This Is The Beginning of The End of The 9/11 Era

Edited by Sam Thielman

EVER SINCE I WROTE REIGN OF TERROR, people have asked me how we end the long 9/11 era. Someone asked me a version of that question tonight, at my Anyone Comics signing. I gave the answer I always give, the only answer I believe to be true: Organize.

The inertial forces of capital, militarism and nativism will keep the War on Terror on its present trajectory. We have seen time and again since 9/11 how they consolidate their hold over both political parties, no matter how much the voters of those parties want peace, freedom, prosperity and genuine security. Against these forces we have ourselves. But if we organize, we can win.

And tonight, against all odds, against DoorDash, against Michael Bloomberg, against Bill Ackman, against Palantir's Alex Karp, against Andrew Cuomo, against the Murdoch media behemoth, against Bill Clinton, against Jim Clyburn, against the entire Democratic Party, Zohran Mamdani will win the Democratic nomination for mayor. The ranked-vote total will confirm it; Cuomo stunningly conceded the nomination. 

For three weeks, every time I turned on the local news, every time I turned on a basketball or a baseball game, every time I loaded a YouTube video, every time I went to my mailbox, I saw those forces call Zohran Mamdani a dangerous, antisemitic jihadi. When I went out to do some poll visibility for Mamdani earlier today, one of the very few people who expressed hostility to Zohran hissed at me that Mamdani was flirting with a slogan that meant killing Jews. They threw 9/11 Politics, in both its 2001 version and its 10/7 variant, at Zohran. They willingly endangered New York Muslims, people like Mahmoud Khalil who are being grabbed off the street, by stoking these flames. That danger was never once part of the journalistic coverage of the election, which preferred to deceitfully present antizionism as antisemitism. [Khalil was finally allowed to spend the night with his eight-week-old son for the first time this past Friday—Sam]

They did it because it usually works. As community organizer Bobby Khan understatedly recalled for me in 2021, after 9/11 New York's Muslims "did not see solidarity here." 9/11 politics transformed Cordoba House into the Ground Zero Mosque. 9/11 politics—not only them, but them—made Donald Trump president.

And tonight, Zohran Mamdani is on the verge of sitting in the seat of Rudy Giuliani. 

It is important, it is revealing, and it is crucial to observe who played 9/11 Politics against Zohran. Who made a deliberate point of trying to make Jews like me hate and fear Zohran. It was DoorDash, Bloomberg, Ackman, Karp, and the rest. It was capital. 9/11 Politics were their means to divide the people of this city so they can continue conquering it. To keep the most vibrant city on earth out of reach of the working people—and particularly the immigrants and their children—who create its vibrancy. To keep New York what Bloomberg once called "a luxury product." 

Let it sink in: In an era of obscene wealth consolidation, in a prolonged period of soul-crushing unaffordability, capital needs the politics of 9/11 to divide the people of New York from living the lives we deserve.

But in the home of 9/11, the place of the lost towers, we're still banging. We never lost power.  Welcome to New York City. 

While I was out in the baking heat today volunteering for Zohran, the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal flashed a notification on my phone. It read: New York's housing crisis has gotten so bad that a socialist might become mayor. And just like that, even a Murdoch paper could understand historical materialism. 

Capital has ground New York down so deeply that the people who live here will not take it anymore. 

Mamdani wanted this fight, he waged it, and he won it. He did what the people's playbook said it would take to win it: He organized thoroughly, mobilized relentlessly, and promised the working class deliverable policies needed to keep their lives within their grasp—lower rent; free childcare; fast and free buses; cheaper groceries through public stores—despite the entire political and economic establishments laughing at those policies and those needs. He did not shy away from these needs. He championed them.

Usually the Democratic nomination in New York City is the mayoral election. That won't be the case this year. The Democratic Party machinery will be as intransigent as possible. Capital will flood into this race as never before. The fear-mongering of these past three weeks is likely nothing compared to the way they are going to call a Bronx Science grad who raps about his grandmother a terrorist who will kill Jews. 

They will do all of this because they see what the people of New York did tonight as a test case. And they are correct. If a socialist can wrest power from the servants of oligarchy in the financial capital of the world—well, my friends around this country, around this world, what can you do to take the power back from them where you live? 

And the advancement of that movement—for socialism, for freedom, for social peace, for the unity of the multiethnic working class—is how we end the 9/11 Era. Not shallow declarations by Security State-allegiant politicians funded by AIPAC that merely look toward the next war. By organizing and outcompeting them. It made my Jewish heart grow three sizes to see Jacob Kornbluh report that Mamdani has overperformed in Borough Park and Midwood. On NY1, Mamdani ally Ali Najmi turned to the camera and told Eric Adams, who will run as a third-party candidate in the general election—as Cuomo yet may—"You are not ready for us." 

But me? As a 45-year old native Brooklynite who is raising his children here? I've waited my whole life for this. Every hour of the long, long 24 years since 9/11 in particular, I've waited. For long, gloomy periods of my life I convinced myself something like this just wasn't possible. But if we organize, we can win. 

As Mamdani put it in his victory speech, it is time for the city of New York "to stop Donald Trump's fascism." 

It's just getting started. It's a long way to November, and whatever comes after. But after the long, dark midnight of 9/11, if you squint hard enough, dawn is breaking.