“I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.”
--The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 1965
https://www.kqed.org/news/12061703/british-commentator-sami-hamdis-detention-at-sfo-raises-alarms-over-free-speech
News
British Commentator Sami Hamdi’s Detention at SFO Raises Alarms Over Free Speech
by Katie DeBenedetti
October 27, 2025
KQED.org News
Sami
Hamdi, managing director of the International Interest, during a speech
at the 17th Annual Convention for Palestine at the Tinley Park
Convention Center in Tinley Park, Illinois, on Nov. 30, 2024.
Immigration officials on Sunday detained Hamdi, who has been a vocal
critic of Israel, and the State Department said his visa was revoked as
it seeks to remove him from the U.S. (Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty
Images)
Activists are warning about the erosion of free speech as they demand the release of British political commentator Sami Hamdi, who was detained at San Francisco International Airport on Sunday during a speaking tour of the U.S.
The State Department confirmed in a statement on social media that Hamdi, who has been a vocal critic of Israel, had his visa revoked and will be removed from the country.
He was traveling across the U.S. to appear at multiple events, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Sacramento chapter’s annual gala Saturday, and another CAIR gala in Florida, scheduled for Sunday night.
The organization alleged that Hamdi was detained because of his criticism of Israel and at the urging of right-wing political activists, including Laura Loomer, who has called herself a “proud Islamophobe.”
“Abducting a prominent British Muslim journalist and political commentator on a speaking tour in the United States because he dared to criticize the Israeli government’s genocide is a blatant affront to free speech,” CAIR said in a statement.
Loomer wrote on X that she demanded federal authorities “treat Hamdi as the major National security threat that he is” and reported him “over his documented support for Islamic terrorism.”
The Department of Homeland Security revoked Hamdi’s visa and has him in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody as it moves to deport him, spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said.
Bay Area Spared From Federal Immigration Enforcement ‘Surge,’ Officials Say
“The United States has no obligation to host foreigners who support terrorism and actively undermine the safety of Americans,” the State Department said on X on Sunday. “We continue to revoke the visas of persons engaged in such activity.”
Hamdi is the managing director of the International Interest, an organization that says it “advises on geopolitical environments and risks across the globe.” He has also appeared on Al Jazeera, Britain’s Sky News and other media outlets to offer commentary on the war in Gaza.
His detention appears to follow others by DHS under President Trump to revoke visas from people over political speech, including people who the State Department said “celebrated” Charlie Kirk’s death.
“Sending him to ICE detention, I think, is intentionally trying to put fear into others who are also speaking about this subject and … others who are traveling with visas as well, as public speakers or guests at different events,” said Reshad Noorzay, the executive director of CAIR Sacramento Valley/Central California.
California’s CAIR chapter said Monday that its legal team, as well as attorneys from the Muslim Legal Fund of America and the HMA Law Firm, are seeking Hamdi’s release.
Noorzay told KQED on Sunday that the organization is hoping Hamdi can reunite with his family and travel back to the United Kingdom. He said in the future, there should be a longer conversation about what the claims that led to Hamdi’s detention were and the State Department’s willingness to “act so brazenly.”
“It’s an attack on free speech, it’s an attack on the community and it’s really an attack on Americans who dare to criticize a foreign government and its actions,” he said.
KQED’s Sara Hossaini contributed to this report.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/13/opinion/zohran-mamdani-muslim-america-new-york.html
When I Look
at Zohran Mamdani,
Here’s What I See
Activists are warning about the erosion of free speech as they demand the release of British political commentator Sami Hamdi, who was detained at San Francisco International Airport on Sunday during a speaking tour of the U.S.
The State Department confirmed in a statement on social media that Hamdi, who has been a vocal critic of Israel, had his visa revoked and will be removed from the country.
He was traveling across the U.S. to appear at multiple events, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Sacramento chapter’s annual gala Saturday, and another CAIR gala in Florida, scheduled for Sunday night.
The organization alleged that Hamdi was detained because of his criticism of Israel and at the urging of right-wing political activists, including Laura Loomer, who has called herself a “proud Islamophobe.”
“Abducting a prominent British Muslim journalist and political commentator on a speaking tour in the United States because he dared to criticize the Israeli government’s genocide is a blatant affront to free speech,” CAIR said in a statement.
Loomer wrote on X that she demanded federal authorities “treat Hamdi as the major National security threat that he is” and reported him “over his documented support for Islamic terrorism.”
The Department of Homeland Security revoked Hamdi’s visa and has him in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody as it moves to deport him, spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said.
Bay Area Spared From Federal Immigration Enforcement ‘Surge,’ Officials Say
“The United States has no obligation to host foreigners who support terrorism and actively undermine the safety of Americans,” the State Department said on X on Sunday. “We continue to revoke the visas of persons engaged in such activity.”
Hamdi is the managing director of the International Interest, an organization that says it “advises on geopolitical environments and risks across the globe.” He has also appeared on Al Jazeera, Britain’s Sky News and other media outlets to offer commentary on the war in Gaza.
His detention appears to follow others by DHS under President Trump to revoke visas from people over political speech, including people who the State Department said “celebrated” Charlie Kirk’s death.
“Sending him to ICE detention, I think, is intentionally trying to put fear into others who are also speaking about this subject and … others who are traveling with visas as well, as public speakers or guests at different events,” said Reshad Noorzay, the executive director of CAIR Sacramento Valley/Central California.
California’s CAIR chapter said Monday that its legal team, as well as attorneys from the Muslim Legal Fund of America and the HMA Law Firm, are seeking Hamdi’s release.
Noorzay told KQED on Sunday that the organization is hoping Hamdi can reunite with his family and travel back to the United Kingdom. He said in the future, there should be a longer conversation about what the claims that led to Hamdi’s detention were and the State Department’s willingness to “act so brazenly.”
“It’s an attack on free speech, it’s an attack on the community and it’s really an attack on Americans who dare to criticize a foreign government and its actions,” he said.
KQED’s Sara Hossaini contributed to this report.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/13/opinion/zohran-mamdani-muslim-america-new-york.html
When I Look
at Zohran Mamdani,
Here’s What I See
Illustration by Susana Blasco
Listen to this article · 33:12 minutes
October 13, 2025
New York Times
New York Times
[Ms. Ahmad is an editor in the Opinion section.]
A few days before Zohran Mamdani’s decisive victory in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York, a friend and I were speculating about his chances of winning. We indulged in a moment of giddy optimism at the prospect that a Muslim man might actually become the mayor of the city we live in. With the polling available then, it seemed plausible. “If he does,” my friend, Arman Dzidzovic, said, “it’s about to get so much worse.”
Arman was referring to the wave of anti-Muslim vitriol already swelling toward Mr. Mamdani and his campaign, including suggestions that he was a terrorist sympathizer — or even a terrorist himself. Arman, a Muslim like me, felt that the higher Mr. Mamdani’s star rose, the worse the anti-Muslim racism would get. I didn’t disagree.
Then we both fell silent. The shared understanding of what it means to be Muslim in America hung in the air between us.
It’s a confounding time to be Muslim in this country. A degree of Muslim culture I would have never thought possible when I was a kid is now imbued in the everyday lexicon of Americans. I’m still a little shocked every time I hear non-Muslim teenagers say “inshallah.” My friend and I were having this discussion about Mr. Mamdani while sitting in a trendy Yemeni coffeehouse, one of many proliferating across the country as places where young Muslims and non-Muslims alike hang out after hours instead of at bars.
And yet with every inch of progress, we’ve come to expect bigoted outbursts against people who share our faith and take up places of prominence. More than two decades after Sept. 11, 2001, we’ve learned to anticipate the patterns of anti-Islamic hate — after a terrorist attack, the bombing of another Muslim-majority country or simply when a high-profile Muslim enters the public consciousness. We can count on crude, anti-Muslim prejudice to bleed into our social media feeds, with the dogmatic good-versus-evil narratives peddled by politicians coming quickly in their wake.
So it came as no surprise when, within hours of Mr. Mamdani’s primary victory, right-wing politicians and talking heads called him “little Muhammad,” accused him of wanting to enforce Shariah and insinuated that his victory could bring about another Sept. 11.
But perhaps more insidious is the pernicious Islamophobia that has morphed in the years since the attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the kind that has seeped into the liberal institutions that claim to oppose racism and prejudice. Their actions have helped lay the groundwork for the Trump administration to take anti-Muslim attitudes and codify them in policies and law, with far-reaching consequences for Muslims in America. In these spaces, Mr. Mamdani is not “little Muhammad” but instead a virulent antisemite who portends violence for Jewish New Yorkers on account of his criticism of Israel and his faith in Islam.
After two years of war in Gaza and nearly nine months into President Trump’s second term, the treatment of Mr. Mamdani, 33, has served as a black light, revealing the flecks of anti-Muslim bigotry that still dapple American institutions. The candidate has become an avatar for many things, but when it comes to Islamophobia after Oct. 7, Mr. Mamdani is the poster child for the double standards that Muslims in America are held to today.
The term “Islamophobia” can seem like a misnomer. Is it really a phobia, the way one can be afraid of spiders or heights, or is it simply a form of prejudice? However you put it, much of the experience of being a Muslim in America amounts to assuaging the fears of others, even if those fears are rooted in bigotry.
Many of us learned how to react to that fear early. After the attacks on Sept. 11, my family, like so many others, put American flags outside our house and on our car. Once I started getting stopped by airport security, at age 11, my parents instructed me to always make eye contact with agents, to speak to them confidently and with a smile. These are the social equivalents of putting your hands in the air, of making it clear you’re one of the “good” Muslims, lest someone with the ability to make your life worse think you’re one of the “bad” ones.
I met with Mr. Mamdani one afternoon last month at his campaign offices, where he recounted similar experiences. “Growing up Muslim in New York City after 9/11 was, to some extent, growing up having been marked as an other,” he told me. “I faced what I think many Muslim kids faced,” he said. “Whether it’s the names, the characterizations, the motivations.”
If his experience coming of age after Sept. 11 was anything like mine — Mr. Mamdani and I are almost the same age — there was a shock to being singled out for our faith after the attacks. A degree of Islamophobia existed in America before that day, of course, but after it a pall of suspicion fell over us all, one that has never fully lifted. As a child, I found it confusing: Why was I, a fifth grader, getting stopped at the airport because I could be a terrorist? The logic didn’t track. But then you live with it, and living in that reality informs how you see the rest of the world. That’s true for Mr. Mamdani, too: “In some ways,” he said, “it was also a preparation for being in politics.”
That preparation is evident on the campaign trail. Mr. Mamdani answers the relentless questioning of his beliefs about Jews, antisemitism, Hamas, Oct. 7, Israel’s right to exist — on and on — with an unwaveringly chipper attitude. Regardless of how he answers them, these “Do you condemn” questions deftly associate him with the actions and phrases that don’t always come directly from him, testing, probing, goading him to misstep. It’s maddening to watch, yet he answers them all, sometimes with a winking sense of humor.
At a town-hall meeting of mayoral candidates hosted by the UJA-Federation of New York in May, he paused in the midst of a similar line of questioning on Jews and Israel, smiled and said: “These are all softballs! Come on!” The crowd tittered.
I asked Mr. Mamdani whether he sees his Muslim identity as part of the reason he’s repeatedly questioned about his views on Israel. “I think it’s part of it,” he said. “I also think my having stood up for Palestinian rights throughout my political career is another part of it.”
It’s not hard to imagine how the consciousness of Palestinian suffering was woven into Mr. Mamdani’s political identity. Raised by his mother, Mira Nair, an acclaimed Indian filmmaker, and his father, Mahmood Mamdani, one of Columbia University’s more prominent anticolonial professors, Zohran Mamdani grew up with intellectuals like Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi over for dinner. He was a founding member of Bowdoin College’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and a regular fixture at protests against Israeli incursions into Gaza well before Oct. 7, 2023.
Since the war in Gaza began, he’s made speaking up for Palestinians a part of his political agenda: As a state assemblyman, he sponsored a bill to prevent nonprofit corporations from supporting illegal Israeli settlements, led a five-day hunger strike in front of the White House and was arrested as part of a sit-in organized by Jewish Voice for Peace in front of Senator Chuck Schumer’s house.
But he is also Muslim, and to be a Muslim now is to grow up with an understanding of the injustices facing Palestinians that is deeper than most people’s. For much of the past two decades, the American Muslim understanding of the Palestinian struggle was part and parcel of the knowledge that our lived reality cleaved away from the mainstream narrative of the war on terror. As our communities were surveilled and our home countries bombed and invaded, what many Muslims knew to be true — that the war on terror wrought chaos and death on hundreds of thousands of Muslims that had nothing to do with the attacks on Sept. 11 — remained a belief we could speak only in hushed tones to one another.
There was “a real sense of contradiction between what was stated and what was actually happening,” Mr. Mamdani told me, when I asked him about his memory of those years. (He was 9 years old on Sept. 11.) “I learned very young, even just in understanding my family’s own history, that no matter if you cared about politics, politics cared about you.”
