The situation
NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani is lowkey catching heat after his social media team recycled old footage to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day this Monday. Instead of filming new content to honor Native American history in the Big Apple, the administration reused clips originally produced two years ago during the Eric Adams era.
The drama
Fabien Levy, the former deputy mayor of communications under Adams, pointed out the move on social media. Levy claimed it was “concerning” to see the current administration “devalue the Lenape” by simply repurposing large chunks of video from the city’s 400th-anniversary celebration. The recycled footage covers the history of the Lenape people from Inwood Hill Park to the Rockaways. The Mayor’s social media posts kept the captions focused on resilience and ancestral traditions, but the lack of original production definitely didn't go unnoticed.
To make matters more heated, Mamdani completely ghosted any mention of Italian-American New Yorkers or Columbus Day. The Mayor has never been quiet about his disdain for the holiday; he even posted a photo of himself flipping off a Columbus statue in a past push to have it removed from the city. Naturally, the decision to skip the Manhattan parade has left some residents feeling some type of way.
Why it matters
For a team known for their focus on digital aesthetics, this slip-up is a major L. Beyond the optics of recycling content, it highlights the ongoing tension in the city regarding how the administration balances cultural acknowledgments—or, in this case, chooses to ignore certain traditions entirely.
