The Mamdani-DSA Comrades: São Paulo Forum Terrorists, Progressive International Communists

New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani was all smiles and disaffecting charm at his November 21 Oval Office meeting with President Donald Trump. The two political foes who had earlier exchanged epithets (Mamdani called Trump a fascist and a despot; Trump called Mamdani a communist) couldn’t have been chummier or more cordial. Instead of insults, the two adversaries exchanged pats on the arm, handshakes, smiles, and compliments. CNN’s insufferable Jake Tapper found the lovefest “flabbergasting” — as did many other observers on both sides of the political aisle. Trump said he was surprised that he and Mamdani agree on more than he had expected and that they both share a desire to reduce crime and the housing shortage in the Big Apple.

“I met with a man who really wants to see New York be great again,” the president said. “I think you’re going to have, hopefully, a really great mayor. The better he does, the happier I am. And we’re going to be helping him to make everybody’s dream come true — having a strong and very safe New York.”

That, of course, would be wonderful. That is, if Mamdani, after his inauguration in January, turns out to be a “very rational person” (as Trump described him), and if he turns out to be as affably “moderate” as he appeared at his White House presser. Well, good luck with that! We’ll see; but don’t bet on it.

The Front Man

Mamdani is merely the front man for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — and they are far from “moderate.” Like Mikhail Gorbachev and Barack Obama, Mamdani is the velvet glove on the steel fist, the alluring face of the current socialist-communist charm offensive.

Recall that Mamdani campaigned on far-left issues such as defunding the police, ending cash bail, decarceration (emptying the jails, turning loose thousands of criminals), legalizing marijuana, decriminalizing simple drug possession, legalizing prostitution (which he calls “decriminalizing sex work”), maintaining NYC’s sanctuary status for illegal migrants, declaring NYC a transgender sanctuary, opposing (and possibly arresting) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, raising taxes on “whiter neighborhoods,” and much more. (See here, here, here, here, and here.) Then there are all his socialist freebies: free bus rides, free child care, a $30 minimum wage, Medicare for all, a rent freeze, city-owned grocery stores, etc. And to cap it all off, there’s the classic communist call for “seizing the means of production.”

Just red-meat campaign rhetoric to bring out the far-left base? If you fall for that, you probably also believe Mao Zedong was merely an “agrarian reformer,” and Fidel Castro was a “nationalist,” not a communist.

Sanders’ Creation

Even if Mamdani desired to moderate his established course (which isn’t likely), he is caught in a current that he willingly jumped into. He is not his own man; he is a creation of Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America. They’re loving on him now, but woe betide him if he strays off the commie reservation. Bernie and the craftier DSA leaders, no doubt, will counsel him against following the extreme Bolshevik berserkers who demand immediate fulfilment of his campaign pledges. But they will also demand that he push the leftward agenda harder and faster than the “moderate” Democrats led by Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Representative Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.).

As left-wing philosophy Professor Ben Burgis of Rutgers University notes in an article at the radical-left website Jacobin (“Zohran Is Taking Bernie’s Movement Into the Future”), the current Mamdani phenomenon is the result of years of persistent plodding, plotting, and plowing by the DSA at the national, state, and local levels.

“Zohran Mamdani’s historic mayoral victory marks a new chapter for democratic socialism in America,” writes Burgis. “Like Bernie Sanders before him, he’s shown that relentless focus on a unifying message of economic justice can win against establishment sabotage.” He continues:

This momentous victory wouldn’t have happened if Bernie Sanders hadn’t laid the groundwork during his two historic runs for president, giving birth to the revitalized, millennial-led democratic socialist movement out of which Zohran comes. Bernie, too, began his political career as a local mayor, and he seems to see much of himself in Mamdani….

Zohran is Bernie’s heir in particular ways. First, he is, to a unique extent, a product of the post-Bernie “millennial left.” He was deeply involved in its main organization, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), for years before he ran for office….

One of Bernie’s greatest strengths as a left-wing communicator has always been that, while he unapologetically holds straight-down-the-line progressive positions on social policy issues, he’s relentlessly focused on broadly appealing calls for universalist economic redistribution. 

Yes, Mamdani is a Bernie Bro and a DSA apparatchik, but with more charisma, charm, and communication ability than the geriatric socialist from Vermont. As the DSA’s own website notes, the organization is “Making Mamdani a Model.” He is their male version of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) — with an added Muslim twist to take advantage of the current Gaza-inspired activism. It’s working. As The New American reported, DSA radicals now hold 250 elective offices in cities across the country: Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit, New York City, Poughkeepsie, and Washington, D.C.

