One week into his term, New York City’s “democratic socialist” Mayor Zohran Mamdani is already dealing with a controversy thanks to his newly appointed tenant advocate.
Mamdani tapped leftist activist Cea Weaver to be his “director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants,” and it didn’t take long for her radical views – which include referring to homeownership as a “weapon of white supremacy” and calling on the government to “seize private property” – to be exposed. Thus far, Mamdani is standing by his far-left appointee, but, if her recent behavior is any indication, Weaver does not appear ready for primetime.
On Wednesday’s show, Megyn was joined by Mark Halperin, host of MK Media’ Next Up, to discuss the absurdity of Weaver’s radical views and what it signals about the Mamdani administration.
Extremist Views
Weaver was not even a week into her new assignment when the internet unearthed a trove of highly inflammatory and hypocritical rhetoric from the 37-year-old white woman who attended Bryn Mawr College and NYU.
Back in 2018, Weaver railed against gentrification, saying there is “no such thing as a ‘good gentrifier,’ only people who are actively working on projects to dismantle white supremacy and capitalism and people who aren’t.” The only problem? She herself is a “gentrifier” living in the highly gentrified Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.
According to The New York Post, she spent five years (2010 to 2015) organizing the Crown Heights Tenant Union but has not acknowledged her own role in the gentrification of the neighborhood. Instead, she blamed others in an interview with Dissent magazine published last year.
“Where I live in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, we saw this cycle where landlords and bankers and policymakers had driven up the value of real estate using speculative financial capital, the housing market crashed, and then the solution to that was just a different private equity firm coming in and owning the buildings,” Weaver told Dissent. “This cycle fueled waves of gentrification in Crown Heights.”
But that hypocrisy may be the least of her problems. In June 2018, Weaver called on the government to “seize private property.” That November, she tweeted to “impoverish the ‘white’ middle class” and said “homeownership is racist/failed public policy.” She doubled down in August 2019, writing that “private property including and kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building’ and public policy.”
And while Weaver seems to really have it out for white people, “POC [people of color] families” who own homes haven’t escaped her criticism. “I think the reality is for centuries we’ve really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good,” she said in March 2021. “And transitioning to treating it as a collective good toward a model of shared equity will require that we think about it differently and it will mean families, especially white families but POC families who are homeowners as well, are gonna have a different relationship with property than one that we currently have.”
Weaver might not want to tell that to her mother, Celia Applegate, who teaches German studies at Vanderbilt University and, records show, owns a home in Nashville worth $1.6 million.
While the tenant czar deactivated her X account where much of the extremist rhetoric appeared, UnHerd uncovered an active Facebook account where she defended “the government’s sacred right to seize property” and argued that “moving to a gentrifying neighborhood” is tantamount to “structural racism,” as is “moving to the suburbs.” Her conclusion? “Property is theft.”
She has also referred to the United States as an “apartheid state,” supported defunding the police, called for ICE to be abolished, and blamed “white people, white people, and corporate fucking Dems (who are also white people)” for the election of Donald Trump in 2016.
The Defense
None of this seems to be an issue for Mamdani, who is standing by his new hire. He told reporters at an unrelated press conference on Tuesday that his administration hired Weaver “to build on the work that she has done to protect tenants across the city” and “we are already seeing the results of that work.”
Weaver, for her part, tried to smooth things over by claiming “regretful comments from years ago do not change what has always been clear – my commitment to making housing affordable and equitable for New York’s renters.”
Former NYC Mayor Eric Adams said Weaver’s views reflect “extreme privilege and total detachment from reality” and said “you have to be completely out of your “f****ing mind to call [homeownership] ‘white supremacy.’” She pushed back on that criticism during an appearance on NY1 late Tuesday.
“I don’t think I’m out of my mind,” she said. “You know, I think that some of some of those things are certainly not how I would, how I would say things today, and are and are regretful. But, you know, I do think my sort of decades of experience fighting for more affordable housing sort of stands on its own.”
Under Pressure
But the spotlight appears to be getting to the leftist activist. When approached by The New York Post and The Daily Mail outside her Crown Heights apartment building Wednesday morning, she broke down in tears as she dodged questions.
“She’s not ready for primetime,” Megyn said. “You can’t run around calling white people who own homes racist and say you have plans to devastate the ‘white middle class’ or the middle class period and not expect a little blowback, sweetheart. When you become an administrative official for the greatest city in America, you’re going to have a little blowback.”
Megyn said one of the biggest issues for Weaver – aside from the fact that she would benefit from a little eyebrow pencil, mascara, bronzer, and lip gloss before her next TV appearance – is that her defense doesn’t hold up. “This is not when she was in middle school,” she noted. “This is just a couple of years ago.”
Halperin agreed, but he said the interviewer had a responsibility to follow up. “When somebody says, ‘Oh, these were regrettable,’ the reporter should say, ‘Let’s walk through it. This is not a million years ago. What do you regret about it,'” he explained. “She’s got a PR advisor telling her to say they’re ‘regrettable’ and think she can move on.”
But he said that is not the most alarming piece of this controversy. “How could she have gotten through a job interview,” Halperin asked. “I’m not just talking about the vetting of all these public statements; I’m talking about competence and the question of this mayor trying to prove himself that he is going to know how to run this city. How could she survive the job interview? I don’t get that.”
That’s to say nothing of the fact that Halperin said he finds Weaver’s demeanor disconcerting. “Her demeanor freaks me out. I’ll be honest about it,” he added. “There’s just something about her demeanor that is really unsettling to me. And as a resident of New York, I plan to go cover her if she stays in the job.”
With national attention now on the otherwise obscure position, it remains to be seen if the Mamdani administration wants to deal with the headache that is Weaver longterm. “I saw several stories saying [Mamdani is] off to a fast start,” Halperin concluded. “I don’t know what else he’s doing, but this lady is two anchors handcuffed around his ankles if he is trying to get off to a fast start.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Halperin by tuning in to episode 1,225 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Channel (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.