Who Owns New York? Part Two

Zohran Mamdani, "the X Class," Soros, and Car Apps: A Terrifying Reality

I have not written for a while. I almost never get “writer’s block”, and when I do, something is wrong.

So I asked my mom, who happens to be a hypnotist/past life regression therapist, why. She had me “check in” on a deeper level than the conscious one. I realized that I was “frozen” in order to avoid writing this essay; because the reality that I had discovered, since having written Part One of this three-part series, regarding who really runs New York and its boroughs, is so frightening, and so overwhelming.

But my mom pointed out that I — and you all — have taken on overwhelming odds before.

She is right. So let’s go.

I left you with the warning that the much-watched New York City mayoral race, and the borough City Council races, are being affected by a group of oligarchs and tech bros working behind the scenes, with their puppet candidate out front.

Democratic mayoral race primary winner Zohran Mamdani is the symbol of those manipulations.

Since my last update, Mamdani’s lack of preparedness to lead a book club, let alone one of the greatest and most complex cities on earth, and his personal fecklessness, have become only more flagrant. His ballyhooed “Scavenger Hunt” on August 24, 2025, produced the least diverse assortment of New Yorkers I have seen in my four decades living in this city. Indeed, I have never seen so many white people, accompanied by almost no people who were not white, in one setting in New York City. This was a crowd of white people as far as the eye could see.

These thirty-somethings wandered through the various stops set out by the Mamdani campaign. I thought of the hardworking low-income and middle-class people whom I am meeting through my work with the Donald J Trump Republican Club in Brooklyn — ironically, a far more economically and racially diverse group than are Mamdani’s group of self-described “radicals.”

The working people of New York and Brooklyn on August 24 2025 were looking after their families or their businesses, or recovering from a week of labor. They were not inclined to wander like Zohran’s affluent-looking monochromatic followers (many of whom had to abandon ship when the organizers ran out of clue cards for the “hundreds” of attendees).

Given that the Mamdani campaign could not manage the logistics of a scavenger hunt successfully, one thinks about the logistics involved in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, or a natural disaster, in New York City, and quails for the future.

A video has surfaced, one which I cannot un-see, in which Mamdani, appearing as rapper “Mr Cardamom,” is half-naked, for no narrative reason, while wearing an apron and appearing to cook in a food truck. Cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey vamps about, rather fabulously, like a gangster, teaches a class on expanding criminal revenue, and makes the “f— you” symbol with both of her hands. Zohran Mamdani produced this video; he did not simply appear in it.

Lots of comments on Youtube, sounding suspiciously repetitive, try to make the case now that this production of Mamdani’s, and his appearance in it, are not embarrassing, and do not show poor judgement.

High jinks!

What may not be obvious to a general audience is that this video is the product of a specific global creative aristocracy. Madhur Jaffrey, internationally famous as an actress as well as as a cookbook author (and mother of respected actress Sakina Jaffrey), is the former wife of the late renowned Indian actor Saeed Jaffrey. Cultural aristocrats.

Mamdani’s mother Mira Nair, who from a career as a maker of well-regarded, profitable and unprofitable independent films, is suddenly being given the unbelievably lucrative and influential Disney National Treasure franchise, is also from this global cultural-aristocratic class. Nair was educated at the exclusive Loreto Convent, Tara Hall, Shimla, India, and then, as I noted before, went on to Harvard.

Judging from the Mamdani family’s choices, that group of individuals do not care much about its members becoming American citizens. Indeed, at least one prioritizes other identities for “Zohran.”

Mira Nair spent 28 adult years in America, being educated, living, and working in the US, before becoming a United States citizen. Nair’s Ugandan-Indian husband, Dr Mahmood Mamdani, teaches at Columbia University, but is somehow also the Chancellor of Kampala International University in Uganda. His latest book, tellingly perhaps, is titled Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities.

Dr Mamdani became a US citizen only in 2018, after 19 adult years in the United States as a non-US citizen, teaching at Columbia University.

Dr Mamdani thus became a US citizen just a year before his son Zohran did, who had, as I reported in my last essay, lived for 11 adult years in America as a noncitizen.

There is no reason to resent globally talented and artistic people from Southeast Asian, or any, origins, descendants as these are of multiple generations of cultural- and now-economic aristocrats. They no doubt deserve their good fortune.

But you must understand, looking at this family, that this is a subculture of jet-setting cultural producers, who have shown clearly by their choices about citizenship, that they have no particular allegiance to the United States.

