{"id":326,"date":"2026-07-14T22:14:55","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T22:14:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/longdistancemoversusas.com\/?p=326"},"modified":"2026-07-14T22:14:55","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T22:14:55","slug":"how-maga-cynically-created-a-moral-panic-about-zohran-mamdani-and-italian-americans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/longdistancemoversusas.com\/?p=326","title":{"rendered":"How MAGA cynically created a moral panic about Zohran Mamdani and Italian Americans"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

MAGA trolls and their allies in right-wing media joined forces last week to gin up an exceptionally dumb, cynically engineered culture war \u201coutrage.\u201d Apparently, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani \u201chates\u201d Italians because a map of \u201cimmigrant enclaves\u201d released by the city\u2019s Office of Immigrant Affairs did not include downtown Manhattan\u2019s Little Italy. The recriminations from deeply offended supporters of America\u2019s most unapologetically racist president in at least a century were swift.<\/p>\n

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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\u2019s Feast of San Gennaro festival in the fall and showing them Giuseppe and Margherita\u2019s old neighborhood. But the neighborhood hasn\u2019t been an Italian immigrant enclave in many decades. Census data from 2010<\/em> 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 \u2014 with at least as many tourist trap tchotchke shops and Albanian-owned pizzerias as \u201cauthentic\u201d Italian red sauce joints. The immigrants who made Little Italy, and their descendants, assimilated and moved on.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But why let sober contemplation of facts get in the way of stoking an angry mob? Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo \u2014 well known for bragging about his success at manipulating the media with relentless, truth-bending (to put it generously) attacks against immigrants and \u201cwokeness,\u201d and whose political malevolence is often rewarded with patty-cake interviews in places like The New York Times \u2014 was among the first flame-fanners. He posted to Elon Musk\u2019s Nazi-friendly social media platform X, \u201cMamdani has always had a seething hatred for Italians,\u201d which Rufo said is \u201cthe hatred of beauty, culture, exploration, and genius\u2014which is unbearable for many DSA dirtbags.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Podcaster Adam Carolla quote-tweeted Rufo, saying Mamdani \u201chates our country.\u201d Fox Business senior correspondent Charles Gasparino likened the map to \u201cethnic cleansing,\u201d while Fox News\u2019 managing editor for politics Will Ricciardella called it \u201cbasically a hate crime.\u201d Trump pal and political dirty trickster Roger Stone took the occasion to sell red \u201cMake America Italian Again\u201d 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).\u00a0<\/p>\n

But it was when I saw a man-on-the-street video from The Free Press \u2014 Bari Weiss\u2019 \u201canti-woke\u201d website \u2014 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<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

One of the interviewees talks about his family coming to New York \u201c120 years ago, from Sicily\u201d and declares Mamdani to be \u201cnot a real New Yorker.\u201d Another asks what they have done \u201cto invite you to hate us.\u201d 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\u2019s tearing America apart.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The whole thing reminds me of an episode of \u201cThe Sopranos\u201d in which the murderers, pimps and racketeers in boss Tony Soprano\u2019s crew lose their minds over protests against a statue of Christopher Columbus. When the organized crime kingpin catches his son reading Howard Zinn\u2019s \u201cA People\u2019s History of the United States,\u201d he bellows, \u201cIn this house Christopher Columbus is a hero \u2014 end of story.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Right-wing midwits \u2014 the kind of cultural illiterates who think \u201cStar Trek\u201d only recently got political \u2014 share this clip often, apparently forgetting that by the end of the episode Tony not only doesn\u2019t give a damn about defending Columbus\u2019 honor, he wishes his fellow parasitic criminal comrades would just shut up already about imagined \u201canti-Italian discrimination\u201d they seem to be wishing they were victimized by.<\/p>\n

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\u2019 legacy \u201cto advance a political narrative.\u201d For context, the organization was founded by mob boss Joseph Colombo (of New York\u2019s notorious \u201cFive Families\u201d) as a public relations tool in 1970. Its biggest claim to fame was protesting production of \u201cThe Godfather\u201d and successfully lobbying Paramount to not use the word \u201cMafia\u201d in the film.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What\u2019s especially rich is that this concern-trolling about immigrant enclaves is coming from some of the country\u2019s most vitriolic anti-immigrant activists. And they\u2019re trotting out the old self-serving myths: Italian immigrants worked hard, assimilated immediately, didn\u2019t complain about anything. Never mind that the same slanders once leveled at Italian Americans \u2014 they\u2019re subhuman savages, they\u2019re criminals, they\u2019re lazy, their culture is antithetical to American values, they refuse to learn English \u2014 are the same ones MAGA uses to defame immigrants today.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In fact, data shows that immigrants and their children have assimilated at roughly the same speed for more than a century, and today\u2019s 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<\/em>, just like their American-born children, the very thing American xenophobes of every era have always claimed immigrants will never do.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 that also did not include Little Italy.) Sure, Mamdani buckled to a loud pressure campaign, but he\u2019s a politician \u2014 going along to get along is part of the job.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m not a politician, so I\u2019m free to speak freely about the paisans<\/em>: 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.<\/p>\n

Read more The courts won\u2019t give cover to Trump\u2019s IRS self-dealing<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anti-immigrant right-wingers engineered performative outrage over Manhattan\u2019s Little Italy not being included on a map of immigrant enclaves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":325,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nHow MAGA cynically created a moral panic about Zohran Mamdani and Italian Americans - Long Distance Movers USA<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/longdistancemoversusas.com\/?p=326\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How MAGA cynically created a moral panic about Zohran Mamdani and Italian Americans - 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