If he wins in November, Mamdani, 33, would become the city’s first digital-native mayor.

But long before he was a rising political star, Mamdani was “Young Cardamom,” “TreyDadday,” and “bayaye27,” as he documented his life across the web in unfiltered bursts. What I saw in reading all of his posts, which span 18 years and multiple personas, is a portrait of a man with a revolutionary vision for America. One that hasn’t faded.

Mamdani’s internet trail reveals far more than a veneered candidate biography on a website ever could. In tweet after tweet, he calls for the end of the free market, for defunding the police, and for dismantling the prison system, which he describes as the “carceral state.” He champions communism (at least in one jokey photo), stans anti-Israel activist Linda Sarsour, calls cops “haram” (the Arabic term for forbidden under Islamic law), and insists that New York should look more like socialist Vienna. As Mamdani moves more into general-election mode as the front-runner to beat—wearing suits, moderating his message, and cozying up to the business community—his digital past offers a rare glimpse of the ideology beneath the polish.

The Mamdani campaign did not respond to my requests for comment. But here is the real Mamdani, based on my review of his internet past:

“Capitalism is theft.”

That is how Mamdani put it in 2020, when he was a first-time candidate and self-described socialist running for New York’s state assembly in Queens. He posted a PDF from the Marxists Internet Archive, used hashtags like #TaxTheRich and #CancelRent, and referred to supporters not as voters but “comrades.”

This wasn’t just talk. He called for a “political revolution,” and argued that socialism wasn’t “some utopian fantasy” but the “only pragmatic response to the crises we face.” He praised Vienna’s public housing model—where roughly 60 percent of residents live in government-owned apartments—and said New York should emulate it. “We want to move away from a situation where most people access housing by purchasing it on the market,” he wrote, “[and] toward a situation where the state guarantees high-quality housing to all.”

But Vienna’s housing system, widely cited by Mamdani, has been plagued by reports of rising rents, deteriorating buildings, and aging units without basic amenities like private bathrooms or central heating.

That didn’t dull his enthusiasm. He comes from a posh family—his mother, award-winning director Mira Nair, sold her Chelsea loft for $1.45 million in 2019—but Mamdani treats wealth itself as a form of theft. “Socialism doesn’t mean stealing money from the rich,” he wrote on X in 2020. “It means taking back money the rich stole from everyone else.” In another post: “Taxation isn’t theft. Capitalism is.”

He hasn’t disavowed those views. When asked on CNN last month whether he liked capitalism, Mamdani smiled. “No, I have many critiques of capitalism,” he said.

If elected, Mamdani plans to expand the public sector significantly—making all bus rides free, opening a city-run grocery store in every borough, and offering universal childcare.

“We don’t just need more accountability. We need fewer police.”

That’s what Mamdani tweeted in the summer of 2020, at the height of the George Floyd protests. He wasn’t subtle. “Defund the NYPD,” he wrote during a week of violent unrest across the country. A month later, he laid out a four-point plan to begin doing just that: freeze hiring, cancel overtime, halt equipment purchases, and slash $1 billion from the NYPD’s budget over four years—“to start,” he added.

In December 2020, he took his criticism a step further, calling the police force “haram.” Since then, and especially since Mamdani launched his mayoral campaign, his tone has shifted. On the debate stage, he said that “police have a critical role to play in public safety.” His platform no longer includes budget cuts. Instead, he proposes creating a new Department of Community Safety to handle gun violence and severe mental illness.

“May the light guide us to freedom, justice, and equality for all.”

That was Mamdani’s Hanukkah post in 2023. He often posts greetings for most major religious holidays—but only in his messages to Jews does he pair them with progressive political refrains. His Passover message in 2020 struck a similar note, ending with the activist slogan “until all of us are free.”

A few days earlier, he celebrated an endorsement from The Jewish Vote—a group affiliated with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, which later described the October 7 massacre by Hamas as “neither justifiable nor unprovoked.” At the time, Mamdani used the endorsement to affirm his opposition to antisemitism—but only while also condemning Islamophobia and condoning the struggle for “collective liberation.” When he has posted about Muslim holidays or his visits to various mosques, no such equivocation appears.

When Israel suffered the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, his first reaction was not to condemn the terrorists. In his statement on the Hamas attack, released October 8, 2023, Mamdani didn’t mention the word Hamas once. There was no reference to the Israeli women who were raped, the children who were kidnapped, or the festivalgoers who were gunned down.

Instead, Mamdani criticized Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and accused Israeli lawmakers of calling for “another Nakba.” A few days later, Mamdani claimed that Palestinians were on “the brink of genocide,” even though Israel had not begun its ground invasion. He was arrested for disorderly conduct at an anti-Israel demonstration.

