I enrolled in Columbia University’s undergraduate school for nontraditional students, the School of General Studies, in 2017 as a 33-year-old progressive Democrat. By the time I graduated in May 2020, my entire worldview had been upended.
What I witnessed on campus was not education but indoctrination — a sweeping cultural revolution fueled by anti-Americanism, antisemitism and revolutionary zealotry.
It’s easy to write off the footage we see online — masked protesters storming libraries, chanting for an intifada and vandalizing campus property — as fringe behavior. But to me, someone who lived inside Columbia’s ecosystem for years, it’s not shocking at all.
These are not isolated eruptions. They’re the product of an ideology deeply embedded in the university’s intellectual and administrative infrastructure.
And now that same ideology is being packaged into a mayoral campaign.
Its champion is Zohran Mamdani. If he wins, New York City will become an extension of Columbia’s campus.
What I encountered during my years at Columbia was not a battle of ideas but a dismantling of the very idea of America.
The buzzword on campus was “decolonization” — of land, of curriculum, of language, of thought.
Professors and students didn’t just challenge Western institutions; they sought to delegitimize them entirely.
They referred to North and Central America as “Turtle Island,” rejected Western science’s and liberal democracy’s legitimacy and portrayed capitalism as a force no different from slavery or apartheid.
In seminars, it was taken for granted that police are tools of oppression, Israel is a “settler-colonial” state and the United States is irredeemably imperialist.
These weren’t debates. They were dogmas.
Mahmood Mamdani, a prominent professor at Columbia and a major figure in postcolonial theory, has played a significant role in this transformation.
Postcolonial theory, like all critical theories, treats the university not as a place to seek truth but as a battleground to destabilize what we’ve long considered true.
The goal is to undermine students’ confidence in Western values and replace them with a blend of Marxism, Islamism and anti-Zionism.
Prof. Mamdani led teach-ins at last year’s anti-Israel encampments on Columbia’s campus. In his writings and his speeches, he consistently frames America as the root of all evil.
Some might argue it’s unfair to link Zohran’s candidacy to his father’s academic legacy. But the connection is explicit.
His mother, filmmaker Mira Nair, told The New York Times just last month: “The world [Mahmood and I] live in, and what we write and film and think about, is the world that Zohran has very much absorbed.”
This is not guilt by association. This is a self-proclaimed ideological inheritance.
That inheritance has already shaped Mamdani’s political record.
When he failed to get into Columbia — after falsely stating on his application he’s “African American” — Mamdani chose Bowdoin College in Maine. There, he co-founded the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, the same group that today helps organize radical campus actions at Columbia.
SJP is not some benign student club — it’s supported by American Muslims for Palestine, an organization with direct roots in the Islamic Association of Palestine, once Hamas’ main propaganda arm.
The year before Mamdani graduated, The Post exclusively reported, SJP invited to Bowdoin the 9/11 apologist Asad Abukhalil, who has said the 9/11 massacre was “a repercussion of the Cold War, when the United States made its bed . . . with the religious fanatics of the Muslim world.”
On Oct. 7, 2023, the day of Hamas’ massacre of Israeli civilians, Columbia’s SJP chapter blamed the violence not on the terrorists who carried it out but on the Israeli and US governments.
Mamdani’s own organization, the Democratic Socialists of America — whose members celebrated the Oct. 7 bloodbath in Times Square — issued a similarly disgraceful statement.
Mamdani sat in April for a three-hour interview with the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who defended Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and has even stated that “America deserved 9/11.”
This is the company Mamdani keeps. How many times does he need to show New Yorkers who he is before we finally believe him?
Mamdani credited the Marxist revolutionary Frantz Fanon as one of his core intellectual influences in a 2019 interview with his alma mater’s student newspaper.
Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth” is required reading for all Columbia students. The book’s very first page states that “decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.”
That wasn’t a metaphor. And it isn’t at Columbia.
“COLUMBIA WILL BURN 4 THE MARTYRS,” a masked radical graffitied on a bookshelf during a May protest, referring to dead terrorists.
That day, a campus safety officer was injured so badly, he had to be carried out of Butler Library on a gurney.
One Jewish student told me she felt so unsafe on campus that she stopped attending her classes in person. “I know what ‘intifada’ means,” she said.
We all know what it means. It means the murder of two Israeli embassy staffers standing outside DC’s Capital Jewish Museum and the firebombing of a Boulder, Colo., event for Israeli hostages. It means the continued weakening of Western institutions until they crumble.
Yet Mamdani refuses to even condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada.”
Some continue to insist what happens on campus stays on campus. But history shows otherwise.
The radicalism that once confined itself to student lounges now shapes local elections, public-school policy and city budgets.
The ideology I encountered at Columbia — anti-police, anti-capitalist, anti-Israel, and proudly anti-American — has found its candidate in Zohran Mamdani. And if he wins, that ideology will be codified into city policy.
Mamdani calls for tax hikes to pay for government-owned grocery stores, fare-free buses and his proposed $65 million investment in sex-trait modification for children and adults. And he doesn’t want less gender pseudoscience in schools — he wants more.
This isn’t about partisanship anymore. The old lines between left and right are increasingly irrelevant. The real division now is between those who still believe in the American project — flawed, yes, but worth defending — and those who want to tear it all down. I’ve seen what the latter looks like up close. I fear it’s coming for City Hall.
What New Yorkers need now is a bipartisan coalition of conscience: with anyone who understands what’s at stake.
Zohran Mamdani must be defeated — not with violence but with clarity and courage. America’s greatest city cannot become Columbia writ large.
Ben Appel is the author of “Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic.”
X: @benappel
This story originally appeared on NYPost
