In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt casually dropped one of the most memorable lines in American political history. “My friends,” he said in a campaign speech, “judge me by the enemies I have made.” He was talking about Wall Street financiers, corporate monopolists, and the rest of the United States’ financial elite. Now it’s 2025, and we’re looking at a very different political landscape. But FDR’s message remains true: you really can judge a politician by the forces arrayed against them. And with that in mind, Minneapolis mayoral candidate Omar Fateh has a roster of enemies anyone could be proud of. From the deranged racists attacking him online for his Somalian heritage, to the corporate Democrats making shady backroom deals and alliances against him, his opponents represent everything people hate about politics in America. 

Fateh is oftencalled the “Mamdani of Minneapolis,” and the two politicians have some striking similarities. Both are democratic socialists, backed by their regional chapters of the DSA. Both are young, a rarity in our country’s increasingly elderly political scene. (Fateh is 35, Mamdani just 33.) Both of them, if they’re elected, would be their respective cities’ first Muslim mayor. And both of them have faced horrifying racist and Islamophobic attacks, with Mamdani even receiving death threats in June. 

But in other ways, there are important differences. Fateh doesn’t quite have Mamdani’s charisma—who does?—but his record as a legislator is actually more impressive. Among other policies noted in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, he’s passed legislation to legalize fentanyl test strips, “spearheaded a bill that made public college free for Minnesota students whose families make less than $80,000 annually,” and has become known for his “hardball tactics,” including “saying he would not vote for any budget bill unless both the [Minnesota] House and Senate passed his bill boosting pay for rideshare drivers.” And somehow, he’s been on the receiving end of even more blatant racism than his New York counterpart. 

[content warning: racism]

“I can tell by the shape of his head he’s Somalian,” reads one typical post, from a right-wing political strategist and frequent Fox News guest named Joey Mannarino. “Somalians should not be running for office in the United States of America. He should run for Mayor in Mogadishu so he can enjoy his mud hut lifestyle there rather than bringing it here.” You might hope this was the ranting of an obscure crank, but no such luck: Mannarino has over 633,000 followers. And he’s not the only one spewing this stuff. Daily Wire pundit Matt Walsh declared that Fateh “was born in America, but he's not actually an American,” questioning “the benefit of importing a bunch of Somalis into this country” and saying that “I can't think of a single positive.” Turning Point USA spokesman Charlie Kirk has accused Fateh of plotting an “Islamic takeover of America.” (The fact that Fateh is vocal about LGBTQ rights, hardly the sign of a religious fundamentalist, seems to have passed Kirk by. Then again, so have most facts.) Chaya Raichik, the right-wing propagandist who runs “Libs of TikTok,” simply posted an unflattering photo of Fateh with the caption “DID YOU KNOW: The average IQ in Somalia is 68.” Others in the MAGA peanut gallery chimed in: “Return to Somnalia [sic].” “Are you even a legal citizen?” “Are you married to your first or second cousin?” There’s zero subtlety or plausible deniability here. These people are just openly saying that because Fateh’s family came from Africa, he’s a dangerous subhuman. It’s kind of jaw-dropping.

There are a few factors at work here. Notably, almost all of the examples above came from Twitter / X, where Elon Musk has opened the floodgates for racists and neo-Nazis of all kinds to post to their withered hearts’ content. But it’s also notable that Omar Fateh is the specific target, and is receiving a type of racism that’s more explicit and venomous than practically anything I’ve seen directed against a politician. These attacks are distinct from the standard-issue anti-Black racism that’s been around in the U.S. forever, and they’re more extreme than what other politicians of color face. Nobody talks about Hakeem Jeffries’ skull shape, or accuses him of having a “mud hut lifestyle.” This is happening because Fateh is a man of specifically Somalian descent, and because he’s a socialist. 

In the first place, it’s easy for racist trolls like Walsh or Raichik to spread unhinged smears about Somalians, because the media has given the average American a woefully poor understanding of what Somalia and its people are actually like. It’s no accident that in all the bigoted posts about Fateh online, a constant theme is to compare him to the villainous Somalian pirate in the Hollywood movie Captain Phillips. Some trolls have gone so far as to make edited videos of Fateh with the pirate’s voice, saying “I am the mayor now” (rather than “I am the captain now.” They’re able to weaponize that cultural reference because the conversation about Somalia in the U.S. has been shaped almost entirely by lurid stories about piracy like Captain Phillips.

