Since he dropped the news around the year-end holidays and his inauguration, you may have missed how Zohran Mamdani saved many of his most radical appointments for last.
On Friday, the new mayor named Ali Najmi to chair his Advisory Committee on the Judiciary, which picks judges for family and civil courts and interim appointees for criminal courts; Najmi is big on making the bench more “diverse.”
Mamdani outright ordered the committee to find more diversity picks and to get public defenders and other anti-prosecution types more involved in judicial selections: Expect the city’s courts to become even more eager to put criminals back on the streets.
The day before, he picked Cea Weaver to run his Office to Protect Tenants: She’s a proud radical who has called for the city to force private landlords out of business so it can seize their buildings; that’s partly why she praises his rent-freeze plans as likely to “deepen the crises” in the housing marketplace.
She’s spent years advocating unabashed Marxism: “Elect more Communists,” ran a tweet from December 2017; “Seize private property,” another in June 2018.
Just before the New Year, Mamdani chose Kamar Samuels as schools chancellor.
On top of wanting to end Gifted & Talented programs, Samuels is so obsessed with racial re-engineering of the school system that he’s won praise from far-left “1619 Project” chief Nikole Hannah-Jones.
And before that came the mayor’s elevation of two radical lawyers to the city’s top legal jobs.
Tapping Steven Banks as corporation counsel is putting the fox in charge of the henhouse: The longtime Legal Aid attorney spent decades suing the city to expand homeless services into a multibillion-dollar industry; as homeless czar in the de Blasio years, he doubled homelessness spending (without, of course, reducing homelessness).
Banks has said that government ought to use eminent domain — seizing private property — to provide free housing for everyone.
Ramzi Kassem will serve as City Hall’s chief counsel; he recently defended Columbia University protest leader Mahmoud Khalil and before that an al Qaeda terrorist who pleaded guilty to planning a major terrorist attack on a French ship.
As a student at Columbia in 1998, Kassem wrote an article blaming “European Jews” for all the problems in the Middle East; he was a top Biden adviser on immigration, when the main policy was to let everyone in, no questions asked.
Then, late on Friday, the new mayor named political organizer Tascha Van Auken to run a new Office of Mass Engagement, which seems designed to use taxpayer funds to ensure that radical activists have maximum pull with every city agency.
Yes, Mamdani has hired some de Blasio and even Adams retreads, but he plainly really means his inaugural vow to govern as a Democratic Socialist.
He’s going to deliver for the far left at the expense of the other 99% of New Yorkers.
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