A New York City official appointed by brand-new Mayor Zohran Mamdani is taking heat over social media posts expressly endorsing communism. On January 1, Mamdani appointed Cea Weaver as “Director of the newly revitalized Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants.” Within days, internet sleuths had turned up Weaver’s old Twitter posts from 2017 to 2019, in which she called homeownership racist and urged voters to “elect more communists.”

Mamdani’s office described Weaver as a “nationally recognized tenant organizer and housing advocate,” who “currently serves as Executive Director of Housing Justice for All and the New York State Tenant Bloc.” The crowning achievement of Weaver’s activist career, according to the mayor’s office, was “securing passage of the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019,” a state rent control law that, as they put it, “closed loopholes allowing landlords to dramatically raise rents and deregulate rent-stabilized apartments.”

In other words, Weaver has bona fide credentials as a pro-tenant, anti-landlord leftist. A local news station further reports that Weaver advised Mamdani’s mayoral campaign on policy and is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The DSA is a far-left political party that embraces the label “socialism” and argues that “Capitalism is a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit.”

Weaver is now installed as New York City’s chief tenant advocate, where her background suggests she will bring new zeal to the task of helping tenants fight their landlords.

New York City’s Office of the Tenant Advocate (OTA) was established in 2017 as a sort of tenants’ rights watchdog. In particular, it was designed to help tenants fight landlord “harassment,” defined as anything “that causes or is intended to cause a tenant to surrender or waive any rights in relation to the occupancy of their unit,” especially construction work in the building.

Indeed, Weaver’s recently discovered social media posts suggests that, if she had her way, she would go beyond simply helping tenants protect their rights.

On August 21, 2019, Weaver wrote that “Private property including and kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building’ public policy.” On June 13, 2018, she declared “Seize private property!” If that sounds suspiciously like communism, that’s because it is; on December 18, 2017, Weaver wrote, “elect more communists.”

Weaver has since deleted her X account, but not before these comments reached the attention of U.S. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon. “We will NOT tolerate discrimination based on skin color,” Dhillon warned in her own social media post. “It is ILLEGAL. DOJ Civil Rights is paying very close attention.”

Mamdani himself appears unfazed by the revelation of Weaver’s past comments. If his transition team performed proper vetting on his appointees, they likely would have known about Weaver’s communist sympathies already. On Tuesday, Mamdani publicly defended her appointment, telling reporters, “We made the decision to have Cea Weaver serve as our executive director for the mayor’s office to protect tenants, to build on the work that she has done to protect tenants across the city, and we were already seeing the results of that work.”

Mamdani campaigned on lowering the cost of housing in New York City, and he has his work cut out for him to do so. But his socialist leanings, and those of his aides, have prompted him to address housing costs by vilifying the landlords who control the housing supply.

Thus, Mayor Mamdani’s administration confronts a great irony. In the same press release where he announced Weaver’s appointment, Mamdani also announced that the city would intervene in the bankruptcy proceedings of a realty company that owed unpaid money to the city and failed to properly maintain its rental properties.

Imagine that: New York’s rent control law and severe restrictions on landlord renovations led to rental companies poorly maintaining their properties, all while going bankrupt. In his “Basic Economics,” economist Thomas Sowell uses rent control as the textbook example of a government-imposed price ceiling. Using real-life examples, Sowell argues that rent control results both in a supply shortage and a decline in the quality of existing supply.

If Mamdani wants to fulfill his campaign promise to bring down housing costs, he is going about it all wrong.