When the Zohran Mamdani campaign promised to “shift the tax burden from overtaxed homeowners in the outer boroughs to more expensive homes in richer and whiter neighborhoods”, there was little response and even less outrage in the media.
Had any politician campaigning to run a major city promised to punitively target any other racial group, it would have been a major national story and a future civil rights investigation.
Instead, Mamdani was allowed to go on MSNBC and try to clean up the message by claiming that it was a “description of the neighborhoods” not an “intention of where we would tax New Yorkers” and that “nothing can be worked backwards from some kind of racial goal in this city.”
“The use of that language is just an assessment of that neighborhood,” he tried to assure NBC’s Meet the Press. “It’s not driven by race. It’s more of an assessment.”
Had a politician promised to target people living in “blacker neighborhoods” for a punitive policy and then claimed that he was just describing who lived in the neighborhoods rather than stating his intent to target people because of race, he would have been dismissed as a lying racist.
But since the media gave Mamdani a pass for his racist policy platform, his appointments have demonstrated further evidence of his administration’s systemically racist housing policy goals.
Tweets from Cea Weaver, appointed to head of Mamdani’s Office to Protect Tenants, not only repeatedly cursed and insulted white people, but declared a specific intent to discriminate against white people.
Weaver had tweeted “impoverish the *white* middle class. Homeownership is racist” and declared that “private property is a weapon of white supremacy”. She also warned that, “we’ll transition from treating property as an individual good to a collective good. Whites especially will be impacted.”
Like her new boss, his new tenant official had explicitly tied housing policy to racial targeting and described policy objectives that are specifically meant to harm a hated minority racial group.
While white people officially make up around 21% of the population of New York City, this listing includes Muslim minority groups like Arabs and Azerbaijanis as a ‘subcategory’ so that the actual white minority is even smaller than it appears. Under Mamdani’s ideological predecessor and political mentor, Bill de Blasio, around 450,000 white people reportedly left New York City.
A key policy figure in the Mamdani administration has now defined driving out white people by undermining homeownership and seizing housing as an objective. And this accords with the Mamdani campaign’s publicly stated goal of increasing taxes on white homeowners.
Weaver’s tweets conclusively disprove Mamdani’s claims that his pledge to target white neighborhoods was descriptive rather than racial. It accords with the hateful statements of other figures involved in his campaign and his administration including Catherine Almonte Da Costa, a DEI expert who worked as Mamdani’s director of appointments, before being dumped over her hateful tweets, who had previously stated that “it’s important that white people feel defeated.”
There is no question that this meets the bar for federal civil rights monitoring of the Mamdani administration, for close scrutiny of the impact of its policies on the white minority, and for eventual consent decrees blocking Mamdani policies, especially housing policies, that disproportionately impact white people.
To put this into context, previous federal civil rights investigations, including by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), needed to demonstrate nothing except disparate impact on minorities by a policy while accusing policymakers of being covertly racist.
For example, HUD in 2017 falsely accused Houston and its black mayor, Sylvester Turner, of civil rights violations for allowing neighborhood residents to decide whether a housing project should be located there with “no checks and balances in place to avoid acquiescence with racially motivated opposition.”
HUD’s evidence that opposition to the housing project was racist were “surmises” from liberal newspapers and “local nonprofits”. HUD claimed that some of the written comments objecting to the housing project “used coded language” such as worries about crime, trash and property values. Not one of the comments cited by HUD made any mention of black people, Latinos or race. But HUD still found Houston guilty of civil rights violations because of “coded language” by a handful of ordinary citizens who were not public officials or in any position of authority.
Contrast that with public statements by Mamdani and his Tenant Office director that they are targeting white people with their housing policies. There’s no need for “surmises”, no need to scour comments by random people for “coded language” or to introduce newspaper editorials accusing opponents of racism as evidence: Mamdani and Weaver are already on the record.
During President Trump’s second term, HUD has for the first time launched civil rights investigations over housing policies discriminating against white people.
In December 2025, HUD warned Boston and the Wu administration that their DEI program pushing racial preferences violates civil rights laws. Boston’s program utilized “the percentage of ‘residents who are non-white’ to identify ‘high-risk’ areas worthy of public investment.”
While Boston Mayor Michelle Wu has expressed her animus towards white people on the record, stating, “I’m getting used to dealing with problems that are expensive, disruptive and white” and getting sued for discriminating against Italian-American restaurant owners, the new radical Mamdani administration has done so in more explicit and legally actionable terms.
Rather than inversely disfavoring white people by favoring minorities, as Boston has been doing, New York City is set to specifically make white people a target of its housing policy. A key housing policy figure has already stated in the past that ‘impoverishing’ white people is a goal.
This is what actual systemic racism looks like and what civil rights law was designed for.
Civil rights law was not meant to address ‘disparate impact’ in which a policy happens to harm a group without any active intent, but was built to remedy affirmative impact, bigoted government policies meant to harm black people and any group for racial reasons.
A city boss promising to go after “whiter neighborhoods” and a housing policy official promising to hurt white people is exactly the kind of bigoted government policy that violates civil rights.
The Trump administration must be ready to take action against any housing policy, tax policy or other policy by the Mamdani administration that harms white people and exacerbates the growing departure of white people from New York City due to systemic racism.
There must be no place in America for the racism that Mamdani has brought to New York City.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
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