POLITICS: Zohran Mamdani’s other baggage — bringing a socialist army to City Hall

Zohran Mamdani may be a lightweight in his own right, but as mayor he’d bring an entire extremist movement along with him to City Hall, with dire consequences for the city.

Mamdani can hedge and haw all he likes, but he’s the face of a truly radical movement, the Democratic Socialists of America — which boasts of being truly anti-capitalist and indeed looking to “seize the means of production,” which is as Marxist as anyone could ask.

Zohran himself just a few years ago lectured about how socialists needed to be honest about these goals; that he’s changed his tune merely means he’s now more interested in winning elections.

After all, this is a guy who’s said that identifying himself as African-American just because he was born in Uganda would be fundamentally “misleading” — but did just that when applying to Columbia.

As mayor, he would at the very least bring a host of fellow DSA believers to the highest reaches of city government.

And the DSA is a lot harder left than the Working Families Party, which has always been mainly a vehicle for unions and other “progressive” special interests to boost their influence.

The DSA’s constitution is frank about the party’s beliefs: “We reject an economic order based on private profit”; it seeks a “social order based on popular control of resources and production” and “economic planning.”

As Santiago Vidal Calvo notes for The Post, these ideas have wrought disaster wherever tried — impoverishing society as a whole even as the socialist elite prospers.

Already, ex-Rep. Jamaal Bowman is rumored as Mamdani’s pick for schools chancellor. As an “educator,” Bowman stood four-square against standards and rigor, and for DEI nonsense.

Imagine cop-hating Queens City Councilwoman Tiffany Cabán — an early Mamdani supporter — replacing Jessica Tisch as police commissioner.

Or other lefty radicals running the Department of Finance and the Economic Development Corp.

The DSA has been leveraging its way to power ever since its first marque triumph: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s ouster of Queens boss Joe Crowley, then the No. 4 House Democrat, in the 2019 primary.

Now, exploiting the city’s ridiculous public-campaign-finance system and now the ranked-choice primary-voting rules as well as the establishment’s social-media cluelessness, it’s poised to seize City Hall behind Mamdani’s disarming charm and puppy-dog head tilt.

Beware: Even if the voters fend off this takeover attempt, the DSA will keep on pushing.

Everyone else in local politics needs to get serious about not just beating Mamdani now, but treating all Democratic Socialists as completely toxic.