From Captain Sullenberger to Mamdani’s New York
“New York is starting to experience ‘globalise the intifada.’ The Palestinian cause isn’t about helping Palestinians—it’s about hating Jews, supporting terrorism and wreaking havoc against the West.” — @emilykschrader
“Columbia’s encampments revealed a growing pro-Hamas sentiment among youth—marked by openly antisemitic behaviour. Tip of the iceberg.” — @haymoney
“Mamdani’s refusal to condemn Hamas shows moral bankruptcy. NYC cannot afford leaders who treat terror groups as legitimate and allies like Israel as oppressors.” — @CityDeskNYC
The Empire That Mistook a Dragon for a Dove
Once upon a Cold War, America wanted to outsmart the Soviets. So it flew its President to Beijing. Nixon shook Mao’s hand. Kissinger toasted Zhou Enlai. The cameras flashed. The world was told: “This is the week that changed history.”
But what it changed was the balance of power. What it birthed was a rival empire. They thought they were opening China. In reality, China was opening America for itself—its markets, its universities, its vulnerabilities.
Critics saw it early. Michael Pillsbury called it “the hundred-year deception.” Aaron Friedberg called it “a gamble that empowered a rival empire.” But Washington was too busy applauding itself. Behind the smiles, the Chinese Communist Party planned. Deng Xiaoping whispered, “Hide your strength, bide your time.” And America mistook a dragon for a dove.
That misreading of power was not a mistake of one decade—it became a habit of a civilisation convinced that charm could replace clarity. Perhaps because of its booming economy, strong dollar and glittering cars, America began treating intellectual analysis as dispensable. It was high on money, low on meaning.
Pakistan’s McCarthy in Khaki
Once upon a Jihad, America needed a launchpad to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. So it chose Pakistan. Not for its democracy. Not for its philosophy. But for its geography.
General Zia-ul-Haq was handed billions. F-16s flew in. Tanks rolled in. Intelligence systems lit up. Pakistan was deployed as if it were America’s patron saint of anti-communism—a McCarthy in uniform.
The comparison was absurd on its face. To imagine Zia, an Islamist general steeped in Sharia zeal, as a crusader against communism was an intellectual farce. Washington surely knew that the weapons meant for Soviet tanks in Kabul would also embolden Pakistan’s ongoing “Jihad by a thousand cuts” against India. The world’s foremost democracy was arming one of the world’s most duplicitous dictatorships and calling it strategy.
Every Stinger missile that humbled a Soviet tank also hardened Pakistan’s ambitions. India, a poor but proud democracy, was forced to divert billions from schools, roads and poverty alleviation into new weapons and border fortifications. The nation had to arm itself not for conquest but for survival.
And yet, decades later, American presidents still grumble about Indian tariffs on Harley-Davidsons—as if the imbalance lay in trade, not terror. India bled billions fighting the Jihad America itself had armed. Having financed a theocracy that set South Asia on fire, Washington now complains about motorcycles.
When Trump Trumped Ideology
Once upon a campaign, Donald Trump promised to name the threat. “Radical Islam,” he said, “must be confronted.” He even spoke of a Presidential Commission on Radical Islam during his first term. He vowed ideological clarity. For a moment, America remembered its wounds.
But the memory of that promise evaporated as quickly as it was made. The Commission never saw the light of day.
In his first term, Trump accused Qatar of funding terrorism “at a very high level.” Months later, he called the Emir “a friend.” Deals were signed. Real-estate flowed. The Commission vanished. The rhetoric softened.
In his second term, the indulgence matured. Media speculation claimed that Qatar even offered a $400 million Boeing 747—retrofitted to serve as Air Force One. The man who vowed to confront ideological fog was now navigating it.
How could America have erred on something so obvious? How could a state that funds extremism be seen as a stabiliser of the region? What do they drink in Washington?
The Voice of India America Refused to Hear
Sitaram Goel, writing through his institution Voice of India, was not just a civilisational seer—he was a witness to ideological betrayal. He observed a peculiar pattern in American engagement with India. U.S. diplomats enthusiastically built library premises across the country—symbols of soft power and cultural outreach. But the shelves inside those libraries were often stocked not with Jefferson or Madison, but with Soviet literature, including Zhdanov’s Stalinist doctrine.
