Understanding Zohran Mamdani

Misunderstanding The Threat

Over the weekend, some accounts on X were surprised to see that Zohran Mamdani had campaigned at a gay club in New York. They shouldn't have been surprised. Mamdani isn't a devout Muslim, and the risk he represents isn't Sharia law, but a brand of anti-Western resentment known as Third Worldism. 

Zineb Riboua, an astute Moroccan writer, understands the ideology Mamdani represents, and was gracious enough to let us share her explanatory essay below. Before we get to it, a brief programming note as we head into a heavy earnings week. 

Applying Our Approach Ahead Of Earnings

Our Halloween post here documented the strong recent returns of our trading approach. 

In which we respond to a Zero Hedge commenter. https://t.co/Ucr9waId1W

— Portfolio Armor (@PortfolioArmor) October 31, 2025

That approach works well when harvesting elevated implied volatility ahead of earnings. We have two new trades teed up for later today that do just that. If you would like a heads up when we place them, feel free to sign up for the Portfolio Armor Substack/occasional email list below. 

Now on to Zineb Riboua's excellent essay on Mamdani. 

Authored by Zineb Riboua at Beyond the Ideological

Zohran Mamdani, Third-Worldism, and the Algerian Revolution

Third-World Resentment

“We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.”
― Marcel Proust

Mamdani’s Third-Worldism

Zohran Mamdani is routinely labeled a socialist or an Islamist sympathizer. The right brands him a radical. The establishment (whatever that vague term encompasses) casts him as a provocateur, a liar who eats with his hands for clout. But these tags overlook the deeper ideological current animating his worldview. Mamdani, in truth, draws from a very distinct left-wing tradition: Third-Worldism, a postcolonial moral project born in the mid-twentieth century that recast politics as a global uprising against Western hegemony.

I recognize this tradition viscerally. As a Moroccan, I grew up amid the lingering echoes of decolonization, which continue to mold perceptions of justice and power, albeit less overtly than in the West. I should say that I’m Berber, and I’ve always felt somewhat detached from that way of thinking. From high school onward, Third World rhetoric permeated everyday discourse on climate change, Palestine, or inequality. The issues evolve, but the lens persists, as it’s fundamentally a moral binary logic that divides the powerful from the powerless.

Mamdani’s speeches evoke that same architecture of thought. His convictions echo the Algerian Revolution’s core belief that the oppressed occupy history’s moral vanguard and that their liberation redeems human dignity. In the United States, a nation without colonies, he adapts this anti-imperial ethos to a society steeped in guilt and redemption narratives. Mamdani repurposes the lexicon of Third-World liberation for American soil, transforming decolonization into a scaffold for moral and political identity.

In general, the perennial political challenge lies in identifying one’s true adversary. Each era masks its conflicts, and ours is even more difficult given the trickeries of language. Anglo-American conservatives, trained to debate policies and principles, are unprepared for this kind of politics. They face a movement that treats moral certainty as innocence or the pursuit of “real justice” and disarms opposition by framing power as compassion or the pursuit of “real common good”. Wokeism was only the beginning, showing that moral language can sustain ideology more effectively than doctrine or policy. Mamdani represents the next stage. He turns this moral framework into political practice, carrying it beyond culture and identity into economics and foreign affairs.

Algerian Revolution and Mamdani’s Language

It is worth examining the language that shaped Zohran Mamdani’s worldview, a language that first crystallized in the late 1950s during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). Thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Jean-Paul Sartre transformed anti-colonial resistance into a moral epic, portraying liberation not only as political emancipation but as the rebirth of the human spirit itself.

In the Francophone world, the tradition survived through networks of writers, students, and militants who kept the spirit of decolonization alive after independence. The ethos of the Algerian struggle carried into the May 1968 uprisings in France, when young people turned their anger at De Gaulle’s authority into a broader revolt against capitalism and Europe’s moral exhaustion. Many in Paris saw themselves as heirs to anti-imperial liberation, replacing distant colonial wars with domestic cultural rebellion. From that point on, the language of decolonization merged with the language of personal emancipation and identity, dissolving the boundary between private grievance and global injustice. It was the end of the beginning, the moment the revolutionary gave way to the citizen activist.

