{"id":2037315,"date":"2026-07-10T17:47:14","date_gmt":"2026-07-10T14:47:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2037315"},"modified":"2026-07-10T17:47:14","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T14:47:14","slug":"italian-americans-say-mamdani-tweet-about-columbus-shows-hatred","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2037315","title":{"rendered":"Italian Americans Say Mamdani Tweet About Columbus Shows \u2018Hatred’"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/zohran-mamdani-america-250.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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\n\tAmerican conservatives are once again up in arms about a six-year-old tweet by Zohran Kwame Mamdani, elected last year as New York\u2019s mayor.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt was June 2020, and a wave of iconoclasm was sweeping the United States. Minneapolis police had murdered George Floyd, an African American man, the month before, and protesters argued that monuments to Confederate soldiers and leaders, slaveholders, and similar figures didn\u2019t just mark important parts of American history, but rather promoted their white supremacist views.<\/p>\n

\n\tProminent in this discussion were monuments to Italy\u2019s Christopher Columbus, who, as the Progressive Magazine<\/em> put it in 2017, \u201cengaged in enslavement, outright theft and the genocide of this hemisphere\u2019s indigenous peoples.\u201d A BBC discussion of his legacy points out that he was \u201cexceptionally cruel\u201d and that \u201chis behaviour became so barbaric that the Spanish authorities actually intervened and Columbus was eventually arrested.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAmong those calling for the removal of monuments to Columbus was Mamdani, then just a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) who had campaigned for Palestinian City Council candidate Khader El-Yateem. In 2020, he would be elected to office representing New York\u2019s 36th State Assembly district, encompassing parts of the borough of Queens.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tDuring that campaign, on June 18, Mamdani posted a photo to Twitter (now X) showing a middle finger directed at a monument to Columbus in Queens. (It echoes, perhaps incidentally, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei\u2019s famed 1995\u20132017 series \u201cStudy of Perspective,\u201d in which he makes the same gesture at targets including Tiananmen Square, the White House, and the Reichstag.)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cTake it down,\u201d wrote Mamdani.<\/p>\n

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Take it down. pic.twitter.com\/7Bmis8hnnh<\/p>\n

\u2014 Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@ZohranKMamdani) June 18, 2020<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

\n\tAnti-Columbus activism continues; climate activists defaced a painting of him at the Naval Museum in Madrid just last year. Conservatives have responded by reaffirming their affection for the Italian explorer. US president Donald Trump has made his admiration of Columbus clear, even erecting a monument to him on White House grounds in 2026.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe American right wing reserves a special contempt for socialism, and Mamdani has come in for frequent attacks. Now, the tweet has gained the attention of commentators including Italian American activist and Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo, who boasts some 850,000 followers on X. He reposted Mamdani\u2019s six-year-old tweet on July 9, claiming that \u201cMamdani has always had a seething hatred for Italians\u2026 The hatred of Italians is the hatred of beauty, culture, exploration, and genius\u2014which is unbearable for many DSA dirtbags.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAlso weighing in and referring to the place of Mamdani\u2019s birth is New Jersey political operative and failed campaigner for the US House of Representatives Mike Crispi, who tells Mamdani, \u201cWE built New York City. Not third world Ugandans. Zohran has specifically targeted Italian Americans repeatedly, and we will accept it no longer.\u201d For some reason, he follows up, in all capital letters, \u201cWe reject Communism.\u201d (Mamdani is not a Communist; Democratic Socialism is different.)<\/p>\n

\n\tPopular X account Defiant L\u2019s, dedicate to \u201cexposing hypocrisy, one day at a time\u201d to its 1.7 million followers, thinks it has caught Mamdani in its favorite vice, posting a combination of his Columbus image and another post of his saying, \u201cI am outraged by the removal of the Rainbow Pride Flag from the Stonewall National Monument. New York is the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, and no act of erasure will ever change, or silence, that history.\u201d The combined image is captioned \u201cOops.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe same day as Rufo\u2019s post, the New York Post <\/em>published a story (its second in two days) about a kerfuffle over a map the city published of New York City immigrant enclaves that includes areas such as Chinatown, Koreatown, Little Bangladesh, and Little Guyana, but not Little Italy. Some also are livid that Jewish neighborhoods are not noted.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a statement to the Post<\/em>, a City Hall spokesperson said the map wasn\u2019t designed to highlight religious enclaves, saying that it \u201chighlights neighborhoods in New York City that have substantial foreign-born populations from regions and countries around the world,\u201d adding that the map is not a comprehensive list of \u201call of the rich diversity across the city.\u201d By that measure, Little Italy would not qualify: \u201cIn 2010, not a single resident of New York\u2019s Little Italy was actually born in Italy, according to the Census Bureau,\u201d according to an article from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.<\/p>\n

\n\tMamdani\u2019s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the new argument about his Columbus post.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s not even the first time Columbus\u2019s advocates have spoken out about the tweet; it also made the rounds during his mayoral campaign, last year, when the New York Post <\/em>reported that Italian Americans were \u201coutraged.\u201d All the same, Mamdani went on to a historic victory over Andrew Cuomo, an Italian American candidate who was accused of sexual harassment by multiple women starting in December 2020.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/zohran-mamdani-america-250.jpg?w=1024″] American conservatives are once again up in arms about a six-year-old tweet by Zohran Kwame Mamdani, elected last year as New York\u2019s mayor. It was June 2020, and a wave of iconoclasm was sweeping the United States. Minneapolis police had murdered George Floyd, an African American man, the month before, and protesters […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2037315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2037315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2037315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2037315\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2037315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2037315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2037315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}