The older you get, the more you notice how often language is used not to describe reality, but to invert it.
When I was a kid growing up in Australia in the 1970s, there was a popular packet of circular lollies called Life Savers, which were hollow in the centre. Their slogan, which differentiated this sugary product from all the others on the corner-store shelf, was: “The candy with the hole”. In other words, it had less, not more, inside. And it worked. We bought them habitually without realising the irony.
I was much older when I finally realised the brilliance of this inversion, of course. But now I see it everywhere, and nowhere more so than in the victory speech by New York Mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani yesterday.
He spent 25 minutes repeatedly reminding his fans that what they had just bought, which on the outside looked much the same as any other politician, was differentiated by a proudly hollow centre. His speech deliberately referred to things that do not exist, credited his fans with qualities they do not possess, and promised them utopian outcomes that will never happen.
Given that he dresses so sharply, and his army of fans have the political sophistication of abusive anonymous social media users, you could even say he’s the dandy with the trolls.
The most brazen inversion in the speech was the reference to his “aunt”. Mamdani originally referred to her in a speech outside the Islamic Cultural Centre in the Bronx on October 24, which started, while he held back tears, with: “I want to speak to the memory of my aunt who stopped taking the subway after September 11th [2001] because she did not feel safe in her hijab.”
When photos emerged soon afterwards of his aunt happily getting about without a hijab, Mamdani was forced to correct himself, saying that when he said “aunt”, he actually meant his dad’s cousin, which doesn’t sound nearly as dramatic.
In his speech yesterday, he box-ticked the various demographics in his supporter base. “Thank you to those so often forgotten by the politics of our city, who made this movement their own. I speak of Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties. Yes, aunties.”
He paused for the Pavlovian applause after each ethnic stereotype, saving the longest pause for the last, aunties. Mamdani smiled triumphantly. The audience was cheering an allusion to a fictional story. They knew it. And he knew they knew it. Hence the smile. If they are dumb enough to cheer that, they will cheer anything. His mandate, at least with this crowd, is virtually unlimited. Tyrants dream of having this much power.
He got them into this state by telling them two things: that they are victims, and white people want to oppress them.
Again, there are more holes in these stories than candy. Mamdani referred to his audience having “fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery-bike handlebars, knuckles scarred with kitchen burns”. Since when did lifting boxes bruise your fingers? Did your hands ever get calloused from riding a bike all day when you were a kid? How many chefs do you know whose knuckles are burned?
And yet the audience cheered because these imaginary injuries endowed them, whether they have jobs or not, with the victimhood they crave, and Mamdani was more than happy to oblige.
Then he said: “These are not hands that have been allowed to hold power.”
Yeah, right. If anything defines the liberal, democratic West, it is that, more than any other society around the world and throughout history, working-class people are denied power. They can’t choose where they live, what jobs they will do, who they will marry, what opinions they can hold, who to vote for, or even what they will eat for dinner. All those things are decided by the rich and powerful, right?
Seriously, the way Mamdani portrayed it, why would anybody choose to live in New York at all? Um, the answer to that is: Mamdani’s supporters. As it turns out, most of his supporters are people who chose not only to migrate to the United States, but chose New York as their new home. A poll conducted in October found that a massive 62 per cent of Mamdani’s supporters were not born in the US. Had they been excluded from voting, Mamdani’s nearest rival, Democrat Andrew Cuomo, would have won the election by a comfortable 9 percentage points.
Mamdani is promising them all sorts of things, from rent freezes to free education and state-run supermarkets. His supporters know better than most people that these socialist programs never work. But they don’t care. What they really want is for New York to resemble the shitholes from which they migrated, but with cleaner water and better sanitation, albeit only for a while. If Mamdani gets his way, New York will soon look more like Mogadishu than Memphis, if it doesn’t already, and his supporters will be grateful.
He also insinuated that he will criminalise “Islamophobia”, which is the only sign that smart white people need to flee the city while they can. When free speech is outlawed, chaos and tyranny are not far away. The evolution of Western Civilisation has for 2000 years been the long, slow process of reducing these forces of darkness; now they are incubating within our own cities.
Like most people, I don’t care much about New York. I visited it once in 2017, and thought it was a great city that had long since peaked. The cities of South East Asia are far more exciting.
But Mamdani’s rise is a warning to all of us. The Third World is colonising the West. Australia will have its own Mamdani soon. If we don’t stop this colonisation, there will be nothing left for our kids.
