American conservatives are once again up in arms about a six-year-old tweet by Zohran Kwame Mamdani, elected last year as New York’s mayor.
It was June 2020, and a wave of iconoclasm was sweeping the United States. Minneapolis police had murdered George Floyd, an African American man, the month before, and protesters argued that monuments to Confederate soldiers and leaders, slaveholders, and similar figures didn’t just mark important parts of American history, but rather promoted their white supremacist views.
Prominent in this discussion were monuments to Italy’s Christopher Columbus, who, as the Progressive Magazine put it in 2017, “engaged in enslavement, outright theft and the genocide of this hemisphere’s indigenous peoples.” A BBC discussion of his legacy points out that he was “exceptionally cruel” and that “his behaviour became so barbaric that the Spanish authorities actually intervened and Columbus was eventually arrested.”
Among those calling for the removal of monuments to Columbus was Mamdani, then just a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) who had campaigned for Palestinian City Council candidate Khader El-Yateem. In 2020, he would be elected to office representing New York’s 36th State Assembly district, encompassing parts of the borough of Queens.
During that campaign, on June 18, Mamdani posted a photo to Twitter (now X) showing a middle finger directed at a monument to Columbus in Queens. (It echoes, perhaps incidentally, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s famed 1995–2017 series “Study of Perspective,” in which he makes the same gesture at targets including Tiananmen Square, the White House, and the Reichstag.)
“Take it down,” wrote Mamdani.
Anti-Columbus activism continues; climate activists defaced a painting of him at the Naval Museum in Madrid just last year. Conservatives have responded by reaffirming their affection for the Italian explorer. US president Donald Trump has made his admiration of Columbus clear, even erecting a monument to him on White House grounds in 2026.
The American right wing reserves a special contempt for socialism, and Mamdani has come in for frequent attacks. Now, the tweet has gained the attention of commentators including Italian American activist and Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo, who boasts some 850,000 followers on X. He reposted Mamdani’s six-year-old tweet on July 9, claiming that “Mamdani has always had a seething hatred for Italians… The hatred of Italians is the hatred of beauty, culture, exploration, and genius—which is unbearable for many DSA dirtbags.”
Also weighing in and referring to the place of Mamdani’s birth is New Jersey political operative and failed campaigner for the US House of Representatives Mike Crispi, who tells Mamdani, “WE built New York City. Not third world Ugandans. Zohran has specifically targeted Italian Americans repeatedly, and we will accept it no longer.” For some reason, he follows up, in all capital letters, “We reject Communism.” (Mamdani is not a Communist; Democratic Socialism is different.)
Popular X account Defiant L’s, dedicate to “exposing hypocrisy, one day at a time” to its 1.7 million followers, thinks it has caught Mamdani in its favorite vice, posting a combination of his Columbus image and another post of his saying, “I am outraged by the removal of the Rainbow Pride Flag from the Stonewall National Monument. New York is the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, and no act of erasure will ever change, or silence, that history.” The combined image is captioned “Oops.”
The same day as Rufo’s post, the New York Post published a story (its second in two days) about a kerfuffle over a map the city published of New York City immigrant enclaves that includes areas such as Chinatown, Koreatown, Little Bangladesh, and Little Guyana, but not Little Italy. Some also are livid that Jewish neighborhoods are not noted.
In a statement to the Post, a City Hall spokesperson said the map wasn’t designed to highlight religious enclaves, saying that it “highlights neighborhoods in New York City that have substantial foreign-born populations from regions and countries around the world,” adding that the map is not a comprehensive list of “all of the rich diversity across the city.” By that measure, Little Italy would not qualify: “In 2010, not a single resident of New York’s Little Italy was actually born in Italy, according to the Census Bureau,” according to an article from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
Mamdani’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the new argument about his Columbus post.
It’s not even the first time Columbus’s advocates have spoken out about the tweet; it also made the rounds during his mayoral campaign, last year, when the New York Post reported that Italian Americans were “outraged.” All the same, Mamdani went on to a historic victory over Andrew Cuomo, an Italian American candidate who was accused of sexual harassment by multiple women starting in December 2020.
