Somewhere in the bowels of New York City Hall, a senior adviser named Lena Afridi started collecting a $185,000 annual salary in April. No press release. No announcement. No public acknowledgment whatsoever that Mayor Zohran Mamdani had just handed a six-figure government job to an editor at a magazine that describes itself as "a collective for thinking gay communism."
The magazine is called Pinko. Its earlier tagline was "communism for fags."
Afridi — who uses they/them pronouns — was brought on to advise First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan "on responses to federal intervention." Which is City Hall shorthand for helping New York resist federal immigration enforcement. The hiring was so quiet that it took investigative journalism to surface it, and by the time reporters came looking, Afridi had already scrubbed most of the social media history that made the hire so remarkable.
Most of it. Not all of it.
Before the digital cleanup, Afridi had posted in June 2020 that "while I believe that defunding the NYPD is absolutely necessary in order to get much needed resources to the people, I also believe that the only way to achieve true liberation is not through reform but abolition of the police." Not reform. Not defunding. Abolition. Of the police. In the city that gave us September 11th.
In September 2021, Afridi declared that "undoing capitalism" was the only way to stop climate change. In October 2019, Afridi instructed the public to "stop glorifying Gandhi," calling him "a racist anti-Black misogynist who referred to even S. Asian Muslims as aggressive bullies." Gandhi — the patron saint of nonviolent resistance — apparently didn't pass the ideological purity test.
Then there's the matter of Rita "Bo" Brown. In October 2021, Afridi eulogized Brown as "a militant butch working class revolutionary and one of the founders of the George Jackson Brigade" — a 1970s Marxist organization. And when Air Force serviceman Aaron Bushnell self-immolated outside the Israeli Embassy, Afridi wrote that he "died for truth" and is "venerated across the world."
Pinko magazine's stated mission statement goes further than anything Afridi posted individually. The publication defines communism as "the freedom not to have to seek our lives on the market, attained through the abolition of all forms of private property, family and the state." Private property. Family. The state. All three — gone. That's not a fringe blog post. That's the editorial platform of a publication where Mamdani's new senior adviser served as editor.
Before joining City Hall, Afridi spent three years as chief of staff at PowerSwitch Action, a nonprofit focused on what it calls "multiracial feminist democracy." Born in Karachi, raised in Flushing, Queens. One administration official, speaking to the Free Beacon, described Afridi simply as a "strange person."
Neither City Hall nor Afridi responded to press inquiries about the appointment.
The silence is the tell. When you're proud of a hire, you put out a press release. When you're confident in a staffer's record, you let reporters ask questions. The Mamdani administration did neither — because the record speaks for itself, and what it says is that a $185,000 public salary is now funding someone who publicly advocated for abolishing police, abolishing private property, abolishing the family, and abolishing the state that signs the paychecks.
This is also the same Mamdani administration already under fire for its posture toward federal law enforcement. Afridi's portfolio — advising on "responses to federal intervention" — means New York taxpayers are now paying someone who called for abolishing police to help the city resist the federal government's immigration enforcement. The person who wants no police is helping fight the police.
Mamdani didn't need to advertise this one. The $185,000 deposit clears whether the public knows about it or not.
