The beaming, photogenic mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, is nothing if not entertaining from a purely clinical aspect. As long as you are not a Big Apple resident or have to spend the day employed there, it is something to sit back and watch the man operate. Or attempt to.
He's gotten a shiny new, 'free' grocery store opened.
Not for nothing, but this shop feels more like a Hollywood movie set than a real store. https://t.co/DErZplYxvG
— Viral News NYC (@ViralNewsNYC) February 13, 2026
Mamdani's also doing a bang-up job clearing up the homeless problem, as he promised.
NEW: city hall has confirmed a 19th outdoor death.
— Andrew Siff (@andrewsiff4NY) February 11, 2026
“We were also made aware of one more additional death after an individual was found unresponsive on the street under the Manhattan Bridge last evening.” #NBC4NY
Nothing worse than the government being there to help.
BREAKING: A new report reveals that under Zohran Mamdani, homeless people didn’t receive any help in 96% of 311 calls made during NYC freeze.
— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) February 11, 2026
18 homeless people have died. pic.twitter.com/k0sXigtIuE
Or not.
First mayor in 100 years to skip mass with the new archbishop, although he did get a good word in for World Hijab Day.
Zohran Mamdani, "who in the past week put out a tweet marking World Hijab Day and suggested that the US should use the Prophet Muhammed’s example on immigration...[dissed] millions of area Catholics as the first city mayor in nearly 100 years to skip the local archbishop’s…
— Byron York (@ByronYork) February 11, 2026
Home girls are not down with the changes so far, though.
I DON'T KNOW WHAT THIS IS
It’s the Mamdani effect. 🤮
— Based Jessica (@RealJessica) February 12, 2026
“Honestly, there's no way that people are actually visiting New York City, or people live in New York City, and they enjoy living here. I have lived in New York City my entire life.”
“I have never seen something like this. EVER. I've lived here 26… pic.twitter.com/EpJKFAxxYJ
...“Honestly, there's no way that people are actually visiting New York City, or people live in New York City, and they enjoy living here. I have lived in New York City my entire life.”
“I have never seen something like this. EVER. I've lived here 26 years. I'm currently driving through Canal Street. It literally looks like I just entered a third-world country. Streets are absolutely disgusting. There's garbage everywhere.”
“There's like cops just swarming the streets for no reason because they're not even doing anything. It literally looks like a cesspool full of people that are like imported here and placed here to ruin the city. It's like so disgusting.”
“And then on top of that, you guys went and voted for an absolute imbecile to run the city who is going to do nothing except make the city worse. So, enjoy New York City. This is definitely not the Big Apple anymore.”
Well, you have to cut the youngster a huss, I guess. He doesn't have his hepcat socialist team together yet.
Some people who helped him climb to the pinnacle are already counting on big changes.
Top Mamdani ally pic.twitter.com/VIBh3aWqo8
— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) February 13, 2026
Others who are part of his inner circle braintrust are exactly who and what kind of miserable souls you would think they'd be.
If you want to understand the champagne part of champagne socialist, read this hilarious thread of entitled airline complaints from Mamdani advance man. https://t.co/uDXAkySgi9
— Kirsten Fleming (@KirFlem) February 12, 2026
But, you ask, what about the people he's picked to run the city departments?
Well, the police commissioner is a billionaire holdover from the Adams administration, and Mamdani just announced three more appointments for other departments, or 'city agencies' as they call them.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani today announced three new appointments to lead critical agencies and offices across city government. Mayor Mamdani appointed Lisa Gelobter as New York City’s Chief Technology Officer and Commissioner of the Office of Technology and Innovation; Nisha Agarwal as Commissioner of the Mayor’s Office for People With Disabilities; and Lisa Scott-McKenzie as Commissioner of the New York City Department for the Aging.
And he's tapped a guy, an emergency room doctor, named Alsiter Martin to lead the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. This is a big one.
They've already got some issues erupting there, even before Dr Martin takes over.
It seems a good number of employees - or maybe just the most obnoxious - got together on their own and started a little group in the department that causing all kinds of controversy.
this Department of Health? the one overseeing two 9/11s a year from fentanyl? pic.twitter.com/xqR6b46GuR
— erdle 🍇🍇🍇 (@gooderdle) February 5, 2026
Employees of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Department of Health have created a “working group” that accuses Israel of committing genocide, The Post has learned.
DOH staffers held the first “Global Oppression and Public Health Working Group” meeting Tuesday afternoon — in the middle of the workday — with members gathering at the department’s headquarters in Long Island City, as well as remotely.
“We really developed in response to the ongoing genocide in Palestine,” one presenter reading from the group’s mission statement said near the beginning of the meeting, according to video obtained by The Post.
A city overrun with garbage, drugs, rats, and disease, but they've got time for this.
Into this chaos steps Dr. Martin, with some people already questioning the choice, as his experience is supposedly only in emergency rooms and teaching at Harvard. Although, to be fair, he's reportedly great at both. Admittedly, though, it is vastly more challenging to handle a 7,000-member employee roster with a $1.6B budget.
