One week into the mayoralty of #Zohran #Mamdani, there is already a political crisis. Yesterday, Cea Weaver, his pick to lead the revived Office to Protect Tenants, was on the front page of the New York ‘Post’ and making international headlines. At issue are deleted posts from the 2010s that called home ownership a “weapon of white supremacy” and declared, simply, “Seize private property!” Other posts said private property should be treated as a “collective good” and that it was important to “impoverish the *white* middle class.” Trump’s Justice Department condemned the posts, and Mamdani’s critics have reacted with both horror and thinly disguised glee: Here is the first domino that may fall against the 34-year-old democratic-socialist mayor.
Mamdani, though, isn’t moving against Weaver like he did his old director of appointments, Catherine Almonte Da Costa, who resigned after old antisemitic tweets of hers surfaced. “Cea Weaver is someone that we hired to stand up for tenants across the city based on the track record that she had of standing up for tenants across the city and the state,” Mamdani told reporters on Wednesday.
“Sticking by Weaver is the right political move for Mamdani,” political columnist Ross Barkan writes. She has spent more than a decade organizing tenants and negotiating legislation in Albany. “She is not easily replaced, and dumping her would create yet another challenging news cycle for Mamdani while handing his opponents an early victory. None of the Weaver posts are recent, and if they are histrionic, recalling the nauseating apogee of the woke era, they are not all wrong on the substance.”
Read Barkan on why Mamdani will need to get comfortable with a level of scrutiny unlike that faced by any mayor in the city’s history: nymag.visitlink.me/QhziqU
