If there’s one thing that Columnist Leo Glasgow and I can agree on, it’s that New York is the most important city in the world. It’s the best city in the world. Every few weeks after break I’m flooded with homesickness, remembering my reading spot on a cold granite statue overlooking the Hudson River or the staircase that still serves as the point of congregation for me and my friends.
New York is not just a city — it’s a vision in action, a vision of the ideal “melting-pot” America, the sort where I can get lotus dumplings in Chinatown and then take the train to Astoria and have the best beef shawarma I’ve ever eaten in my life. If you were to just take a snapshot of a random car on the 4 train, you’d find people from all occupations, all backgrounds, people all united by one thing: dreams.
As someone who’s lived in New York since I was a one-year-old, it is bizarre to admit that since becoming conscious of city politics, I never once heard open praise of a mayor. A recent SNL sketch recreating the already-hilarious mayoral debate brought this to light, poking fun at the fact that as soon as someone is elected mayor, everyone in the city immediately hates them.
This mayoral race, we have a chance for things to be different. The leading mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, a young, socialist democrat assemblyman, has put forth his vision of an affordable New York City for the people first and forevermore. Through a mounting grassroots campaign, Mamdani has garnered tremendous support from young people and immigrants throughout the city. New York can and will make history.
Glasgow’s column attacks Mamdani’s character, branding him as a hypocrite for hosting an expensive wedding in Uganda. This framing strikes me as completely irrelevant to Zohran’s platform and mayoralty. Mamdani is free to have an expensive wedding in his nation of birth — it has nothing to do with the country’s human rights crisis. Mamdani can be rich and still fight for the working people. Having a wedding in a country does not equate to supporting the policies of those who tarnish it with a corrupt hand.
Furthermore, Glasgow says that Mamdani’s campaign is partly funded by foreign cash, but he fails to mention that 99.9% of Mamdani contributions actually come from individuals, totaling just short of $4 million dollars.
Glasgow’s criticism of Mamdani’s decision not to condemn the saying “globalize the intifada” reflects his own misunderstanding of what intifada means. In Arabic, the word translates to “uprising” or “shaking off,” and in practice the phrase is one that encourages liberation and resistance against an oppressive force. This attack seems more a sense of Glasgow’s personal disagreement with the Palestinian cause, which shouldn’t be relevant anyway to Mamdani’s candidacy as mayor, considering the mayor of New York is not a primarily diplomatic position, nor is it designed to be at all.
Glasgow states that Mamdani’s policy of rent freezing will not work. He cites a 1994 case in which rent control policies in San Francisco led to mass evictions, an updated market price and a citywide housing shortage. Besides the fact that this example is outdated and refers to a completely different city, it fails to take into account the measure Mamdani is proposing in addition to the rent freeze — his goal to build 200,000 units of affordable housing over the next 10 years and his promise to crack down on bad landlords.
Glasgow further mentions that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will raise the fare to three dollars which actually serves to bolster Mamdani’s platform of urging the city to make public buses faster and free, which will mitigate that very thing.
Mamdani’s initiative to establish city-run grocery stores will not work against local, family-owned grocers as Glasgow described. Instead, it will target the larger corporations which dominate the grocery industry in the city, and more importantly, act as a price control on grocery costs by circumventing rent and property taxes. This, along with his proposal to create a Department of Community Safety, will directly combat food insecurity and reframe the purpose of the NYPD, which is to prevent crime in the first place.
The most telling sign of Mamdani’s candidacy is that Glasgow, who wrote a whole article slandering him, admitted that he’ll support him if his policies work. Leo, my question to you is this: Why not take that leap of faith? As two members of New York’s youngest bloc of voters, we have the power to make history, and tonight, history will be made.
Leah Badawi '27 is an Opinion Columnist and a Government and English student in the College of Arts & Sciences. She also serves as the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Rainy Day Literary Magazine. Her fortnightly column “Leah Down The Law” reflects on politics, history, and broader culture in an attempt to tell stories that are often left between the lines. She can be reached at lbadawi@cornellsun.com.