Whether it’s on the news or in the movie theater, we rarely hear about Somalian doctors, novelists, diplomats, or academics; only pirates, terrorists, and refugees, the latter usually framed as a problem for whichever country they arrive in. Just look at the New York Times topic page for Somalia. It’s all disaster, all the time. This is part of a broad and insidious pattern, in which our media ignores Africa almost completely unless violence, poverty, disease, or natural disaster are involved. It was the same with Haiti during last year’s election. Donald Trump and J.D. Vance were able to spread the most absurd lies about Haitians “eating pets” in part because Americans don’t know enough about Haiti to have any counter-narrative. Ignorance is the soil racism grows in, and in the U.S. we have mountains of it. 

But the other key element here is that Fateh is a socialist. Historically racism and anti-socialism go hand in hand, whether it’s Hitler ranting and raving about “Jewish Bolshevism” (and Churchill, circa 1920, agreeing with him), or the bigots of the American South parading around with signs that said “RACE-MIXING IS COMMUNISM” in the 1950s. Today, nearly every prominent figure spreading slurs about Omar Fateh is also a vehement anti-socialist, from Walsh to Kirk to Raichik. But they have a problem, because Fateh’s economic agenda—taxing the rich, better funding for public schools, stronger unions, higher wages—is difficult to argue against on the merits. If you openly say you want wages to remain low, schools to have less funding, and the rich to keep as much of their loot as possible, you sound like a sociopath, because you are one. So instead of arguing the economics, these figures stoop to the gutter and use racial smears, hoping to divide and conquer working people along lines of ethnicity and religion and prevent change. It’s almost literally the oldest tactic in the book. 

But right-wing bigots aren’t the only people working against Fateh. Far from it. The pro-corporate establishment in the Democratic Party opposes him just as strongly, and that’s been the case for a while now. Back in 2023, no less of a Democratic rising star than Governor Tim Walz deployed his first-ever veto—after five years in office!—to stop one of Fateh’s signature bills, which would have set minimum pay rates for Uber and Lyft drivers. Walz was responding to threats from the rideshare companies, who said they might “pull out of greater Minnesota” if the policy became law. He should have said, as FDR did, that “no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country,” and showed them the door. Instead he capitulated, saying that although he supported workers’ rights in principle, he was “committed to finding solutions that balance the interests of all parties.” (This idea of “balancing” the interests of workers and bosses, rather than simply saying the workers should win, is a common liberal pathology.) Eventually, Walz did sign a version of the bill in 2024. But it was significantly watered down from the original, with a lower minimum pay for drivers in the Twin Cities region (just $1.28 per mile and $0.31 per minute, compared to $1.45 and $0.34 in the original), and without the provisions for “a driver’s right to sue for alleged violations of the proposed labor standards” from the 2023 bill. 

That was May 2024, and just a few months later, Walz joined the Kamala Harris campaign—where Tony West, Harris’s brother-in-law and the chief legal counsel for Uber, was a key advisor. It seems likely the governor’s willingness to stymie Fateh and the rideshare drivers on behalf of so-called “stakeholders” in the tech industry would have soothed any anxieties West had about giving a self-described progressive the nod. And this year, when Fateh won the endorsement of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) party, Walz refused to endorse his party’s nominee, instead lending his support to incumbent mayor Jacob Frey. Like with New York Democrats’ hostility to Mamdani, “vote blue no matter who” runs only one way in Minnesota.

And just who is Mayor Frey, the candidate Walz, and many other establishment Democrats prefer? Well, he’s a piece of work. Frey has been mayor of Minneapolis since 2017, and he claims to believe in “progressive governance”—but, like California’s Governor Gavin Newsom, he’s really just a conservative wearing the “progressive” label like a cloak. Like Walz, he vetoed a bill to give Minneapolis rideshare drivers better wages in 2023, when it was attempted at the municipal level. (No wonder they like each other!) Before that, he opposed calls to defund the Minneapolis police in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, and he was later caught allowing the cops to conduct “no-knock” raids after promising a “moratorium” on the practice. Thanks to his leadership, Minneapolis still has the fourth most violent police department in America, measured by uses of force per 1,000 residents. Frey has cracked nasty jokes about people who work from home, calling them “losers” as he promoted return-to-office policies. He’s reassured local landlords that he’ll never allow rent control. This month, he’s threatening to sue a property owner for allowing homeless people to sleep on his land, after months of sending the police to raid poor people’s tents and confiscate their belongings. And perhaps worst of all, he vetoed a city resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza last February. This is a catalog of everything a politician should not do. And now, the Minnesota DFL is going out of its way to empower Frey at Fateh’s expense.