In New York City, where thousands of Muslims were followed by the Police Department in a sprawling surveillance program — later declared unconstitutional — Mr. Mamdani remembers how seemingly basic activities like a visit to a mosque or a soccer field would result in finding yourself watched. “It was the banal. It was the everyday,” he said. “The inversion of innocence and guilt.”
Kashif Shaikh, the head of Pillars Fund, a nonprofit that helps fund Muslim Americans’ cultural and political projects, remembers how hard those years were. “If you were going to speak out against that war,” he said, “they would frame it as ‘You support the terrorists.’”
But as the jingoism that peaked during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq began to fade, “We were starting to see a little bit of progress,” Mr. Shaikh said. “There was a lot of building that was happening over the last 20 years.” Muslim political organizations like the Muslim Civic Coalition and the Muslim Public Affairs Council were created or expanded, and as more Muslims rose through the ranks of American society, the veil of fear across the Muslim community in the aftermath of Sept. 11 began to lift.
“Our generation has a confidence in that we have something to offer to the dialogue of New York other than apologizing for what other Muslims did on 9/11,” Ali Najmi, Mr. Mamdani’s election lawyer and a longtime political confidant of his, told me.
At 41, Mr. Najmi is emblematic of the many Muslim Americans who have found their footing in American politics. A child of Pakistani immigrants, he is among dozens of Muslims now helping shape Democratic policy in and out of office, including Representatives Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, André Carson and Lateefah Simon, and Minnesota’s attorney general, Keith Ellison.
As mainstream American pop culture embraced more Muslims — Ramy Youssef, Riz Ahmed, Bella Hadid — we’re seen not just as “terrorists,” Mr. Shaikh told me. “We’re seen as full human beings.”
But passing the good/bad litmus test remains a cost of entry for Muslims who aspire to reach the upper echelons of power in American society. Mr. Mamdani is no exception.
A few days before Zohran Mamdani’s decisive victory in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York, a friend and I were speculating about his chances of winning. We indulged in a moment of giddy optimism at the prospect that a Muslim man might actually become the mayor of the city we live in. With the polling available then, it seemed plausible. “If he does,” my friend, Arman Dzidzovic, said, “it’s about to get so much worse.”
Arman was referring to the wave of anti-Muslim vitriol already swelling toward Mr. Mamdani and his campaign, including suggestions that he was a terrorist sympathizer — or even a terrorist himself. Arman, a Muslim like me, felt that the higher Mr. Mamdani’s star rose, the worse the anti-Muslim racism would get. I didn’t disagree.
Then we both fell silent. The shared understanding of what it means to be Muslim in America hung in the air between us.
It’s a confounding time to be Muslim in this country. A degree of Muslim culture I would have never thought possible when I was a kid is now imbued in the everyday lexicon of Americans. I’m still a little shocked every time I hear non-Muslim teenagers say “inshallah.” My friend and I were having this discussion about Mr. Mamdani while sitting in a trendy Yemeni coffeehouse, one of many proliferating across the country as places where young Muslims and non-Muslims alike hang out after hours instead of at bars.
And yet with every inch of progress, we’ve come to expect bigoted outbursts against people who share our faith and take up places of prominence. More than two decades after Sept. 11, 2001, we’ve learned to anticipate the patterns of anti-Islamic hate — after a terrorist attack, the bombing of another Muslim-majority country or simply when a high-profile Muslim enters the public consciousness. We can count on crude, anti-Muslim prejudice to bleed into our social media feeds, with the dogmatic good-versus-evil narratives peddled by politicians coming quickly in their wake.
So it came as no surprise when, within hours of Mr. Mamdani’s primary victory, right-wing politicians and talking heads called him “little Muhammad,” accused him of wanting to enforce Shariah and insinuated that his victory could bring about another Sept. 11.
But perhaps more insidious is the pernicious Islamophobia that has morphed in the years since the attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the kind that has seeped into the liberal institutions that claim to oppose racism and prejudice. Their actions have helped lay the groundwork for the Trump administration to take anti-Muslim attitudes and codify them in policies and law, with far-reaching consequences for Muslims in America. In these spaces, Mr. Mamdani is not “little Muhammad” but instead a virulent antisemite who portends violence for Jewish New Yorkers on account of his criticism of Israel and his faith in Islam.
After two years of war in Gaza and nearly nine months into President Trump’s second term, the treatment of Mr. Mamdani, 33, has served as a black light, revealing the flecks of anti-Muslim bigotry that still dapple American institutions. The candidate has become an avatar for many things, but when it comes to Islamophobia after Oct. 7, Mr. Mamdani is the poster child for the double standards that Muslims in America are held to today.
The term “Islamophobia” can seem like a misnomer. Is it really a phobia, the way one can be afraid of spiders or heights, or is it simply a form of prejudice? However you put it, much of the experience of being a Muslim in America amounts to assuaging the fears of others, even if those fears are rooted in bigotry.
Many of us learned how to react to that fear early. After the attacks on Sept. 11, my family, like so many others, put American flags outside our house and on our car. Once I started getting stopped by airport security, at age 11, my parents instructed me to always make eye contact with agents, to speak to them confidently and with a smile. These are the social equivalents of putting your hands in the air, of making it clear you’re one of the “good” Muslims, lest someone with the ability to make your life worse think you’re one of the “bad” ones.
I met with Mr. Mamdani one afternoon last month at his campaign offices, where he recounted similar experiences. “Growing up Muslim in New York City after 9/11 was, to some extent, growing up having been marked as an other,” he told me. “I faced what I think many Muslim kids faced,” he said. “Whether it’s the names, the characterizations, the motivations.”
If his experience coming of age after Sept. 11 was anything like mine — Mr. Mamdani and I are almost the same age — there was a shock to being singled out for our faith after the attacks. A degree of Islamophobia existed in America before that day, of course, but after it a pall of suspicion fell over us all, one that has never fully lifted. As a child, I found it confusing: Why was I, a fifth grader, getting stopped at the airport because I could be a terrorist? The logic didn’t track. But then you live with it, and living in that reality informs how you see the rest of the world. That’s true for Mr. Mamdani, too: “In some ways,” he said, “it was also a preparation for being in politics.”
That preparation is evident on the campaign trail. Mr. Mamdani answers the relentless questioning of his beliefs about Jews, antisemitism, Hamas, Oct. 7, Israel’s right to exist — on and on — with an unwaveringly chipper attitude. Regardless of how he answers them, these “Do you condemn” questions deftly associate him with the actions and phrases that don’t always come directly from him, testing, probing, goading him to misstep. It’s maddening to watch, yet he answers them all, sometimes with a winking sense of humor.
At a town-hall meeting of mayoral candidates hosted by the UJA-Federation of New York in May, he paused in the midst of a similar line of questioning on Jews and Israel, smiled and said: “These are all softballs! Come on!” The crowd tittered.
I asked Mr. Mamdani whether he sees his Muslim identity as part of the reason he’s repeatedly questioned about his views on Israel. “I think it’s part of it,” he said. “I also think my having stood up for Palestinian rights throughout my political career is another part of it.”
It’s not hard to imagine how the consciousness of Palestinian suffering was woven into Mr. Mamdani’s political identity. Raised by his mother, Mira Nair, an acclaimed Indian filmmaker, and his father, Mahmood Mamdani, one of Columbia University’s more prominent anticolonial professors, Zohran Mamdani grew up with intellectuals like Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi over for dinner. He was a founding member of Bowdoin College’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and a regular fixture at protests against Israeli incursions into Gaza well before Oct. 7, 2023.
Since the war in Gaza began, he’s made speaking up for Palestinians a part of his political agenda: As a state assemblyman, he sponsored a bill to prevent nonprofit corporations from supporting illegal Israeli settlements, led a five-day hunger strike in front of the White House and was arrested as part of a sit-in organized by Jewish Voice for Peace in front of Senator Chuck Schumer’s house.
But he is also Muslim, and to be a Muslim now is to grow up with an understanding of the injustices facing Palestinians that is deeper than most people’s. For much of the past two decades, the American Muslim understanding of the Palestinian struggle was part and parcel of the knowledge that our lived reality cleaved away from the mainstream narrative of the war on terror. As our communities were surveilled and our home countries bombed and invaded, what many Muslims knew to be true — that the war on terror wrought chaos and death on hundreds of thousands of Muslims that had nothing to do with the attacks on Sept. 11 — remained a belief we could speak only in hushed tones to one another.
There was “a real sense of contradiction between what was stated and what was actually happening,” Mr. Mamdani told me, when I asked him about his memory of those years. (He was 9 years old on Sept. 11.) “I learned very young, even just in understanding my family’s own history, that no matter if you cared about politics, politics cared about you.”
In New York City, where thousands of Muslims were followed by the Police Department in a sprawling surveillance program — later declared unconstitutional — Mr. Mamdani remembers how seemingly basic activities like a visit to a mosque or a soccer field would result in finding yourself watched. “It was the banal. It was the everyday,” he said. “The inversion of innocence and guilt.”
Kashif Shaikh, the head of Pillars Fund, a nonprofit that helps fund Muslim Americans’ cultural and political projects, remembers how hard those years were. “If you were going to speak out against that war,” he said, “they would frame it as ‘You support the terrorists.’”
But as the jingoism that peaked during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq began to fade, “We were starting to see a little bit of progress,” Mr. Shaikh said. “There was a lot of building that was happening over the last 20 years.” Muslim political organizations like the Muslim Civic Coalition and the Muslim Public Affairs Council were created or expanded, and as more Muslims rose through the ranks of American society, the veil of fear across the Muslim community in the aftermath of Sept. 11 began to lift.
“Our generation has a confidence in that we have something to offer to the dialogue of New York other than apologizing for what other Muslims did on 9/11,” Ali Najmi, Mr. Mamdani’s election lawyer and a longtime political confidant of his, told me.
At 41, Mr. Najmi is emblematic of the many Muslim Americans who have found their footing in American politics. A child of Pakistani immigrants, he is among dozens of Muslims now helping shape Democratic policy in and out of office, including Representatives Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, André Carson and Lateefah Simon, and Minnesota’s attorney general, Keith Ellison.
As mainstream American pop culture embraced more Muslims — Ramy Youssef, Riz Ahmed, Bella Hadid — we’re seen not just as “terrorists,” Mr. Shaikh told me. “We’re seen as full human beings.”
But passing the good/bad litmus test remains a cost of entry for Muslims who aspire to reach the upper echelons of power in American society. Mr. Mamdani is no exception.
Credit: Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times
It wasn’t until a week before the Democratic primary that one of the “Do you condemn” questions finally gave those ready, even eager, to find fault with Mr. Mamdani the smoking gun they were looking for. Asked by a podcast host what he made of protest chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “From the river to the sea,” Mr. Mamdani responded by first speaking to the fears and traumas of Jewish New Yorkers after Oct. 7 but didn’t denounce either phrase outright: “As a Muslim man who grew up post-9/11, I’m all too familiar in the way in which Arabic words can be twisted, can be distorted, can be used to justify any kind of meaning.”
The backlash was swift, and its repercussions may well follow him even after this race. His critics pounced on the interaction. Multiple Jewish organizations condemned his lack of condemnation of either phrase, and others took the opportunity to denounce him as a material danger to the Jewish community. One example: Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League suggested that Mr. Mamdani was supporting “an explicit incitement to violence” against Jews.
Mr. Mamdani secured more votes in the primary than any other New York Democrat in more than three decades. His win was hailed as a harbinger of hope in the Democratic Party, proof positive that a multiethnic, multiclass coalition could inject energy into the stagnant politics of a party that has otherwise been floundering in the Trump era.
Within hours of his victory, though, social media posts telling Jewish New Yorkers that they were in danger began to proliferate online. Some even went as far as to say that Jews needed to leave the city for their safety. After the first Muslim candidate ever to win a primary for mayor of New York City took the race, one of the first articles this newspaper published quoted a post by the writer Jill Kargman, who said that the election result was “like a spiritual Kristallnacht. It proved Jew hatred is now OK.”
In the months since the primary, Mr. Mamdani has been called an antisemite repeatedly online and in person. People often shout it at him as he walks through the streets of the city campaigning. The label has stuck despite the fact that he campaigned alongside Brad Lander, the comptroller, who is the highest-ranking Jewish official in New York City, and despite the fact that polling has shown that a plurality of Jewish New Yorkers planned to vote for him.
“When an accusation is leveled against you again and again, no matter how you respond, it sounds as if you are guilty,” Mr. Mamdani told me. “And to someone watching from afar, it’s as if you invited the conversation.”
Two years after Oct. 7, the specific accusation made repeatedly against Mr. Mamdani is a familiar one to many Muslims. Hundreds of us — if not thousands — have been sidelined or silenced since under the banner of antisemitism.
“For the first time last year, we saw employment termination climb to the No. 1 spot of request for assistance,” Afaf Nasher, the head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations of New York, told me. “Overnight, CAIR-New York has had to become experts in free speech.”