Goel’s indictment was precise: “The United States spends on library premises; the Soviet Union stocks the shelves.” It was an ideological failure.
Despite its professed opposition to communism, America routinely praised Nehru’s socialism, funded missionary networks and ignored Hindu intellectuals who opposed both Marxist materialism and cultural erasure. It didn’t merely misunderstand Hinduism—it seemed to hold it in contempt.
More tellingly, Goel saw this as a reflection of character, not just policy. America, he argued, was often gracious to its critics and contemptuous toward its admirers. It flattered Marxists, indulged Islamists and dismissed Hindu civilisational voices with a smirk. This wasn’t diplomacy. It was the behaviour of a unique kind of mindset—one that flatters its enemies to feel sophisticated, ignores its friends to appear neutral and punishes loyalty as if it were bias.
Goel had seen this firsthand. Through Voice of India, he documented how pro-American anti-communists in India were treated with quiet disdain. While Nehru’s socialism was celebrated, Hindu thinkers who defended civilisational pluralism were sidelined. Goel himself suffered under this ideological neglect—not for lack of clarity, but for refusing to flatter the West’s illusions.
From Silence to Naming the Enemy
India’s response to ideological violence has been shaped by memory, not denial. From Bangalore to Ahmedabad, Mumbai to Delhi, the country bled but it did not forget to name the enemy or the ideology. It did not apologise for noticing.
But this clarity was not always present. Under the Sonia–Manmohan–Chidambaram regime, India spoke in euphemisms. Terror was stripped of theology. Jihad was denied a name. Civilisational wounds were treated as law-and-order problems. The vocabulary was secular. The silence, strategic.
It was only with Modi’s ascent that the fog began to lift. The enemy was named—at least at times. The language of appeasement gave way to a vocabulary of resistance. India, once hesitant to name its wounds, began to speak with conviction and purpose.
America, despite its unmatched economic and technological power, has allowed its moral compass to be hijacked by its adversaries. It no longer names the ideology. It no longer defends its memory. It no longer knows what it stands for.
When a civilisation confuses commerce for conscience, it loses the ability to distinguish profit from principle. And when brahma-tej—the fire of moral intelligence—is neglected, kṣātra—the disciplined force of protection—does not vanish. It turns impulsive. It strikes without direction.
This is not the fading of power. It is its descent into blindness.
The Unravelling of American Clarity
In Bharatiya philosophy, there is a term for betraying one’s own inner knowledge: prajñā aparādha—the crime of intellect. It is not forgetfulness. It is the refusal to act on what one already knows.
America’s post–Cold War history is not a string of tactical errors. It is a civilisational failure rooted in ideological confusion. From Nixon’s handshake with Mao to Trump’s embrace of Qatar, the pattern is clear: a superpower that mistakes access for alignment and trade for truth. It is not that America lacks power. It is that it has lost the compass that gives power meaning.
For a brief moment, it seemed the American Right might recover its civilisational bearings. Figures once close to the populist movement—Steve Bannon, Raheem Kassam, Michael Anton, Darren Beattie, Jack Posobiec and Julie Kelly—tried to translate populist energy into doctrine: economic nationalism, moral realism, civilisational defence. But the political class had no appetite for ideas. The moment passed.
Instead of building institutions, the Right built personalities. Instead of elevating scholars, it elevated influencers. The very minds capable of articulating a civilisational response—historians, theologians, dissident academics—were sidelined. The populist revolt had no priesthood.
Outside power, the resistance persisted. Writers like Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Amy Mek, Daniel Greenfield, along with patriotic media institutions Breitbart, Rebel Media and PEGIDA, continued dissecting the ideological roots of Jihadism and Western self-guilt. But they were confined to the digital periphery. Their research was labelled “hate.” Their warnings, “phobia.” The antibodies of civilisational defence existed but they were quarantined.
