Will Omar Fateh become America’s most radical mayor?

American politics is often reactionary. Barack Obama rode the dip of the 2007-2008 financial crash, but after eight years of neoliberal slog Middle America chose Donald Trump to extract the globalist cancer from their venerated land.

The Democrats staged a counterattack in the 2018 midterms, thrusting names like Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into the spotlight. A reaction to a reaction to a reaction.

And right on time, now that Trump has returned to office, a new breed of even more radical young Democrats is on the ascent.

Democratic New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is committed to radical socialism and will likely be enthroned as America’s most powerful local executive in November thanks to a tide of support from the young, wealthy and highly educated.

In Minneapolis, there stirs the potential for a similar uprising. State Senator Omar Fateh is a near carbon copy of Mamdani. The 35-year-old son of Somali immigrants shares similar disdain for white people and the police. But unlike New York’s socialist, Fateh has amassed a collection of political scandals that expose him as a reckless and naive political player.

In 2022, Fateh assured Democratic party leaders he had no ties to a man later convicted of lying to a grand jury in a 2020 ballot fraud case. The man in question was his own brother-in-law, who had volunteered for his campaign. In doing so, he misled Democratic-Farmer-Labor party leadership in a state where the DFL holds immense sway over Democrats.

Fateh also faced an ethics complaint for failing to disclose a $1,000 payment to Somali TV for airing multiple campaign ads. More seriously, he was accused of running his campaign out of an adult day care center rent-free, without reporting it as an in-kind donation — an allegation Senate President Dave Osmek called “a big, big problem.” State regulators responded by suspending the license of the day care instead of punishing the young progressive.

The Marxist vision demands clean divisions – class, race, sex – to stress the perpetual power struggle between warring groups. To that end, Fateh caught heat in 2023 when he called white folks who “look like” his Republican colleagues America’s “greatest domestic threat.” We can thank Biden’s Homeland Security team for that assessment, as they laughably singled out white supremacist violence as the nation’s singularly vicious menace.

Fateh’s progressive platform echoes that of young politicos of similar stripes. His support for eliminating the police, once emblazoned on his campaign website, has since vanished. He’s called for a $20 minimum wage, free public transit (in the spirit of Mamdani), and legislation to dismantle legal protections for cops by ending qualified immunity and repealing laws that make it a crime for civilians to falsely report police misconduct.

On the bright side, slashing police budgets would open up funds for “economic justice” services for “LGBTQ+ and BIPOC people,” like the Trans Equity Summit, which Fateh vows will be “fully funded and prioritized.”

Life for those “experiencing homelessness” is also set to improve – not with the hard, unpopular work of pulling people off the streets or prying them loose from the grip of fentanyl – but supplying encampments with handwashing stations and needle disposal bins.

His legislative record hints at an even more radical agenda: he sponsored a bill for slavery reparations despite the practice never having been legal in Minnesota, a bill to ban bottled water, and, peculiarly, a bill seeking to outlaw the sale of dogs and cats. He’s managed a couple of small successes – pushing through protections for Uber and Lyft drivers and a bill that promised free college tuition for working-class families.

Omar Fateh now stares down incumbent Mayor Jacob Frey. Frey, who entered office as a moderate Democrat but was crushed by 2020’s fiery-but-mostly-peaceful BLM upheaval, has since lost the sympathies of the far left. Frey has won both re-election races since entering office in 2017. But Fateh has the Mamdani momentum behind him: the seething anti-establishment fervor hungry for revolution – a revolution against Democratic obeisance to Trump’s perceived tyranny.

When conservatives put their blinders on, seeing only a string of Trump victories, they lose sight of Democrats’ abhorrence for the man and his movement. For this reason, don’t be surprised if Trump’s steamroller agenda results in Mayors Mamdani and Fateh, and President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Politics is a funny thing, like fashion or music. What’s old can become new again, and what’s popular now can be tossed away in the blink of an eye.