Yves here. This post makes clear the open thuggishness among opponents of Muslim candidate for New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, whose second sin is being a democratic socialist and wanting government to do more things for lower income people. Having run a small business in New York, I do question the impact of some of his ideas, like raising the already nosebleed New York City Corporation Tax, but his policies are a work in progress and I anticipate they will be refined to more clearly focus on the haves versus the haves-much-less if he does become mayor. Notice in particular how DHS chief Kristi Noem makes clear her intent to assert heretofore unprecedented powers to sandbag Mamdani.
I am also amazed that Rudy Giuliani is allowed to leave his crypt.
By Jose Pagliery, NOTUS and Katie Honan. Originally published at THE CITY on July 2, 2025. Produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS and THE CITY
Zohran Mamdani speaks at a rally with unions that endorsed him, July 2, 2025. Credit: Alex Krales/THE CITY
President Donald Trump’s Homeland Security Advisory Council — a group that includes Rudy Giuliani, cop-turned-actor Bo Dietl and the founder of Bikers for Trump — held its first meeting on Wednesday to discuss the top threats facing the nation.
The conversation quickly turned to New York City mayoral candidate Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani.
After hearing Giuliani deliver a speech against asylum-seeking immigrants, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem chimed in.
“I want to ask you: Do you want to run for mayor of New York again?” she asked, drawing cheers and applause from around the conference room.
“Bo and I have been talking about putting together some kind of strategy. It’s doable if it’s one candidate. It’s a suicide mission if you’re three,” Giuliani said.
The longtime GOP politician called the Republican in the race, Curtis Sliwa, “our candidate.” He labeled Eric Adams — the current mayor running for reelection as an independent whose criminal indictment was dropped by the Justice Department to free him up to support Trump’s anti-immigration policies — as “kind of our candidate.” And he reserved the worst insult for former governor Andrew Cuomo, who lost to Mamdani in the Democratic primary but could still mount an independent campaign.
“I’ve known him since he was 15 years old. His mother would describe him as, ‘Well, Chris is the smarter boy,’” Giuliani joked, referring to the former governor’s journalist brother.
But all that was a prelude to a parley over Mamdani, the 33-year-old Democratic Socialist who’s running on a platform that champions the working class with rent caps for rent-stabilized units, police accountability and what he calls “Trump-proofing NYC.”
“This is not an exaggerated problem,” Giuliani told the 22-person council. “Somehow we got the combination of an Islamic extremist and a communist.”
Mamdani is Muslim, but Giuliani’s remark is an attempt to label as a threat a Democratic politician who has repeatedly said he does not question Israel’s right to exist as a nation but has called Israel’s retaliatory attacks on Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, a “genocide.”
The Homeland Security Advisory Council is not typically so heavy on politics. It was created in 2003 in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks and, as stated in the Federal Register, is meant to provide “nonpartisan and organizationally independent strategic advice to the Secretary of Homeland Security on critical matters related to Homeland Security.” Its current charter, issued in March, says that it will spend about $800,000 a year and dish out advice on “terrorist attacks, major disasters, or other emergencies” from “national leaders” in academia, business, and experienced first responders.
The meeting’s rancor aimed at Mamdani continued when Noem called on David Chesnoff, a prominent Las Vegas attorney who previously defended Corey Lewandowski — yet another Trump adviser on the council — from accusations of making unwanted sexual advances on a Republican donor at a 2021 event.
“I want to do this because I’m tired of the normalization of anti-American philosophy, for example, in New York … it’s amazing you can have the Hezbollah flag being marched within shouting distance of where the towers fell,” he said, referencing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
“We have somebody running for mayor … that applauds the very same philosophy and people that did that,” Chesnoff continued. “We need to send a bigger message to the American public of the danger that poses.”
That comment appeared to catch Noem’s attention. Noem, whose department oversees the increasingly militarized deportation raids frequently led by masked people who hide their names and badges, said she’s looking for creative ways to expand her power.