Socialists Making Headway

No question, the DSA is on the move. And they plan to take America to a very dark and scary place, all the while clothed in a camouflage of compassion, tolerance, diversity, equity, and inclusion. How has this come about? Author-researcher Trevor Loudon explained all of this in an article for The New American (“Democratic Socialists of America: Communism for the New Millennium”) in 2019. More than any other person, Loudon has, through his books, documentaries, speaking tours, podcasts, and Keywiki website, been exposing and warning about DSA for years. (See our video interview with him on Mamdani and DSA shortly before the New York City election here.)

The central figure in the DSA’s advance, as noted above, is Bernie Sanders, the “Independent” U.S. Senator from Vermont. His lifetime score of 26 percent on the Freedom Index (covering 25 years in the House and Senate), while the equivalent of an F- report card, doesn’t begin to reveal the extent of his subversive, revolutionary record, stretching back decades to his notorious stint as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in the 1980s, when he shamelessly used his office to shill for the communist regimes in the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Nicaragua. (See “Exposed”: Fake News Ignores Video of “Drunk, Naked” Bernie Sanders Singing With Soviet Comrades.)

DSA More Left Than Socialist International

For decades, the DSA was a member of the Socialist International (SI), the global organization for socialist, communist, and “former” communist parties and NGOs. (For more on the Socialist International see here, here, here, and here.) However, in 2017, DSA and other leftist organizations, deciding SI wasn’t “progressive” enough for them, left the Socialist International. Where did they go? Further leftward, of course. In August 2023, DSA joined the recently formed Progressive International (PI). In the brief space we have here we will offer a few clues to its ideological stripe. Consider the PI’s Council, for instance, which includes open members of communist parties, such as:

• Karol Cariola, member of Chile’s Chamber of Deputies, former general secretary of the Communist Youth;
• Annie Raja, member of the National Secretariat of the Communist Party of India (CPI), wife of the general secretary of the CPI;
• Vashna Jagarnath, deputy general secretary of the Socialist Revolutionary Worker’s Party of South Africa;
• Mariela Castro, deputy of the National Assembly of People’s Power of Cuba, niece of Fidel Castro, daughter of Raúl Castro;
• Guilherme Castro Boulos, member of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies, former member of the Union of Communist Youth, current leader of the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), which regularly allies itself with several of Brazil’s communist parties.

And that’s only a thumbnail. Now, consider all the frothing at the mouth by the American media every time a conservative Republican goes to Europe and meets with political leaders whom the media have falsely labeled and vilified as fascist. But nary a peep about the Mamdani-DSA-Sanders affiliation with the Progressive International.

Progressive International

The Progressive International was launched in 2020 by the Sanders Institute and the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25). As one might guess, the eponymous institute was founded by Bernie. DiEM25 is the creation of Yanis Varoufakis, a Greek Marxist (he joined the Communist Society at the University of Essex) and Croatian Marxist Srećko Horvat, whose 2017 book Subversion! was praised by Noam Chomsky and the rest of the usual Marxoid chorus. (For more on the Progressive International, see Loudon’s Keywiki entry.)

São Paulo Forum

Even more troubling than its affiliation with the PI is the DSA’s association with the São Paulo Forum (FSP, Foro de São Paulo), an operation launched by the Cuban DGI, Fidel Castro’s communist intelligence agency, to bring Marxist-Leninist political parties throughout Latin America together with narco-terrorist groups in the region. More than 20 years ago we wrote:

The São Paulo Forum (SPF) was created in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1990, under the official sponsorship of Fidel Castro and Brazil’s Communist Workers Party, headed by Lula da Silva, now president of Brazil. Member organizations of the SPF include the Communist Parties of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, and Venezuela. “Former” terrorist groups that have gone political, such as Nicaragua’s Sandinistas and El Salvador’s FMLN, are also SPF members. So are organizations that are currently on the U.S. State Department’s list of active terrorist groups, such as Colombia’s FARC and ELN, the Tupac Amaru of Peru, Chile’s MIR, and the Basque ETA of Spain.

The New American has been chronicling and exposing the FSP’s activities for years, while the “mainstream” media have intentionally turned a blind eye to their growing threat. Unfortunately, even most of the conservative media have pretty much neglected to notice the FSP’s outsized footprint in Latin America. (See some of our FSP coverage here, here, here, here, here, and here.) Notwithstanding the São Paulo Forum’s open association with murderous communist tyrants and terrorists, the DSA voted to join the FSP in 2023, shortly after joining the Progressive International.

DSA’s Not-so-hidden Danger

This all provides ample warning to anyone not willfully blind that there may be some not-so-hidden traps when Mamdani, Bernie, AOC, and other members of the DSA use words like “democratic” and “progressive” to promote their communist-socialist agenda.