From Caligula's Horse to Kampala's Seed
Ugandan-Indian Marxist Mamdani defeats Cuomo in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor.
Zohran Mamdani, 33, is the son of Indian filmmaker Mira Nair and Indian-Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani, a tenured professor at Columbia University. He was brought up as a Muslim in accordance with his father’s religion, though his mother is a Hindu.
Firang: White people/Westerners
Desi: Indian
Hindustani is a linguistic blend of Hindi and Urdu. Although mutually intelligible, Hindi is associated with Hindus and Urdu with Muslims.
After grabbing headlines with Get Out the Vote videos in his first language, Zohran is once again in the news. In the small hours of the night, the political upstart defeated former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo for the Democratic nomination in NYC’s 2025 mayoral race.
In a 2013 interview with India’s Hindustan Times, Mira Nair tells us all that we need to know about her son.
Zohran is a Ugandan and an Indian who has not assimilated into “Uhmericcan” culture.
He is “chaalu,” meaning a cunning and untrustworthy schemer. This survivalist trait is deeply ingrained and celebrated in Indian society as ingenious.
Equating American identity with cultural bankruptcy and materialism, while clinging to the imagined moral purity of being “desi,” is his main cope.
He comes from a family of globalist elites who critique the West while thriving in its institutions. This class of borderless globalists lusts for the prestige of Hollywood and the Ivy League + the power of American politics, even as it lays waste to it all.
A self-professed Marxist and foreigner, a multimillionaire activist whose own mother publicly described him as sly and calculating, an artist – even better, a failed one [RIP “Young Cardamom”] – who sneers at all things American, and a newbie state legislator with a thin résumé… Zohran has all the makings of a far-left political star.
Come November, he will become the newest addition to NYC’s decade-long travesty of leadership ad absurdum. From a progressive opportunist & failed mayor → a connoisseur of nightclubs & failed mayor → Kampala’s most famous son since Idi Amin → a tree? a bird? a plane? Same difference.
Caligula’s horse walked so Young Cardamom could run.
The stakes of Zohran Mamdani's win go beyond one primary race or the relative odiousness of Andrew Cuomo.
Mamdani is no garden-variety Marxist. His victory legitimizes anti-assimilationist, post-American identity politics – profoundly corrosive to the moral & cultural architecture of the nation.
Out-of-control illegal + legal immigration has flooded NYC with so many Mamdanis that one of them is now poised to lead America's largest and most iconic city.
He is the harbinger of what's coming: après moi, le déluge.