Mamdani Uses Taxpayer Money to Build a City-Funded Activist Army

New York City may be broker than a barista with a college degree but that isn’t stopping socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani from funding his activist army.

On Wednesday, the mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement rolled out a program called “Organize NYC” that’s billed as a “long-term initiative to bring mass public participation into the work of governing.”

The first thing these paid activists will do is to get people to participate in the Rent Guidelines Board hearing in June.

“Volunteers will canvass across the city to encourage tenants and landlords to testify ahead of the Board’s June vote, which will determine whether rents increase or remain the same for more than 2 million New Yorkers.

This vote mainly has to do with a potential further rent freeze in the city.

The Mayor’s Office said in a statement that these publicly paid community organizers “will not advocate for any specific outcome,” but you can bet that critics of the program aren’t buying it.

If you have any doubts about what that totally, absolutely neutral program is about just watch a few minutes of the ad pumping this grift.

Yes, “Mohammed” in the commercial here is wearing a keffiyeh, which has become a symbol of Palestinian “resistance” to Israel and is often worn by members of Hamas.

Even some Democrats weren’t too pleased with this sartorial choice.

“It’s all intentionally divisive and hateful,” former Democratic state Assemblyman Dov Hikind said to the New York Post on Saturday. “This man is representing the administration. If someone came to my door with a keffiyeh, I’d immediately be nervous.”

But that’s only a small part of the issue with Organize NYC.

In a separate New York Post editorial on Sunday John Ketcham and Christian Browne—two Manhattan Institute scholars—called out Organize NYC as an attempt to create a thinly veiled, “taxpayer-funded effort to embed campaign-style political organizing inside city government, dress it up as civic virtue, and deliver Mamdani’s campaign promise under a veneer of official neutrality.”

That certainly seems to be the case.

As the authors noted, Mamdani’s office has been vague about how much money the utterly broke city government facing a “historic” budget crisis will be sending Organize NYC’s way.

It’s clear what Mamdani is doing. He’s funding his activist class and making sure that public money is going to his people while using them to bolster numbers for their pet causes. As I wrote when he won the election in November, Mamdani will “provide an ample training ground for his socialist comrades to gain experience wielding power.”

This is a small but critical part of that larger goal. And you can be sure this model will be copied elsewhere.

The leftist Dissent Magazine celebrated Mamdani’s initiative to keep activists activated. Though even they had to acknowledge that “pushing against the limits of what is perceived as acceptably ‘political’ within the confines of city government will be one continuing challenge for the Office of Mass Engagement.”

You can be sure that not only will Mamdani lean heavily on this organization in New York City, but the Left will launch similar efforts elsewhere.

That’s why what happens in New York unfortunately matters beyond the limits of the five boroughs. Mamdani’s revolution is a pilot program for socialist government that the Left hopes to scale up and spread elsewhere. Nevermind that the previous pilot programs didn’t turn out too good. Surely, True Socialism will work this time, right?

Right now, Mamdani and company are focused on consolidating, ensuring they keep control long after their popularity plummets.

Once Democrats and the Left gain power they focus immediately on cementing it, ensuring that their people get the fruits of patronage, and that public money flows toward their pet projects, their people, and away from their enemies.

Whether their policies or other activities serve the broader public matters a lot less than ensuring their own people are taken care of.

You can see why the Left’s activist class, their NGO network, and their hordes of government bureaucrats remain so committed to the cause despite obvious governing failures.

Those failures are your problem, not theirs.

From their perspective, the government doesn’t really have to provide clean streets, efficient services, law and order, or anything like that. It’s about spoils and special benefits, with a little redistribution and social engineering on the side.

This is one of the many reasons so many of our big, blue cities seem utterly dysfunctional despite so many economic advantages.

Unfortunately for New York, Mamdani is doing everything his predecessors did wrong and making things worse. But he’s doing this while cleverly ensuring that even if his socialist experiments fail there will be nothing anyone can do about it.

Dark times in the Big Apple.