“The Department of Homeland Security has authorities that have never been utilized before … and I’m going to need some good minds on how to use those authorities,” she said.
Her comment comes just one day after Trump, speaking from a new mass immigration incarceration camp quickly built in the South Florida swamp, threatened to jail Mamdani if he attempts to stop Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the city and disparaged him as a “communist.”
Following a rally where he received the endorsement of some of the city’s top unions, Mamdani responded to Trump’s comments and those from officials on the council Wednesday branding him a security threat, calling the comments a distraction “from what I fight for.”
“And ultimately, what I fear,” he said, “is that if this is what Donald Trump and his administration feel comfortable about saying about the Democratic nominee for the mayor of New York City, imagine what they feel comfortable saying and doing about immigrants whose names they don’t even know.”
As many commenters here have been saying for some time now; the overseas ‘Forever War’ tactics will “come home” to haunt us all. All we non-believers in the official narrative are now “Enemies of the State.”
Using the power of the State to advance particular agendas is nothing new. What is new, for America in the last seventy-five years at least, is the naked intimidation and threats on display. Not since the days of HUAC, the House Unamerican Affairs Committee, orchestrated by the justly infamous Joseph McCarthy, has America seen such a naked appeal to emotion to justify outright political oppression.
America has already crossed the Rubicon. Soon, if this trajectory continues, America will cross the Styx.
Stay safe.
Will there be a homecoming parade?
There already was. On June 14th.
If you would like to see how this kind of thuggery is, as we speak, playing out in the EU as well, take a look at this speech by former Irish MEP Claire Daly yesterday to EU Parliament members. The intro comment is: “Former Irish MEP Clare Daly returns to the European Parliament and delivers a searing critique of the EU’s crackdown on dissent.”
Apparently, “hidden” in the 17th sanctions package against Russia are articles for sanctions against EU citizens who spread “dis-information”. The main point is that there is no trial, no due process and no legal defense, just a letter than you are f***ed. And, it has already been used against an EU citizen in Germany who presented pro-Palestinian views.
It seems that Kaja Kallas is very much a part of this, apparently with support from the foreign ministers from the 27 EU states.
It’s pretty horrific. hXXps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thdnG3GEKhE
(If interested, of course, replace the ‘XX’ in the link with ‘tt’)
Claire Daly is the kind of Western politician capable of both of recognising reality and is well equipped to explain it to others. I know that her kind of politician has always been in short supply, but never more so than now as we slide ever deeper into the swamp of liberal totalitarianism based on an unmeritorious but credentialled and connected meritocracy and it’s members deeply felt need to hate and punish the “other” – even amongst our own citizens because some of us ask questions which have unwelcome answers.
bertl: Thank you. You expressed that very well.
> Apparently, “hidden” in the 17th sanctions package against Russia are articles for sanctions against EU citizens who spread “dis-information”. The main point is that there is no trial, no due process and no legal defense, just a letter than you are f***ed. And, it has already been used against an EU citizen in Germany who presented pro-Palestinian views.
Any more details on this?
sz: Only what I heard in Clare Daly’s presentation to the EU parliament. However, what she related, especially in relation to the German citizen who was subject to these sanctions, was harrowing. She discussed his case. Briefly, his bank account was frozen, he could not access funds, he could not work, he could not travel, he is required to get approval even to buy medicine, and she added, anyone who would like to help him can also be targeted. She explained that the term sanctions does not convey the severity of their effect. And once again, this is all without any due process or recourse.
If you have the time, take a look at the video. As bertl said, she is very articulate. It is only about 20+ minutes. And of course, as she also pointed out, this action can be directed at anyone who steps out of the official narrative. No courts are involved.
We can stretch that history a bit…The Palmer Raids of 1919-20 rounded up and deported hundreds blacks and reds including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. All denied legal representation.
I wonder how far away we are from people like Mamdani becoming “tragic accident” or “brutal robbery” victims… Apologies if this sounds crazy.
