Mamdani's smile is actually a very scary mask.

The smile tells you that, even if you have every good reason to worry, you must not dare to. What looks like warmth and charisma is actually a tool to disarm scrutiny.

photo: Dmitryshein/Wikipedia

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New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani ran for office promising voters free everything — with a gaping smile that concludes every empty sentence.

Then he asked them to give him $4 million to fund his transition team. In a fundraising video, Mamdani claimed that he only had $1 million to keep paying his “incredible team.” At his victory speech last month, people who campaigned long and hard for him expected free drinks; they were charged $15 for a single beer.

The cracks are already starting to show (if they weren’t already before), but his smile keeps getting bigger.

Mamdani has brought on 400 people to his transition team across 17 committees including a committee on community organizing, on worker justice, and on immigrant justice. Despite the claims that Mamdani needed millions of dollars to go through tens of thousands of resumes, the “team” is mostly drawn from his political allies in the Democratic Socialists of America, antisemites in disguise, and other questionable folks who were already involved in his campaign.

He ran a campaign on habitually calling President Trump a fascist, then built a transition team that includes some of the most extreme figures in New York City politics. For example, Mamdani’s “public safety” committee includes Alex Vitale, the author of “The End of Policing,” which calls for eliminating the police, legalizing many crimes, and using social services to deal with other offenses. Vitale had claimed that “police are violence workers,” described police as “the natural enemy of the working class” and urged that “if you don’t want racism and violence, don’t get the police involved.”

Unsurprisingly, for the transition team of a politician whose signature issue was validating Islamic violence and hatred against Jews through moral inversion, Mamdani’s transition team stands out for the sheer number of members who hate Jews. That includes Hassaan Chaudhary, a fellow Indian Muslim who headed up Muslim outreach for Mamdani, who had praised Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his call to eliminate Israel, and used “Jew” as an insult.

Also on the Mamdani transition team is ousted Women’s March leader Tamika Mallory, who’s celebrated wild antisemite Louis Farrakhan, and accused Jews of being behind slavery.

Mamdani’s legal committee includes Tahanie Aboushi, a BDS supporter, close friend of another antisemite Linda Sarsour, and “Palestinian” “civil rights” lawyer whose father was sentenced to 22 years in prison. As Middle East Forum noted, she was involved in an organization that a Hamas front group tried to direct funds to.

Another member of the legal committee is Ramzi Kassem, who’s claimed that 9/11 was due to the “resentment these terrorists felt towards the United States” as a result of “our country’s policies” and that “the legacy of 9/11 ought to be recounted primarily through the stories of Muslims the world over who have largely paid the price of American power and prosperity.” Kassem’s clients included Ahmed al-Darbi, an Al Qaeda terrorist and the brother-in-law of one of the hijackers who flew a plane into the Pentagon, and who was himself a key figure in the bombing of an oil tanker. “Terrorism is but one of many reactions to oppression and dispossession and not their cause,” Kassem has argued.

The deeper problem is that none of this is accidental or incidental. Mamdani is not an outlier. He is an example of a broader pattern: a coordinated, ideologically driven strategy to capture local offices and turn them into platforms for national and international activist causes.

The Democratic Socialists of America, and the activist networks surrounding it, have realized that municipal offices — small, overlooked, low-turnout — provide the perfect entry point. They build campaigns around emotionally charged identity messaging, foreign-policy crusades that have nothing to do with local governance, and promises of “free everything” that feel good and poll well among politically disengaged voters. Mamdani is simply the latest, and perhaps the most theatrically polished, version of this model.

His actual record reflects the same strategy. While he branded himself as the champion of transit and housing affordability, far more of his legislative energy has gone into symbolic anti-Israel resolutions, internationalist messaging, and activist-driven political theater. He has spent far more time attacking foreign governments than improving the basic functioning of the one he was elected to serve. This is not an oversight; it is the worldview of local office as a megaphone rather than a job.

His transition team reinforces this pattern. Transition teams reveal priorities, not personalities. Mamdani did not seek out experienced administrators, urban planners, transit experts, economists, or people with a record of delivering services in a city of 8.5 million people. He sought out the same activists, ideologues, and factional allies who fueled his campaign. This is not “community representation.” It is consolidation — turning the mechanics of governance into an extension of the campaign war room. The question is not why the transition team looks like this. The question is why anyone expected anything else.

And because this is a movement, not an individual, you can already see what comes next. Expect efforts to defund or structurally weaken the New York City Police Department through “budget realignment.” Expect symbolic anti-Israel resolutions drafted to inflame tensions while doing nothing to improve the life of a single New Yorker.

Expect city funds to be redirected toward activist-aligned nonprofit organizations under the banner of “justice.” Expect ambitious-but-impossible transit and housing promises to fade quietly once the numbers hit the wall. And expect constant political theater: unregulated protests and other political demonstrations throughout the city, messaging bills that cannot pass, and a mayoral office used as a staging ground for national and international ideological battles.

