The Identity Thieves – Christopher F. Rufo
Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez two of America s most prominent socialist politicians have committed identity theft. No, they did not pilfer a Social Security number or swipe the digits of someone else s credit card. They have done something more subtle: stealing the image of the oppressed for personal and political gain.
It s an old trick. Just as Elizabeth Warren claimed Native American heritage as she ascended the ranks of academia, Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez adopted the identities of the poor and downtrodden as they ascended the ranks of politics. Both built their political personas on a small kernel of truth: Mamdani claimed on his college application to be black because he was born in Uganda, despite being the son of two famous, affluent, and educated Indians; Ocasio-Cortez claimed to be a Bronx girl because she lived in the borough until age five, when she moved to a tony corner of Westchester County. Both have structured their identities around grand narratives of oppressor and oppressed, which they hope to convert into power and prestige.
The truth is that both Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez belong to groups Indians and Latinos, respectively that do not fit neatly into America s deepest historical binary, that between white and black, colonist and slave. Though both could doubtlessly point toward some personal slight or past injustice against their ethnic group, neither Mamdani nor Ocasio-Cortez can lay a real claim to historical oppression. Indian Americans are among the most educated and affluent groups in America, and the vast majority of Latinos arrived in the United States after desegregation and the Civil Rights Act. The very fact that millions of people uprooted themselves from India and Latin America to try their luck in this country indicates that they considered America a land of opportunity, rather than injustice.
For Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez, however, the myth of post-Civil Rights Act discrimination must be maintained at all costs. Both use their privilege Mamdani, graduate of Bowdoin and son of a professor; Ocasio-Cortez, graduate of Boston University and daughter of an architect to advance their narrative of oppression.
They do it because it works. Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez have translated the politics of resentment to win political campaigns in Queens and the Bronx, respectively. They motivate anxious, college-educated left-wing activists, who run the ground game for their campaigns and harvest the support of working-class and minority voters in the outer boroughs.
It has always been thus. Marx and Engels were sons of affluence; Lenin was a lawyer; Mao was a librarian at Peking University. Left-wing radicals abandoned the theory of spontaneous working-class revolution not long after they hatched it. The vanguard of the proletariat has been their dominant concept since the Russian Revolution. And identity theft claiming to represent the poor, the downtrodden, the oppressed has been their dominant tactic.
Truth.