As I have written in my book The Bodies of Others, this “X class” — as cultural historian Paul Fussell names them, in his classic analysis of social hierarchies, Class: A Guide through the American Status System — is at home in capitals around the world; but largely with others similarly positioned. This “X class” often has no need for any primary allegiance to a nation, a local community, a specific people — even if that nation has welcomed a family of immigrants, and offered it a home.

Indeed, Zohran Mamdani’s mother has said publicly, with no evident compunction, that her son Zohran’s allegiance is not to the country in which he is now seeking office, but rather to India.

In a 2013 article titled, “My Son is Not a Firang. We are Desi”, in the Hindustan Times, Nair and her family, including her 21 year old son, who by now has spent 14 years in America, are described thus:

“She left India when she was 19 and has homes in Uganda, New York and India [Italics mine]. But internationally acclaimed filmmaker of Indian origin, Mira Nair says she has kept her son Zohran with husband Mahmood Mamdani, grounded, with his Indian roots intact.

“He is a total desi. Completely. We are not firangs at all. He is very much us. He is not an Uhmericcan (American) at all. [Italics mine.] He was born in Uganda, raised between India and America. He is at home in many places. He thinks of himself as a Ugandan and as an Indian,” Nair told us during her recent visit to the capital. […]

A junior in college with one more year to go, the 21-year-old is studying Arabic and Politics. “He is a very chaalu [smart, working] fellow. We speak only Hindustani at home.”’

The first meaning of “desi” in the Oxford English Dictionary is “1. of, from, or characteristic of India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh.” “Firangs” is derived from the Persian “ferenghi”, which contains shades of disparagement of Europeans within the term: “A variant term will be familiar to aficionados of Hobson-Jobson and British Raj literature, in which ‘feringhee’ is a common Indian term of abuse for white colonists.”

So as late as 2013, Mamdani’s mom, who had by then been living in America for decades, proudly told one of India’s largest and most respected newspapers that her adult son was not American but was rather totally identified with his family’s origin of India; and that he was not a “foreigner” — ie, a Westerner, ie an American — but that years into Mamdani’s childhood and young adulthood in the US, he still speaks only Hindustani at home, and that “he thinks of himself as a Ugandan and as an Indian.”

To all this I will ask: why?

Why does this much-blessed family, whose choices show that they have little regard for US citizenship or identity, think that a young man who also shows little regard for an American allegiance or identity, should lead our most important city?

Because that is what elite X class global aristocrats — assume. They are entitled, to whatever role they wish, whatever resources, but they tend to expect of themselves and their families no allegiance to anyone else; to no country, no homeland, no people outside their own.

Once they have the oligarch backers, the whole world becomes their toy.

Rama Duwaji, Mamdani’s 27-year-old wife, and our potential First Lady of New York, also seems ambivalent about her identity as an American: “The bio on Duwaji’s Instagram, where she boasts nearly 85,000 followers, indicates she’s originally from Damascus, Syria, though a campaign spokeswoman told the New York Times Wednesday that the artist is “ethnically Syrian and was born in Texas.”'

The Post has reached out to Mamdani’s campaign for clarification.”

Why is all of this so upsetting to me?

Here is why. I now live half of the time in a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn. I have learned that the governance of Brooklyn, and of New York, is the merest sham. And that people such as Mamdani and Diwaji and their jet-setting friends, are really a new form of globalist carpet-bagger; that civic representation in this American city is truly theatre.

I stood in line at United States Post Office in Brooklyn, recently. I had to wait almost 45 minutes. There was no air conditioning, and it must have been 85 degrees in the cavernous, shabby, dark building.

Old people, disabled people, suffered.

The lines were so long in part because the facility was understaffed, and in part because eight out of ten of those in line, were healthy young immigrants who seemed to have arrived not very long ago, who were shipping large boxes of items, and money orders, to Ecuador and Mexico and Guatemala and Venezuela, and who did not speak any English.

The elderly Americans, who had worked all of their lives, and who now likely lived on social security, leaned on canes or crutches, or sat patiently in wheelchairs, and waited, and waited, the sweat breaking out on their brows.

I went to the local public library. It is now not just a library, but also a “cooling station”. The people who need “cooling” in the summer, of course, are mostly homeless people. While I empathize, the problem with “some-NGO’s-bright-idea” of turning a library into an unrelated cooling-service offering, is that the library quickly becomes, not a library.

