The Right Incites Blatant Islamophobia After Zohran Mamdani’s Win

Right-wing lawmakers and commentators have responded to New York City mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani’s landmark win on Tuesday with blatantly Islamophobic and xenophobic hatred, inciting violence against the left-wing politician who was already recently subject to a hate-related death threat.

Mamdani, who is Muslim, faced threats of a car bomb last week from a caller who left repeated voicemails with Islamophobic statements. The threats are reportedly being investigated by law enforcement as a hate crime. Mamdani has said, in emotional comments, that this is one of many Islamophobic death threats he’s received amid his mayoral campaign.

Figures on the right seemed eager to stoke that violence, making statements openly attacking Muslim people online and suggesting, without any evidence whatsoever, that Mamdani is a terrorist — rhetoric reminiscent of some of the ugliest Islamophobia in the U.S.’s history.

Numerous right-wingers said Mamdani’s win would cause another attack akin to 9/11. “There will be another 9/11 in NYC and @ZohranKMamdani will be to blame,” said right-wing influencer Laura Loomer who has, at times, been close with President Donald Trump and reportedly advised him on some issues.

“Mamdani Vows To Knock Down World Trade Center To Build More Affordable Housing,” read one “joke” headline from the conservative satire publication Babylon Bee, a beloved website of Elon Musk.

Others, like Donald Trump Jr., suggested that all Muslims bear responsibility for the 2001 attack, and that voting for Mamdani was like casting a vote for 9/11. Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-Georgia) posted an AI-generated picture of the Statue of Liberty replaced by a figure in a burqa, saying, “This hits hard.”

Such statements are meant to incite fear and violence against Muslims.

The invocation of 9/11 is especially telling, as Muslims continue to be scapegoated for the attack and discriminated against both in casual situations and by government regulations that target Muslim communities. Anti-Muslim hate reached a new high last year, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza — with the level of complaints of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab incidents even surpassing those directly following 9/11.

Others on the right, meanwhile, said that Mamdani’s win — brought on by a multi-racial coalition of grassroots organizers — is yet another reason that the federal government should curb immigration, in a plainly fascist line of reasoning that echoes some of the most racist campaigns in world history.

“NYC is the clearest warning yet of what happens to a society when it fails to control migration,” said White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who crafted Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. He went on to suggest that immigrants have ruined New York City — a remark that is not just repugnant, but that also relies on lies about the electorate. “Democrats change politics by changing voters. That’s how you turn a city that defined US dominance into what it is now.”

Charlie Kirk, the founder of school-focused hate group Turning Point USA, used the opportunity to say that the U.S. should outright ban all immigration, throwing in a slur against immigrants.

It’s not just the right that has spewed hatred against Mamdani, however. The super PAC backing disgraced Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s campaign, at one point, edited a picture of Mamdani to make his beard look darker and larger in a mailer. Mamdani called it out as “blatant Islamophobia,” and the mailer was never sent out to addresses.

The explosion of bigotry and hatred is potentially, in a way, a reflection of Mamdani’s popularity. The democratic socialist faced seemingly insurmountable odds in the election against Cuomo, the establishment candidate who posed no threats to either major party’s goals. After all, just as of February, Mamdani was polling at 1 percent to Cuomo’s 33 percent.

Some lawmakers have pushed back against the Islamophobic and bigoted backlash.

In a reply to Miller’s post about “control[ing] migration,” for instance, Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wisconsin) wrote: “Racist fuck. Go back to 1930’s Germany.”