‘Seize private property’: NYC’s socialist mayor taps communist sympathizer to lead office to ‘Protect Tenants’

New York City’s newly sworn-in Democratic Socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has already started taking steps to advance his radical agenda by selecting an anti-private-property extremist to lead the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants.

Mamdani announced on January 2 that Cea Weaver would join his team, noting that she had previously led Housing Justice for All, a coalition of groups representing tenants and homeless New Yorkers, and its sister organization, the New York State Tenant Bloc.

‘Private property including any kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy.’

Mamdani credited Weaver for helping to pass “landmark legislation that closed loopholes landlords used to raise rents and push apartments out of stabilization.”

“Now she’ll work with us to hold landlords accountable and ensure New York City tenants are living in safe, clean homes,” Mamdani wrote.

Following Weaver’s appointment, an undated video resurfaced on social media of the activist discussing her goal to eliminate private property ownership.

“I think the reality is, is that for centuries we’ve really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good,” Weaver stated in the video. “And transitioning to treating it as a collective good and towards a model of shared equity will require that we think about it differently. And it will mean that families, especially white families but some [people of color] families who are homeowners as well, are going to have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have.”

RELATED: ‘Money hungry Jews’: Mamdani appointee abruptly quits after her anti-Semitic online posts resurface

Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon reacted to the resurfaced video of Weaver.

“I don’t think so,” Dhillon wrote. “We have federal housing laws that trump any collective Marxist fantasies.”

Weaver once urged Americans to “elect more communists” in a 2017 post on her now-deactivated X account, the New York Post reported.

She also called to “seize private property.”

“Private property including any kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy,” Weaver reportedly wrote in 2019.

RELATED: Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs accuses NYC Mayor Mamdani of anti-Semitism after his first day in office

Zohran Mamdani. Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images

Weaver has previously expressed support for freezing rent, writing in a January 2025 post on Bluesky, “There are lots of things the mayor CANT [sic] do on housing, but freezing the rent is one of the only things they can unilaterally do for 2.4 million New York renters. Policy plans are great, so is a rent freeze.”

According to New York City’s Tenant Protection Cabinet, 65% of the city’s residents are renters.

Democrat Governor Kathy Hochul’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

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