If you were to cast your gaze across the America of a hundred years ago, the America of 1925, you would have had many reasons for despair. That was the year that the Second KKK reached its all-time high in membership. The previous year, immigration to the US from all Asian countries was banned, and immigration from southern and eastern Europe (home of Italians, Jews, Poles, and other undesirables) was drastically limited. And behind all that stood the Red Scare, in which Jews, Italians, anarchists, socialists, communists were drummed out of American life in an orgy of violence, mass arrests, and deportations.

Just ten years later, those same forces that had been put on their back feet in the 1920s powered the second greatest reform movement in American history. This was not a story of the long arc of progress or the ever-present yin and yang of reform and reaction. This was a story about how a terrible defeat and even more terrible repression educated an entire generation, many of them immigrants and the children of immigrants, many of them working class, many of them from a despised religious and ethnic minority, to wield power for themselves and on behalf of a better vision for the country.

Fast-forward a century. As Moustafa Bayoumi tells us in this eye-opening report in The Guardian, on how Muslim New Yorkers transformed themselves and their political circumstances after an appalling wave of repression following 9/11, a similar dynamic now seems to be at play in the astonishing rise and soon-to-be victory of Zohran Kwame Mamdani.

Where other commentators have focused on Zohran’s undeniable political gifts and social media presence, his DSA roots and army of volunteers, Moustafa narrates the inner history, the hidden transcript, of New York’s Muslim community, many of them younger, scrappier, more politically attuned and organizationally supple, than our political discourse would have us realize. Most interesting of all is how these organizers used identity as a path to the widest forms of solidarity, and how they turned their experience with government repression into broad awareness of the political economy of surveillance capitalism. Out of their experience came Zohran.

Give yourself a respite this weekend and make sure to read this piece.