To counter insidious Third-Worldism — whether from Mamdani’s left or Fuentes’ right — conservatives must act decisively.
Zohran Mamdani, Nicholas Fuentes, and others of their ilk feast on resentment.
That America’s political soil is fertile for this effort isn’t surprising — globalism and fiscal profligacy put the American Dream out of reach for millions, while the decline of faith turned the deadly sin of envy into a virtue.
Faith had largely immunized America to ruinous class envy, as had the abounding visible examples of those who worked hard and made a better mouse trap.
The aim of political systems, insofar as they contend with wealth creation and property, is to do one of three things: to foster a system where all can optimize their individual capacity for making money; to protect those with property from those who want it; or to forcibly redistribute property along politically advantageous lines. The latter two systems — notably feudalism and Marxism — are not concerned with wealth creation, so much as they are with the question of who owns what.
It’s hard to blame some people for trusting in would-be leaders who say that their lack of money and a house is due to a globalist cabal of shadowy insiders — bankers, cosmopolitan globalists … Jews. After all, this challenge has been a long time in coming.
It seems like a distant, impossible memory today, but in the 1990s, America’s divided government, with a triangulating President Bill Clinton presiding over a massive tech boom while House Speaker Newt Gingrich forced fiscal constraint and welfare reform, led to four years of federal surpluses from 1998 to 2001. Then 9/11 happened and a costly war ensued. Then the Great Recession happened — and costly bailouts. Then Covid-19 happened, with costly shutdowns. America ran its first trillion-dollar deficit in 2009, with deficits exceeding $1 trillion nine more times over the next 16 years to today. Federal borrowing is crowding out the American Dream.
Understanding Alien Ideologies
Mamdani, Fuentes, and other charlatans capitalize on this miasma. But conventional politicians, especially conservatives, risk misdiagnosing the philosophical origins of this newly packaged snake oil, seeking to counter it with the standard battery of policies and talking points — akin to trying to treat a viral infection with antibiotics.
Zineb Riboua, a research fellow with Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East, addresses this Mamdani misdiagnosis in her Oct. 28 Substack essay, “Zohran Mamdani, Third-Worldism, and the Algerian Revolution.” Riboua, a Moroccan-born Jewish Berber, studied in France, Britain, and America, giving her a vantage point to understand the Ugandan-born Mamdani and his alien ideology.
Riboua dissects Mamdani not as a mere socialist or Islamist sympathizer, but as a torchbearer for Third-Worldism — a mid-20th-century postcolonial ideology that frames global politics as a moral crusade against Western hegemony. She explains how resentment masquerades as righteousness in our streets, campuses, and legislatures — taking woke to the next level.
Riboua traces Mamdani’s worldview to the Algerian Revolution of 1954-1962, where thinkers like Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre elevated anti-colonial struggle into a redemptive epic. In their narrative, the oppressed were not merely fighting for land or sovereignty; they were instead the moral vanguard of history, birthing a new human dignity through violence and liberation.
She writes that, “For Sartre, the Third World was … the moral substitute for the exhausted European left. The future of politics. That moralization of politics, where suffering becomes the ultimate source of legitimacy, is precisely what survives in Mamdani’s rhetoric.”
Thus, in America, Mamdani adapts this anti-imperial framework to domestic battles. Housing becomes a colonial metaphor — the landlord as colonizer, the tenant as the colonized. Policing morphs into occupation, with the NYPD cast as imperial — even Israeli — enforcers. Palestine serves as the ultimate symbol of resistance, unmoored from traditional socialism or theocracy. Islam, in this lens, isn’t about faith but rather a badge of subjugation turned into moral cohesion against the West.
Claiming Moral Purity
Riboua correctly warns that conservatives, accustomed to debating policies and principles, are ill-equipped for this morality tale of powerful oppressors and virtuous victims. It’s not about facts or economics; it’s about claiming moral purity through suffering.
It’s not a coincidence that Mamdani’s rise post-October 7, 2023, and Hamas’ orgy of rape, torture, hostage taking, and murder, came amid surging anti-Zionist campus activism. In Third-Worldism’s telling, Israel becomes the last bastion of Western domination, a successor to colonial powers.
Here it is helpful to note for the American reader that in the Algerian context, this rhetoric spilled into anti-Jewish hostility. Algerian post-independence violence in 1962 accelerated the exodus of Algerian Jews, portrayed not as victims but as complicit in colonial privilege even though the vast majority of them were poor. Even so, Third-Worldism’s anti-Zionism recast the Jew as a symbol of enduring Western power, making opposition to Israel a moral extension of decolonization.
Parallels on the Right
This brings us to a disturbing parallel on the right, where a return of once-thought discarded antisemitism echoes these same toxic themes. Here we have Nicholas Fuentes, the 27-year-old white nationalist and Holocaust denier whose “Groyper” movement has gained traction among a remnant of disaffected young conservatives. Fuentes traffics in overt racism, misogyny, and antisemitism, railing against “Jewish subversion” and “white genocide.” Thus, Fuentes represents a right-wing mutation of Third-Worldism’s resentment politics.
Riboua closes her essay with a warning:
Conservatives often fail to grasp these shifts, and Anglo-Americans even more so. They treat Third-Worldism as a policy platform when it operates as a moral creed. Its power lies not in practical solutions but in its claim to moral purity and its ability to turn resentment into virtue. Universities have nurtured this sensibility for decades, replacing historical complexity with ideological certainty and teaching generations to interpret politics through the binary of victim and oppressor. Mamdani’s rise is the political outcome of that education.
To counter this insidious Third-Worldism — whether from Mamdani’s left or Fuentes’ right — conservatives must act decisively across political, cultural, and philosophical fronts.
Politically, we should continue to call out and, where appropriate in public institutions, uproot antisemitism in all its forms.
Culturally, we must reclaim the narrative by promoting American exceptionalism in education and media. America’s 250th anniversary is a great time to proclaim America’s founding principles of liberty and contrast that with, for example, the Algerian Revolution’s descent into authoritarianism. Further, persistent victimhood myths could be countered with stories of immigrant success and free-market triumphs.
And philosophically, we must reaffirm Judeo-Christian values as the bedrock of Western civilization. It’s Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome — not the revolutions of France, Algeria, and New York. Reject moral relativism by teaching that true justice stems from understanding that every person is made in God’s image, rather than through collective resentment.
And we must emphasize ordered liberty over revolutionary zeal, reminding us that human dignity arises from God-given rights, not endless grievance that can only be rectified through violence.