Ms. Nasher said that many of the firings or employment disputes that come across her desk recast advocacy for Palestinians, specifically pro-Palestinian speech, as inherently antisemitic. Hesen Jabr, a labor and delivery nurse at NYU Langone Health, was fired for describing the bloodshed in Gaza as a genocide in an acceptance speech she gave for an award she got for displaying compassionate care to her patients.
In Maryland a middle school teacher, Hibah Sayed, was told that a sticker of the Palestinian flag displayed on her classroom door (one among many flags, smaller than an index card) could be seen as antisemitic, as was a kaffiyeh she sometimes wore, not to mention a sweatshirt with the words “Gaza: soul of my soul.” She had a spotless record at her school. She kept her job but was told to sign a document stating that she could be fired if she displayed anything to do with the Middle East on her campus. Like Ms. Jebr, Ms. Sayed had no employment issues before Oct. 7.
Sahar Aziz, a law professor at Rutgers University, has spent years studying the ways in which civil liberties have been suspended for Muslims in America after Sept. 11. She said the perceptions of Muslims as inherently Jew-hating or violent have paved the way for attacks on pro-Palestinian speech. “I say ‘Muslims’ and ‘Palestinians’ together because you cannot disconnect those two, in terms of people’s perceptions in the United States,” she told me. “The reason anti-Palestinian racism is so salient and so effective and acceptable is because it rides on the back of Islamophobia.”
Not all attacks on pro-Palestinian speech are Islamophobic, Ms. Aziz said, but the two often bleed into each other. As American institutions convulsed with protests against the Israeli campaign in Gaza, anti-Muslim language and incidents — the murder of a 6-year-old Palestinian American named Wadea Al-Fayoume, the shooting of three Palestinian college students in Vermont, dozens of incidents of mosques vandalized and threatened — were already on the rise. The attempts at suppressing pro-Palestinian speech, using antisemitism as a cudgel, were well underway by the time Mr. Trump was elected for the second time. Palestine Legal, an aid organization that supports pro-Palestinian voices facing legal action in the United States, said it received more than 2,000 requests for legal aid in 2024 alone.
With groups like Project Esther, an initiative of the Heritage Foundation (the same group that devised Project 2025) whose stated mission is to suppress pro-Palestinian speech, Ms. Aziz suggested, we are seeing something comparable to the era of the Patriot Act in the early 2000s, when the quashing of civil liberties became government policy. “It means the future may be worse,” she said. “The more institutional it becomes, the harder it is to combat.”
But the Trump administration has taken the language and institutional policies and codified them. In January, Mr. Trump issued an executive order to “combat antisemitism.” The order has given the green light for the Department of Justice to establish a multiagency antisemitism task force, which has, among other things, moved to arrest and deport or, according to the order, “otherwise hold to account” those deemed guilty of antisemitic harassment under a vague definition of what antisemitism could entail.
The logical extreme of these policies has already arrived in full force. Rumeysa Ozturk, a graduate student at Tufts, was part of a group that wrote an opinion essay for the campus paper calling for the school to divest from Israel. As a direct result, she was snatched from the street by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and ferried to a detention facility in an unmarked car. Mahmoud Khalil and Momodou Taal, who both led pro-Palestinian demonstrations on college campuses, and Ms. Ozturk are among the dozens of Muslims facing the threat of deportation for their protests against Israel’s campaign of indiscriminate violence in Gaza.
In all three cases, Trump officials and lawyers have contended that their speech was antisemitic and that their participation in activities protected under the First Amendment amounted to material support of a terrorist group. “We don’t want terrorists in America,” Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, said of Mr. Khalil and others like him.
“The accusations of being a terrorist sympathizer, of being an extremist — these are facts of life for so many Muslims who engage with any part of public life,” Mr. Mamdani told me. “And the notion that to stand up for Palestinian rights is to somehow be a bigot is what so many face whenever they express that solidarity.”
Trump administration officials have called Muslims supporting Palestinians antisemitic terrorists, but the trope that Muslims are antisemitic is prevalent in liberal circles as well. “I think liberals have realized it’s racist to assume Muslims are terrorists or terrorist supporters just as a matter of course,” Ms. Aziz said. “But I don’t think that’s the case when it comes to antisemitism.”
Top Democrats have stopped short of calling Mr. Mamdani an antisemite. But when Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York castigated him, they used phrases like “he left open far too much space for extremists” (Governor Shapiro) and said that he had made “references to global jihad” (Senator Gillibrand, for which she later apologized).
With three weeks to go until Election Day, some top Democrats — including the Senate minority leader, Mr. Schumer, and the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, who also represent New York — have not endorsed him, despite the fact that he may well become the next Democratic mayor of their city. Jay Jacobs, the chairman of the New York State Democratic Party, said he would resign before he would back Mr. Mamdani. All cited Mr. Mamdani’s criticism of Israel as a major reason for withholding support.
They continue to hold out despite support for Mr. Mamdani from a number of prominent Democrats, such as Gov. Kathy Hochul and Representatives Pramila Jayapal, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamie Raskin, as well as Senator Bernie Sanders.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Mamdani’s opponents Eric Adams (who dropped out of the race last month) and Andrew Cuomo repeatedly suggested Mr. Mamdani is antisemitic.
“One of the candidates running for mayor is spewing antisemitism,” Mr. Adams reportedly told a closed-door meeting of Jewish leaders in March.
“We know all too well that words matter,” Mr. Cuomo said of Mr. Mamdani’s “Globalize the intifada” episode. “They fuel hate. They fuel murder.”
I asked Mr. Mamdani what he made of accusations of antisemitism when they came from members of his party. “Nothing that has happened in the general election has been as hurtful as what happened in the primary election,” he responded. “It was within a Democratic primary, and so much of our party’s politics is ostensibly in opposition to the Republican Party’s vision of this country. And yet what we saw is that there is quite a bit of room for that Islamophobia within our own party.”
Mr. Mamdani said he’s committed to approaching his detractors from a place of understanding.
“You have to distinguish between that which is said in good faith and that which is said in bad faith,” he said. For those who express their fear in good faith — and he said he extends “good faith to those unless you know otherwise” — he approaches them with the aim of “understanding the basis of the fear.” He added, “Some of that fear is connected to things that I have proposed. Some of it is connected with things that are imagined around what I have said or proposed.”
“I don’t begrudge New Yorkers who have concerns about me,” Mr. Mamdani said, “because for many of them, they’ve only ever engaged with a caricature of me.”
Correcting that caricature has become one of the key agenda items of the campaign. After his primary victory, Mr. Mamdani had a number of closed-door meetings with members of the Jewish community, particularly groups and congregations that were troubled in particular by his “Globalize the intifada” response.
Among the skeptics is Halie Soifer, the chief executive of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, a political advocacy nonprofit. She explained to me why the fear of a Mamdani mayoralty should be treated as valid, citing a recent spate of attacks on Jews — the killing of two Israeli Embassy workers in Washington, the firebombing of a group marching in Colorado in support of Israeli hostages and the arson attack at the governor’s mansion in Pennsylvania, which targeted Mr. Shapiro and his family — as a key reason the Jewish community is on high alert.
I asked her what she believes would happen to Jews in New York if Mr. Mamdani took over City Hall. She said Jewish New Yorkers are “concerned that the elected head of the city that has the largest Jewish population outside of Israel is going to potentially give a green light to those who want to inflict harm on Jewish Americans.”
“I don’t think there’s a belief among Jews that he himself would be a perpetrator of violence,” she said, “but there’s a concern that his language is giving a permissive structure to those who may.”
Ms. Soifer listed several issues that she said must be clarified in order to gain the Jewish community’s trust: his past support of an economic boycott of Israel, his refusal to say Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state rather than as a state with equal rights for all and his definition of what constitutes an antisemitic hate crime.
“We have this rise in anti-Zionist beliefs manifesting themselves in antisemitic violence,” Ms. Soifer said. “People are concerned about their safety,” she went on. “They’re concerned about security, and they want to know that whoever they elect as mayor shares that concern.”
Incidents of antisemitism have undoubtedly increased over the past two years. The F.B.I. recorded more than 4,000 incidents of anti-Jewish hate crimes since 2023, more than half of them destruction or vandalism of property. This month, an assailant rammed his car into a group of Jewish congregants in front of a synagogue in Manchester, England, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. Two of the congregants died.
Audrey Sasson, the executive director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, told me that many Jewish New Yorkers are navigating their political decisions through this rise in antisemitism. “A lot of liberal Jews are in the middle place, who are afraid of rising antisemitism in the age of Trump but not sure how to feel about a mayoral candidate,” she said. “It surfaces a moment of real reckoning for the Jewish community.”
“There’s a lot of whispering happening,” she said. “Is he antisemitic?” But Ms. Sasson, who has campaigned for Mr. Mamdani, said that once many in the Jewish community get a chance to know Mr. Mamdani, the caricature falls away. “We saw how vulnerably he spoke about the impact of that on him emotionally,” she went on, referring to a moment on the campaign trail in early June when he choked back tears speaking about the accusations of antisemitism he’s been facing. “Cuomo and Adams are here to use Jews as pawns, to use our real Jewish fears,” she said.
There’s a tragic dynamic between antisemitism and Islamophobia in the years since Oct. 7. Jews and Muslims are tiny minorities in this country, both on the receiving end of conspiratorial racism and prejudiced policies now and at various other points in American history. At the extremes of the right and the left, they are often intertwined. The Trump administration’s tactics, which use the accusation of antisemitism as a blunt tool to suppress pro-Palestinian speech, have made the question of whether it is harder to be a Muslim or a Jew in America into a kind of zero sum contest.
As Mr. Mamdani attempts to make inroads with Jewish voters who have brought their experiences with antisemitism to the fore of his campaign, he’s been on the blunt end of racism and bigotry himself.
The expected outbursts from the right against Mr. Mamdani’s socialist policies are paired with racist accusations. There are the openly Islamophobic statements from MAGA stalwarts like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who posted an A.I.-generated image of the Statue of Liberty wearing a burqa after his primary win, and Laura Loomer, a Trump confidante, who wrote on social media that Mr. Mamdani is “literally supported by terrorists. NYC is about to see 9/11 2.0.”
But it goes beyond online statements. Mr. Mamdani’s office has received a string of death threats since he began campaigning. I listened to a voice mail message left at his office. A man with a deep voice said, “You should go back to fucking Uganda before I shoot you in the fucking head. Your whole family, too. You pieces of shit Muslims don’t belong here. You’re not compatible with our Western values.”
I’ve read hundreds of Islamophobic slurs written online against Mr. Mamdani for this essay, leaving me pained but somewhat unfazed. You get used to it when you’ve lived here your whole life. Hearing the unbridled hate in someone’s voice felt different. In September a man in Texas was charged with making terroristic threats as a hate crime against Mr. Mamdani.
Many politicians, including many of his Democratic peers, have remained noticeably silent as Mr. Mamdani has faced these threats and racist outbursts.
As a Muslim American, I have found the way his party has failed him particularly wrenching. It echoes what so many of us have experienced from the institutions we are a part of, big and small, and the repercussions we have faced in the wake of Oct. 7, no matter how established (or sometimes because of how established) we are. We may feel as though we belong in the communities and circles we are a part of, but advocacy for Palestinians — and advocacy for ourselves — can cast us out of them overnight, like the nurse at N.Y.U.
This is what has made the psychic toll of this particular moment crushing for so many Muslims in America. There has been progress — we do have Muslim politicians, professors, business leaders, cultural icons — but it is matched with the heartbreak of betrayal from the very communities that we believed had embraced us.
Many of us grew up with the images, the never-ending images, of people who looked just like us covered in ashes and rubble created by American bombs. Then, many Muslims felt they could say nothing. Now, as Israel has extended its bombing campaigns beyond Gaza to Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iran and even Qatar, merely registering horror or even righteous anger at the state responsible for leaving tens of thousands of civilians across these countries dead still carries consequences.
The arrests and detentions of people like Mr. Khalil and Ms. Ozturk send a message, just as the firing of a nurse does and just as the treatment of a mayoral candidate does. It tells us that Muslim suffering is acceptable and that there is a cost if we dare say otherwise.
Mr. Mamdani, with his dimpled smile and affable attitude, is in some ways an unlikely face for the paradox of the current moment facing Muslims. But his boy-next-door charm might be the reason he’s among the first Muslim politicians to break into the American mainstream the way he has. My Muslim friends and I often joke that he’s our “gold star boy” because of his goody-two-shoes past. (The most dirt The New York Post has been able to dig up on him is that he once pilfered a table while in college.)
When I was sitting in his campaign office, I asked Mr. Mamdani what it was like to be both the face of progress for one community and a harbinger of Islamist evil to another. “It feels like a contradiction, in both the promise of this moment and the backlash to the very thing,” he replied. Our gold-star boy looked a little weary from his day of campaigning, wearier still when he paused to consider the racist vitriol that comes his way. “To be a Muslim in public life is to know that you will face things of this nature. It doesn’t mean that they’re acceptable. It doesn’t mean that they are not disgusting,” he told me. “But it also means that they’re not surprising.”
