JD Vance Calls Mamdani ‘The Guy Who Wants to Take All Property Away from White People’

I know it’s been more than a year, but I remain in disbelief over how we ended up with a sexual predator and convicted felon in office, a federal health official whose brain was partly eaten by a worm, an FBI agent who’s lauded QAnon, and a defense secretary who was nicknamed “Kavanaugh on steroids”; yet it appears that we’ve finally found someone with a history so controversial that MAGA is upset. Her crime? Advocating for affordable housing.

Hours after he was inaugurated on Thursday, Jan.1, Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D-New York) named housing advocate Cea Weaver the Director of the Office to Protect Tenants. Weaver, in a collection of now-deleted social media posts that were mostly published before 2020, had previously railed against homeownership in New York, calling it a “weapon of white supremacy,” urging people to “impoverish” the white middle class,” and writing that the city should “elect more Communists” and “seize private property.”

Weaver’s comments have since resurfaced. On Wednesday, when Fox News anchor Jesse Watters asked Vice President JD Vance about Mamdani (“Have you been watching this New York Mayor Mamdani guy?”), Vance replied, laughing, “The guy who wants to take all property away from white people? Yeah. He seems pretty out there, right?” Yeah, right—as if Vance doesn’t obsess, presumably every night, about the fact that Trump seems to prefer Mamdani’s company to his own. The segment was titled “VANCE ON THE COMMIE TAKING OVER NYC.”

WATTERS: Have you been watching this New York Mayor Mamdani guy?

JD VANCE: Heh heh heh. The guy who wants to take all property away from white people? pic.twitter.com/DDb7ttbuIB

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 8, 2026

Speaking to Inside City Hall on Tuesday, Weaver said she regrets her old social media posts, and Mamdani has since defended her appointment, with spokeswoman Dora Pekec saying, “She was vetted. We were aware of all of these tweets.”

And, for what it’s worth, the connection between race and housing has long plagued the U.S., and in 2024, a report by the National Fair Housing Alliance found that the rate of white homeownership was 60% higher than Black ownership. (In 2019, the rate of white homeownership was 80% higher than Black ownership.)

Naturally, MAGA is having none of it. On Monday, the white supremacist (right-wing provocateur) Laura Loomer—spelling Mamdani’s middle name wrong—tweeted that Weaver’s comments entail that he “must relinquish ownership of [his] family’s luxury gated compound,” adding that “your POC status does not exempt you from the rules being applied to white people.” Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Department of Justice Harmeet Dhillon chimed in on Tuesday, tweeting, “New York: Consider this your official notice from [the DOJ.] We will NOT tolerate discrimination based on skin color. It is ILLEGAL.”

In Wednesday’s Fox News interview, Watters also asked Vance if Mamdani is a threat. “I mean, you live in New York, he’s a threat to you, I’d say,” he replied. “He sounds like a total crazy person who wants to take your house away because you have the wrong skin color. That’s not a threat to me politically, but a threat to our country.” Again, Vance is probably just butthurt that Trump gave Mamdani more attention in 24 hours than he’s given Vance in two years.

Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, largely focused his campaign on affordable housing, a dire issue for NYC, where the typical household spends more than half of its income on rent and up to 100,000 people are without housing. He won in a landslide victory in November, and has since signed two executive orders to reduce fees and subscription prices for essential goods and services. Sure sounds like a threat to me.

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