Conservatives Must Confront the Mamdani Machine

At his election night victory party within Brooklyn’s Paramount Theatre, a defiant Zohran Mamdani took the stage and framed his win in thinly veiled Marxist terms. “The working people of New York” had finally taken back power from “the wealthy and the well-connected,” he declared.

To his supporters and the liberal media (although what’s the difference, really), Mamdani’s rise is a grassroots triumph fueled by socialist idealism and effective organizing. It is the fulfillment of the promise of democracy.

The reality, however, is far different.

Behind the façade of Mamdani as an underdog “man of the people” is a deep-pocketed network of liberal elites pulling the strings. His victory is the culmination of a carefully engineered campaign that was financed and coordinated by a network of well-funded nonprofits, activist groups, and ideological operatives who have spent years grooming predominantly Muslim candidates to advance a broader “democratic socialist” agenda.

A Fox News investigation revealed that of the 110 organizations that supported Mamdani, all are dedicated to either Muslim identity or socialist interests. These organizations then further collaborated with 76 Democrat Party affiliates, among other closely allied groups and unions, to help elect Mamdani.

Two organizations in particular, Emgage PAC (the nation’s largest Muslim-American political action committee) and MPower Change (a “grassroots” organization focused on mobilizing Muslim voters) have excelled at leveraging identity politics into electoral victories. Both also have extensive ties to Muslim activist Linda Sarsour, whom Zohran Mamdani met by way of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York.

In 2013, Sarsour co-founded the Muslim Democratic Club of New York to help mobilize Muslim voters and elect progressive Democrats to local office. A few years later, in 2018, Mamdani joined their board.

Upon assuming his new position, Mamdani gained access to resources such as voter lists, donor networks, and extensive organizational support, which subsequently contributed to his successful campaign for his seat in the New York General Assembly – and then Mayor of New York City.

Linda Sarsour is also the co-founder of MPower Change, as well as a long-time ally of Emgage Action and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), all of which have been very generous in their financial support to Mamdani.

Speaking at CAIR’s 2025 Leadership & Policy Conference last month, Sarsour stated that the funding that powered Mamdani’s rise is “Muslim money.”

“The PACs that have supported Zohran, or a particular PAC that has supported Zohran, are probably over 80 percent of Muslim-American donors in this country,” she added. Sarsour also identified the CAIR-funded Unity and Justice Fund PAC as “the largest institutional donor to the pro-Zohran super PAC in New York.”

But where does this money come from? Far from being “grassroots,” MPower and Emgage are extremely well funded from a variety of high-net-worth sources. One of those sources will no doubt be familiar to readers – billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, which has given MPower and Emgage nearly $2.5 million in recent years.

Emgage’s Defend and Advance campaign in particular has helped propel a slate of high-profile candidates to electoral victories, including New York City’s Zohran Mamdani, Virginia’s newly elected lieutenant governor Ghazala Hashmi, and Dearborn, Michigan’s reelected mayor Abdullah Hammoud.

Not only do these candidates all share the same Muslim immigrant identity and democratic socialist ideological framework, but they are also backed by the same transnational donor networks and globalist foundations.

And they aren’t hiding it. Power wants to be seen.

Alex Soros, son of George Soros, released an image of himself standing beside Zohran Mamdani, writing on X, “So proud to be a New Yorker! Congrats, Mayor Zohran Mamdani.” The younger Soros is now chair of the $25 billion nonprofit Open Society Foundations, which, as previously mentioned, has helped fund left-wing groups and political operatives and campaigns stretching from district attorney races to federal elections.

In addition to these Muslim activist and Mamdani-aligned organizations receiving repeated grants from Open Society and the Ford Foundation, Mamdani’s brain trust and transition team includes many figures tied to the same ecosystem promoting Muslim and immigrant engagement and mobilization.

For example:

Lina Khan, the former FTC chair under Biden, and now one of the four co-chairs of Mamdani’s transition team, replaced career FTC staff in favor of loyalists financed by dark money from organizations like the Open Society Foundations.

Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition, which endorsed Mamdani for mayor, is a recipient of major Open Society and Ford Foundation funding.

Patrick Gaspard, a former Obama aide and past president of the Open Society Foundations, has reportedly advised Mamdani’s campaign as an informal strategist, creating a bridge between the world’s largest liberal foundation and New York City’s mayor-elect.

The connections between these individuals, groups, and the money behind them highlight a tight network of foundation-funded nonprofits, activist coalitions, and political operatives working in lockstep to translate demographic change into permanent political power.

From New York to Michigan to Virginia, the same constellation of organizations, such as Emgage, MPower Change, and CAIR reappear, backed by many of the same benefactors such as the Open Society Foundations.

Yet money and organization alone don’t explain Mamdani’s success. Organizations like Emgage and MPower Change would be powerless were it not for the dramatic demographic change that is rapidly changing America’s electoral landscape.

Mamdani himself made this clear when he specifically thanked the “Yemeni bodega owners, Mexican abuelas, Senegalese taxi drivers, Uzbek nurses, Trinidadian line cooks, and Ethiopian aunties” who propelled him to victory.

Mamdani’s victory should be seen as the predictable outcome of six decades of unchecked mass immigration, championed by legislators beginning with the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, and further facilitated by various NGOs, the combination of which has radically, and perhaps irreversibly, transformed the political and cultural landscape of America’s cities.

In New York, the scale of change is astonishing: nearly 38 percent of NYC residents are now foreign-born, up from just 18 percent in 1970. Nearly one million are Muslim.

Given this new demographic reality, identity-based politics has become the organizing principle of the urban Left, and a new generation of radical activists and their institutional networks are mobilizing to harness its power.

Candidates like Zohran Mamdani are not simply the products of local enthusiasm voting for “hope and change.” They are the result of a deliberate pincer movement of top-down electoral engineering and bottom-up voter mobilization.

The uncomfortable truth is that Mamdani’s victory illustrates how demographic change, NGO funding, and ideological organization can intersect to reshape urban politics and America more broadly. The coalition that delivered his victory is not an accident, but a product of long-term planning, institutional money, and the systematic cultivation and reinforcement of identity-based voting blocs.

The danger is not merely that radical candidates like Zohran Mamdani will continue to win office, but that the demographic conditions and political organization taking place across America will make their victories inevitable.

If current immigration trends persist, and foundation-funded activism continues to fuse with identity-based organizing, America’s elections will cease to be contests of civic ideas and instead become nothing more than referendums on identity, with their outcomes determined by demography under the guise of “democracy.”

Adam Johnston is a writer whose work has been featured in The Federalist, The Blaze, and the Daily Caller. He is also the creator of the Substack publication “Conquest Theory,” where he regularly writes about politics, history, philosophy, and technology. You can find him on X @ConquestTheory.