I felt a sense of weariness, too, hearing Mr. Mamdani resign himself to this reality. There’s a shared grief among Muslims right now, one that feels redundant when we express it to one another. Sitting with Muslim friends or family members over the course of these past two years of war, we often speak of the pain of witnessing the horrors coming out of Gaza, a pain that is deepened by the hypocrisy and hostility of many American institutions. “I know,” I often find myself saying, over and over again. “I know.”
The ravages of this war — whole cities wiped off the map, tens of thousands dead, the largest cohort of child amputees in recent history — have had a lasting effect on the Muslim American psyche. Now, even with a cease-fire in effect, it’s difficult to imagine how an end to the war in Gaza could put the genie back in the bottle.
For many of us, the pain comes, in part, from upholding a stoic facade while those who spew venom face few or no consequences. It’s seeing peers casually dehumanize Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians and knowing that calling it out is largely futile if not dangerous. It’s seeing that kind of language echo through institutions as small as a middle school all the way up to the White House.
It’s not like nothing has changed. Slightly more than half of American adults now have a somewhat or very unfavorable view of Israel, and a clear majority say they are concerned with starvation in Gaza and Israeli strikes that kill Palestinian civilians. Even as many of our institutions have failed us, the American people seem, finally, to be grasping what we’ve known all along.
But Muslims have been made to grin and bear it in America for more than two decades. Watching Mr. Mamdani stand unwaveringly in the face of a stream of anti-Muslim abuse is to witness the distillation of that dynamic in a single person. I’d be lying if I said I think his fate in this particular matter will improve over time. It is a certainty that Mr. Mamdani, if he wins the mayoralty, will have to contend with even more Islamophobic slurs, on a national scale.
In the face of this, it’s easy to become cynical, even as his popularity marks a moment of triumph for Muslims. Mr. Mamdani sees it differently.
“I used to be quite consumed by forever being a minority — of being an Indian in Uganda, Muslim in India, all of these things in New York City,” he said to me. It’s a sentiment he’s had to express often over the course of his campaign. It’s at once well rehearsed and heartfelt. “I remember my father telling me that to be a minority is also to see the truth of the place, to see promise and to see the contradictions of it.”
Mr. Mamdani finds hope in that tension.
“I was always left with a cleareyed sense of the world that I was in,” he said, “and how to ensure that the contradiction of that world didn’t leave you with a sense of bitterness.”
More on Mamdani:
Opinion | Mara Gay
‘They’re Not Avoiding the Things They Don’t Know’
Oct. 7, 2025
Opinion | Jennifer Steinhauer
Win or Lose, It’s Zohran Mamdani’s Political World Now
Oct. 6, 2025
Opinion | Nicole Gelinas
Democrats Have a Real Problem Facing Charismatic Candidates
Sept. 1, 2025
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Meher Ahmad is an editor in the Opinion section.
Source photograph by Damon Winter/The New York Times
It wasn’t until a week before the Democratic primary that one of the “Do you condemn” questions finally gave those ready, even eager, to find fault with Mr. Mamdani the smoking gun they were looking for. Asked by a podcast host what he made of protest chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “From the river to the sea,” Mr. Mamdani responded by first speaking to the fears and traumas of Jewish New Yorkers after Oct. 7 but didn’t denounce either phrase outright: “As a Muslim man who grew up post-9/11, I’m all too familiar in the way in which Arabic words can be twisted, can be distorted, can be used to justify any kind of meaning.”
The backlash was swift, and its repercussions may well follow him even after this race. His critics pounced on the interaction. Multiple Jewish organizations condemned his lack of condemnation of either phrase, and others took the opportunity to denounce him as a material danger to the Jewish community. One example: Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League suggested that Mr. Mamdani was supporting “an explicit incitement to violence” against Jews.
Mr. Mamdani secured more votes in the primary than any other New York Democrat in more than three decades. His win was hailed as a harbinger of hope in the Democratic Party, proof positive that a multiethnic, multiclass coalition could inject energy into the stagnant politics of a party that has otherwise been floundering in the Trump era.
Within hours of his victory, though, social media posts telling Jewish New Yorkers that they were in danger began to proliferate online. Some even went as far as to say that Jews needed to leave the city for their safety. After the first Muslim candidate ever to win a primary for mayor of New York City took the race, one of the first articles this newspaper published quoted a post by the writer Jill Kargman, who said that the election result was “like a spiritual Kristallnacht. It proved Jew hatred is now OK.”
In the months since the primary, Mr. Mamdani has been called an antisemite repeatedly online and in person. People often shout it at him as he walks through the streets of the city campaigning. The label has stuck despite the fact that he campaigned alongside Brad Lander, the comptroller, who is the highest-ranking Jewish official in New York City, and despite the fact that polling has shown that a plurality of Jewish New Yorkers planned to vote for him.
“When an accusation is leveled against you again and again, no matter how you respond, it sounds as if you are guilty,” Mr. Mamdani told me. “And to someone watching from afar, it’s as if you invited the conversation.”
Two years after Oct. 7, the specific accusation made repeatedly against Mr. Mamdani is a familiar one to many Muslims. Hundreds of us — if not thousands — have been sidelined or silenced since under the banner of antisemitism.
“For the first time last year, we saw employment termination climb to the No. 1 spot of request for assistance,” Afaf Nasher, the head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations of New York, told me. “Overnight, CAIR-New York has had to become experts in free speech.”
Ms. Nasher said that many of the firings or employment disputes that come across her desk recast advocacy for Palestinians, specifically pro-Palestinian speech, as inherently antisemitic. Hesen Jabr, a labor and delivery nurse at NYU Langone Health, was fired for describing the bloodshed in Gaza as a genocide in an acceptance speech she gave for an award she got for displaying compassionate care to her patients.
In Maryland a middle school teacher, Hibah Sayed, was told that a sticker of the Palestinian flag displayed on her classroom door (one among many flags, smaller than an index card) could be seen as antisemitic, as was a kaffiyeh she sometimes wore, not to mention a sweatshirt with the words “Gaza: soul of my soul.” She had a spotless record at her school. She kept her job but was told to sign a document stating that she could be fired if she displayed anything to do with the Middle East on her campus. Like Ms. Jebr, Ms. Sayed had no employment issues before Oct. 7.
Sahar Aziz, a law professor at Rutgers University, has spent years studying the ways in which civil liberties have been suspended for Muslims in America after Sept. 11. She said the perceptions of Muslims as inherently Jew-hating or violent have paved the way for attacks on pro-Palestinian speech. “I say ‘Muslims’ and ‘Palestinians’ together because you cannot disconnect those two, in terms of people’s perceptions in the United States,” she told me. “The reason anti-Palestinian racism is so salient and so effective and acceptable is because it rides on the back of Islamophobia.”
Not all attacks on pro-Palestinian speech are Islamophobic, Ms. Aziz said, but the two often bleed into each other. As American institutions convulsed with protests against the Israeli campaign in Gaza, anti-Muslim language and incidents — the murder of a 6-year-old Palestinian American named Wadea Al-Fayoume, the shooting of three Palestinian college students in Vermont, dozens of incidents of mosques vandalized and threatened — were already on the rise. The attempts at suppressing pro-Palestinian speech, using antisemitism as a cudgel, were well underway by the time Mr. Trump was elected for the second time. Palestine Legal, an aid organization that supports pro-Palestinian voices facing legal action in the United States, said it received more than 2,000 requests for legal aid in 2024 alone.
With groups like Project Esther, an initiative of the Heritage Foundation (the same group that devised Project 2025) whose stated mission is to suppress pro-Palestinian speech, Ms. Aziz suggested, we are seeing something comparable to the era of the Patriot Act in the early 2000s, when the quashing of civil liberties became government policy. “It means the future may be worse,” she said. “The more institutional it becomes, the harder it is to combat.”
But the Trump administration has taken the language and institutional policies and codified them. In January, Mr. Trump issued an executive order to “combat antisemitism.” The order has given the green light for the Department of Justice to establish a multiagency antisemitism task force, which has, among other things, moved to arrest and deport or, according to the order, “otherwise hold to account” those deemed guilty of antisemitic harassment under a vague definition of what antisemitism could entail.
The logical extreme of these policies has already arrived in full force. Rumeysa Ozturk, a graduate student at Tufts, was part of a group that wrote an opinion essay for the campus paper calling for the school to divest from Israel. As a direct result, she was snatched from the street by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and ferried to a detention facility in an unmarked car. Mahmoud Khalil and Momodou Taal, who both led pro-Palestinian demonstrations on college campuses, and Ms. Ozturk are among the dozens of Muslims facing the threat of deportation for their protests against Israel’s campaign of indiscriminate violence in Gaza.
In all three cases, Trump officials and lawyers have contended that their speech was antisemitic and that their participation in activities protected under the First Amendment amounted to material support of a terrorist group. “We don’t want terrorists in America,” Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, said of Mr. Khalil and others like him.
“The accusations of being a terrorist sympathizer, of being an extremist — these are facts of life for so many Muslims who engage with any part of public life,” Mr. Mamdani told me. “And the notion that to stand up for Palestinian rights is to somehow be a bigot is what so many face whenever they express that solidarity.”
Trump administration officials have called Muslims supporting Palestinians antisemitic terrorists, but the trope that Muslims are antisemitic is prevalent in liberal circles as well. “I think liberals have realized it’s racist to assume Muslims are terrorists or terrorist supporters just as a matter of course,” Ms. Aziz said. “But I don’t think that’s the case when it comes to antisemitism.”
Top Democrats have stopped short of calling Mr. Mamdani an antisemite. But when Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York castigated him, they used phrases like “he left open far too much space for extremists” (Governor Shapiro) and said that he had made “references to global jihad” (Senator Gillibrand, for which she later apologized).
With three weeks to go until Election Day, some top Democrats — including the Senate minority leader, Mr. Schumer, and the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, who also represent New York — have not endorsed him, despite the fact that he may well become the next Democratic mayor of their city. Jay Jacobs, the chairman of the New York State Democratic Party, said he would resign before he would back Mr. Mamdani. All cited Mr. Mamdani’s criticism of Israel as a major reason for withholding support.
They continue to hold out despite support for Mr. Mamdani from a number of prominent Democrats, such as Gov. Kathy Hochul and Representatives Pramila Jayapal, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamie Raskin, as well as Senator Bernie Sanders.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Mamdani’s opponents Eric Adams (who dropped out of the race last month) and Andrew Cuomo repeatedly suggested Mr. Mamdani is antisemitic.
“One of the candidates running for mayor is spewing antisemitism,” Mr. Adams reportedly told a closed-door meeting of Jewish leaders in March.
“We know all too well that words matter,” Mr. Cuomo said of Mr. Mamdani’s “Globalize the intifada” episode. “They fuel hate. They fuel murder.”
I asked Mr. Mamdani what he made of accusations of antisemitism when they came from members of his party. “Nothing that has happened in the general election has been as hurtful as what happened in the primary election,” he responded. “It was within a Democratic primary, and so much of our party’s politics is ostensibly in opposition to the Republican Party’s vision of this country. And yet what we saw is that there is quite a bit of room for that Islamophobia within our own party.”
Mr. Mamdani said he’s committed to approaching his detractors from a place of understanding.
“You have to distinguish between that which is said in good faith and that which is said in bad faith,” he said. For those who express their fear in good faith — and he said he extends “good faith to those unless you know otherwise” — he approaches them with the aim of “understanding the basis of the fear.” He added, “Some of that fear is connected to things that I have proposed. Some of it is connected with things that are imagined around what I have said or proposed.”
“I don’t begrudge New Yorkers who have concerns about me,” Mr. Mamdani said, “because for many of them, they’ve only ever engaged with a caricature of me.”
Correcting that caricature has become one of the key agenda items of the campaign. After his primary victory, Mr. Mamdani had a number of closed-door meetings with members of the Jewish community, particularly groups and congregations that were troubled in particular by his “Globalize the intifada” response.
Among the skeptics is Halie Soifer, the chief executive of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, a political advocacy nonprofit. She explained to me why the fear of a Mamdani mayoralty should be treated as valid, citing a recent spate of attacks on Jews — the killing of two Israeli Embassy workers in Washington, the firebombing of a group marching in Colorado in support of Israeli hostages and the arson attack at the governor’s mansion in Pennsylvania, which targeted Mr. Shapiro and his family — as a key reason the Jewish community is on high alert.
I asked her what she believes would happen to Jews in New York if Mr. Mamdani took over City Hall. She said Jewish New Yorkers are “concerned that the elected head of the city that has the largest Jewish population outside of Israel is going to potentially give a green light to those who want to inflict harm on Jewish Americans.”
“I don’t think there’s a belief among Jews that he himself would be a perpetrator of violence,” she said, “but there’s a concern that his language is giving a permissive structure to those who may.”
