Who’s Behind Zohran Mamdani? Three Guesses.

Zohran Mamdani is about to become mayor of New York, and yet a year ago, virtually no one outside of his state assembly district had ever heard of him. What accounts for his meteoric rise to international fame and almost certain election as mayor of what was once the greatest city in the world? The answer is obvious: he has the backing of George Soros, the far-left multibillionaire who finances so much of the international left today.

Fox News reported Friday that “A former top executive for liberal billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF) between 2017 and 2020 is back in the spotlight amid reports highlighting his involvement with Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign and connecting Obama world to the campaign.”

That executive is Patrick Gaspard, “who has served in several high-profile political positions, including advising former President Barack Obama’s historic 2008 campaign, serving as the Democratic National Committee’s executive director, and being tapped as the Center for American Progress (CAP) president in 2021, has been informally advising Mamdani on the side and recently introduced Obama campaign architect David Axelrod to him.”

The New York Post noted in July that “although Soros and his family didn’t directly donate to Mamdani’s campaign, Patrick Gaspard, a former Open Society Foundations president who is now a distinguished senior fellow for a liberal think tank heavily funded by Soros called Center for American Progress, did play a key role.” The Post pointed to a New York Times report that revealed that Gaspard, whom the Paper of Record described as “an adviser to mayors and presidents” without mentioning the Soros connection, “quietly helped guide Mr. Mamdani.”

Gaspard is an old political hand on the left; the first campaign he worked on was Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential run. In a June 2009 profile of Gaspard, the New York Observer revealed that he “writes poetry and considers as a personal hero Aimé Césaire, the pioneering black-pride poet and politician who taught the anti-colonialist theorist Frantz Fanon.” Fanon was an advocate for revolutionary violence; Zohran Mamdani read his work as a student at Bowdoin College.

It was Patrick Gaspard who helped propel Mamdani from being a minor candidate in a crowded field to defeating Cuomo, who had gone into the Democratic primary as the front-runner. If he was worried about any other candidate, it was city comptroller Brad Lander, who was the left’s standard-bearer before Mamdani’s precipitous rise to the top. After Mamdani gained attention by screaming at border czar Tom Homan over efforts to detain and deport illegal aliens, and gained the support of far-left New York State Senator Gustavo Rivera, Gaspard prevailed upon Lander to meet with him and Mamdani.

“The day before the final debate,” says the Times, “Mr. Lander and Mr. Mamdani sat down at Yara, a Lebanese restaurant in Midtown, with campaign aides and Mr. Gaspard. Over plates of fattoush, hummus and eggplant, the two candidates decided they would cross-endorse each other to defeat Mr. Cuomo…. The two men discussed how Mr. Lander could use his campaign funds to attack Mr. Cuomo in the race’s final days, and when they took the debate stage the next day, they teamed up to highlight the allegations of sexual harassment that ended Mr. Cuomo’s governorship.”

This strategy coincided with one that the Soros-funded Working Families Party “had been pushing for months urging their candidates to attack Mr. Cuomo, not each other.”  Meanwhile, Lander’s endorsement sent “a signal to older liberal voters and Jewish voters that Mr. Mamdani could be trusted.” Lander explained: “I know how to read the polls. I had made clear how important it was to defeat Andrew.”

Soros and his minions clearly felt the same way.

The token Republican in the New York City mayoral race, Curtis Sliwa, who has no more chance of being elected mayor than Donald Trump does, said that in his view, Mamdani “doesn’t want to get rid of billionaires. He only wants to destroy the ones who don’t bankroll his radical agenda. If you’re George Soros or part of the far-left donor class, you get a free pass and a seat at the table. Mamdani will drive out everyone else and turn New York into a city run by untouchables, where the Soros machine calls the shots.”

By “untouchables,” Sliwa didn’t mean members of the lowest Hindu caste, or G-Men; he was referring to people who could flout the law without fear of prosecution, secure in the knowledge that the judicial system was firmly in the control of their friends and allies. Thus they could do whatever they wanted without fear of being touched. Mamdani, after all, believes in a system that, for all its pretensions about caring for working people, actually concentrates all power and wealth in the hands of the government. Those outside the government apparatus have no recourse against those who are within it. Mamdani, although he poses as an outsider, is, from the standpoint of protecting and expanding big government and increasing the benefits that the political elites enjoy, an insider’s insider, another Soros tool.