It's No Longer About Policy

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A HARD PILL TO SWALLOW
_It's No Longer About Policy_

THE TERRIFYING TRUTH ABOUT MAMDANI VOTERS

_They didn’t vote for him because of policy. They voted for him
because, in their ideology, “that’s what good people do.” Voting
is no longer about competence and credentials; it’s cartoon
politics._

JOSHUA HOFFMAN | FUTURE OF JEWISH
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| NOVEMBER 15, 2025

There is a particular kind of ideological possession sweeping through
the West — one that convinces people that compassion means cruelty,
that justice means double standards, and that moral clarity comes
prepackaged in slogans.

It has claimed professors, students, politicians, and influencers.

And last Thanksgiving, I learned that it claimed my littlest sister.
Not all at once. Not with a dramatic declaration. But in the casual
confidence with which she said something she would’ve condemned in
anyone else, unaware that she was speaking a language she didn’t
create and defending a worldview she was brainwashed to choose.

I don’t speak with her anymore. That unraveling began last November.
The moment still feels surreal. The kitchen was warm, the table
half-set at our mother’s house. And then suddenly her boyfriend was
in my face, raising his voice, trying to dominate the space with sheer
aggression.

The spark for this absurd encounter? A conversation about Denver. They
had just come from visiting there and were deciding whether to stay in
New York City or move to Colorado. My sister said they didn’t like
it in Denver, and someone asked why. My sister shrugged and said,
“There’s no culture there.”

I asked, completely surprised by her statement, what she meant by
that. So she added, “There’s too many white people there.” I
remember pausing — not offended, just startled by the casual
arrogance of it, by a _white_ person herself making such a statement.
“So white people don’t have culture?” I asked.

She doubled down, annoyed that I dared to question what had become an
article of faith in her ideological universe. In their framework,
saying something blatantly racist about white people isn’t racist at
all; it’s righteous. It’s punching “up.” It’s
“progressive.” And if you question it, you’re the problem.

My question wasn’t even confrontational; it was a simple request for
clarification. But the moment the words left my mouth, her face
changed. Not because I’d said anything wrong, but because she
suddenly realized — in a room filled mostly with white people —
what she had just said sounded exactly like the thing she claims to
oppose.

So she did what people do when they’ve absorbed a worldview that
can’t withstand its own reflection: She fled. She got up abruptly
and ran to the bathroom, shut the door, and started crying. Not the
tears of someone truly hurt, but the panicked, self-protective tears
of someone who has realized they violated their own ideology’s rules
and doesn’t know how to recover. She wasn’t crying because of me;
she was crying because she’d been caught. She’d made a blatantly
racist statement and, for the first time, didn’t have an approved
script to hide behind.

She knew her boyfriend couldn’t rescue her with one of his canned
lectures about power dynamics. She knew she couldn’t claim
victimhood. She couldn’t brand me a bigot. She couldn’t twist the
meaning of her own words into something noble or “anti-racist.”
Not in front of a table of white Jewish family members who were just
staring at her, confused, waiting for her to explain why what she said
wasn’t what it obviously was.

What she felt in that bathroom wasn’t guilt; it was exposure.
Exposure to herself, to her own hypocrisy, to the years of being
molded by her black boyfriend that there’s something “wrong”
with being “white.”

A few minutes later, he said to me, in front of everyone, “Josh, you
can’t talk to your sister like that.” Like what? Like asking her
to explain her own words? Like holding her to the same standard she
pretends to hold everyone else to? I can’t call out racism in
whatever form it may be?

The irony was almost too thick to swallow. Here was a man who treats
race like a weapon he’s entitled to swing at anyone he wants, trying
to scold me for pointing out an obviously racist statement made at a
family dinner table that he’s a guest at.

According to him, and apparently now according to her, racism isn’t
about what you say; it’s about who says it. Saying something
derogatory about white people is somehow “speaking truth to
power.” If my sister had said it in safe company, it would’ve been
“calling out white privilege.” But because she said it in front of
actual white people — people who weren’t going to nod along like
trained seals — suddenly I was the villain for noticing.

In his mind, I was supposed to absorb her contradiction silently.
Pretend it wasn’t racist because her “I have a black boyfriend”
credentials rendered her incapable of bigotry. Pretend identity grants
immunity. Pretend the moral universe revolves around whatever script
he’s memorized from Instagram or the latest “anti-racism”
workshop.

The way he said it, too — “You can’t talk to your sister like
that” — as if I’d raised my voice, insulted her, demeaned her.
As if pointing out hypocrisy is a form of verbal assault. His tone
carried that smug implication that he alone knows how family dynamics
should work, that he’s the enlightened one, and the rest of us are
dangerously behind on the latest ideological software updates.

He wanted me to bow to a reality where accountability is oppression
and calling someone’s bluff is abuse. Where truth is optional, but
feelings — selective, curated feelings — are sacred. Where my
sister, an adult capable of voting, theorizing, moralizing, and
debating, must suddenly be treated like a fragile child the moment her
own logic collapses.

What he was really saying wasn’t: “You can’t talk to your sister
like that.” It was: “You’re not allowed to disrupt the narrative
we rely on.”

And that, more than anything, revealed the hollowness of the ideology
they share. A worldview that can’t survive a single clarifying
question isn’t a worldview; it’s a costume. And he, standing there
puffed-up and aggrieved, was its most loyal enforcer.

That’s when I told him, “If my sister doesn’t like the way I
talk to her, she can tell me herself.” You’d think I slapped him.
He did not like that one bit.

