❓WHAT HAPPENED: Socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) has announced the appointment of Cea Weaver as the director of the newly revitalized Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, sparking controversy over her past social media posts attacking white middle-class homeowners and calling for the government seizure of private property.
👤WHO WAS INVOLVED: Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Cea Weaver, and Deputy Mayor for Housing and Planning Leila Bozorg.
📍WHEN & WHERE: Weaver’s appointment was announced on January 1, 2026, by Mamdani, with her deleted social media posts reemerging over the days that followed.
💬KEY QUOTE: “Impoverish the *white* middle class. Homeownership is racist / failed public policy.” — Cea Weaver
🎯IMPACT: Weaver’s racially charged and politically radical past statements have raised questions about her suitability for the role and the direction of housing policy in New York City, and fit a pattern of Mamdani tapping far-left ideologues to serve in his administration.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani‘s appointment of Cea Weaver as the director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants is drawing intense pushback after now-deleted social media posts authored by Weaver expressing anti-white and pro-communist views resurfaced following her nomination on January 1, 2026. Weaver, like Mamdani, is a member of the far-left Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and a long-time progressive housing activist with numerous public statements in support of Marxist collectivization policies.
“Private property including and kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building’ pubic policy,” Weaver wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter) in August 2019. Meanwhile, in a November 2018 social media post, she endorsed the adoption of government policies aimed at stripping the white-middle class of wealth, writing: “Impoverish the *white* middle class. Homeownership is racist / failed public policy.”
In a July 2018 post, Mamdani’s new director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants stated, “There is no such thing as a ‘good’ gentrifier, only people who are actively working on projects to dismantle white supremacy and capitalism and people who aren’t.” A month earlier, Weaver had called for the government seizure of private property.
Especially troubling is a 2017 post where Weaver calls on voters to elect more communists to government, and for white men to be barred from public office. She added in another social media missive that, “this country built wealth for white people through genocide, slavery, stolen land & labor. white supremacy built the north and the south.”
As late as 2022, Weaver was still publicly calling for economic collectivization, stating in a podcast interview, “I think the reality is that for centuries we’ve really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good. And transitioning to treating it as a collective good and towards a model of shared equity will require that we think about it differently and it will mean that families—especially white families, but some POC families who are homeowners as well—are going to have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have.”
Weaver is just one of several controversial appointees announced by Mamdani since winning last November’s New York City mayoral race. In December, Catherine Almonte Da Costa—tapped by Mamdani to serve as his Director of Appointments—was forced to resign before ever formally taking the position after anti-Semitic social media posts she had made resurfaced.
Additionally, his choice of Mysonne Linen, a 49-year-old former armed robber, to advise his administration on criminal justice policy has drawn significant public criticism, along with his naming of Ramzi Kassem—known for his legal advocacy on behalf of accused Islamist terrorists—as New York City’s chief counsel.
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