I am reminded of the Costa-Gavras movie “Z”.
Costa Gavras also produced “Missing” which is also well worth watching.
These are sad days for America and the world.
We are now seeing the use of aggressive tactics of intimidation and repression at home, which, in the not too distant past, were used only on protesters in third world country vassal states. Crazy? No.
Yes, and Springsteen agrees with you:
https://brucespringsteen.net/news/2025/land-of-hope-and-dreams/
Too bad his pal O’bomber signed off on all of this shit when he could have stopped it.
If Springsteen agreed with me, it would make me doubt myself.
Reminds me of that Trump-led obsession with Obama’s birth cert. From time to time a perfect object for people to join together to express crypto racism takes the stage.
Zohran Mamdani is an excellent candidate, witty, clear-headed, forthright. He will be a great mayor.
Democrats would do well to field additional able young candidates throughout the country, if they are to overcome the astonishingly lousy GOP policies we see these days.
He could be a great Mayor, if he’s allowed to govern.
I consider most of the talk about deporting Mamdani to (hopefully) be theater, but the possibility of Capital going on strike is real. It’s happened before – NYC’s “fiscal crisis,” i.e. the Bankers Coup, of 1975, the opening salvo of Neoliberalism – and would complement Trumpismo’s reflexive desire to punish cities.
Yes. Getting elected is the first massive hurdle. Or more accurately, a series of hurdles represented by the powerful political machines at the City, State, and National levels. And you correctly point to what’s behind them all. Even if he were to get himself elected, they would still keep him from governing in any meaningful way.
To me, this “Homeland Security Advisory Council” just represents the public clown show level of repression, not the real sources of power. They posit the usual strategy for the “right-wing” faction of our kayfabe duopoly: divide the masses through scary smear tactics, emphasize his religion (same as the 9/11 terrorists!) and “communist” beliefs (that label still works with many people, though the youngsters are starting to develop immunity) in order to divide-and-rule. The usual stuff. This may not work – I see Mamdani’s victory as a rather shocking message to the real Powers that Be, not completely unlike the message from Luigi Mangione. If the clown show doesn’t work, the real PTBs will be waiting.
pjay: You are more sanguine than I.
The quotes in the article read like something from a Ku Klux Klavern. I am reminded of Cool Hand Luke, and “What we have here is a failya to communicate.”
Are USanians reverting to type? From outside the U S of A, this has a very bad smell indeed.
This is much too typical: ‘“I want to do this because I’m tired of the normalization of anti-American philosophy, for example, in New York … it’s amazing you can have the Hezbollah flag being marched within shouting distance of where the towers fell,” [Chesnoff] said, referencing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.’
Has anyone ever seen a yellow-green Hezbollah flag at a demonstration in the U S of A?
Ahh, yes, “anti-American philosophy,” by dangerous immigrants, who want to pollute the purity of the blood of the USanians and make goo-goo eyes at their womenses. Time for some cross-burning!
Or, as Judith notes above, it is reminiscent of Z about Grigoris Lambrakis (film by Costa-Gavras, book by Vassilis Vassilikos).
OT but amusing. Someone at wiki may have a sense of humour. I pulled up the “Homeland Security Advisory Council” wiki page and noticed that the link to Matthew Flynn described him as “an English footballer who plays for Curzon Ashton as a defender.
It also did not include Guiliani. Rudy may be insulted.
The real test of the democratic establishment will be this:
Do they help insulate him from all of this or just let it happen.
I’m leaning towards the just let it happen and finger wag camp because they don’t seem too thrilled about him winning the primary.
They did it to Bernie, they will do it to Zohran.
Indeed. For years, the mainstream D’s have shown themselves to be more interested in undermining their Left wing than fighting Trump, who has always been a fundraising gold mine for them. As far as they’re concerned, better to have control of a dying Party than be irrelevant in a viable one.
