NYC Veers Hard Left: What It Means for Virginia

The Democrats’ nomination of Zohran Mamdani, a hard-left member of the Democratic Socialists of America, for mayor of New York City should be front-and-center in every Republican campaign in Virginia’s 2025 elections.

It is now crystal clear: The center of gravity of the Democratic Party is the radical Left. Virginia gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger can play moderate all she likes, but the radicals run her party. Because alongside Spanberger, Virginia Democrats also nominated Sen. Ghazala Hashmi for lieutenant governor, with her history of anti-Israel activism and opposition to merit-based admissions to Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. 

Mamdani and the progressive leftist engine now powering the Democratic Party are fundamentally at war with the West and Western values, mores, and social compacts. 

For all his posturing as being uniquely representative of and attuned to non-Western cultures and values, Mamdani, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Barack Obama before him, is the banal bourgeois product of elite Western education. He grew up the son of a Columbia professor and Hollywood filmmaker and attended elite private secondary schools, Bronx High School of Science, and Bowdoin College. Despite his elite education, like AOC and Obama, he was chronically underemployed before running for office.

Mamdani’s redistributionist war on billionaires and batty anti-capitalist ideas like rent freezes and government-owned grocery stores are warmed-over ‘70s socialism popular with over-credentialed but undereducated and callow progressive Democrats. Mamdani and his ilk cannot create value, so they must obtain what they believe is their due through force. 

But Mamdani is, at heart, an identity politics entrepreneur, leveraging his largely ancestral ties to non-Western nations to gain political power. He may hate capitalism, but he knows that being anti-Western is good for business. 

Like so much of the anti-Western Left, he is institutionally antisemitic, refusing to condemn explicitly genocidal slogans like “globalize the intifada” and energetically supporting the anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement. For progressive Democrats, Israel—plucky, tiny, Western-oriented survivor of genocidal wars waged by non-Western regimes, whose achievements in just 77 years of existence are a standing rebuke to failed Third World states—is simply the most active front in a wider war on the West.

Progressive Democrats will never criticize Islamist massacres of Christians in Nigeria, Chinese genocide of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, or the violent persecution of minorities in Iran, because to do so would be to criticize non-Westerners. Progressive Democrats will never take sides against the family. 

Hashmi is cut from the same cloth as Mamdani. As a state senator, she blocked Northern Virginia education advocate Suparna Dutta’s nomination to the State Board of Education. Dutta’s championing of returning to merit-based admissions to Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology was unacceptable to Hashmi—just as Mamdani wants to do away with merit-based testing for New York’s magnet schools. And Dutta’s advocacy of the U.S. Constitution—one of the canonical documents of Western civilization—in Board of Education meetings was a bridge too far for Hashmi and her comrade, board member Anne Holton (wife of Sen. Tim Kaine). 

Hashmi’s history of anti-Israel activism is well-known. She supported the post-Oct. 7 anti-Israel protests on Virginia campuses, claiming the protesters were simply people who cared “deeply about human rights.” And as chair of the Senate Committee on Education and Health, she held a hearing “to investigate the events on Virginia university campuses following October 7, 2023” without notifying any Jewish community organizations, Jewish campus organizations, or law enforcement agencies about the hearing in advance or allowing committee members to ask questions. Republican Sen. Tara Durant bluntly called the hearings “a sham.”

Make no mistake, Mamdani, not Spanberger, embodies the modern Democratic Party. Spanberger is part of a breed of weak-kneed Democrats that don’t know how to handle the progressive radicalism in their midst and, in due course, will bow to it or be swept away by it. It’s up to our statewide candidates and the Republican Party of Virginia to remind voters of this at every turn.

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