The 9/11 City That Forgot
In 2001, New York was the wound. The skyline was torn. The nation was shaken. “Never forget” became a creed. By 2025, the city that once stood for vigilance now stands for inversion.
Within a decade of the attacks, the narrative shifted. Academia reframed 9/11 not as an assault on civilisation but as a backlash against Western excess. The attacker became a victim of inequality. The victim became an agent of imperialism.
Out of this inversion emerged a new moral grammar: wokeism, intersectionality and systemic guilt. Movements like Black Lives Matter (BLM), which began with legitimate outrage over racial injustice, soon absorbed anti-Zionist rhetoric and postcolonial grievance. By 2016, its platform accused America of “genocide against Palestinians”. By 2020, slogans like “From Ferguson to Gaza” linked domestic policing to foreign conflict.
Critics noted that BLM’s ideological DNA was not merely progressive—it was revolutionary. Co-founders Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza described themselves as “trained Marxists”. Their activism drew from traditions shaped by the Weather Underground—a violent 1960s collective that romanticised domestic insurrection—and the Frankfurt School, whose cultural theories reprogrammed Western academia with neo-Marxist critiques of capitalism, family and faith.
BLM’s now-archived “What We Believe” page declared: “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure…” Its thirteen guiding principles—restorative justice, collective value, globalism, queer and trans affirmation—echoed Marxist-Leninist frameworks: abolition of punitive systems, rejection of bourgeois norms and collectivist ethics. Critics called it cultural Marxism. Defenders called it intersectional liberation. But the ideological imprint was unmistakable.
As Ram Swarup once warned, ideologies choose their own victims. In New York, the skyline was rebuilt but the memory of its fallen was dismantled.
The Indoctrination Pipeline: From Beijing to Brooklyn
This ideological inversion was not organic. It was engineered.
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) funding flowed into American universities and media outlets for over two decades. Confucius Institutes operated on over 100 campuses at their peak—including Columbia, Stanford and Chicago—promoting CCP narratives while suppressing dissent. Harvard, Yale and MIT received millions in undisclosed Chinese donations routed through shell foundations.
Media outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post ran paid inserts from China Daily, a CCP-run outlet. Hollywood studios adjusted scripts to appease Beijing. Think tanks softened language. Academic journals avoided “sensitive” topics.
The result: a city where Arab-funded chairs, CCP-endowed programmes and postcolonial grievance studies now shape the curriculum. The very institutions that should defend America’s fight against terror now erase its memory with impunity. New York was not conquered. It was leased—intellectually, ideologically and morally.
The Final Inversion: Racial Justice as Civilisational Erosion
By 2025, the West’s ideological battlefield is no longer in Kabul or Gaza. It is in the language of its own cities. And nowhere is this clearer than in New York.
The tragedy is not that radicals exist. It is that institutions—Harvard, Columbia, NYU—have surrendered to them. Chairs in Islamic studies are funded by regimes that jail poets. Professorships in race theory are shaped by donors who silence dissent. The curriculum is no longer about emancipation. It is about inversion.
And the Right? It built no counter-narrative. It quarantined its thinkers. It outsourced its memory. In Trump’s America, the ideological Right is a fallen pack of cards—wrecked, scattered and silent.
New York was supposed to be the city of its firemen—those who ran into burning towers to rescue the last remaining lives. The city of pilots like Captain Sullenberger, who landed a crippled plane on the Hudson and saved every soul aboard. The city of first responders, civilisational defenders and moral clarity. It was meant to be shaped by voices who honoured that legacy—those who named the ideology, defended the memory and refused to appease.
Instead, it is Mamdani’s.
Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, in a Fox News interview in October 2025, apologised to rank-and-file NYPD officers, reaffirmed his willingness to honour an ICC warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu and declined to give Trump credit for the Israel–Hamas ceasefire. When asked whether Hamas should lay down arms, he avoided a direct answer—saying only that “both Hamas and the Israeli military should abide by international law.”
This is not a scandal. It is a symptom—the punctuation mark at the end of America’s prajñā aparādha and the beginning of its reckoning.