Which is why what Mamdani represents is not a new movement but the return of an older sensibility that America itself once resisted and outlasted. His stances on housing, policing, and Palestine channel global anti-imperial heritage into American realities. The landlord morphs into the colonizer, the tenant into the colonized. The NYPD becomes the occupier. New York’s boroughs serve as metaphorical battlegrounds in the decolonization process. It transcends socialism, unmoored from class or ownership, and eludes Islamism, unbound by theocratic aims. Here, Islam serves as an emblem of subjugation with universal resonance, a faith recast as resistance and moral cohesion against Western dominance.

This idea of spiritual resistance belongs to the same moral tradition that once inspired pro-revolutionary thinkers. Jean-Paul Sartre, writing in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), perfectly captured the intellectual mood that birthed this tradition:

“The Third World finds itself and speaks to itself through his voice. We know that it is not a homogeneous world; we know too that enslaved peoples are still to be found there, together with some who have achieved a simulacrum of phoney independence, others who are still fighting to attain sovereignty and others again who have obtained complete freedom but who live under the constant menace of imperialist aggression. These differences are born of colonial history, in other words of oppression.”

This passage reveals how Western intellectuals projected a redemptive, almost spiritual quality onto the struggles of the colonized. For Sartre, the Third World was not just a geopolitical zone. It was the new subject of history, the moral substitute for the exhausted European left. The future of politics. That moralization of politics, where suffering becomes the ultimate source of legitimacy, is precisely what survives in Mamdani’s rhetoric.

The Algerian Revolution, not the Iranian one, is the real origin of this sensibility. The Iranian Revolution unsettled the Western left because it spoke in religious terms, while the Algerian struggle was secular and universal, allowing French and Western radicals to identify with it. Fanon’s idea of violence and Sartre’s defense of it turned Algeria into a moral event that promised redemption for both colonized and colonizer. It deserves closer study because it remains the clearest expression of Third-Worldist politics, uniting anti-imperial struggle with the quest for moral renewal. Today, it is often overlooked, overshadowed by the Iranian Revolution and by newer decolonial theories that ignore its intellectual depth.

Mamdani keeps that dynamic alive in a new setting.

The Jew, the Israeli, and Mamdani’s Third Worldism

But what I find notable is that Zohran Mamdani found his audience at a moment when that voice had returned to prominence. The aftermath of October 7 and the surge of anti-Zionist activism on university campuses created the perfect moral terrain for his message. Across American institutions, decolonization has shifted from academic theory to political instinct, giving young activists an ethical framework for interpreting conflict. Mamdani speaks that language fluently.

He channels the same emotional power that once animated anti-imperial movements, but now within the American political system. In this moral landscape, Israel holds a special place. It stands as the final embodiment of Western domination, a state seen as the successor to the colonial powers that once resisted by the Third World.

During the Algerian War of Independence, that same struggle against Europe often blurred into hostility toward Jewish communities. When independence came in 1962, violence against Jews in Algeria accelerated their mass exodus to France. The revolution’s rhetoric of liberation carried an undercurrent of exclusion that cast the Jew as Europe’s privileged double. Many Algerian Jews were poor and socially marginalized, but they were depicted as embodiments of colonial privilege and moral complicity, seen as sharing in the power that oppressed them.

This pattern extended across the post-colonial world. From the 1960s onward, Third-Worldist movements increasingly framed their politics through anti-Zionism, portraying Israel as the last fortress of Western imperialism and Palestinian resistance as the moral center of a global struggle. Mamdani draws directly from this legacy.

In his politics, Israel becomes the final expression of colonial Europe, and the Jew is recast not as a victim but as a symbol of enduring Western power. Opposition to Israel thus functions as a continuation of decolonization, a moral conflict that transforms the old fight against empire into a permanent contest between innocence and guilt.

Conservatives often fail to grasp these shifts, and Anglo-Americans even more so. They treat Third-Worldism as a policy platform when it operates as a moral creed. Its power lies not in practical solutions but in its claim to moral purity and its ability to turn resentment into virtue. Universities have nurtured this sensibility for decades, replacing historical complexity with ideological certainty and teaching generations to interpret politics through the binary of victim and oppressor. Mamdani’s rise is the political outcome of that education.

Ms. Riboua wrote a follow up post to this, "Zohran Mamdani, Islam as Language, American Third-Worldism" which you can read on her Substack here.