Meet 5 Radicals (Among Many More) in Mamdani’s Transition Team

Speculation swirls over New York City’s incoming socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani and whether he will be “rational” or a radical once he’s in office.

While that matter is yet to be settled, a review of Mamdani’s transition team indicates that, at the moment, it may be best to bet on radical or maybe just wildly irresponsible and incompetent.

On Tuesday, Fox News Digital reported that Mamdani had “appointed a convicted armed robber” to advise him on the criminal justice system. Mysonne Linen had been in prison for seven years after he committed a string of violent robberies in the 1990s.

Mamdani defended the appointment.

“We put together a team of more than 400 New Yorkers who are on 17 different committees, and these are New Yorkers who bring with them both a fluency of the policies and politics of the city, the places that they’ve succeeded, the places that they’ve failed, and we will take all of their experiences and their analysis into account as we build a city for each and every person,” he said to Fox News.

It should be no surprise then that that team of 400 is filled with mostly a combination of staffers from the disastrous administration of former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, another far-left figure, and a whole lot of extreme folks.

It’s worth pointing out the backgrounds of just a few of the people on Mamdani’s list.

Alex Vitale

Despite the fact that Mamdani called for defunding the NYPD in 2020, saying on X that they are “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety,” he changed his tune on the campaign trail. Mamdani insisted that he no longer wanted to defund the police, quite convenient given the idea’s now radioactive poll numbers, but instead wanted to fund more social workers who would respond to 911 calls.

Keeping the competent NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch at her post is a good thing as long as that lasts, but Mamdani was likely showing his true colors with the appointment of Alex Vitale to his Committee on Public Safety.

Vitale literally wrote the book on police abolition. He wrote “The End of Policing” in 2017. Here’s a snippet of what it’s about, from Fox News: “The book, which opens by explaining that police don’t exist to help citizens, argues for an end to traditional policing for certain criminal activity, including narcotics use, prostitution, patrolling borders, and ‘misbehaving adolescents.’ The book also argues that police shouldn’t combat street gangs.”

In addition, Vitale argued that policing the border is racist. In fact, he wrote that basically all policing is racist in America.

“Racism in policing is structural, not simply a product of bad attitudes,” the book notes. “Training officers to recognize implicit bias without changing what they are tasked with enforcing is like teaching a soldier to be sensitive while sending him to occupy a foreign country.”

Tamika Mallory

Remember the “Women’s March” of pink hat-wearing women that was sort of like the “No Kings” protests of President Donald Trump’s first term?

I’ll forgive you if you’ve forgotten. The movement collapsed and was seemingly memory-holed by the legacy media after it was revealed that several founding members of the protest group had been accused of antisemitism.

Well, one of the accused is back and on Mamdani’s transition team: Tamika Mallory.

Mamdani also appointed Mallory to the Committee on Public Safety, despite or perhaps because she had called for defunding and perhaps, on that beautiful day when human nature wholly changes, outright abolishing the police.

Mallory has been a longtime admirer of the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan, and once called him the “GOAT,” or “greatest of all time.’” She did somewhat qualify her admiration for Farrakhan, however, saying in a 2019 interview with “The View,” “I didn’t call him the greatest of all time because of his rhetoric. I called him the greatest of all time because of what he’s done in black communities.”

Kassandra Frederique

It’s hard to stop pointing out members of the now oxymoronic “Committee on Public Safety,” but it really is stuffed with some fringy folks.

Kassandra Frederique is the head of the Drug Policy Alliance and is now a member of this esteemed body. Like that old, and not quite accurate joke about the Opium War, her organization isn’t for curtailing drug use, it’s fighting on the side of the drugs. Frederique and her organization are against “prohibition” of basically any drug, no matter how destructive.

When asked in an interview how she felt when she heard of celebrities dying of drug overdoses, she said, “As someone who is an abolitionist and also works to be a drug policy reformer, every day I have to fight the prohibitionists inside of me.”

She continued: “When I heard that Whitney Houston passed, when I heard that Prince passed, you know, yesterday when I heard Michael K. Williams passed, it was a blow. And I go through my own existential crisis, about like, what am I doing? Is this, am I on the right side? I always come back to the point that the work that I do, the things that I believe in are right.”

I hate to keep citing memes here, but she seems to be saying, “Am I out of touch? No, it is the children who are wrong.”

Her organization was reportedly “integral” to the decriminalization of hard drugs in Oregon in 2020, a policy so immediately catastrophic that even Democrats in the state backed repealing the law.

Those who don’t learn from history may be doomed to repeat it, but it appears that some who made those mistakes in history are also liable to learn nothing and repeat them.

Good luck, New York.

Demetre Daskalakis

Dr. Demetre Daskalakis already drove one brief news cycle as of late when he resigned from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in late August due to conflicts over vaccinations with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He was President Joe Biden’s monkeypox czar.

Here’s how The Washington Free Beacon’s Jon Levine recently described Daskalakis: “New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s public health brain trust includes an accused Satanist who advised former president Joe Biden on the 2022-2023 monkeypox outbreak, the architect of the Empire State’s race-based COVID-19 policies, and a former city official who denied the NYPD’s request for masks during the pandemic.”

Daskalakis essentially refused to recommend a cessation of the behavior that would allow the transition of monkeypox, which in most cases happened between gay men. He said in 2023 that the administration would make “sure [they] got the word out in a way that supports people’s joy, as opposed to calling them ‘risky.’”

I’d post more about Daskalakis here, but this is a family-friendly website.

Rabbi Abby Stein

Mamdani’s transition team features a far-Left, anti-Israel transgender rabbi, who has been placed on the Committee on Public Health.

Abby Stein was a prominent supporter of Mamdani’s campaign. He appeared in an ad with female rabbis making the case that Mamdani would help New York.

“We know Zohran will fight to make our city affordable and safe for our families,” Stein said in the ad. “As Jews, as rabbis, as New Yorkers, we believe that all people deserve to thrive. Zohran agrees.”

Stein has been controversial even among Democrats. He said that he had been kicked out of the White House in 2024 after hectoring first lady Jill Biden about creating a ceasefire in Gaza.

Jarrett Stepman is a columnist for The Daily Signal. He is also the author of “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.” Send an email to Jarrett

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Signal by Jarrett Stepman.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.