safety for Palestinians, no coalition building with Muslim community organizations, no plan for how this arrest would take place or be defended. The left’s obsession with spectacle is not just distracting—it’s dangerous.

And the irony is that Mamdani’s declaration mirrors the very liberal strategies he claims to oppose: vague gestures meant to placate outrage without redistributing any actual risk. Kamala Harris told Black Americans that she believed them. Mamdani tells Muslims that he will deliver justice. Neither tells us how. Neither is held accountable for what follows.

There is a historical precedent for this kind of political behavior—especially among Black politicians. The rise of the Congressional Black Caucus was once seen as a breakthrough. Today, it functions largely as a symbolic body, often endorsing pro-police, pro-corporate legislation while claiming to represent the interests of the oppressed. It’s not that these politicians don’t believe in justice—it’s that they operate within systems that reward visibility more than impact. Mamdani’s statement signals that he’s learning the same lesson.

In a city like New York, where politics are deeply performative and surveillance is hyperlocal, being loud without infrastructure is not resistance—it’s negligence. The people who will pay for Mamdani’s posturing will not be Netanyahu. They will be young Arab kids in Bay Ridge stopped and searched. They will be Muslim families in Queens visited by federal agents. They will be imams flagged on watchlists, organizers quietly dropped from grants, mosques infiltrated under the pretense of national security.

It is not courage to risk other people’s safety for your own political ascent. It is cowardice disguised as radicalism.

The trajectory of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign—whether it culminates in victory or defeat—is emblematic of a broader phenomenon: the systemic incorporation and neutralization of democratic socialism within the neoliberal state apparatus. This process is neither novel nor accidental. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s political arc stands as a case study in how insurgent, grassroots leftism is methodically absorbed, repackaged, and ultimately rendered compatible with corporate and imperial interests.

If Mamdani secures the mayoralty of New York City, the city will become a laboratory for the institutionalization of this dynamic on a local scale. The rhetoric of radicalism will remain, but its content will be hollowed out, reduced to symbolic gestures and performative acts designed to placate rather than empower. The structural forces—capital’s dominance over urban policy, aggressive policing, and the unwavering commitment of U.S. foreign policy to imperial objectives—will persist unchallenged.

Mamdani will confront the imperatives of governance: courting donors from real estate and finance, negotiating with entrenched bureaucracies, and managing a sprawling metropolis under the weight of austerity. His role will crystallize into that of the conciliator—a progressive face designed to absorb dissent among Muslim Americans and other marginalized communities, only to redirect that dissent back into the Democratic Party’s imperial fold.

This is the contemporary logic of left electoralism in the United States: it must remain radical enough in language to inspire hope, but pragmatic enough in action to preserve capital accumulation and state power. Mamdani’s campaign thus risks becoming a vector for the depoliticization of Muslim Americans, transforming legitimate rage at American empire into a sanitized, manageable constituency.

The stakes are not abstract. To fold Mamdani into the neoliberal elite is to reinforce the very systems that surveil, detain, and deport Muslim communities. It is to legitimize a party that has perpetuated war abroad and repression at home. It is to condone the displacement of working-class interests in favor of electoral calculus and corporate appeasement.

If the left fails to recognize this, it will reproduce the cycle of co-optation that has repeatedly subdued radical potential. Mamdani’s ascendance would mark not a breakthrough, but the culmination of a project that transforms revolutionary rhetoric into political anesthesia. It would be the ultimate concession: a declaration that the systemic violence underpinning the American empire is inviolable, that the illusions of representation suffice to quell demands for justice, and that the horizon of transformative politics ends where the boundaries of empire begin.

The radical left must confront this reality unflinchingly. The question is not whether Mamdani can win—but whether the left will resist the politics of containment and demand a genuinely oppositional praxis that refuses to be assimilated into the empire's machinery. The survival of any emancipatory project depends on it.