A Minneapolis Marxist looking to become the Zohran Mamdani of the North Star State is offering an even more extreme program of woke goodies on a platform that would enact race-based housing policy, prevent evictions from rental properties, and codify public financing for the state’s annual “Trans Equity Summit.”
Omar Fateh, born in Washington, D.C., to Somali immigrant parents, grew up in Falls Church, Virginia. He ran an unsuccessful 2015 campaign for school board in Fairfax County, moving to Minneapolis shortly after his electoral loss. He then worked in a variety of municipal government jobs and has served in the Minnesota state senate since 2021.
Fateh announced his candidacy for mayor in November 2024 and stunned the state’s political class last week by winning the endorsement of the Minneapolis Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL) over incumbent mayor Jacob Frey.
Frey—an avowed progressive with maximalist stances on Black Lives Matter and COVID-19 restrictions enforcement—nonetheless took heat from the far left of his party for a number of moderate stances, including coming out against rent control, vetoing a bill that would have set minimum wage standards for Uber and Lyft drivers, and dismantling a homeless encampment that spent almost a year erected in Minneapolis’s Phillips neighborhood.
Fateh is broadly supportive of a slew of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, many of which he proudly touts on his campaign website. He’s vowed to “ensure that events like the Trans Equity Summit are fully funded and prioritized” and attacked Frey for underfunding and mismanaging the event, “resulting in the cancellation of the 2024 summit.”
“Space will be protected for community care and collective witnessing for trans and gender non-conforming neighbors,” read a promotional email for the Aug. 11 event from Augsburg University, which also promised participants “a job and resource fair and healing justice offerings.”
The state allocated at least $15,000 for the event in 2023, records show.
Fateh’s record on trans issues as a state senator includes having sponsored a bill that would prevent Minnesota from cooperating with out-of-state judgments surrounding “gender-affirming care.”
Like Mamdani, Fateh has committed himself to building more public housing and frustrating efforts for more market-based approaches. On his website, he promised to implement the sunny-sounding “Minneapolis 2040 Plan.”
The plan includes enshrining explicitly race-based housing considerations in an effort to steer more minority groups into full-time housing by, among other tactics, “prioritiz[ing] outreach to local developers and businesses owned by people of color, indigenous people, and women, in the administration and development of City-funded housing projects.”
“The funding of street reconstruction and maintenance prioritizes equity considerations in transportation,” the plan adds.
Fateh has vowed to fix homelessness by “prevent[ing] rental evictions” and proposed on his campaign website to ship Minneapolis’s homeless to “other jurisdictions” to find housing elsewhere.
Fateh has a long history of opposing law enforcement, and has vowed to reduce the footprint of the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD), replacing “armed officers” with members of a “Behavioral Crisis Response program.”
On a since-deleted website, Fateh celebrated the Minneapolis City Council’s decision to defund the police and praised an amendment to the city charter that would have replaced the MPD with a “Department of Public Safety.” As a state senator, he has sponsored bills that would end qualified immunity for cops and repeal a law making it a crime to falsely report police misconduct.
Minneapolis did ultimately end up steering millions of dollars away from their police department after the death of George Floyd, leading law enforcement officers to leave the force in droves, ushering in a surge of crime.
Other policies in Fateh’s platform include moratoriums on new charter schools, fresh new taxes on “the rich,” and carbon taxes. He has also vowed to institute a $20 an hour minimum wage and make public transportation free.
Fateh’s track record as a state legislator shows a lawmaker preoccupied with race. He sponsored a bill in February 2022 to create a commission studying reparations for black Minnesotans and apologize for slavery—even though Minnesota was never a slave state. The bill would also have steered $2 million in public funds to “study the effects of systemic racism on Black Minnesotans who are descendants of persons who were treated as chattel slaves in this state.”
He backed legislation in January 2021 to mandate that high school students in Minnesota be subjected to an “ethnic studies” requirement.
“Every public school in Minnesota must offer as part of the social studies curriculum one or more ethnic studies courses that include the following topics: (1) Latinx Studies; (2) African American Studies; (3) Asian American Studies; (4) Indigenous/First Nations Studies; or (5) Ethnic Studies 101,” the bill read. It is now state law.
Like Mamdani and democratic socialists more broadly, Fateh has staked out sharply critical positions on Israel. Just 10 days after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks against Israel, Fateh called for a ceasefire, blasted the Jewish state for defending itself, and parroted the lie that Israel struck al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City—an explosion actually caused by a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket.
“Since the Hamas attacks, Israel has cut off water, power, fuel, food, and medicine to over two million people,” he wrote. “And today, we heard the shocking and horrifying news that hundreds of Palestinians seeking medical treatment were killed in a single air strike on the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza. Both of these actions constitute collective punishment and are flagrant violations of international law.”
Fateh, a Muslim, also claimed that “we have seen a mass mobilization of efforts to demonize and defame anyone who dares speak out against the atrocities we see committed on a daily basis by our ally, Israel,” and warned that outrage over Hamas’s massacres was similar to rhetoric “that has been a precursor to every documented act of genocide in modern history.”
He later falsely accused Israel of committing a genocide and signed a letter accusing a state senator who noted that children in Gaza are taught to martyr themselves of Islamophobia.
Fateh’s other pieces of legislation include bills to ban bottled water, prohibit pet stores from selling dogs and cats, end standardized testing requirements for admission to public universities in Minnesota, and normalize relations with Cuba.
The socialist’s DFL endorsement did not come without controversy. Frey campaign officials alleged that the online voting system broke down, and many supporters of the incumbent mayor left the convention. The remaining delegates endorsed Fateh by a show of hands at around 9:30 p.m., and the campaigns of both Frey and challenger Jazz Hampton indicated they do not believe all votes were counted.
While Fateh has the DFL’s official endorsement, Minneapolis uses a ranked-choice voting system in its municipal elections. Fateh, Frey, and three other candidates will appear on the ballot in November as DFL members, with an independent, a Republican, and a member of the Socialist Workers Party running in the election as well.
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