January 7, 2026

CHECKING IN WITH THE THEATER KIDS: Mamdani’s Commie Housing Official Is a Lunatic.

Venture aloud that the new mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, might just have a touch of the communist about him, and you will run immediately into a wall of indignant pedantry. “He’s not a communist,” his apologists will insist. He’s a “communitarian.” Other preferred substitutions include “collectivist,” “Fabian,” “democratic socialist,” and, in the less intellectually inclined depths of the well, “just, like, someone who cares about other people.”

Whatever. A commie by any other name still smells as foul. Besides, far more important than whether Mamdani wishes to be more closely associated with the Judean People’s Front or the People’s Front of Judea is what he is actually doing with his power — and, alas, what Mamdani is actually doing with his power is appointing lunatics such as Cea Weaver to run the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. Given that New York City has more people living in rented housing than any other American city has residents, this is a position from which a great deal of mischief can be made.

If Cea Weaver did not exist, one would be hard-pressed to invent her. Weaver seems to have been designed in a laboratory to work in the Ideological Compliance Department of the East German Kommunale Wohnungsverwaltung, but, as the result of an unfortunate accident with a time machine, ended up overseeing housing policy in the most important city in the United States.

That may be close to what happened to Weaver. According to the Daily Mail, in their article yesterday headlined, “Breathtaking hypocrisy of woke NYC mayoral aide who says whites owning homes is racist… as her $1.4m secret is revealed:”

New York City’s new renters’ tsar wasted no time in outraging locals by vowing to make life harder for whites in the Big Apple over their role in ‘racist gentrification.’

But Cea Weaver has kept strangely quiet about her own mother – a white professor who owns a gorgeous $1.4 million home in America’s fastest gentrifying city, where longtime black residents are quickly being priced out.

The hardline leftist’s mother Celia Applegate, a professor [of] German Studies at prestigious Vanderbilt University, resides at a pretty, roomy 1930s Craftsman home in one of Nashville’s leafiest neighborhoods.

Here’s the Webpage for Celia Applegate, Professor of German Studies at Vanderbilt:

The history of Germany in the 20th century is one of massive state-sanctioned property theft in both err, post-Weimar Germany, and the Soviet satellite state that succeeded it in East Germany. How much does Cea Weaver root for the Stasi when she pops The Lives of Others into the Blu-Ray player?

So what about dad? In a post headlined “Crybully: Mamdani’s Tenant Advocate Breaks Down When Confronted About Hypocrisy,” Ed Morrissey adds:

Sohrab Ahmari asks the right question:

Is Weaver mentally unstable? She certainly seems unprepared for the job, which is public-facing and substantial enough to deal with the media. Weaver was adept enough to scrub her social media after the election, but it turned out to be too late. Michelle Tandler kept a lot of receipts, which she posted in a lengthy thread on Monday. However, the first tweet has the right context for today’s events, given the “gentrifier” declaration she made in 2018:

Ed asks, “Was that aimed at her parents? Or was it just empty sloganeering from someone who never imagined that she would be held accountable for her public statements?”

It could be the former: Newsweek notes that “Weaver’s father, Stewart Weaver, was reported in 2023 to own a home in Rochester, according to real estate publication The Real Deal. At the time, a spokesperson for Housing Justice for All, an organization Cea Weaver worked for at the time, told the publication that Stewart Weaver ‘manages an additional rental property with a family member.’”

More on Weaver and her astonishing vocal fryyyyyyy from Megyn Kelly and Mark Helprin:

UPDATE:

To be fair, that’s a slightly less extreme aviation position than AOC, 2019’s New Socialist It Girl, who wanted to ban commercial flight entirely that year: The 10 Most Insane Requirements Of The Green New Deal. “Eliminate air travel. GND calls for building out ‘highspeed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.’ Good luck Hawaii! California’s high-speed boondoggle is already in $100 billion dollars of debt, and looks to be one of the state’s biggest fiscal disasters ever. Amtrak runs billions of dollars in the red (though, as we’ll see, trains that run on fossil fuels will also be phased out). Imagine growing that business model out to every state in America?”

Posted at 9:16 pm by Ed Driscoll