How MAGA cynically created a moral panic about Zohran Mamdani and Italian Americans

Culture admin July 14, 2026 0 Comments

How MAGA cynically created a moral panic about Zohran Mamdani and Italian Americans

MAGA trolls and their allies in right-wing media joined forces last week to gin up an exceptionally dumb, cynically engineered culture war “outrage.” Apparently, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani “hates” Italians because a map of “immigrant enclaves” released by the city’s Office of Immigrant Affairs did not include downtown Manhattan’s Little Italy. The recriminations from deeply offended supporters of America’s most unapologetically racist president in at least a century were swift.

My grandfather was born over 110 years ago in a cold-water flat on Bleecker Street to impoverished Sicilian immigrants who had arrived in America less than a year earlier. (I guess that makes me an anchor great-grandbaby.) I still get a kick out of taking my kids to Little Italy’s Feast of San Gennaro festival in the fall and showing them Giuseppe and Margherita’s old neighborhood. But the neighborhood hasn’t been an Italian immigrant enclave in many decades. Census data from 2010 showed that not a single Italian immigrant lived in the neighborhood. What was once a 50-block Italian American community has long since shrunk to about 2 1/2 blocks — with at least as many tourist trap tchotchke shops and Albanian-owned pizzerias as “authentic” Italian red sauce joints. The immigrants who made Little Italy, and their descendants, assimilated and moved on.

But why let sober contemplation of facts get in the way of stoking an angry mob? Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo — well known for bragging about his success at manipulating the media with relentless, truth-bending (to put it generously) attacks against immigrants and “wokeness,” and whose political malevolence is often rewarded with patty-cake interviews in places like The New York Times — was among the first flame-fanners. He posted to Elon Musk’s Nazi-friendly social media platform X, “Mamdani has always had a seething hatred for Italians,” which Rufo said is “the hatred of beauty, culture, exploration, and genius—which is unbearable for many DSA dirtbags.”

Podcaster Adam Carolla quote-tweeted Rufo, saying Mamdani “hates our country.” Fox Business senior correspondent Charles Gasparino likened the map to “ethnic cleansing,” while Fox News’ managing editor for politics Will Ricciardella called it “basically a hate crime.” Trump pal and political dirty trickster Roger Stone took the occasion to sell red “Make America Italian Again” hats. The operatic levels of pearl-clutching hyperbole almost seemed parodic (and a subsequent Rufo post seems to indicate that, at least to him, it was).

But it was when I saw a man-on-the-street video from The Free Press — Bari Weiss’ “anti-woke” website — in which a handful of supposed Little Italy locals growled that Mamdani is trying to erase their culture, that the whole thing started to feel like dark performance art. (I half-expected Andy Kaufman to rise from the dead wearing a monochrome track suit, screaming something about gabagool.)

One of the interviewees talks about his family coming to New York “120 years ago, from Sicily” and declares Mamdani to be “not a real New Yorker.” Another asks what they have done “to invite you to hate us.” If this were a non-right-wing outlet interviewing members of the nearby Chinatown community (which still houses actual immigrants) about discrimination, The Free Press would likely mock it as the kind of snowflake-sensitive, identity-based grievance politics that’s tearing America apart.

The whole thing reminds me of an episode of “The Sopranos” in which the murderers, pimps and racketeers in boss Tony Soprano’s crew lose their minds over protests against a statue of Christopher Columbus. When the organized crime kingpin catches his son reading Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” he bellows, “In this house Christopher Columbus is a hero — end of story.”

Right-wing midwits — the kind of cultural illiterates who think “Star Trek” only recently got political — share this clip often, apparently forgetting that by the end of the episode Tony not only doesn’t give a damn about defending Columbus’ honor, he wishes his fellow parasitic criminal comrades would just shut up already about imagined “anti-Italian discrimination” they seem to be wishing they were victimized by.

Speaking of the Mafia and irony, on Friday the Washington Examiner published a column by three members of the Italian American Civil Rights League, accusing Mamdani of trying to erase Italian immigrants’ legacy “to advance a political narrative.” For context, the organization was founded by mob boss Joseph Colombo (of New York’s notorious “Five Families”) as a public relations tool in 1970. Its biggest claim to fame was protesting production of “The Godfather” and successfully lobbying Paramount to not use the word “Mafia” in the film.

What’s especially rich is that this concern-trolling about immigrant enclaves is coming from some of the country’s most vitriolic anti-immigrant activists. And they’re trotting out the old self-serving myths: Italian immigrants worked hard, assimilated immediately, didn’t complain about anything. Never mind that the same slanders once leveled at Italian Americans — they’re subhuman savages, they’re criminals, they’re lazy, their culture is antithetical to American values, they refuse to learn English — are the same ones MAGA uses to defame immigrants today.

In fact, data shows that immigrants and their children have assimilated at roughly the same speed for more than a century, and today’s immigrants actually tend to learn English faster than the early 20th century immigrants so lauded by MAGA bigots. The fact that Little Italy is no longer an immigrant enclave is an American success story, not a tragedy. Its inhabitants became Americans, just like their American-born children, the very thing American xenophobes of every era have always claimed immigrants will never do.

Mamdani seems to have put a lid on this manufactured controversy, telling reporters that the immigrant enclave map was created by the administration of his predecessor, Eric Adams, and would be updated to include Little Italy and other ethnic enclaves. (This led a former Adams official to say that the previous administration never released such a map, followed by a Politico reporter surfacing a different immigrant enclave map released during the Adams administration — that also did not include Little Italy.) Sure, Mamdani buckled to a loud pressure campaign, but he’s a politician — going along to get along is part of the job.

But I’m not a politician, so I’m free to speak freely about the paisans: This episode was a fake scandal in which MAGA activists and right-wing media merged xenophobia with racial grievance politics because stoking panic about Mamdani is good for their businesses. What it was not was anti-Italian discrimination.