Zohran Mamdani, the trust-fund socialist newly installed as mayor of New York City, is rapidly building an administration stocked with ideologically aligned, highly privileged progressives who profess contempt for capitalism while enjoying every advantage it affords.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, Mamdanis latest high-profile hire is his new communications director, 33-year-old Anna Bahr, whose rsum reads like a case study in elite liberal hypocrisy. Bahr attended Oakwood School in North Hollywood, one of Los Angeless most exclusive private schools, where annual tuition can reach $55,000a striking contrast with the rhetoric of her most prominent former boss, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), who has long condemned private schools for exacerbating economic inequality.
Bahr is emblematic of a familiar pipeline on the left: expensively educated media professionals who drift seamlessly from journalism into partisan Democratic messaging. While enrolled at Barnard College, the womens affiliate of Columbia University with a total annual cost approaching $100,000, she interned at the Huffington Post, MSNBCs Rachel Maddow Show, and Ms. magazine, the feminist outlet founded by activist Gloria Steinem, before securing a coveted position at the New York Times.
Her stint at the Times lasted less than a year before she returned to Los Angeles to serve as a press aide to thenDemocratic mayor Eric Garcetti, embedding herself more deeply in the progressive political class. Bahr later leapt at the opportunity to join Sanderss 2020 presidential campaign, rising to become his national press secretary and then co-founding Left Flank Strategies, a hard-left consulting shop whose clients included Squad-adjacent radicals such as Cori Bush, Barbara Lee, and Jamaal Bowman.
In 2024, Bahr rejoined Sanders as communications director in his Senate office, a role she held until Mamdanihailed in progressive circles as a younger, more telegenic socialist standard-bearerrecruited her to City Hall this week. She will now oversee the mayors communications department, working with a cadre of similarly privileged young ideologues to sell Mamdanis aggressive anti-capitalist agenda to New Yorkers who will bear its consequences.
Central to that agenda is a sweeping rhetorical assault on individual liberty and free enterprise, encapsulated in Mamdanis chilling inaugural declaration: "We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism." The line was crafted by his speechwriting director, 29-year-old Julian Gerson, a graduate of the Dalton School, one of New York Citys most expensive private institutions, where tuition can climb to $67,000 a year.
Gerson refined his craft at Middlebury College, an elite liberal arts school often dubbed an Ivy League safety and carrying a price tag of roughly $94,000 annually. Months before joining Mamdanis campaign in March 2025, he publicly praised Luigi Mangione, the man accused of shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan, writing on Facebook that Mangione was "adored not only because he dared to target a leader of one of the most vile, self-enriching industries darkening our society today, but because he dared to defy the stasis of nihilistic rejection," and even suggesting that a New York street be renamed in Mangiones honor.
Bahr and Gerson are expected to work closely with Morris Katz, the mayors 26-year-old senior adviser and self-described "muse," whose background further underscores the administrations rarefied character. Katz is the son of television screenwriter and playwright David Bar Katz and Julie Merberg, an author of left-wing childrens books such as Diversity is a Superpower, My First Book of Feminism, and My First Book of Feminism (for boys), titles that reflect the ideological conditioning now marketed to children.
Like Mamdani himself, Katz attended an elite New York City public school that primarily serves affluent families, reinforcing the pattern of wealthy progressives presuming to speak for the working class. Joining this circle is Katzs friend and former colleague Joe Calvello, who will serve as press secretary after departing the troubled U.S. Senate campaign of Maine socialist Graham Platner and who is notorious for his background in lacrosse, a sport closely associated with prep-school culture and the liberal elite.
This tightly knit group of privileged white radicals will also be responsible for promoting Mamdanis sweeping housing program, overseen by Cea Weaver, the newly appointed director of the Mayors Office to Protect Tenants. Weaver, described by critics as an extremist, has denounced private property and homeownership as "weapon[s] of white supremacy," urged public officials to "impoverish the white middle class," and, like Mamdani, advocated replacing privately owned homes with "public housing for everyone."
Taken together, Mamdanis personnel choices reveal an administration driven less by grassroots experience than by an insular class of well-heeled activists determined to impose collectivist experiments on a city already strained by high costs, crime, and outmigration.
New Yorkers now face the prospect of a government led by affluent socialists who condemn the very system that financed their education and careers, while advancing policies that threaten property rights, middle-class stability, and the free-market dynamism that once made the city a symbol of American opportunity.
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