New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was confronted on past statements by Cea Weaver, who he tapped to be the director of Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants, as well as those of other appointees, during "The View" on Tuesday.
"Some appointees have come under fire for past social media posts, this often happens when new administrations come in," co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin said. "Your new chief equity officer made several now-deleted comments disparaging liberal White women. Your tenant advocate tweeted that homeownership was a weapon of White supremacy and called to elect more communists, among other posts. What message do you think this conveys to New Yorkers, and how would you push back on this ?"
Mamdani said New Yorkers would find his opinions in his own words.
"What I would say is that if you want to know my views or my opinions, you'll find them in my words as the mayor of New York City, and I'm someone who's looking to make the city that every New Yorker can afford. That includes those who are tenants, those who are homeowners. Those who aspire to be homeowners," he said.
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Mamdani then provided an explanation of what the Office to Protect Tenants has done so far.
"The mayor's office to protect tenants, the executive director that we hired 20 days ago. In those 20 days, we have taken on a landlord that had more violations than I could count, and we have secured $30 million in guaranteed repairs for thousands of those violations, and sometimes when a politician tells you this, it sounds intangible. It just sounds like stats and statistics that you'll never feel and know," he said.
Weaver, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, has gone viral for multiple statements she posted to social media.
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A screenshot of an Aug. 21, 2019, post shows Weaver writing that "private property including and kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as 'wealth building' public policy."
In a post from Dec. 18, 2017, Weaver also called to "elect more communists."
In a DSA video from March 2021 that has since gone viral, Weaver said, "I think the reality is that for centuries, we have really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good."
She went on to say that "transitioning to treating it as a collective good towards a model of shared equity, will require that we think about it differently."
During his interview on "The View," Mamdani also said he supported abolishing ICE.
