My good friend Robert Stacy McCain wrote about new New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani appointing Cea Weaver to be Director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. It seems like the lovely Miss Weaver wants people like you and me to be poor and dependent upon the government, a government she said on May 30, 2017, should have no more white male members.

This Activist Has Long Been Polarizing. Mamdani Is Standing by Her.

Cea Weaver, a tenant advocate named to a high-profile role in Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration, is facing criticism for past comments calling homeownership “a weapon of white supremacy.”

By Dana Rubinstein, Sally Goldenberg and Mihir Zaveri | Wednesday, January 6, 2026 | Updated: Thursday, January 7, 2026 | 8:47 AM EST

For the second time in three weeks, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing intense scrutiny for the years-old social media behavior of a high-level appointee — an episode that has once again forced him to answer for his vetting processes.

Mr. Mamdani named Cea Weaver, a housing activist, to run the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants on Jan. 1, during his very first news conference on his very first day in office.

In past social media posts that have since been deleted, most of which predate 2020, she called homeownership a “weapon of white supremacy” and said that it was important to “impoverish” the white middle class. That rhetoric had played a role in raising her profile within New York housing circles, even as it seemed to hobble her 2021 bid to join the city’s powerful Planning Commission. Her calls to “elect more Communists” and “seize private property” had been well documented in The New York Post.

Heaven forfend! The New York Times actually cited the New York Post as a source? I am shocked, shocked! I say.

I suppose that Miss Weaver hates her own family, given that the New York Post reported:

The mother of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new woke renters’ rights honcho — who’s dubbed homeownership “a weapon of white supremacy” — is a professor at a prestigious college and owns a beautiful Nashville home worth $1.6 million.

Celia Applegate — whose daughter Cea Weaver is the director of Mamdani’s Office to Protect Tenants — teaches German studies at Vanderbilt University and owns a pricey classic Craftsman home just south of the main strip in Nashville, Tennessee.

Applegate bought the property with her partner, David Blackbourn, in July 2012 for $814,000 and real estate websites now list the pad’s value at more than $1.6 million, records show.

This article continues below the fold, because I have embedded a video of Comrade Kaprugina in Dr Zhivago spouting the line, “There was living space for thirteen families in this one house!”

That’s how the Communists look at it!

While Mr McCain’s article was based on reporting that “It is scarcely an exaggeration to call Cea Weaver a Communist,” I wish to take a different tack: home ownership is the best way for working-class Americans to build some wealth, wealth and some security which can be passed down to their children, and a way to escape monthly payment of rent to someone else.

My wife and I both grew up poor. My wife’s parents had no ‘generational wealth’ for her to inherit. I was a bit luckier that, when my mother passed away, my sisters and I each inherited roughly $19,000 in cash from her 401(k) retirement plan. In 1991, that became a good part of the down payment my wife and I made to buy our first house.

Our previous house in Jim Thorpe.

A career opportunity pushed us to move from Hampton, Virginia to Hockessin, Delaware, to Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, and the money we made back from selling the house in Hampton provided the down payment for our house in Jim Thorpe. Through fifteen years in Pennsylvania, fifteen years of paying a mortgage, along with fifteen years of retirement savings through my 401(k) plan, we built up enough resources to buy our current house with cash, and to have a decent chunk of change to remodel what was most certainly a fixer upper in the Bluegrass State.

Do you realize what that means? With our house already paid for, we have no mortgage payment, and we do not have to pay rent to anyone.

This is the part that people like Miss Weaver don’t get. Yes, we sacrificed in the past, but home ownership means we don’t have to pay for our housing, a rather important thing for people who are now elderly and retired. Even without having to move around, had we stayed in our first home, we’d have eventually paid off our mortgage and owned the home free and clear.

More, a fixed rate mortgage — we were not stupid enough to get an adjustable rate mortgage — means that, over time, as inflation slowly, or sometimes not so slowly, pushes up prices, including rents, mortgages stay the same dollar amount as far as principal and interest are concerned, though taxes and insurance can increase. That means a mortgage payment which might have been 30% of your take-home pay when you took it out will slowly decline as a percentage of your income as time passes.

Perhaps Miss Weaver doesn’t realize that. Perhaps the 37-year-old daughter of a well-to-do Vanderbilt University — current annual tuition $67,934 and total direct costs $94,274 per year — professor and baccalaureate graduate of tony Bryn Mawr College — current tuition $67,730 and total direct costs $90,710 — really has no understanding of how working-class Americans live. Perhaps a woman with a “Free Palestine” poster taped to one of her apartment windows just doesn’t get how normal Americans live and work and survive in our country, but conservative Americans do. She knows that New York City renters face high prices, but she apparently wants them to continue paying high rent, for the rest of their miserable lives.