Mamdani also amplified disputed or false claims about the war. He repeated the allegation that Israel bombed the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza, a narrative that international investigators have largely debunked. He reposted a claim that pro-Israel students had sprayed chemical weapons on anti-Israel demonstrators at Columbia University. It turned out to be fart spray.

He called Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib his heroes.

Mamdani has invoked Omar and Tlaib—two progressive lawmakers known for their opposition to Israel—nearly a dozen times. In most instances, he pointed to them as examples of the kind of leadership he aimed to bring to Queens.

“Growing up, I watched congressmen call for hearings on the radicalization of Muslims,” he wrote on X. “Today, I get to watch @IlhanMN & @RashidaTlaib grill corporate CEOs in hearings on behalf of working people.”

Then, before linking to his donation site, he added: “Help us follow in their footsteps.”

In another post, he wrote that Tlaib “proves another world is possible.” He paired it with the flag of the United Arab Emirates instead of Palestine. A commenter corrected him. Mamdani replied with a face-palm emoji.

Meet bayaye27.

That was Mamdani’s Instagram handle from 2015 to 2019, while he was building a rap career in Uganda. In Luganda, one of the major languages spoken in Uganda, bayaye loosely translates to thug. His 115 posts chronicled everything from CD hustling to coverage in the local press. In one selfie at a barber shop, he teased his upcoming look: “About to get that Bollywood villain mustache.”

At the top of the account, one image stood out: his profile picture, of a man in a red T-shirt with one word written across the chest: COMMUNIST. The man was not Mamdani—but Lil Wayne, clipped from a still of Jay Sean’s 2009 “Down” music video. In it, Wayne raps the lyrics “Honestly, I’m down like the economy” while pointing to the block letters on the T-shirt.

This wasn’t Mamdani’s only online alter ego. In college, he went by “TreyDadday” on Facebook. As a rapper, he adopted the stage name “Young Cardamom,” releasing tracks like “#1 Spice” and touring Kampala with his childhood friend turned producer Hussein Abdul Bar. Years later, he and Hussein referred to themselves on Instagram as “Buziga boys”—a nod to the ritzy neighborhood in Kampala where they both grew up, with a view of Lake Victoria and homes that today sell for more than $1 million.

“We believe in collective liberation.” 

That is a line from Mamdani’s proposal, “A Platform for Socialist Feminism,” a nearly 2,000-word plan that he released in April 2020, just weeks into the Covid-19 pandemic. While Republican-led states moved to restrict abortion access, Mamdani went in the opposite direction. His plan called for “free abortion on demand,” contraception access for illegal immigrants, and a total overhaul of the state’s prostitution laws.

Under capitalism, he wrote, gender equality was “impossible.” The only way forward, in his view, was to decriminalize “both the buying and selling of consensual sex.” In a section titled “Protect Sex Workers and End Violence Against Women and Nonbinary People,” Mamdani rejected the so-called Nordic Model, which makes it illegal to buy sex, but not to sell it. He called that model “untenable.”

“This model discriminates against women who have few other options to earn a living besides sex work,” he argued. “Sex workers can sell sex, but there’s no one to buy it. This disproportionately impacts trans women, migrant women, and street-based workers.”

Mamdani’s proposal didn’t gain much attention at the time. But in retrospect, it is striking—especially since residents in many parts of Queens are pushing back against the open sex trade. In Corona, which borders his state assembly district, residents have been pushing the city to clean up their streets. The majority of those residents are Hispanic. Since launching his mayoral campaign, Mamdani hasn’t highlighted the issue.

“I promised things that were simply impossible.”

That’s how Mamdani described his campaign platform—not for state assembly or mayor, but for vice president of the student council at the Bronx High School of Science. He told the story in two separate interviews with his high-school friend Daniel Kisslinger, years before Mamdani entered formal politics. In both interviews, Mamdani laughed about the promises he made: fresh juice every morning from locally sourced fruits, abolishing the school’s mandatory gym requirement, and a total overhaul of detention policies.

“I served 44 dean’s detentions by the time of my graduation,” he told Kisslinger in 2020.

“You were a detention abolitionist,” Kisslinger joked.

He lost that election—“Moon Jeong whooped my ass,” he admitted—but the story stuck. It painted a picture of a candidate with big ideas and a habit of making promises he couldn’t keep.

In another interview, this time with a Ugandan media outlet in 2016, Mamdani made a different kind of claim: that he had lived in Uganda his whole life. “While Uganda is my birthplace and home, I don’t have anything besides Kampala,” he said. “I’ve lived in Buziga since birth.”

That isn’t true. His official state assembly biography says that Mamdani moved to New York at the age of 7. He attended a private elementary school on the Upper West Side, then went on to Bronx Science and Bowdoin College, a liberal-arts school that has a $93,800 annual sticker price. By the time he gave that interview, he had spent more years in America than in Uganda.