...The mayor lauded Martin’s background as an ER doctor and his policy work at the highest levels of government, including the White House, when announcing his appointment last week. Others agree, viewing his boots-on-the-ground clinical experience and work to reduce health disparities as a strength and a complement to Mamdani’s progressive agenda. Some public health experts, however, are raising concerns about his lack of traditional public health credentials and senior leadership experience — a departure from recent commissioners who spent years managing large agencies or working in disease surveillance.
Being the city’s top doctor has never been easy, but Martin will take the helm at a particularly challenging time. The Health Department is charting its own path on vaccine recommendations, global disease surveillance and public health emergency preparedness as the Trump administration scales back federal resources and overturns longstanding public health policy — all while the department keeps up with its goals of preventing illness and reducing health disparities among city residents.
Martin said in a statement to Crain’s that his clinical experience and public policy work has shaped how he will approach the public health challenges New Yorkers face. “As an emergency physician, I’ve spent my career on the front lines of our health care system, treating patients in crisis and seeing firsthand how the social and economic conditions of people’s lives determine their health long before they arrive in the emergency department,” he said.
“That experience is the driving force behind my vision for this role,” Martin said. “From running vaccination campaigns to addressing homelessness to connecting families with cash assistance benefits, I’ve operated at the intersection of clinical care and public health throughout my career.”
All of the Gotham papers, whether pro or con (and if con, they were gently so), spoke of the good doctor as an ER guy.
Trust Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon to tease out of Dr. Martin's record the factoid that probably got him the job working for a Democratic Socialist of America (DSA) member mayor: Dr. Martin orchestrated voter registration drives in mental hospitals.
NEW:
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) February 12, 2026
New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pick to run the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene comes with a controversial political résumé:
Alister Martin, the city’s new health czar, founded Vot-ER, a left-wing nonprofit that promotes voter registration in psychiatric… pic.twitter.com/lWUBwep5jZ
...that promotes voter registration in psychiatric hospitals where patients are being treated for schizophrenia, suicidal ideation, and severe addiction, @aaronsibarium reports.
The Gothamist benignly reported Martin's organization as purely an emergency room initiative.
...Martin is an emergency physician and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, and previously served as a White House fellow and on an advisory panel on outreach to low-income communities with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, according to his LinkedIn profile. He also founded a program known as Vot-ER that helped emergency room patients register to vote.
Even an ER seems an odd place to collect signatures, but Democrats are relentless, busy registration bees.
But psychiatric hospitals?
Now, that's inventive.
Oh, wait - Martin was a Kamala staffer, too?
Things are suddenly becoming clearer...
Mamdani selected Alister Martin on Jan. 31 to lead the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Martin, a former emergency room doctor, launched Vot-ER in 2019, a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic. The group creates materials for doctors to register their patients to vote in clinical settings. One of its earlier partners, the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute, is an inpatient clinic for people with psychotic disorders.
Citing the "therapeutic" benefits of voting, the institute has used Vot-ER’s tools since at least 2021 to register patients hospitalized for schizophrenia, suicidal thoughts, and life-threatening addictions. Some of those patients had been involuntarily committed, raising thorny questions about informed consent and the use of vulnerable people as political pawns.
"Oftentimes these patients do not have the capacity to make a decision early on in an acute hospitalization," Jane Rosenthal, a psychiatrist and medical ethicist at New York University’s Tisch Hospital, told the Washington Free Beacon in 2024. "What are we doing ethically posing this kind of question to people who are so vulnerable?"
Such questions did not deter Martin, a former Kamala Harris staffer, from helping more than 50,000 doctors register their patients to vote. Vot-ER’s tools have been used in cancer hospitals, emergency rooms, hospices, and even the neonatal intensive care unit, where some providers now ask the parents of gravely ill infants about their voter registration status.
This is amazing work by Sibarium, but he notes that the Republican National Committee has its eye on them back all the way to the 2024 election.
...Applications for vot-ER’s tools ask whether the "majority of your patients" are "24 years old or younger," "Black/African-American," or "LGBTQIA+." And the group suggests doctors tell "undocumented citizens" to register their naturalized families to vote—a move that prompted scrutiny from the Republican National Convention in the leadup to the 2024 election.
"Trusting individuals who violated this nation’s immigration laws to only register friends and family who are lawfully able to register to vote is foolish and dangerous, especially when the patients are not legally allowed to register themselves," the RNC said in letters to election officials in six swing states.
The letters asked those officials to monitor Vot-ER for possible violations of election law. Vot-ER, the RNC wrote, is "weaponizing the healthcare system … for partisan political purposes."
Chin rubbing time, no?
Hmmmmm - now why would the communist mayor of the nation's largest city choose a fellow to run their health department who'd advocated soliciting illegal immigrants during elections, and been credibly accused of 'weaponizing the healthcare system for partisan political purposes'?
The schizophrenic question isn't so funny.