His posture shifted. His voice tightened. And then — and this part
was almost surreal — he turned on his Nigerian accent. Not his
regular way of speaking, not the voice he’d been using all dinner
and in every previous conversation I’ve had with him in the seven
years they’ve been together. No. He reached for that deep, heavy,
“authoritative” version of it that he clearly used as a tool. A
show of force. A way to signal dominance, intimidation, superiority
— all wrapped in cultural performance.

It was jarring. A minute earlier he sounded like any other American
guy. Suddenly he was doing a whole different character, as if an
accent could be a weapon.

And in that moment I realized something I hadn’t fully put words to
before: He wasn’t defending my sister. He wasn’t even engaging
with the actual conversation. He was trying to assert power — _his_
power — in a room where he assumed he could win automatic moral high
ground simply by being the black man calling out the “white” guy.
It was identity politics distilled down into a single, awkward dinner
table standoff.

Except it didn’t land. And he could feel it. And that made him even
angrier.

I later wondered what would have happened if I had said the exact
mirror image of her sentence: “I visited New York City and didn’t
like it because there’s too many black people and no culture.” Her
boyfriend would have exploded — which, to be clear, would be
understandable. But somehow, when the sentence is flipped, when the
target is “white,” many people now believe it’s acceptable, even
enlightened.

Two days later, I heard that my sister retold the story to our
step-sister (another white person), and that’s when the real break
happened. My sister said to our step-sister, “Can you believe that
Josh actually thinks white people have culture?”

The sentence wasn’t just ignorant; it was evidence of a worldview
that eats away at basic human connection. This is the intellectual
decay that passes for sophistication among many Zohran Mamdani voters:
a worldview where education means indoctrination, where intelligence
is measured by fluency in fashionable resentments, where moral virtue
is earned through loud allegiance to the “right” causes.

My sister went to one of the top universities in America, and yet she
has absorbed ideas that collapse under the slightest pressure. But
maybe that’s the point. Ideology gives people like her something
intoxicating: fake certainty without real responsibility. A hollow
script. A wannabe tribe. An identity filled with contradiction and
hypocrisy.

And for many young Jews, this ideology comes with an additional twist,
what I’d call weaponized guilt. To be a young, “progressive” Jew
today often means proving you are _not_ “one of those Zionist
Jews,” that you’ve shed your own people’s history to align with
the “real oppressed.” Supporting politicians like Zohran Mamdani
becomes a way of laundering identity, of signaling purity, of winning
social approval. It’s a way of stepping outside the crosshairs of a
culture that treats Jews as honorary oppressors unless they loudly
renounce their own people.

This is why she didn’t vote for Mamdani because of policy. She voted
for him because, in her ideological ecosystem, “that’s what good
people do.” Voting is no longer about the real world; it’s about
belonging to “the tribe.” About showing loyalty to a narrative.
About displaying the correct moral posture.

There is a psychological reward structure to it: the rush of feeling
righteous, the relief of outsourcing complexity to prepackaged
slogans, the addictive comfort of being part of a cause that requires
no introspection. In this framework, contradictions don’t matter.
Double standards are not bugs; they’re features. Racism is redefined
not by content, but by direction. People are not individuals;
they’re categories. Responsibility is optional, while victimhood is
currency.

Try challenging any of this and watch the transformation: The person
you once knew becomes an ideological avatar, speaking in borrowed
phrases, reacting not as themselves, but as a representative of a
worldview that has colonized their mind. It’s frightening. It’s
sad. It’s happening everywhere.

This is why I’m not entirely convinced that Mamdani voters were
driven by “economic anxiety.” You’ve heard the script: “New
York City is too expensive, rent is too high, people are struggling,
that’s why they voted for change.” That might be true for some
people, but I know it’s not true for my sister and her boyfriend,
both of whom work in tech and make at least $200,000 per year. And I
read somewhere that post-election polling showed the majority of
Mamdani voters earn over $100,000 per year.

So I’m telling you what it seems few people want to say out loud: A
huge chunk of Mamdani supporters didn’t vote for him because of
policy, or competence, or even a coherent vision for the city. They
voted for him because he’s “a person of color.” Full stop. That
was the whole metric. That was the qualification. A box checked. An
identity-slot machine pulled for moral points.

It’s the most shallow, least imaginative, intellectually laziest
reason to vote for someone — but in certain circles, it gets framed
as deep, righteous, enlightened, “progressive.” It’s not. It’s
cartoon politics. It’s the equivalent of choosing a book because you
liked the cover and then pretending you studied the contents.

This is the mental universe so many people like my sister and her
boyfriend inhabit: ideology first, reality and logic … maybe never.

I didn’t lose my sister to New York City, or to her boyfriend’s
warped view of the world, or even to a political argument. I lost her
to a belief system that promises moral trophies, that teaches people
their families are relics, their histories burdens, their identities
negotiable, their ancestors embarrassments. It’s a belief system
that tells Jews that the only acceptable way to be Jewish is to be
quiet about it, or to be “anti-Zionist.”

Can you imagine telling black people to be quiet about being black, or
to be anti-Africa? Half of the United States would be engulfed in
flames by end of day tomorrow.

If my sister ever steps out of the bubble that taught her to see
herself as a villain and her boyfriend as the moral compass of every
room, I’ll be here. I’m not unreachable. I’m simply unwilling to
be around people who think whiteness is a cardinal sin and
self-respect is rebranded as oppression.

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