Scrappy gang of privileged elites gears up to sell ‘the warmth of collectivism’
Zohran Mamdani, the trust-fund socialist who recently became mayor of New York City, is surrounding himself with like-minded elites who hate capitalism.
Mamdani’s new communications director, Anna Bahr, attended one of the most expensive private schools in Los Angeles. Annual tuition at her high school alma mater, Oakwood School in North Hollywood, runs as high as $55,000. Her most recent boss, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), has repeatedly denounced private schools for perpetuating economic inequality.
Bahr, 33, is one of many expensively educated professionals who has made the entirely natural transition from journalist to Democratic flack. While attending Barnard College, the sex-segregated Columbia affiliate that costs roughly $100,000 per year, Bahr interned at the Huffington Post, the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, and Ms. magazine, a feminist publication founded by activist Gloria Steinem. After graduating, she landed a job at the New York Times.
The young journalist spent less than a year at the Times before returning to Los Angeles to become a press aide for the city’s Democratic mayor, Eric Garcetti. Bahr jumped at the chance to work on Sanders’s second presidential campaign in 2020, and eventually became his national press secretary. She teamed up with a group of Bernie alums to launch Left Flank Strategies, a radical consulting firm whose clients included Squad-adjacent Democratic cranks such as Cori Bush, Barbara Lee, and Jamaal Bowman. Bahr joined Sanders’s Senate office in 2024, serving as communications director until being poached this week by Mamdani—the younger, more attractive socialist.
Bahr will oversee the mayor’s communications department, working alongside a number of privileged youths to craft messaging in support of Mamdani’s efforts to dismantle capitalism. “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism,” the mayor said last week in his inaugural address. The person responsible for that bone-chilling sentence, Mamdani’s speechwriting director Julian Gerson, is a 29-year-old graduate of the Dalton School—one of the most expensive private schools in New York City, with tuition rates as high as $67,000.
Gerson honed his writing craft at Middlebury College, the Ivy League safety school that costs roughly $94,000 per year. Several months before joining the Mamdani campaign in March 2025, he wrote glowingly of Luigi Mangione, the freak accused of gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan. 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,” Gerson wrote on Facebook. In another post, he suggested one of New York’s streets should be renamed in Mangione’s honor.
Bahr and Gerson will presumably collaborate with Morris Katz, the mayor’s 26-year-old senior adviser and “muse.” Katz is the son of David Bar Katz, a semi-renowned television screenwriter and playwright, and Julie Merberg, a celebrated author of left-wing children’s books including Diversity is a Superpower, My First Book of Feminism, and My First Book of Feminism (for Boys).
Like Mamdani, Katz attended an exclusive New York City public school that caters to wealthy elites. Katz’s friend and former colleague, Joe Calvello, is also joining the mayor’s office as press secretary, which makes him the latest staffer to jump ship from Maine socialist Graham Platner’s embattled U.S. Senate campaign. Calvello is notorious for having played lacrosse, a loathsome “sport” that predominates at elite prep schools rife with toxic liberalism.
Among other things, this scrappy gang of privileged white radicals will craft messaging solutions to bolster Mamdani’s ambitious housing agenda led by Cea Weaver, the newly appointed director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. Weaver, a deranged white woman, has denounced private property and homeownership as “weapon[s] of white supremacy,” and called on public officials to “impoverish the white middle class.” Like Mamdani, she has expressed a desire to abolish privately owned homes and replace them with “public housing for everyone.”
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