Ms. Soifer listed several issues that she said must be clarified in order to gain the Jewish community’s trust: his past support of an economic boycott of Israel, his refusal to say Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state rather than as a state with equal rights for all and his definition of what constitutes an antisemitic hate crime.
“We have this rise in anti-Zionist beliefs manifesting themselves in antisemitic violence,” Ms. Soifer said. “People are concerned about their safety,” she went on. “They’re concerned about security, and they want to know that whoever they elect as mayor shares that concern.”
Incidents of antisemitism have undoubtedly increased over the past two years. The F.B.I. recorded more than 4,000 incidents of anti-Jewish hate crimes since 2023, more than half of them destruction or vandalism of property. This month, an assailant rammed his car into a group of Jewish congregants in front of a synagogue in Manchester, England, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. Two of the congregants died.
Audrey Sasson, the executive director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, told me that many Jewish New Yorkers are navigating their political decisions through this rise in antisemitism. “A lot of liberal Jews are in the middle place, who are afraid of rising antisemitism in the age of Trump but not sure how to feel about a mayoral candidate,” she said. “It surfaces a moment of real reckoning for the Jewish community.”
“There’s a lot of whispering happening,” she said. “Is he antisemitic?” But Ms. Sasson, who has campaigned for Mr. Mamdani, said that once many in the Jewish community get a chance to know Mr. Mamdani, the caricature falls away. “We saw how vulnerably he spoke about the impact of that on him emotionally,” she went on, referring to a moment on the campaign trail in early June when he choked back tears speaking about the accusations of antisemitism he’s been facing. “Cuomo and Adams are here to use Jews as pawns, to use our real Jewish fears,” she said.
There’s a tragic dynamic between antisemitism and Islamophobia in the years since Oct. 7. Jews and Muslims are tiny minorities in this country, both on the receiving end of conspiratorial racism and prejudiced policies now and at various other points in American history. At the extremes of the right and the left, they are often intertwined. The Trump administration’s tactics, which use the accusation of antisemitism as a blunt tool to suppress pro-Palestinian speech, have made the question of whether it is harder to be a Muslim or a Jew in America into a kind of zero sum contest.
As Mr. Mamdani attempts to make inroads with Jewish voters who have brought their experiences with antisemitism to the fore of his campaign, he’s been on the blunt end of racism and bigotry himself.
The expected outbursts from the right against Mr. Mamdani’s socialist policies are paired with racist accusations. There are the openly Islamophobic statements from MAGA stalwarts like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who posted an A.I.-generated image of the Statue of Liberty wearing a burqa after his primary win, and Laura Loomer, a Trump confidante, who wrote on social media that Mr. Mamdani is “literally supported by terrorists. NYC is about to see 9/11 2.0.”
But it goes beyond online statements. Mr. Mamdani’s office has received a string of death threats since he began campaigning. I listened to a voice mail message left at his office. A man with a deep voice said, “You should go back to fucking Uganda before I shoot you in the fucking head. Your whole family, too. You pieces of shit Muslims don’t belong here. You’re not compatible with our Western values.”
I’ve read hundreds of Islamophobic slurs written online against Mr. Mamdani for this essay, leaving me pained but somewhat unfazed. You get used to it when you’ve lived here your whole life. Hearing the unbridled hate in someone’s voice felt different. In September a man in Texas was charged with making terroristic threats as a hate crime against Mr. Mamdani.
Many politicians, including many of his Democratic peers, have remained noticeably silent as Mr. Mamdani has faced these threats and racist outbursts.
As a Muslim American, I have found the way his party has failed him particularly wrenching. It echoes what so many of us have experienced from the institutions we are a part of, big and small, and the repercussions we have faced in the wake of Oct. 7, no matter how established (or sometimes because of how established) we are. We may feel as though we belong in the communities and circles we are a part of, but advocacy for Palestinians — and advocacy for ourselves — can cast us out of them overnight, like the nurse at N.Y.U.
This is what has made the psychic toll of this particular moment crushing for so many Muslims in America. There has been progress — we do have Muslim politicians, professors, business leaders, cultural icons — but it is matched with the heartbreak of betrayal from the very communities that we believed had embraced us.
Many of us grew up with the images, the never-ending images, of people who looked just like us covered in ashes and rubble created by American bombs. Then, many Muslims felt they could say nothing. Now, as Israel has extended its bombing campaigns beyond Gaza to Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iran and even Qatar, merely registering horror or even righteous anger at the state responsible for leaving tens of thousands of civilians across these countries dead still carries consequences.
The arrests and detentions of people like Mr. Khalil and Ms. Ozturk send a message, just as the firing of a nurse does and just as the treatment of a mayoral candidate does. It tells us that Muslim suffering is acceptable and that there is a cost if we dare say otherwise.
Mr. Mamdani, with his dimpled smile and affable attitude, is in some ways an unlikely face for the paradox of the current moment facing Muslims. But his boy-next-door charm might be the reason he’s among the first Muslim politicians to break into the American mainstream the way he has. My Muslim friends and I often joke that he’s our “gold star boy” because of his goody-two-shoes past. (The most dirt The New York Post has been able to dig up on him is that he once pilfered a table while in college.)
When I was sitting in his campaign office, I asked Mr. Mamdani what it was like to be both the face of progress for one community and a harbinger of Islamist evil to another. “It feels like a contradiction, in both the promise of this moment and the backlash to the very thing,” he replied. Our gold-star boy looked a little weary from his day of campaigning, wearier still when he paused to consider the racist vitriol that comes his way. “To be a Muslim in public life is to know that you will face things of this nature. It doesn’t mean that they’re acceptable. It doesn’t mean that they are not disgusting,” he told me. “But it also means that they’re not surprising.”
I felt a sense of weariness, too, hearing Mr. Mamdani resign himself to this reality. There’s a shared grief among Muslims right now, one that feels redundant when we express it to one another. Sitting with Muslim friends or family members over the course of these past two years of war, we often speak of the pain of witnessing the horrors coming out of Gaza, a pain that is deepened by the hypocrisy and hostility of many American institutions. “I know,” I often find myself saying, over and over again. “I know.”
The ravages of this war — whole cities wiped off the map, tens of thousands dead, the largest cohort of child amputees in recent history — have had a lasting effect on the Muslim American psyche. Now, even with a cease-fire in effect, it’s difficult to imagine how an end to the war in Gaza could put the genie back in the bottle.
For many of us, the pain comes, in part, from upholding a stoic facade while those who spew venom face few or no consequences. It’s seeing peers casually dehumanize Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians and knowing that calling it out is largely futile if not dangerous. It’s seeing that kind of language echo through institutions as small as a middle school all the way up to the White House.
It’s not like nothing has changed. Slightly more than half of American adults now have a somewhat or very unfavorable view of Israel, and a clear majority say they are concerned with starvation in Gaza and Israeli strikes that kill Palestinian civilians. Even as many of our institutions have failed us, the American people seem, finally, to be grasping what we’ve known all along.
But Muslims have been made to grin and bear it in America for more than two decades. Watching Mr. Mamdani stand unwaveringly in the face of a stream of anti-Muslim abuse is to witness the distillation of that dynamic in a single person. I’d be lying if I said I think his fate in this particular matter will improve over time. It is a certainty that Mr. Mamdani, if he wins the mayoralty, will have to contend with even more Islamophobic slurs, on a national scale.
In the face of this, it’s easy to become cynical, even as his popularity marks a moment of triumph for Muslims. Mr. Mamdani sees it differently.
“I used to be quite consumed by forever being a minority — of being an Indian in Uganda, Muslim in India, all of these things in New York City,” he said to me. It’s a sentiment he’s had to express often over the course of his campaign. It’s at once well rehearsed and heartfelt. “I remember my father telling me that to be a minority is also to see the truth of the place, to see promise and to see the contradictions of it.”
Mr. Mamdani finds hope in that tension.
“I was always left with a cleareyed sense of the world that I was in,” he said, “and how to ensure that the contradiction of that world didn’t leave you with a sense of bitterness.”
More on Mamdani:
Opinion | Mara Gay
‘They’re Not Avoiding the Things They Don’t Know’
Oct. 7, 2025
Opinion | Jennifer Steinhauer
Win or Lose, It’s Zohran Mamdani’s Political World Now
Oct. 6, 2025
Opinion | Nicole Gelinas
Democrats Have a Real Problem Facing Charismatic Candidates
Sept. 1, 2025
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Meher Ahmad is an editor in the Opinion section.
Source photograph by Damon Winter/The New York Times
A
version of this article appears in print on Oct. 19, 2025, Section SR,
Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: What Does It Mean To
Be a ‘Good’ Muslim In America? . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/opinion/snap-hunger-republicans-congress.html
Opinion
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/opinion/snap-hunger-republicans-congress.html
Opinion
The Empty Promises of Trump’s Imperial Presidency
Credit: Nix+Gerber for The New York Times
Listen to this article · 9:15 minutes
Learn more
by Jamelle Bouie
October 29, 2025
New York Times
As it now stands, approximately 42 million Americans will lose access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program when its funding runs out on Saturday. Most are children, seniors and the disabled. Some are able-boded adults who just happen to work jobs that leave them short of what they need to survive.
Private charity can fill a small part of the gap. So, too, can the efforts of individual states, more than two dozen of which are suing the administration to try to force it to release emergency funds to continue to pay for food stamps. But the overall scale of hunger in the United States is too large for any one institution to deal with the lapse in benefits — the federal government must act.
The federal government must also do something to address a catastrophically large increase in premiums for Americans who buy their health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. Millions will have to drop their insurance if Congress doesn’t fix this problem, and millions more will be forced to spend themselves into ruin to gain access to needed care.
Looking beyond domestic policy, President Trump has launched repeated, and possibly unlawful, attacks on noncombatants in the Caribbean and even the Pacific. He has mused about land strikes targeting Venezuela as well. There is a chance that he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are thinking of regime change in that country. The president has also taken it upon himself to help pay soldiers using funds from a private donor, part of his ongoing attempt to direct spending without congressional approval.
All of this demands a congressional response. If it is not an impending disaster of food and health care insecurity, then it is a president who has done nearly everything he can to tear down the limits placed on the executive branch so that he can usurp the constitutional authority of Congress.
It is also true, however, that the United States, at this moment, does not have a functioning national legislature. The government has been shut down since the beginning of the month, when the Republican-led Congress failed to pass new spending authority into law. Since then, House Republicans have all but given up on governance, and Speaker Mike Johnson has put the House of Representatives on ice. The Senate is in session, but confirmation hearings notwithstanding, it is more or less inert.
There is no formal mechanism in the American system of government to dissolve the legislature. And for good reason: Congress is an independent institution with its own sphere of authority. To give any actor the power to dissolve it would fatally undermine its place in the nation’s constitutional arrangement.
But by keeping the House on indefinite hiatus — as well as sidelining its oversight authority and more or less ceding its power to make law to the president — Republicans have successfully circumvented the text of the Constitution to make our national legislature a nullity. They have, for all intents and purposes, dissolved Congress.
It is impossible to overstate the magnitude of this transformation of the American system. Despite what the president and his apologists would have you believe — or what the executive power fetishists on the Supreme Court seem to think — the executive branch is not actually the leading institution of the federal government. The Constitution makes this clear in its structure: Article I belongs to Congress, and where the president is given a narrower set of defined duties, the national legislature is handed a broad array of powers, including powers that, under the British constitution, had been the king’s.
Those powers include the “Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises”; “To borrow Money”; “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States”; “To declare War” and “To raise and support Armies”; and “To constitute Tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court.” The Constitution also states that Congress will have the power “To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.”
The traditional understanding is that these powers were enumerated like this to limit Congress. But as Richard Primus, a law professor at the University of Michigan, argues in his new book, “The Oldest Constitutional Question: Enumeration and Federal Power,” there is a strong case to make that these powers represent the floor — not the ceiling — of congressional authority. “The point of enumeration, understood this way, was not to rule out powers not mentioned,” Primus writes. “It was to rule in powers that were important to specify, lest Congress’s authority to exercise those powers be doubted — either on the theory that the relevant powers were held exclusively by the states or on the theory that they belonged to the president.”
We may speak, colloquially (and somewhat redundantly), of “coequal” branches, but there is a real sense in which Congress is first among equals, with the power to shape and discipline the other departments of government when necessary. Or, as James Madison observed in Federalist No. 51, “In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates.”
It is difficult, in the present moment, to imagine a powerful and active Congress rather than what we have instead, a hidebound, sclerotic legislature unable to tackle the nation’s most serious problems. But this deficiency isn’t set in stone; it is a function of political choices. “Institutional authority is something built by successful public engagement through time,” Josh Chafetz, a law professor at Georgetown, observes in “Congress’s Constitution: Legislative Authority and the Separation of Powers.” Congressional authority, in particular, “is in part a function of the success or failure of Congress’s public engagements in past historical moments and in part a function of how adroitly congressional members and leaders make use of historical reservoirs of authority in the present to create a future congenial to them.”