Through all of this, the press will celebrate his “movement,” community leaders will be afraid to criticize it, and New Yorkers will be told that any concern about extremism or dysfunction is evidence of bigotry or bad faith. That is precisely why Mamdani smiles. Because the smile tells you that, even if you have every good reason to worry, you must not dare to. The smile tells you everything will be fine, even when you know many things are going to get worse, especially for Jewish New Yorkers. The smile tells you that questioning any of this makes you the problem.

The more he smiles, the more he gaslights, manipulates, distorts, misleads, and makes any objection to his team’s extremism, incompetence, and double standards somehow your moral failure — simply for noticing. It’s the 60-something-year-old Britain-born lady who, just a few weeks ago, told Muslims obnoxiously blasting prayers in Britain’s streets that she is tired of their anti-British behavior, and then is promptly arrested by the police for saying out-loud what so many born-and-bred Brits fundamentally believe.

This idea that Mamdani is some new, sexy, shiny object that we should all “give a fair chance” is nonsense. He is not new; his values and politics are not new; his worldview is not new. We know exactly where this is all headed because the history of socialism, the Red-Green Alliance, and quasi-progressive politics is robust.

But what fools so many people is Mamdani’s smile. It’s the disguise that makes disastrous ideologies look and feel appealing, the gloss that hides the wreckage underneath, and the pleasant veneer that convinces reasonable people to ignore every warning sign they should already know by heart.

It softens the edges of extremism, it turns radicalism into something palatable, and it tricks decent, well-meaning New Yorkers into believing that this time will be different for no good reason.

It’s the political anesthetic that numbs the public long enough for the damage to be done, long enough for the machinery of ideology to lock into place, long enough for him to call the destruction “progress.”

It’s a mask, but this isn’t Halloween where the mask comes off at midnight. It’s a mask that asks for your unconditional trust while hiding the very reasons it doesn’t deserve it.

Mamdani’s smile was never about free public transit or childcare. It’s a get-out-of-jail-free card to lie to New Yorkers’ faces, to build a government staffed by ideologues, and to turn New York City into a playground for activist fantasies while ordinary residents pay the price.

Part of the mystery, at least to those of us watching all of this unfold with clear eyes, is how so many otherwise intelligent people can be fooled by something as thin as Mamdani’s smile.

Psychologists have long documented that smiles trigger automatic trust responses. We are wired to interpret a smile as warmth, safety, and non-threat. Before we even process a person’s words, our brains have already made a snap judgment: friendly equals trustworthy. In business, in sales, in politics — this is one of the oldest persuasion shortcuts in the book. A smile buys people’s attention long enough for the message to slip through unchallenged.

But smiles don’t just generate trust; they also scramble our moral instincts. When someone is peddling radical, hostile, or extremist ideas with a soft tone and a polished affect, it creates emotional dissonance. The friendly presentation and the dangerous content clash. Most people, uncomfortable with the contradiction, unconsciously resolve it by siding with the pleasant emotion rather than the unpleasant truth. It is far easier to think, “Surely someone who smiles like that doesn’t mean harm,” than to confront the fact that charm can be weaponized.

This is where the halo effect kicks in. A confident, relaxed, charismatic smile leads people to assume a whole constellation of virtues that aren’t actually there — intelligence, nuance, moral clarity. In politics this effect is amplified, because charisma is so often mistaken for competence, and polish for principle. Mamdani has mastered this contrast: Present antisemitic rhetoric in a tone so soft and polished that many people simply cannot compute the danger. They expect antisemites to look like mobs brandishing swastikas and yelling Nazi catchphrases, not well-groomed “progressives” with Instagram-ready grins.

And this is the most insidious part: Modern antisemitism thrives in exactly this format. It rebrands itself through academic vocabulary, social-justice framing, and charismatic spokespeople who package hostility as compassion. A smile becomes camouflage. It launders extremist ideas into acceptability because it breaks the stereotype of what hate “should” look like. Many people want to see themselves as open-minded and fair, and so when someone smiles and speaks the language of “justice,” they suppress their discomfort to preserve that self-image. The smile doesn’t just disarm them; it recruits them.

And, so, people aren’t fooled despite the mask; they’re fooled because they want the mask to be real. They want to believe that a charismatic newcomer represents hope rather than risk, transformation rather than turmoil, progress rather than regression. Hope is an intoxicant, and Mamdani knows how to bottle it with precision.

For many voters, especially those who conflate radicalism with authenticity, the smile alone is enough to override everything else. The extremism doesn’t register as extremism. The contradictions don’t land. The incoherence doesn’t matter. The smile smooths it all over. It becomes the delivery system for the idea that anyone who objects is not concerned, but compromised; not cautious, but complicit; not thoughtful, but prejudiced.

In that sense, the smile works because it reassures people that they’re not endorsing nonsense; they’re endorsing “progress.” It tells them that his ideological crusades are acts of courage rather than acts of division. It flatters them into believing that they are the ones helping to write “the next great chapter.”

All because of a counterfeit smile.

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