Homeless, drug-addicted people talk randomly into the computer stations, or break out abruptly into loud, alarming babble, or have arguments with themselves or with invisible persecutors. Children and teens stay huddled in the narrowly-provisioned kids’ section. It is not really safe for them to wander the stacks, that blissful experience that can lead a young reader to stumble upon worlds totally new.

Kids can’t get access to the computer stations for their own research, because adults are using them to get connected to social services. Adults have loud phone calls on their cellphones, and raise their voices as they are put on hold by social services.

The librarian no longer even bothers to say “Hush!” or “Quiet!” periodically — that startling, awe-inspiring demand for respect for the sanctity of a library, honored from childhoods past. Because of the noise, it is difficult for kids to concentrate and to do their homework; they lose focus, understandably; they eventually goof around, play-fight, and chatter; and the homework remains open, uncompleted.

The data on New York kids’ learning to read and do math, is shocking. For some reasons, charts stop in 2022-2023. But fewer than half of New York State kids grades 3-8 are proficient for their grades in “English Language Arts”, or what we used to call reading and writing:

So: we have urgent needs in our own neighborhood. Our elders, our kids, have needs.

But I found that our Democratic representatives, part of this “machine” of globalist oligarchs, don’t even bother engaging with the community’s actual needs.

I ran into an event in a public school playground (was that legal?) put out by my City Council member, Rita Joseph. She came to prominence in protesting police brutality. Her event offered free roller skates. Her staff was very nice, and gave me flyers. There were programs for illegal immigrants. I asked if Ms Joseph had a regular meeting for constituents, at which she could be lobbied. The staffers looked at me blankly, and gave me a card.

I looked up “Legislation” on Joseph’s website. It took me to a blank search result. (I am a nerd about making legislative records, which belong by law to the public, easily available to the public, which is my company DailyClout’s mission).

So to be fair to Ms Joseph, I looked at the City Council’s website for her legislation.

I saw in searching the City Council’s website, that the entire City Council agenda, let alone the actual legislation, is hidden away in multiple clicks, so that you literally cannot navigate the legislative process, let alone learn how to affect it.

Meetings are linked to “agendas” that are hidden in turn in other opaque blue links.

This is how City Council meetings are made opaque:

Rather than tearing your hair out in frustration, you decide to click through to City Council activity for “Last Week” — and you get this:

Okay, that is kind of incomprehensible, but maybe you can click your way to a primary document from which you can figure out what is happening. So you click on the blue link for the zoning meeting, and you get this:

In other words, though you vote in New York, you are not allowed to find out what happened in that perhaps-important-to-you zoning meeting, or how to lobby the bill sponsor if you don’t like the bill, or even, whom to hold accountable at all.

I tried again to search by Rita Joseph’s name on the City Council legislative site. I got this — in other words, the press release about mental health, which had been on the home page, did not change.

My City Council member’s name yielded nothing via search on the site that is suppose to document her activity for me, her constituent:

Thus are the people of the great city of New York and its boroughs, mocked. By hiding the legislation, hiding the work of the legislators, hiding where the meeting is held, hiding the bill text, hiding the outcome, hiding the sponsors — this noble city, with its billions of dollars in value changing hands continually, becomes un-lobby-able by its citizens.

I saw the same thing on the website of City Council Member of Brooklyn’s District 46, Mercedes Narcisse: this is the former nurse, pal of powerful Democrats, who has been in office for years, and who is being challenged by the candidate whom DailyClout is helping to campaign: the “mandated” Republican schoolteacher, Athena Clarke.

Ms Clarke’s and Ms Narcisse’s neighborhood is also working- and middle-class, and it too has serious needs.

Ms Clarke has described to me, for instance, plans to which no one among the voters has consented, to have lithium battery factories placed in residential areas throughout District 46. Her husband, a firefighter, has warned that there is no way to put these facilities’ fires out; they have to be left to burn, thus creating a permanent toxic site. Ms Clarke, Janine Acquafredda, a realtor running as a Republican for Brooklyn Borough President, and other grassroots candidates whom I have met, have all described hearing from their neighbors about the same needs.

Janine Acquafredda:

Athena Clarke:

Small businesses are forced to close because shoplifting and robberies are taking place with impunity. Kids lack safe quiet places to do homework after school. There is no citizen approval for the homeless shelters, drug treatment facilities, or, as noted above, environmentally dangerous factories, that are being forced on these residential areas. Housing is not affordable.