All of these antagonisms came to a head this month, when the state-level DFL abruptly revoked the endorsement the Minneapolis chapter had given Fateh. As their reason, the party cited “substantial failures in the Minneapolis Convention’s voting process on July 19th.” And it has to be said, that convention was indeed a mess. As Current Affairs contributor Stephen Prager reports for Common Dreams, computer malfunctions resulted in “176 ballots in the first round of voting being uncounted, which denied the entry of a third candidate, DeWayne Davis, onto the second ballot.” Then, many of Frey’s supporters walked out of the convention, apparently on the mayor’s orders. A new vote was held, with a rule change allowing a simple show of hands as an emergency measure, and Fateh won it “overwhelmingly.” But Frey filed a challenge with the DFL to overturn the result, and his wish was eventually granted—despite the fact that DeWayne Davis, the candidate who lost the most from the malfunction, says that “I will not challenge the endorsement and will not collaborate with those who are challenging the endorsement.”

As I say, a mess. However, if the Minnesota DFL was concerned about the sanctity of democratic processes, there was a simple solution: throw out the whole result, reconvene the delegates (either in person or remotely), and hold a new, clean vote. Nobody from Frey’s campaign or Fateh’s could reasonably object to that. But that is not what the party did. Instead, its elites have behaved like a spoiled child who’s losing a video game and abruptly shuts off the console to deny their sibling the win. Not only did the DFL strip Fateh’s endorsement from him—punishing a candidate for failures that were the fault of the convention organizers—but they’ve prohibited the Minneapolis DFL from making any new endorsement. They’ve also given Jacob Frey access to the party’s covered voter databases, usually reserved for only the endorsee. The Minneapolis DFL is challenging the decision, but for the moment, the party just has no endorsee at all. The incumbent mayor couldn’t have asked for a better result. 

It gets worse, though. The decision to overturn Fateh’s endorsement came from the DFL’s Constitution, Bylaws & Rules Committee, an internal party body with just a handful of members. (For his part, Fateh describes them as “party insiders and establishment Democrats, which included many Frey donors and supporters.”) So in essence, the party has taken a flawed voting process with many participants, and replaced it with a largely non-transparent voting process of only a few individuals. And there’s reason to believe those party officials’ motives weren’t just about preserving democratic legitimacy, but appeasing their donors. In a now-notorious video clip from a recent meeting of “All of Mpls,” a pro-Frey PAC, Minneapolis city council member Lisa Goodman—another centrist who opposes police funding cuts—makes the will of the donor class she represents clear: 

So, I’m holding checks from a lot of people who contributed to this multi-candidate expenditure [to DFL-endorsed city council candidate Elizabeth Shaffer]... because some of the largest contributors at the $5,000 level didn't feel comfortable giving the money to the DFL. If the decision is overturned I have permission to cash a bunch of those checks[...] It’s clear that people don’t trust the DFL in our world, and don’t want the money spent if Fateh is going to be the DFL-endorsed candidate. 

The video really is a striking example of America’s political rot on full display. Apparently the “smoke-filled room” of old has been replaced with a dingy floral-print kitchen in the background of a Zoom call, where the real power brokerage goes on, voters be damned. That’s what “our world” means. And clearly, the call from the paymasters was heeded. 

More than 60 years ago, Malcolm Xwarned that “the white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative.” Omar Fateh has been learning that lesson firsthand. The racist attacks he’s been getting from the far-right are awful, but at least they’re out in the open. The establishment Democrats don’t even have the courage to say what they stand for, and against. But this shouldn’t be surprising. It was the same with Bernie Sanders, when he ran in 2016 and the Democratic National Committee asserted in court that it’s a “private corporation” with no obligation to provide a fair primary process. It’s the same with Hakeem Jeffries’ reluctance to endorse Mamdani, even after he won Jeffries’ district handily. To expect fair play is to be a mark. In a public statement soon after Fateh’s nomination was revoked, Ilhan Omar called the move a “stain on our party,” and she’s almost right. Really, it’s just clearing away the illusions and letting the party leadership’s true nature shine through. The next time you hear a centrist Democrat talk in hushed tones about “defending our democracy,” remember, this is the kind of thing they really do when the chips are down. 

I’m not in the business of endorsing candidates for office. In fact, I'm generally pretty cynical about them. The experience of voting for John Fetterman in 2022 will do that to you. These days, when I see what appears to be a dynamic young left-wing politician, my first instinct is to wonder how they’ll eventually compromise and sell out their supporters. With Omar Fateh, I have no idea whether he’ll manage to win his election, or whether he’ll be able to deliver on his ambitious policy proposals if he does win. Governing a city as a socialist is hard, as Brandon Johnson has been finding out in Chicago. But when I look at the enemies Fateh has made, some of that cynicism falls away. To paraphrase something George Orwell once said, when I see a man in conflict with wealthy Democratic donors, belligerent internet racists, and the Uber corporation, I don’t have to ask myself which side is worse. If we’re going to win a better future in this country, the people fighting the hardest against Fateh are a perfect showcase of what has to be eliminated from our public life.