A senior adviser to Mayor Zohran Mamdani pulling in a $185,000 salary repeatedly praised “gay communism” and called for abolishing the police in deleted social media posts, a new report said.
Lena Afridi, a self proclaimed “gay communist” who uses they/them pronouns, was hired to advise “on responses to federal intervention” for First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan according to an April LinkedIn post.
Afridi is listed as an editor at Pinko magazine which has described itself as “communism for fags” and a “collective for thinking gay communism.”
“What do we mean by communism? Something like the freedom not to have to seek our lives on the market, attained through the abolition of all forms of private property, family and the state,” Pinko wrote in a 2019 blog post.
Afridi lavished support for “gay communism” and even posted a brief eulogy for Rita ‘Bo’ Brown — a former member of a violent 1970s Marxist organization — in deleted social media posts recovered by The Washington Free Beacon, which first reported the news.
“RIP to Rita Bo Brown, a militant butch working class revolutionary and one of the founders of the George Jackson Brigade,” Afridi wrote on X.
“On a personal note, outside of work: while I believe that defunding the NYPD is absolutely necessary in order to get much needed resources to the people, I *also* believe that the only way to achieve true liberation is not through reform but abolition of the police,” the Mamdani staffer posted.
Afridi also described Aaron Bushnell, the US Air Force serviceman who died after setting himself outside the Israel Embassy in Washington D.C., as someone who “died for truth” and is “venerated across the world” in a piece for Acacia Magazine.
Afridi even once told people to “Stop glorifying Gandhi” because he was a “racist anti-Black misogynist” in other deleted posts.
Afridi is the latest City Hall hire who scrubbed their bonkers social media posts before taking their positions.
Mamdani Chief Equity Officer deleted posts calling to tax wealthy people “to the white meat” and “there’s NO moderate way to black liberation” before being tapped for the job.
Cea Weaver, director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, infamously wrote that homeownership was a “weapon of white supremacy” in now deleted posts
City Hall and Afridi didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