Put a little differently: Although Congress has a host of powers available to it, its ability to deploy those powers in conflicts with the other branches — and to walk away from those conflicts with its authority and stature enhanced — has as much to do with politics and public engagement as it does with the enumerated powers themselves. To reflect on the high-water marks of congressional influence throughout American history is to see periods in which individual lawmakers were powerful and skilled enough to battle with presidents and their administrations for public support.
There is a reason, in other words, we still remember Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Stephen A. Douglas and Charles Sumner. Or, in the 20th century, legislators such as Robert F. Wagner, Robert Taft, Everett Dirksen and Ted Kennedy.
This current Congress, led by John Thune in the Senate and the aforementioned Johnson in the House, has tossed away its ball and left the field of play. It treats its power as a burden: something to avoid for fear of challenging the chief magistrate and risking his wrath in the form of an angry social media post or, more concretely, a primary challenge. Individual members cannot even be bothered to actually represent their constituents, abandoning any effort to push for the material interests of their voters in favor of a commitment to the psychological and symbolic demands of a distinct partisan minority. And to the extent that Republicans have engaged with the public as members of Congress, it is to justify their inaction and explain their decision to hand their authority away to the president and his scheming viziers.
In the absence of a functional Congress, the White House has taken the lead, all but supplanting the legislature as the branch that matters. If and when the shutdown ends — if and when the House returns from recess — there is little chance that this authority, freely given to the executive, will flow back in the opposite direction. It is a revolution of sorts — one that would almost certainly shock the consciences of many, if not most, of the thousands of Americans who have served in the national legislature since it first took shape in 1789.
And yet, the powers do remain, if only on paper. The authority still exists, albeit only in theory.
We are still far away from anything like a post-Trump period in American politics. But it will come, and it is not too early to think about the reconstruction and renewal of American democracy. What should be at the top of any agenda, given the magnitude of the challenges that will face us when Trump and his movement are gone, is the rebirth of Congress as the dominant force in the business of government. And in particular, a Congress that doesn’t hesitate to use its powers — hard and soft, formal and informal — to reshape the American political system.
If Trump represents the apogee of the imperial president — an executive unbound by rule of law — then what we may need, in his wake, is an imperial Congress.
More on hunger
Opinion | Josh Hawley
Josh Hawley: No American Should Go to Bed Hungry
Oct. 28, 2025
Opinion | Tracy Kidder
A New Era of Hunger Has Begun
July 14, 2025
Opinion | Tracie McMillan
I Got $4 a Week in Food Stamps. This Is the Reality of Hunger in America.
June 10, 2025
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va.
https://truthout.org/articles/this-isnt-the-first-time-chicagos-been-used-as-a-laboratory-for-policing/
Interview
Prisons & Policing
This Isn’t the First Time Chicago’s Been Used as a Laboratory for Policing
Ilā Ravichandran says the current anti-immigrant policing in Chicago builds on attacks on Black Lives Matter protesters.
by Ed Vogel
October 28, 2025
Truthout
Chicago police officers and federal law enforcement agents stand in a cloud of tear gas deployed by federal agents against protesters in Broadview, Illinois, on October 4, 2025. The protest erupted after a Customs and Border Protection agent shot an anti-ICE protester in Brighton Park.Scott Olson / Getty Images
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As the Trump administration turbocharges the growth of a nonstop dragnet, turning daily life into a data trail ready to be weaponized, Chicago is serving as one of its most visible targets. The city has long been a flashpoint for the oppressive expansion of digital surveillance. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), universities, and local police have all deployed powerful new technologies to monitor immigrant communities, pro-Palestine organizers, and other targeted groups. Layered on top of this is the constant drumbeat of attacks on Chicago from Donald Trump himself — his threats to “send in the feds,” subsequent deployment of violent ICE raids and the National Guard, and deleterious portrayal of the city as crime-ridden and ungovernable. That rhetoric doesn’t just stigmatize Chicago; it provides cover for expanding the reach of surveillance and policing in the city.
At the same time, more people are beginning to understand the depth of policing and surveillance infrastructure, from both corporations and the state. Companies like Palantir — seeded by the CIA and co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel — quietly power ICE’s deportation machine by linking arrest records, social media posts, and even utility bills into a single profile. Flock Safety, meanwhile, floods neighborhoods with automated license plate readers that track everyday movements — who you visit, what clinics you go to, which protests you attend. Add to this the spread of facial recognition technology and the growth of massive data centers to store and process these massive quantities of information, and you begin to see the architecture of a full-fledged surveillance state. What’s striking — and urgent — is that this infrastructure isn’t hidden in some corner of Chicago. It’s built right into the fabric of everyday life in the city, marketed by these companies as providing “efficiency” or “safety” while actually deepening racialized policing and state repression.
The good news is that organizers here and nationally are fighting back, challenging defense contractors, exposing the harms of this tech, and pushing for real alternatives to disinvestment and policing through community-based investments. Their campaigns are bringing greater public awareness and scrutiny to the surveillance machine that has, for far too long, operated in the shadows. While the current deployment of digital surveillance technologies may feel unprecedented, the state has long used these technologies, and communities have long resisted them.
A new book, Imperial Policing: Weaponized Data in Carceral Chicago, from the Policing in Chicago Research Group, examines the Chicago Police Department’s use of specific surveillance tools and weaponized data during the start of the Black Lives Matter movement and first Trump administration, and documents how academics and communities came together to challenge them.
Ilā Ravichandran of the Policing in Chicago Research Group spoke with Truthout about how this history offers a blueprint for understanding the use of digital surveillance technologies in this current moment, as ICE and Trump escalate their violence on cities like Chicago. As organizers examine every possible foothold where resistance can grow, Imperial Policing offers insights for pathways and methods for building power against this massive apparatus.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Ed Vogel: What is the Policing in Chicago Research Group (PCRG)? Can you share about how this collective formed, its politics, and methods?
Ilā Ravichandran: I came into the project through the Policing in Chicago Research Group (PCRG), which formed around 2017 in the middle of a powerful wave of organizing in the city. People were shutting down intersections, police stations, and city council meetings, demanding a world without cages. As graduate students — many of us already deeply committed movement organizers in Chicago — and with a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Chicago, we wanted our research to serve those struggles directly. Our goal wasn’t to study movements from the outside but to build research with and for them.
We drew inspiration from earlier traditions of activist research, from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s work in the 1960s to feminist and decolonial scholar-activism. Our research gaze turned upward: Instead of scrutinizing already-targeted communities, we focused on exposing how surveillance and policing actually operate. That meant interviewing police officials, analyzing documents, and working directly with youth and community members navigating these systems.
The PCRG was formed in a pivotal moment in cross-movement organizing in Chicago. Can you situate us in this moment?
Chicago today stands out for its sharp contradictions. It’s promoted as a global city — a hub of commerce and culture, constantly expanding through corporate growth and gentrification. At the same time, political leaders and media outlets regularly portray it as a violent, chaotic city of gangs and shootings. Trump amplified that narrative, threatening to “send in the feds” as though Chicago were ungovernable. These stories serve different purposes, but both generate crisis: One produces displacement through development, and the other justifies more policing and surveillance.
Chicago has long been a laboratory for policing. From the repression of labor movements in the early 20th century, to COINTELPRO surveillance of Black Power and civil rights activists, to Jon Burge’s torture regime in the 1980s and ’90s, the city has been central to testing and refining state violence. Today, those patterns persist. The Chicago Police Department (CPD) isn’t isolated — it works in tandem with federal law enforcement, national security agencies, and private corporations building surveillance tech. That’s the backdrop of Imperial Policing: a city where crises created by austerity and racial capitalism are managed not through care, but through carceral webs of policing, incarceration, surveillance, and deportation.
Within this setting, we identified three overlapping “wars.” The “war on crime” — especially the so-called “war on gangs” — targets young Black and Latinx residents, saturating neighborhoods with patrols, cameras, and predictive software. The “war on terror,” ramped up after 9/11, placed Arab and Muslim communities under intense surveillance, with programs like Countering Violent Extremism pulling even teachers and counselors into security networks. And the war on immigrants, despite Chicago’s “sanctuary” label, allows CPD to funnel data to ICE, flagging immigrants as “gang members” or “felons” and facilitating deportations. These wars don’t stand alone — they reinforce one another, producing racialized archetypes like the “gang member,” the “terrorist,” and the “criminal alien” that justify punishment across multiple systems.
As you named, the Chicago Police Department is infamous for many reasons, including for its use of surveillance tools. A core focus of Imperial Policing is the now notorious gang database which CPD maintained as a massive digital list, supposedly designed to track suspected gang members across the city. In 2019, the Chicago Office of Inspector General released an audit that shows that, at its peak, there were 134,242 individuals who were designated as gang members in the database. Of these individuals, 95 percent were Black or Latinx. Most people weren’t aware that they were on the list. There were no clear rules about how someone got added, and once added, there was almost no way to get out. Tell us more about the PCRG’s focus on the gang database and its significance in modeling the violence of surveillance tools?
We focused on the gang database because that’s where movements asked us to focus. Groups like Black Youth Project 100 and Organized Communities Against Deportations were confronting it directly, but the system was opaque.
For organizers, it was a powerful rallying point because it cut across struggles. Young Black residents were being criminalized and funneled toward incarceration, while immigrants labeled as “gang members” lost sanctuary protections and were handed to ICE. The database literally connected the “war on crime” with the war on immigrants.
It also revealed what we mean by “weaponized data.” Police weren’t just collecting facts; they were creating data through racialized encounters, laundering it through a database that made it look scientific, and then circulating it widely. Once someone was tagged, that label traveled — to schools, social service agencies, immigration court, even the FBI. What started as one officer’s suspicion could reshape a person’s entire life.
Take the case of Wilmer Catalan-Ramirez. In 2017, ICE raided his home and detained him because CPD had marked him as a gang member, based not on evidence, but on his Latine ethnicity and where he lived. That label, created through suspicion, became a permanent fact in the system. A single label stripped him of sanctuary protections and landed him in ICE detention for nearly a year. It took a lawsuit and public pressure to clear his record. His story shows exactly how a racialized suspicion becomes “fact,” gains legitimacy through bureaucratic circulation, and then unleashes real violence.
Your framework of weaponized data clearly demonstrates how the “data” in data-based policing is deeply political and serves an ideological purpose. Can you walk us through the process by which data is weaponized in more detail? How organizers can employ this framework as part of their campaigns and political education?
One of the most useful things we lay out in the book is that weaponized data doesn’t just appear out of nowhere — it’s produced, “cleaned,” and then circulated. Each stage makes the data look more neutral, but in reality, it’s reinforcing the same old systems of inequality.
Production is the first step. This is where racialized suspicion gets turned into a so-called data point. Police don’t collect neutral facts; they generate data through strategic deployments. In Chicago, for instance, 72 percent of police stops target Black residents even though Black people make up only about a third of the population. That creates datasets that “prove” Black criminality — when what they actually reflect is police concentration in Black neighborhoods.
Next comes Cleansing. This is where the messy, biased origins of that data get scrubbed away. Officers entered “Black” or even “scum bag” as occupations in the CPD gang database, but once those entries were databased and run through algorithms, they were converted into “risk scores.” Take Chicago’s Strategic Subject List, sometimes called the “heat list.” It was a predictive policing program the city rolled out around 2012. The idea was to assign people a numerical “risk score” that supposedly measured how likely they were to be involved in gun violence — either as a victim or an offender. The scores were built from things like prior arrests, whether someone had ever been shot, their age at the last arrest, or alleged gang ties. In practice, because the inputs were drawn from decades of racially biased policing, the list didn’t predict crime so much as recycle old police assumptions into a new “scientific” tool. A RAND Corporation study found the list had no measurable impact on reducing violence, but it did reinforce surveillance and stigma. By 2019, after heavy criticism, CPD shut it down — only to replace it with yet another data-driven system.
Finally, there’s Circulation. Once the data has been “cleaned,” it flows outward through what we call carceral webs of empire. Risk scores show up in bond court, shaping who gets released. ICE agents, despite Chicago’s sanctuary status, have gained access to police databases, using gang labels to justify deportations — what we call “disavowed collusion.” By the time data reaches these spaces, its racist origins are invisible. It’s just treated as fact.
For organizers, mapping these processes is powerful. It exposes how “objective” data is actually manufactured, how it gets laundered through algorithms, and how it circulates through local, federal, and even international systems. That knowledge helps identify pressure points —whether databases, algorithms, or fusion centers — that can be targeted and dismantled. And perhaps most importantly, it helps us connect struggles across scales. Local fights in Chicago against gang databases, for instance, link directly to global fights against the circulation of coerced evidence or shared counterterror tactics. Understanding weaponized data this way makes clear that abolition is not just local — it has to be coalitional and international.
Imperial Policing’s deep interrogation of the Chicago Police Department’s use of weaponized data might suggest that this pattern of policing is particular to Chicago. Of course, the title itself reveals that the authors understand the problem of weaponized data operating on a much larger scale. How is policing in Chicago an issue of empire?
