Chanting ‘Danny DeVito,’ Italians for Zohran tell protesters to get over Columbus already

Protesters wearing MAGA hats and Curtis Sliwa berets showed up outside Zohran Mamdani’s Astoria office Monday morning to wave Israeli flags and decry a five-year-old post that the mayoral candidate made about a statue on a long-since-busted social media platform.

The protesters claimed they were enraged by a post Mamdani made on Twitter in 2020 giving the middle finger to Astoria’s Christopher Columbus statue while writing “take it down” (a sentiment echoed by many others in New York, including Italian-American politicians).

They were met with a few dozen counterprotesters across the street, organized loosely by the Italians for Zohran group, who said the MAGA-adjacent crowd doesn’t speak for them. The two groups — about equal in size, with the anti-Mamdani forces having slightly more people at one point — were gathered across from each other on 32nd Street in Astoria on the hot and sunny Monday morning; with no visible signs of Mamdani’s office or campaign anywhere, it looked to passersby like the demonstrators were rallying against the the political stances of the grocery store next to the demonstration. 

The scene had a typical back-and-forth between protesters, with the pro-Columbus people breaking out of their NYPD cordons to aggressively wave American and Israeli flags at the counterprotesters across the street and calling them Nazis before NYPD officers shooed them back into their designated area. 

The counterprotesters said they showed up to prove that the flag-waving group didn’t represent all the Italians in New York City, but the overall message was something more specific: get over your obsession with Columbus already. 

“Fuck Columbus, man,” Chris R., a 52-year-old from Brooklyn, told The Groove. “I’m all for an Italian day, but pick a cool Italian. Pick somebody who did something. … You’re backing the wrong horse.” Da Vinci Day has a nicer ring to it, he offered. 

I went to the rally and counter-rally not to wade into the debate over whether Columbus statues across the city should come down, a controversy that has been reheated many times in the past decade. I went because the prospect of an Italian-on-Italian showdown in the streets seemed too good to pass up. But I emerged with an answer to another question: in a potential future of Mamdani’s New York, which Italians would fans of the progressive candidate want to see venerated in lieu of Columbus? 

I got one answer pretty quickly: as a protester shouted over a bullhorn about the evils of socialism, the counterprotesters broke out into a chant of “Dan-ny De-vito!” 

“Danny Devito is a great option,” Jesse Ortiz, who lives in Gowanus and started the Italians for Zohran Instagram page, confirmed to me later. Ortiz, 31, said he was simply “not a fan” of Columbus and all the colonization and genocide of native peoples that his journeys are associated with. But he brought up another thing that many of the counterprotesters referenced, something they said made it confounding to watch so many people across the street hang so much weight on Columbus: he wasn’t even technically Italian. 

“He lived at a time before the Italian nation existed in its modern form,” Ortiz said. Modern Italy was unified in 1861; Columbus sailed under the Spanish crown and claimed to be from Genoa, but many scholars debate whether he was actually from Spain or Portugal. Either way, he certainly wasn’t Italian-American. 

“He represents a genocidal project which is the colonization of the Americas," Ortiz said. “The worship and the veneration of Christopher Columbus by Italian Americans I find really repulsive.”

Ortiz’s personal pick for a replacement was one echoed by a few at the rally: Martin Scorsese, not only a proud Italian-American, but a Queens native, and one whose recent film Killers of the Flower Moon dealt directly with American genocide. 

“He takes a lot of pride in being Italian-American,” Ortiz said. “He’s somebody who’s really able to see history in a beautiful way.” 

Steve, a 35-year-old activist from Queens (who, like a few people I talked to, didn’t want to give their full names for safety), came armed not with alternative names but with an Italian anti-fascist flag and a few facts about the protesters across the street. The flag was the symbol of Arditi del Popolo, an Italian anti-fascist group that formed to resist Mussolini’s National Fascist Party in the 1920s. He pointed out that some of the protesters were holding signs for The Italian American Civil Rights League, a group originally created by the Mafia to deny the Mafia’s existence, and then recently revived by Trump crony Roger Stone. 

“I am not sure how aware they are of their origins,” he said. “For the most part, they are useful idiots. It primarily serves this MAGA core.” 

Why, I asked, are people still so hung up on Columbus? 

“Because they’re so dominant they can only see themselves through domination,” he said. He pointed out that Mamdani’s campaign hasn’t made any direct comments that he knew of about the Italian-American community in the city. 

“Does he need to say anything? We’re literally one of the wealthiest communities in the city,” he said. “And there’s still plenty of Italian-Americans who would benefit from things like rent stabilization.” 

Among the anti-Columbus crowd, Frank Sinatra was another popular pick as an alternative to Columbus. At one point, someone put a Sinatra song on a bluetooth speaker and the crowd sang along. One demonstrator carried a sign listing alternatives to Columbus to consider: Sinatra, Lady Gaga, Johnny Bravo, Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, and Mario and Luigi, at least some of whom are real people. One counterprotester held a sign of Furio from The Sopranos in a famous scene about Columbus, with his words, “I never cared for Columbus.”

Anti-Mamdani protesters tried to heckle the group, claiming they only wanted free stuff, but supporters laughed it off: “Look at this guy, he wants to pay for things,” one responded. Others pointed out how weird it was that Columbus-backing Italians were waving Israeli flags: “You got the wrong flag bro!” one shouted. 

Chris Maisano, a 42-year-old from Flatbush, said Scorsese was at the top of his list too, along with Joe DiMaggio, Sinatra and singer Connie Francis, who died this month. 

“Almost anyone would be worth picking in Columbus's place,” he said. He held a homemade sign that went right for the jugular of the protesters across the street: “You eat jar sauce.” 

"Unfortunately folks like these folks over here like to speak on behalf of everyone who’s Italian-American and they like to do so in some of the most aggressively reactionary ways conceivable,” he said.  “And as someone who’s a progressive Italian-American, I just don’t like that.” 

Anthony Spirito, 28, came in from Hoboken to join the pro-Zohran crowd, holding a sign that said “MAGA Italians vanfunnculo,” Italian for “go fuck yourself.” He’s involved with the DSA across the river and was inspired by Mamdani’s campaign, and was also sick of other Italian-Americans treating Columbus like “some messiah figure.” Top of his list are the first American saint, Mother Cabrini, and Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi.

“I’m just trying to provide some counter presence against the conservative Italian-Americans that I know too well,” he said. 

Chris R. said his family, who are from an Italian section of the Bronx but raised him on Long Island, is full of Trump supporters, and he’s had to reckon with his own Roman Catholic-inflected upbringing. Moving back to the city and being among its diversity helped a lot, he said, and his own grown children keep him in check too. 

“As an Italian-American, it's embarrassing as hell: The ass slapping, the coarse language,” he said. “No one wants to just make you look stupid. They’re just telling you, ‘Hey man, maybe don’t say the R word.’”

Shortly after I spoke with Chris, social media star Crackhead Barney showed up to the protests in a monkey mask; the main protest had already started to disperse. The remaining anti-Mamdani stragglers started getting into shouting matches with Crackhead Barney alone, calling her a crackhead (her literal name), calling her a racist and calling her the very R word Chris mentioned. 

One man in a MAGA hat said he’d take Crackhead Barney over Mamdani for mayor, a position I’m not sure many would agree with. They had, it seemed, lost the plot on the original reason for the protest. The protest mostly broke up at this point; a few anti-Columbus people talked about walking over to the statue, perhaps to give it the middle finger themselves. A few of the pro-Columbus demonstrators were still shouting at the inflammatory social media star.

“If all my paisans just went to therapy,” Chris R. had said earlier, “we’d be great.”