More than likely the Democrats would probably be willing to work with the Department of Homeland Security to remove Mamdani somehow like arresting and incarcerating him on bogus charges or having him assassinated.
The Democrats like to maintain a public face of being against Trump’s policies when they actually support them 90% of the time. Trump just the says quiet part out loud. This is why if and when the Trump presidency ends and we get a Democratic president, he will do nothing to reverse Trump’s agenda and will probably expand upon it. All you get from a Democrat is a neocon with a more pleasant veneer.
Well they did try to incarcerate candidate Donald Trump to keep Biden, their own version of an “outside the box” president, in office. Frankenstein meet your Frankenstein’s monster.
People are revolting against the Bird of Prey with two wings or Mamdani wouldn’t have gotten the nomination. The Trump people aren’t very smart and don’t know how to keep oligarchy in the shadows.
Sex scandals are a common tactic to derail upstarts.
Investigation by tax authorities.
In some countries (Tunisia and Russia come to mind), indictments for tax fraud or any tax-related improprieties is a favoured method to nip emerging movements in the bud, close media outlets publishing unwanted information, and destroy political careers.
And in the US…
I wish Mr. Mamdani well, and hope he makes it. New york city is a visible place and can be front and center in this culture war going on.
One of the sides, the zionist traitors to america; who are everywhere in politics and the media and business circles, will attack him with vitriol and smear campaigns. They also have a history of actually attacking this country and its leaders and it’s military , if they feel they can benefit.
Look at the USS Liberty in 1967, Listen to the survivors who described being attacked, and then attacked again, by the isreali’s. The fact that the isreali;s didn’t just try to cripple the ship. they kept attacking the survivors, trying to kill them all.
Look at the information coming out about james angleton ( a cia/ isreali asset) and his connection to the assasination of john F kennedy. Considering the mobs associated also were connected to the meyer lansky mob. Isreal, who at the time wanted the a-bomb…. seemed to be involved in many ways.
now the cia documents released about RFK assasination, the story of the cia blaming sirhan sirhan… a palestinian… and omitting the ballistics reports showing RFK was shot from behind, and sirhan was in front of him, and the ballistics report showing that there were 13 more bullets fired than could be fired from sirhan’s gun.
Never mind, those stories of who was the cut out who may have actually done the wiring to blow up the buildings 0n 9/11.
The israeli’s are hell bent……. on their cause….
and this current assault on the constitution of the US. the bill of rights. the first amendment.
when I was born…. we supposedly had free speech. and it was a “right”….
but now… if you want to accurately call out the crimes of the genocidal zionist psycho’s who control israeli policies… you can be charged with commiting the “crime” of anti-semitism.
It was bad enough when the zionists perverted the american cultural/legal system by making attacking the rights of americans who choose to do the right thing and BOYCOTT< SANCTION and DIVEST… legal in many states and corporations.
The Zionists of the world, are indeed a subversive and dangerous faction. One everyone ought to be aware of. And Israel is an enemy of the united states.
Darwinism in Hebrew.
You have to admit that Mamdani’s election came at a perfect time for Trump. After Project Iran proved an absolute fiasco and there was no regime change – kinda like what was planned for Russia with Project Ukraine – he needed a distraction for people to fix on. A domestic one. Enter Mr. Mamdani. Trump can now turn the whole thing into a political circus with his retinue of clowns and the media will lap it up. He can go on about how Mamdani is a communist and probably an illegal emigrant that ICE should kidnap and deport, how he may stop Federal money going to New York unless he ‘behaves’ and all the rest of it. Iran? What’s that?
Agreed. But creating chaos and confusion every single day he is alive is Trumps M.O. Saying stupid stuff once gets you ridiculed. Saying dumb stuff every day makes listeners stupid; continual Trump stunts obscure his actions.
„ I am also amazed that Rudy Giuliani is allowed to leave his crypt“
– thanks for the laugh of the day!