One of the things the book makes clear is that Chicago isn’t just a city with bad cops — it’s an imperial hub. Policing here both shapes and is shaped by global projects.
The CLEAR system — Citizen and Law Enforcement Analysis and Reporting — is a good example, an Oracle data warehouse that aggregates millions of police records, including purported gang affiliations. From the start, it was built for sharing. Today, more than 500 agencies nationwide use it, making Chicago a central node in the circulation of police data. CPD even marketed it as a “national model,” sending officers out to promote it. Local “innovations” quickly became national infrastructures.
But Chicago also imports tactics. The Deadly Exchange campaign showed how officers trained in Israel brought home strategies of occupation, which community groups argue were later visible at sites like Homan Square in Chicago, where detainees were disappeared and tortured. The city is both exporter and importer, a crossroad of militarized policing.
This plays out in diffusion networks too. The city’s Crime Prevention and Information Center sits inside CPD headquarters but houses agents from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), Secret Service, and beyond. The presence of JTTF is significant — it shows that data gathered in Chicago is not just shared locally or nationally but plugged into global counterterrorism infrastructures. And while nationally researchers (including our group) have found it notoriously difficult to get clear paper trails of international data flows, we know they exist. For example, the U.S.-Israel Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty requires courts to accept shared evidence as fact, regardless of how it was obtained. In the book, we show how this very mechanism helped enable the re-criminalization and eventual deportation of Palestinian activist and community leader Rasmea Odeh, illustrating how data travels back and forth across borders to reinforce imperial policing and suppress dissent. To summarize, ICE uses CPD gang data to deport people; the FBI mines local Suspicious Activity Reports for terrorism cases. Local policing bleeds seamlessly into federal and international projects.
A portion of the time that PCRG researched and wrote this book occurred during Trump’s first administration. There’s been a lot of coverage regarding the role that technology and surveillance tools are playing in facilitating his administration’s assault against threats to U.S. dominant power structures. What are your thoughts and reflections regarding this political moment and the growing power of surveillance?
Trump’s first administration wasn’t just about rhetoric, it was about building machinery. He weaponized existing surveillance infrastructures to criminalize immigrants, target organizers, and discipline anyone who threatened the fantasy of white settler, hetero-patriarchal order. But let’s be clear: Trump didn’t invent this system. What he did was strip away the polite liberal mask and put surveillance and punishment on blast. He made it explicit that data, tech, and policing would be wielded as tools of domination.
In that moment, we saw how so-called “neutral” technologies became central to his politics of fear. And tech firms — from Palantir to Amazon — were cashing government checks to build the very systems that made Trump’s agenda possible.
If anything, Trump clarified the stakes. He reminded us that these tools are not broken — they’re working exactly as designed. And the danger is not just who’s in office, but the bipartisan consensus that policing, data, and tech is the answer to every crisis. The “smart city” is just the police state with better marketing.
So when we talk about resisting surveillance, we can’t limit ourselves to demanding reform or better oversight. The lesson from Trump’s first term is that the architecture itself is the problem. Abolition means tearing out the wires, not just swapping out who sits at the controls. And that’s the work movements in Chicago and beyond are already leading — refusing to let empire’s digital leash define our lives and futures.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ed Vogel
Ed Vogel is a researcher and organizer.
Related Story:
Op-Ed
Prisons & Policing
By Enabling Police Surveillance, Elected Officials Fuel Trump’s Agenda
Illinois officials have quietly constructed a statewide surveillance apparatus that fuels ICE’s deportation machine.
by Ed Vogel
Truthout
Ilā Ravichandran says the current anti-immigrant policing in Chicago builds on attacks on Black Lives Matter protesters.
by Ed Vogel
October 28, 2025
Truthout
Chicago police officers and federal law enforcement agents stand in a cloud of tear gas deployed by federal agents against protesters in Broadview, Illinois, on October 4, 2025. The protest erupted after a Customs and Border Protection agent shot an anti-ICE protester in Brighton Park.Scott Olson / Getty Images
Truthout is an indispensable resource for activists, movement leaders and workers everywhere. Please make this work possible with a quick donation.
As the Trump administration turbocharges the growth of a nonstop dragnet, turning daily life into a data trail ready to be weaponized, Chicago is serving as one of its most visible targets. The city has long been a flashpoint for the oppressive expansion of digital surveillance. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), universities, and local police have all deployed powerful new technologies to monitor immigrant communities, pro-Palestine organizers, and other targeted groups. Layered on top of this is the constant drumbeat of attacks on Chicago from Donald Trump himself — his threats to “send in the feds,” subsequent deployment of violent ICE raids and the National Guard, and deleterious portrayal of the city as crime-ridden and ungovernable. That rhetoric doesn’t just stigmatize Chicago; it provides cover for expanding the reach of surveillance and policing in the city.
At the same time, more people are beginning to understand the depth of policing and surveillance infrastructure, from both corporations and the state. Companies like Palantir — seeded by the CIA and co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel — quietly power ICE’s deportation machine by linking arrest records, social media posts, and even utility bills into a single profile. Flock Safety, meanwhile, floods neighborhoods with automated license plate readers that track everyday movements — who you visit, what clinics you go to, which protests you attend. Add to this the spread of facial recognition technology and the growth of massive data centers to store and process these massive quantities of information, and you begin to see the architecture of a full-fledged surveillance state. What’s striking — and urgent — is that this infrastructure isn’t hidden in some corner of Chicago. It’s built right into the fabric of everyday life in the city, marketed by these companies as providing “efficiency” or “safety” while actually deepening racialized policing and state repression.
The good news is that organizers here and nationally are fighting back, challenging defense contractors, exposing the harms of this tech, and pushing for real alternatives to disinvestment and policing through community-based investments. Their campaigns are bringing greater public awareness and scrutiny to the surveillance machine that has, for far too long, operated in the shadows. While the current deployment of digital surveillance technologies may feel unprecedented, the state has long used these technologies, and communities have long resisted them.
A new book, Imperial Policing: Weaponized Data in Carceral Chicago, from the Policing in Chicago Research Group, examines the Chicago Police Department’s use of specific surveillance tools and weaponized data during the start of the Black Lives Matter movement and first Trump administration, and documents how academics and communities came together to challenge them.
Ilā Ravichandran of the Policing in Chicago Research Group spoke with Truthout about how this history offers a blueprint for understanding the use of digital surveillance technologies in this current moment, as ICE and Trump escalate their violence on cities like Chicago. As organizers examine every possible foothold where resistance can grow, Imperial Policing offers insights for pathways and methods for building power against this massive apparatus.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Ed Vogel: What is the Policing in Chicago Research Group (PCRG)? Can you share about how this collective formed, its politics, and methods?
Ilā Ravichandran: I came into the project through the Policing in Chicago Research Group (PCRG), which formed around 2017 in the middle of a powerful wave of organizing in the city. People were shutting down intersections, police stations, and city council meetings, demanding a world without cages. As graduate students — many of us already deeply committed movement organizers in Chicago — and with a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Chicago, we wanted our research to serve those struggles directly. Our goal wasn’t to study movements from the outside but to build research with and for them.
We drew inspiration from earlier traditions of activist research, from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s work in the 1960s to feminist and decolonial scholar-activism. Our research gaze turned upward: Instead of scrutinizing already-targeted communities, we focused on exposing how surveillance and policing actually operate. That meant interviewing police officials, analyzing documents, and working directly with youth and community members navigating these systems.
The PCRG was formed in a pivotal moment in cross-movement organizing in Chicago. Can you situate us in this moment?
Chicago today stands out for its sharp contradictions. It’s promoted as a global city — a hub of commerce and culture, constantly expanding through corporate growth and gentrification. At the same time, political leaders and media outlets regularly portray it as a violent, chaotic city of gangs and shootings. Trump amplified that narrative, threatening to “send in the feds” as though Chicago were ungovernable. These stories serve different purposes, but both generate crisis: One produces displacement through development, and the other justifies more policing and surveillance.
Chicago has long been a laboratory for policing. From the repression of labor movements in the early 20th century, to COINTELPRO surveillance of Black Power and civil rights activists, to Jon Burge’s torture regime in the 1980s and ’90s, the city has been central to testing and refining state violence. Today, those patterns persist. The Chicago Police Department (CPD) isn’t isolated — it works in tandem with federal law enforcement, national security agencies, and private corporations building surveillance tech. That’s the backdrop of Imperial Policing: a city where crises created by austerity and racial capitalism are managed not through care, but through carceral webs of policing, incarceration, surveillance, and deportation.
Within this setting, we identified three overlapping “wars.” The “war on crime” — especially the so-called “war on gangs” — targets young Black and Latinx residents, saturating neighborhoods with patrols, cameras, and predictive software. The “war on terror,” ramped up after 9/11, placed Arab and Muslim communities under intense surveillance, with programs like Countering Violent Extremism pulling even teachers and counselors into security networks. And the war on immigrants, despite Chicago’s “sanctuary” label, allows CPD to funnel data to ICE, flagging immigrants as “gang members” or “felons” and facilitating deportations. These wars don’t stand alone — they reinforce one another, producing racialized archetypes like the “gang member,” the “terrorist,” and the “criminal alien” that justify punishment across multiple systems.
As you named, the Chicago Police Department is infamous for many reasons, including for its use of surveillance tools. A core focus of Imperial Policing is the now notorious gang database which CPD maintained as a massive digital list, supposedly designed to track suspected gang members across the city. In 2019, the Chicago Office of Inspector General released an audit that shows that, at its peak, there were 134,242 individuals who were designated as gang members in the database. Of these individuals, 95 percent were Black or Latinx. Most people weren’t aware that they were on the list. There were no clear rules about how someone got added, and once added, there was almost no way to get out. Tell us more about the PCRG’s focus on the gang database and its significance in modeling the violence of surveillance tools?
We focused on the gang database because that’s where movements asked us to focus. Groups like Black Youth Project 100 and Organized Communities Against Deportations were confronting it directly, but the system was opaque.
For organizers, it was a powerful rallying point because it cut across struggles. Young Black residents were being criminalized and funneled toward incarceration, while immigrants labeled as “gang members” lost sanctuary protections and were handed to ICE. The database literally connected the “war on crime” with the war on immigrants.
It also revealed what we mean by “weaponized data.” Police weren’t just collecting facts; they were creating data through racialized encounters, laundering it through a database that made it look scientific, and then circulating it widely. Once someone was tagged, that label traveled — to schools, social service agencies, immigration court, even the FBI. What started as one officer’s suspicion could reshape a person’s entire life.
Take the case of Wilmer Catalan-Ramirez. In 2017, ICE raided his home and detained him because CPD had marked him as a gang member, based not on evidence, but on his Latine ethnicity and where he lived. That label, created through suspicion, became a permanent fact in the system. A single label stripped him of sanctuary protections and landed him in ICE detention for nearly a year. It took a lawsuit and public pressure to clear his record. His story shows exactly how a racialized suspicion becomes “fact,” gains legitimacy through bureaucratic circulation, and then unleashes real violence.
Your framework of weaponized data clearly demonstrates how the “data” in data-based policing is deeply political and serves an ideological purpose. Can you walk us through the process by which data is weaponized in more detail? How organizers can employ this framework as part of their campaigns and political education?
One of the most useful things we lay out in the book is that weaponized data doesn’t just appear out of nowhere — it’s produced, “cleaned,” and then circulated. Each stage makes the data look more neutral, but in reality, it’s reinforcing the same old systems of inequality.
Production is the first step. This is where racialized suspicion gets turned into a so-called data point. Police don’t collect neutral facts; they generate data through strategic deployments. In Chicago, for instance, 72 percent of police stops target Black residents even though Black people make up only about a third of the population. That creates datasets that “prove” Black criminality — when what they actually reflect is police concentration in Black neighborhoods.
Next comes Cleansing. This is where the messy, biased origins of that data get scrubbed away. Officers entered “Black” or even “scum bag” as occupations in the CPD gang database, but once those entries were databased and run through algorithms, they were converted into “risk scores.” Take Chicago’s Strategic Subject List, sometimes called the “heat list.” It was a predictive policing program the city rolled out around 2012. The idea was to assign people a numerical “risk score” that supposedly measured how likely they were to be involved in gun violence — either as a victim or an offender. The scores were built from things like prior arrests, whether someone had ever been shot, their age at the last arrest, or alleged gang ties. In practice, because the inputs were drawn from decades of racially biased policing, the list didn’t predict crime so much as recycle old police assumptions into a new “scientific” tool. A RAND Corporation study found the list had no measurable impact on reducing violence, but it did reinforce surveillance and stigma. By 2019, after heavy criticism, CPD shut it down — only to replace it with yet another data-driven system.
Finally, there’s Circulation. Once the data has been “cleaned,” it flows outward through what we call carceral webs of empire. Risk scores show up in bond court, shaping who gets released. ICE agents, despite Chicago’s sanctuary status, have gained access to police databases, using gang labels to justify deportations — what we call “disavowed collusion.” By the time data reaches these spaces, its racist origins are invisible. It’s just treated as fact.