New struggles have arrived as the tech bros move in, and buy up local politicians, to turn Brooklyn and New York City into extensions of their apps.

There is less and less parking for locals, for instance, because Lyft and Uber have lobbied, and spent millions, to press council members to add bike lanes that remove parking spots; Lyft has also funded Citibikes, the bike rental offering that seems great, til you realize that it is unused 95% of the time, and that the stands chew up what had been parking spaces.

Subways are terrifying, and buses are slow. Now the people of Brooklyn struggle to commute with their own cars — and the car apps, meanwhile, make millions.

Clarke and Acquafredda both spoke of the scary way that Doordash and other delivery ebike drivers, ride on sidewalks, narrowly bypassing appalled pedestrians. We spoke of how alarming that is for the disabled, for the elderly. “For pets!” exclaimed Aquafredda. In the “before” times, such riders would get tickets, or even be arrested.

Who handed over Brooklyn’s pedestrian sidewalks and parking spaces to Doordash, Uber and Lyft?

Could it be the council members funded by Doordash, Uber and Lyft?

Uber NYC PAC spent 1.3 million recently on City Council campaigns, and Doordash plans to spend $2 million.

One of the recipients of this largesses?

Mercedes Narcisse:

Narcisse’s website does not showcase legislation related to general law and order, to environmental issues, to small business support. You can’t find the lithium batteries issue.

It is rather, weird, special-interest legislation: there is a bill for administration of care for Sickle Cells anemia: “Int 0968: (Enacted) A Local Law to amend the administrative code of the city of New York, in relation to establishing guidance to improve health outcomes for individuals affected by sickle cell disease.”

There is a bill to manage how cops interact with autistic people: “Int 0273: (Enacted) Requiring police officers to receive training related to recognizing and interacting with individuals with autism spectrum disorder.”

And there is a bill to support the trauma-related mental health of — migrants, refugees and “asylees”: “Int 1084: (Enacted) A Local Law to amend the administrative code of the city of New York, in relation to creating training on trauma-informed care for persons serving refugees, asylees, asylum seekers, and migrants.”

Oh, in 2023 Narcisse pushed a bill to legalize jaywalking.

I searched “Mercedes Narcisse” on the website that is supposed to document what she is delivering to voters in District 46. I got this:

In other words, exactly the same result as when I searched for “Rita Joseph”: the City Council home page did not change.

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So what I see here, speaking as a former political consultant, is a situation in New York City and its boroughs, in which the DNC “machine” is so entrenched that it does not even have to pretend to try.

That is why I am so terrified of this machine, that Mamdani represents. Mamdani, his invisible resume, and his bored-white-people stunts, are just the banal packaging around an unholy alliance: Big Tech, globalist elites, and the dark enactors of a theatre of fake local democracy.

The “machine”’s dimensions are vast. A self-described “white collar felon” turned whistleblower — the former CFO of the retail electronics chain Crazy Eddie, Sam Antar, who now helps law enforcement uncover financial fraud — wrote a magisterial expose, “The Soros-Mamdani Connection: How $34 Million in Tax-Exempt Flows Raise Questions About Charitable-to-Political Conversion”.

Antar showed that $5.2 billion dollars a year flows through George Soros’ Open Society nonprofits; and that $34 million of this flows probably illegally through PACs, that then flows probably illegally to get-out-the-vote efforts and to “volunteers”, that then elect officials, who then dispense another $16 million a year back to the nonprofits — with overall, the incoming tax-deductible funds housed, along potentially with foreign money, in an opaque offshore instrument.

So next up, in Part Three: “White Collar Felon” Sam Antar Identifies the $34 Million Dollar Money Laundering Operation that Keeps Democrats in Power in NYC”.

In short — is New York even Democratic?

Does Mamdani’s Primary victory represent anything real?

Are these insane policies on the Left — free up those sex workers! No more misdemeanors! Ride your ebike on the sidewalks! Liberate jaywalking! End the “carceral state” (meaning, end prisons)!

— Even derived from grassroots New Yorkers’ real sentiments?

Or is the whole thing a massive fraud — the most massive fraud —

Orchestrated by powerful interests, and with a smiling “Desi, Not Firang” “X class” actor, out front, below the proscenium —

Masquerading as the elections of, and as the day-to-day governance of,

A great and populous American city?