The Time to Stop Mamdani Was 30 Years Ago, by Matt Boose

By Matt Boose, Chronicles, October 31, 2025

Matt Boose is a contributor at American Greatness and a 2020 Publius Fellow of the Claremont Institute. Follow him on Twitter at @matt_boose.

Growing up, as I did, during the George W. Bush presidency, I couldn’t have guessed that my elementary school would turn majority-Hispanic by the time my first child was born.

My childhood understanding of politics was limited to the notions I was bombarded with in social studies classes. Namely, the importance of racial justice, the civil rights movement, and the (supposed) saintliness of Martin Luther King, Jr. Like many people my age, the first distinct political event that I can recall is 9/11. I remember watching from my classroom as the towers burned. The cast of characters from that event loomed over my consciousness in the ensuing years: Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein made their way into my childhood roster of villains with funny names.

The likely first Muslim mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, is a few years older than me. But his experience is obviously quite different from mine, and from that of millions of native-born Americans who are troubled by his inexorable rise to power. To Mamdani, the victims of 9/11 are not the people who suffered harrowing deaths in those towers, but those who became targets of “Islamophobia” in its aftermath. To many people, it is a jarring thought that a man with such a distorted view of New York City’s darkest hour will soon be its mayor. …