New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani named a self-proclaimed "gay communist" who has called for abolishing the police and "undoing capitalism" to a top post in his administration, the Washington Free Beacon can reveal.
Lena Afridi—who uses "they/them pronouns"—deleted much of her social media history shortly before arriving at City Hall, but the Free Beacon recovered her postings. She was quietly named to a senior adviser position in the mayor's office in April 2026, drawing a hefty salary of $185,000 a year, records show.
"I'll be working on responses to federal intervention in the Office of the First Deputy Mayor," Afridi added in a LinkedIn post announcing the move.
Multiple people in the Mamdani administration who knew Afridi told the Free Beacon they could not say what she did day to day, with one calling her a "strange person." Her portfolio appears to include supporting the city's opposition to ICE and other federal efforts to rein in so-called sanctuary cities.
Before joining the administration, Afridi spent three years working as chief of staff for PowerSwitch Action, a nonprofit organization dedicated to "forging multiracial feminist democracy" and "grounded in breaking the interlocking chains of oppression."
The group openly bragged about their involvement in violent anti-ICE riots in Minnesota in a March 2026 blog post.
In addition to her government and advocacy work, Afridi is currently listed as an editor at Pinko, a magazine which describes itself as "a collective for thinking gay communism." On the masthead, she went by "L. Israh Afridi." Israh is an Arabic word for "night journey" that is sacred in Islam.
Earlier website iterations of Pinko touted the magazine as "communism for fags."
"What do we mean by communism? Something like 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," Pinko clarified in a 2019 blog post.
On X, Afridi posted multiple times about her support for "communism" and "gay communism."
Like many Mamdani staffers, Afridi quietly deleted her X account, @lpafridi, in the days leading up to her appointment—but in old posts uncovered by the Free Beacon, she offered a militant and uncompromising far-left agenda.
"On a personal note, outside of work: 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," she declared in June 2020.
Afridi has not been shy about leaning into her communist bona fides, posting in September 2021 that "undoing capitalism" was the only way to stop climate change.
Afridi is a close friend of Cea Weaver, the notorious top Mamdani housing official who's called home ownership "a weapon of white supremacy" and expressed a desire to "impoverish the white middle class."
In October 2021, Afridi posted a brief eulogy for Rita "Bo" Brown, a former member of the George Jackson Brigade, a violent Marxist organization that terrorized the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s.
When Brown was nabbed by the feds in 1977, the New York Times noted that she had been "a suspect in numerous bombings and bank robberies in Washington and Oregon."
In 1979, Brown was sentenced to 25 years in prison after pleading guilty to firearms and bank robbery charges.
When she died in 2021, Afridi paid her respects.
"RIP to Rita Bo Brown, a militant butch working class revolutionary and one of the founders of the George Jackson Brigade," she said on X in October of that year.
Afridi also shares Mayor Mamdani's passionate hatred of Israel. In a rambling essay for the website Acacia, she falsely accused the country of "genocide" and lauded Aaron Bushnell, a mentally ill U.S. airman who lit himself on fire to protest the Jewish state, as someone who "died for truth" and is "venerated across the world."
In the same piece, she noted she was taking the prescription antidepressant Wellbutrin.
Just days after Hamas's Oct. 7 massacre in Israel, which left more than 1,200 Israelis dead, Afridi signed the "Writers Against the War on Gaza Statement of Solidarity."
"We stand with their anticolonial struggle for freedom and for self-determination, and with their right to resist occupation," the letter says in an open endorsement of Hamas violence. "Israel is an apartheid state, designed to privilege Jewish citizens at the expense of Palestinians."
Afridi was born in Karachi and grew up in a Muslim family in Flushing, Queens. She has a history of disparaging remarks towards Pakistan's mortal enemy—the Indians—starting with the country’s founding leader Mahatma Gandhi.
"Stop glorifying Gandhi," Afridi said in an X post from October 2019. "Gandhi was a racist anti-Black misogynist who referred to even S. Asian Muslims as aggressive bullies."
In another, Afridi has complained that Netflix's Indian Matchmaking was "casteist, Islamophobic, anti-Indo Caribbean, classist, etc."
In a prolific online presence, Afridi also wrote about attending drug-fueled dinner parties in the Lower East Side and demonstrated a knack for New York City history, pointing out approvingly that the Ramble—a wooded region of Central Park known for birdwatching—was traditionally a place where gay men sought out anonymous sex.
Afridi is only the latest in a string of oddballs, cranks, antisemites, and Lulu Lenins named into Mamdani’s orbit during his time as mayor.
Mamdani's chief lawyer, Ramzi Kassem, previously represented al Qaeda. Mamdani's Brooklyn borough director, Álvaro López, called people ripping down flyers of Israeli hostages "heroes." Another hire, Drashti Brahmbhatt, has made extensive social media commentary over her hatred of white women. Mamdani's political guru, Morris Katz, attempted to include pictures of his own penis in a children's book about puberty. Mamdani's advance man, Mathis E. Roy Vigne, has made a name for himself by complaining about the quality of first-class airline travel on social media.