For organizers, mapping these processes is powerful. It exposes how “objective” data is actually manufactured, how it gets laundered through algorithms, and how it circulates through local, federal, and even international systems. That knowledge helps identify pressure points —whether databases, algorithms, or fusion centers — that can be targeted and dismantled. And perhaps most importantly, it helps us connect struggles across scales. Local fights in Chicago against gang databases, for instance, link directly to global fights against the circulation of coerced evidence or shared counterterror tactics. Understanding weaponized data this way makes clear that abolition is not just local — it has to be coalitional and international.
Imperial Policing’s deep interrogation of the Chicago Police Department’s use of weaponized data might suggest that this pattern of policing is particular to Chicago. Of course, the title itself reveals that the authors understand the problem of weaponized data operating on a much larger scale. How is policing in Chicago an issue of empire?
One of the things the book makes clear is that Chicago isn’t just a city with bad cops — it’s an imperial hub. Policing here both shapes and is shaped by global projects.
The CLEAR system — Citizen and Law Enforcement Analysis and Reporting — is a good example, an Oracle data warehouse that aggregates millions of police records, including purported gang affiliations. From the start, it was built for sharing. Today, more than 500 agencies nationwide use it, making Chicago a central node in the circulation of police data. CPD even marketed it as a “national model,” sending officers out to promote it. Local “innovations” quickly became national infrastructures.
But Chicago also imports tactics. The Deadly Exchange campaign showed how officers trained in Israel brought home strategies of occupation, which community groups argue were later visible at sites like Homan Square in Chicago, where detainees were disappeared and tortured. The city is both exporter and importer, a crossroad of militarized policing.
This plays out in diffusion networks too. The city’s Crime Prevention and Information Center sits inside CPD headquarters but houses agents from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), Secret Service, and beyond. The presence of JTTF is significant — it shows that data gathered in Chicago is not just shared locally or nationally but plugged into global counterterrorism infrastructures. And while nationally researchers (including our group) have found it notoriously difficult to get clear paper trails of international data flows, we know they exist. For example, the U.S.-Israel Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty requires courts to accept shared evidence as fact, regardless of how it was obtained. In the book, we show how this very mechanism helped enable the re-criminalization and eventual deportation of Palestinian activist and community leader Rasmea Odeh, illustrating how data travels back and forth across borders to reinforce imperial policing and suppress dissent. To summarize, ICE uses CPD gang data to deport people; the FBI mines local Suspicious Activity Reports for terrorism cases. Local policing bleeds seamlessly into federal and international projects.
A portion of the time that PCRG researched and wrote this book occurred during Trump’s first administration. There’s been a lot of coverage regarding the role that technology and surveillance tools are playing in facilitating his administration’s assault against threats to U.S. dominant power structures. What are your thoughts and reflections regarding this political moment and the growing power of surveillance?
Trump’s first administration wasn’t just about rhetoric, it was about building machinery. He weaponized existing surveillance infrastructures to criminalize immigrants, target organizers, and discipline anyone who threatened the fantasy of white settler, hetero-patriarchal order. But let’s be clear: Trump didn’t invent this system. What he did was strip away the polite liberal mask and put surveillance and punishment on blast. He made it explicit that data, tech, and policing would be wielded as tools of domination.
In that moment, we saw how so-called “neutral” technologies became central to his politics of fear. And tech firms — from Palantir to Amazon — were cashing government checks to build the very systems that made Trump’s agenda possible.
If anything, Trump clarified the stakes. He reminded us that these tools are not broken — they’re working exactly as designed. And the danger is not just who’s in office, but the bipartisan consensus that policing, data, and tech is the answer to every crisis. The “smart city” is just the police state with better marketing.
So when we talk about resisting surveillance, we can’t limit ourselves to demanding reform or better oversight. The lesson from Trump’s first term is that the architecture itself is the problem. Abolition means tearing out the wires, not just swapping out who sits at the controls. And that’s the work movements in Chicago and beyond are already leading — refusing to let empire’s digital leash define our lives and futures.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ed Vogel
Ed Vogel is a researcher and organizer.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/opinion/nazi-tattoo-graham-platner-democrats.html
Opinion
A Nazi Tattoo Exposes Democrats’ Greatest Weakness
Credit: Sophie Park/Getty Images
Listen to this article · 10:49 minutes
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by Tressie McMillan Cottom
October 29, 2025
New York Times
All you have to do is take a passing glance at Graham Platner, a progressive candidate for U.S. Senate in Maine, to understand why so many Democrats have been frothing at the mouth over his candidacy for months. His beefy tattooed arms and weathered face made him look like a live-action Popeye. He’s often styled in a dirty ball cap and ragged T-shirt, implying a sort of everyman machismo.
It’s the kind of look that suggests Platner could be the Democratic Party’s new great white hope — a working-class white man who can speak to class antagonism in an economically unequal electorate.
There’s just one teensy-weensy problem. It turns out that friend-of-the-white-working-class had a Nazi tattoo.
The tattoo resembles a Totenkopf, a well-known symbol of official Nazis, the Nazi-adjacent and people who just think that Nazi iconography is tough. The gist is that Platner got the tattoo in 2007 in Croatia when he was on leave with his fellow Marines. Platner has said that he didn’t know the symbol’s semiotics. He only knew that Marines get “terrifying-looking” tattoos.
(It’s worth stating that Platner’s former political director has questioned his claim of ignorance. The campaign said the director’s allegation was a “a lie from a disgruntled former employee.”)
Platner’s campaign has been busy handling the fallout from the tattoo and his Reddit comment history, which was sometimes racist, misogynistic and homophobic and sometimes antifascist and antiracist. It’s the kind of messiness the internet inculcates. No one with a social media history is pure. After 18 years sporting what may or may not have been a symbol of the SS, Platner announced last week that he had the tattoo covered up. We are far enough away from his Democratic primary next June that all this should end up as just another weird little political story in an extraordinary political moment in American history.
Or it would, except over the weekend, several prominent Democrats took time out of their remaining days on God’s green earth to lecture Democratic voters on learning to forgive.
Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Platner sounds like a mistake-making human being who was, like so many soldiers, going through a “difficult time.” The tattoo, his words implied, shouldn’t worry us too much. Platner is a man who can speak to “working-class concerns,” and that is what the party must prioritize.
Bernie Sanders, the longtime senator from Vermont, also had plenty to say. He had endorsed Platner early in his campaign. After the tattoo debacle, Sanders did not revoke his endorsement, saying that there are “more important issues” worth our focus.
Bernie’s got us there. There are more important issues. A gilded, would-be emperor is sitting atop the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the world. How did he get there? A cosplay of economic populism that elevated a fixture of the tabloid press to the captain’s chair of Western democracy. It was turbocharged by his willingness to cozy up to radical right-wing racists, promising them legal, political and cultural clemency for their racist deeds.
Now, Republican politicians are free to steep themselves in white Christian nationalism to play to the base that Donald Trump built for them. This country is being ruled by a powerful minority that espouses deplorable minority views that polling shows a majority of voters in this country disagree with. That is the big problem.
It is also the same problem as a guy wearing a Nazi tattoo.
I cannot swear to know the minds of men like Murphy and Sanders. But, were I a betting person, I’d wager someone else’s riches that they know racism and xenophobia are inextricably linked to America’s inchoate understanding of class politics. They know that “working class” has become a powerful political totem of its own — a discursive sleight of hand used to separate out white voters’ concerns as more legitimate, more materially grounded, more important than other voters’ concerns.
These senators are demonstrating a willful blindness that has become endemic in the Democratic Party. Their rhetoric — and the conventional wisdom that flows from it — suggests that we cannot talk about economic solutions without abandoning our commitment to the Black, Latino, gay, transgender and female poor that are the lifeblood of the Democratic Party’s base. The conceit at the heart of that belief is that poor white people are too racist, and too uniquely ignorant of their racism, to vote in their best interests. Therefore, Democrats have to accept a little racism to win the working class.
It is an old argument. History will tell you that negotiating with racism or fascism or authoritarianism never ends well.
It is also a cop-out that can sound like political pragmatism: The idea that we simply must learn to overlook bad behavior as mere human foibles. Who among us, it is implied, has not said or done or etched a hateful symbol of exclusion and oppression into our minds or bodies? If Democrats are to win back the “working class” that they have lost to Trump, they have to look beyond silly things like Nazi iconography or a little casual racism or a soupçon of sexism and anything else that the “woke” left of the party cares about.
I find it hard to imagine that we would be having this conversation at all were Platner anything other than a fit middle-aged white guy who dresses like a stock photo of a “real man.” Our culture is built to eternally forgive men, generally, and white men of means, especially, for their mistakes. Every single time, they were young and immature and it would be a shame to hold them accountable for anything they did wrong. The rest of us just need to be strong-armed into the forgiving and forgetting portion of the program.
That is how you get to the place I found myself this week, reading apologia for a hateful symbol pretending to be sound, hard-nosed political analysis.
Now, I know for a fact that the working class in this country looks more like a Latino woman who cleans houses than it looks like Platner, a former defense contractor turned oyster farmer with some leftist political beliefs.
I also know a lot of actual poor white people. The kind of poor white people who don’t even make enough or have enough to be counted among the working class. The people who rely on SNAP benefits for their meals and emergency rooms for their health care.
Sometimes they subsist on a diet of racist notions to explain why their lives are as hard as they are. Sometimes those poor white people even have racist tattoos. I live in the South. There is no shortage of Confederate flags and “Don’t tread on me” tags on display in hot, humid months.
Once, at a meeting with tenant organizers in the center of white American poverty in Appalachia, a young white guy showed up to a meeting with his Stars and Bars tattoo on display. The poor white rural women and working-class Black women who run those meetings took this guy to task. They told him (colorfully) to get himself together. And the next week they all protested their landlord together.
Their coalition-building wasn’t the kind of kumbaya that Platner apologists are talking about, where a room full of people were expected to swallow their outrage to preserve one man’s feelings. There was accountability. There was education. And there was meaningful action. There was not a college degree or a political donor among them, and yet, somehow, actual poor people figured out how to handle racist iconography without scapegoating minorities or making excuses for a white man’s mistakes.
Here’s the thing. The Democratic Party has a problem. The party’s leaders think they have a problem with Trump voters. Some polling says white men without college degrees don’t like them, don’t trust them and won’t vote for them, so they think the only logical way forward is to pander. Their polling addiction ignores more complex political instruments telling them that the working class isn’t just white men and that centrism isn’t enough to bring white voters back into the fold.
It is going to take hard politics. The kind that shows up in communities between elections and solves problems that don’t sound glamorous on television talk shows. It looks like facing down the Klan in a trailer park, not complaining about racism while doing far too little to avert it. It means believing that racism is not a natural condition of poverty but a political weapon that rich men use to constrain poor people’s political power. And — most critically — it looks like not wanting, even for a second, to be confused with the people who would do that. You don’t wear a red hat as a joke. You don’t fly the ironic flag of historical hate to get a rise out of people. You don’t wear the cool tattoo for over a decade that maybe, kind of, possibly, probably looks like something horrible and hateful.
It is a remarkably low bar to clear. And a white working-class aesthetic is not nearly enough to clear it. Real working-class politics does not assume the worst of working-class people’s impulses. It does not launder their concerns for political points. It certainly does not argue, directly or indirectly, that a little racism is a good thing for reaching them.
I don’t particularly care about the symbols people use to signal their membership in a group. Maybe you do need a terrifying tattoo to be a real Marine. And maybe sometimes that terrifying tattoo might resemble Nazi iconography. If you are willing to accept that from a distance, as many Democrats say they are, a person may not be able to tell the real symbol of hate from its doppelgänger, that is for you to live with.
But, I do care about the political trade-offs we will ask people to make in the name of pragmatism. If the Democratic future requires us to exchange our discomfort with casual Nazism to advance a political agenda, I am not interested. Maybe other voters are — some polling suggests that young voters still support Platner. And maybe Platner will find a way to redeem himself. No one owes him that chance, but there is still a way forward. It’s called doing the work.
But don’t tell me that excusing that tattoo is good politics. It is the exact same politics that the right is selling, in a different outfit.
Poor people can be self-determined. They prove it every day, mostly by surviving while being poor in a country that is mean and nasty and hostile to them. There is a rich history of multiracial, cross-class organizing in this country, even in the South, where so many people pretend racism is just too strident for working-class politics to thrive.
If that history exists and if that culture still thrives in the poorest corners of our country, why do so many people feel the need to work so hard to redeem a man who had a Nazi tattoo?
That’s a question for Democrats.
More on the future of the Democratic Party:
Opinion | Brody Mullins
How Democrats Became the Party of the Well-to-Do
Oct. 23, 2025
Opinion | David Paul Kuhn
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Sept. 14, 2025
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How Can Democrats Win Back the Working Class?
Oct. 24, 2025
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2022. She is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow. @tressiemcphd