He does look awfully a lot like Count Orlok nowadays. Does he also drink blood, brings rats and flies and make people go insane?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dCT1YUtNOA8
Rudi, Rahm, Noem, I’d rather watch True Blood on tv, thanks.
Appalling ignorance no doubt shared with attorney Cheshoff by crackpot appointees to a silly commission. Where is DOGE? Cheshoff complained about Hezbollah’s flag near the Twin Towers. If he was competent or honest, he would have known or said that 9-11 was done by al Quada not Hezbollah. Hezbollah is basically a political organization which like Hamas essentially confines its activities to their respective homelands. Related are the repeated cited examples of purported killing of Americans by Iran that if they bothered to learn about these episodes, they would know that they were done by non-Iran actors like al Quada. The attack on the Saudi, American residential towers was done by al Quada. Our belligeraty neocon congress folks shamelessly repeat the same stuff. No one calls them out on their lies. The Beirut Marine barrack attack predated Hezbollah. By the way, what were the Marines doing in Beirut? Could it be that they were intervening in the Lebanese civil war on behalf of Israel.? These people have bizarre concepts of what is communism. Devote Islam is incompatible with communism. In fact, the U.S. and Israel have tried to undermine secular governments in Muslim countries by encouraging opposition by Islami. Both Hamas and Hezbollah early on were supported by Israel to undermine the PLO and destabilize Lebanon. Iran is a fierce opponent of al Quada and fought it in Iran and Syria.
No surprise, the Trump Admin doesn’t give a drizzly shit for the Constitution or the Rule of Law.
On the other hand I expect this will generate a lot of pushback and may backfire in ways that our reptilian overlords do not expect.
I have seen Mamdani regularly referred to as a Muslim, but nothing really on how religious he is. (Mind you, I haven’t been paying close attention.)
Has “Muslim” become a quasi-ethnic label now, referring to personal background rather than any discernible religiosity? I can see that political opponents may want to describe a candidate as a Muslim—it can have overtones of “one of those people”—but otherwise does “Muslim” convey any substantial information?
Has “Muslim” become a quasi-ethnic label now, referring to personal background rather than any discernible religiosity?
Yes. Just like “Jewish” in NY.
I lived in NYC during 9/11 and my roommate at the time was an Egyptian immigrant who was an atheist but his spiritual beliefs had no impact on how he was perceived and the comments he got from some bigots. Also vividly remember the stories of Sikhs being attacked by people who didn’t know the difference.
Muslim has been a quasi-ethnic label for a long while now.
The Wiki article summarises Mamdani as “the only child of filmmaker Mira Nair and postcolonialism academic Mahmood Mamdani. Both of his parents are of Indian descent; his mother is a Hindu, while his father is a Gujarati Muslim.”.
Apparently his mom made some Kama Sutra movies so even if he is Muslim, it’s the progressive kind.
My exposure to Bo Dietl was his frequent appearance on Don Imus radio program.
I will point readers to the timely posting by NC/Yves of this article, The Plebeian Council as an Example for Modern Citizen Empowerment which shows how hell bent was the Oligarchy in preserving their power and how regularly the Tribunes of the pleabes were assassinated.
I really loved the idea of general strike that the Roman pleabs have employed soo succesfully 5 times…
I think the CNT’s anarcho-syndicalism and Luxemburg’s mass strike were beautiful, maybe even possible routes to rev*lution a hundred years ago in the Industrial Age, but a street filled with strikers these days is likely to be chased through a city with kamikaze drones. Listen to what guys like Alex Karp are saying. G#za is a testing ground.
The tools these days are more likely to be hacking, counter drones, counter AI. For workers, there’s always old Sabocat to consider.
I think the idea presented in Mr. Robot is not far off. Even this system arming itself to the teeth against its own people is not enough to protect its fragile complexity.
So Noem couldn’t find anyone who would take her dog? Told me a lot right there, just like her lie about meeting Kim.
These people lack a conscience.
Their character structure is more malignant than that of a sociopath.