A left-wing aspiring YouTuber who claims to have volunteered on democratic socialist New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s campaign has admittedly left the U.S. “for good” and now resides in China.
Eric Hovagim describes himself on LinkedIn as a “[g]eopolitical commentary YouTuber” while listing his location on the site as Brooklyn. The pro-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) micro-influencer who uploaded several videos in support of Mamdani, in addition to working as part of the video team of his successful campaign, however, claims to have permanently moved across the Pacific Ocean to China. From there, he posts content downplaying the CCP’s genocide against the Uyghurs, an indigenous predominately Muslim minority group.
“I volunteered to help film and/or edit 3 videos about Zohran’s plan to make NYC more affordable. I was NEVER paid by the campaign, any PAC, or anyone at all around him. All three videos were wrapped up before the primary election,” Hovagim wrote in response to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s (DCNF) request for comment. He added he had only been in contact with Mamdani’s video team and not the rest of the socialist mayor-elect’s campaign.
Mamdani’s campaign did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
“As a dude, I feel sorry for the Uyghurs being used as a pawn by the CIA to foment unrest. I feel bad for the people of Taiwan who overwhelmingly do not want to be independent but are caught in the crosshairs of America’s violent foreign policy. And I feel the worst for the people of Tibet up until they were recently liberated,” Hovagim said in a YouTube video posted Sept. 22 titled, “Why I Left America for Good.”
Eric Hovagim was a video editor on the Zohran campaign.
He recently moved to China as an open supporter of the Chinese Communist Party.
He posts pro-Chinese military edits and filmed a Uyghur restaurant in China in order to try claim there is no Uyghur oppression.
He claims… pic.twitter.com/OdLI4H3Pfz
— Drew Pavlou
(@DrewPavlou) November 16, 2025
(@DrewPavlou) He went on in the video, appearing to call the view the CCP is committing genocide against the Uyghurs, as well as acts of aggression against Tibet and Taiwan, as “CIA revisionist propaganda that’s only now getting its own Wikipedia pages.” The Uyghurs are a Turkic people who live in Chinese-occupied East Turkestan, renamed the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region by the CCP.
“I believe the Uyghurs and other Chinese minority groups in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region are victims of decades of the CIA wasting taxpayer dollars to fund violence in the Middle East. Xinjiang borders Afghanistan and Kashmir, two extremely volatile regions that have fallen victim to both America’s and Israel’s bloodthirsty regimes,” Hovagim told the DCNF. “The CIA has openly engaged in opium trafficking in Afghanistan, effectively making it a narco regime right at China’s border. I’m glad that China acted more peacefully and sensibly than the United States did following various terrorist attacks in the 90s and 2000s.”
“Calling the situation a genocide makes a mockery of real genocides happening in places like Palestine with our tax dollars. Of course all this comes on the heels of the greatest cost of living crisis in US history as we now gear up to invade Venezuela while the overwhelming majority of young people in America will never be able to own their own homes,” the YouTuber added.
Hovagim responded in a Saturday X post to an over-750-page report titled, “Detention Facilities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region,” posted by an account dedicated to “unveiling the CCP’s persecution of Uyghurs & minorities.”
Rather than presenting concrete evidence, this report uses drawings(!), screenshots of Google Maps, and a handful of random images of Chinese police officers
Alternatively here is my friend, Gerald, who was actually thrown in prison 30 years ago without a fair trial in Louisiana https://t.co/Q5dWX8oO1Q pic.twitter.com/3AIyn191QI
— Eric Hovagim (@EricHovagim) November 16, 2025
“Rather than presenting concrete evidence, this report uses drawings(!), screenshots of Google Maps, and a handful of random images of Chinese police officers,” the content creator wrote.
“Zohran’s campaign will go in the history books, but don’t let them fool you. This wasn’t just a masterclass in video production or social media but rather a generationally-messaged disciplined campaign that focused around affordability, the simple idea that New York City is the best city in the world but it’s too damn expensive,” Hovagim said in a Nov. 4 video titled, “How Zohran’s Videos Won the Election.”
The fledgling content creator, however, was no longer a New York City resident, let alone a U.S. resident, at the time of Mamdani’s Nov. 4 victory, his posting history indicates.
“It’s official, I left the U.S. I caught the last chopper out of the great American century of humiliation,” Hovagim stated in the September 2025 video announcing his move to China.
“I suffered enough under the repressive two-party system. I wanted a place to call home where I felt safe, my income paid for a dignified life and where I could feel motivated to get out of bed every day. Somewhere that felt like it was going in the right direction,” the YouTuber said in the video.
“I know what you’re thinking: ‘He’s glazing China,’ ‘he’s [Chinese President] Xi Jinping’s number one foot soldier. And the truth is, I wish. That would be sick as hell,” Hovagim continued, following a bizarre 13-second montage in the video of Xi, marching Chinese soldiers, tanks and planes set to rap music.
Eating Uyghur kebab in Shanghai with my friend Jim
— Eric Hovagim (@EricHovagim) November 1, 2025
“And I also hear what you’re saying, Eric, in a couple of months, Comrade Mamdani is going to transform New York City into the socialist Caliphate that you’ve been praying for. Why would you want to leave right now?” Hovagim added, pointing to a Mamdani campaign poster on his wall.
“I decided to move across the pond because I wanted a better life. The US is cooked,” Hovagim wrote in the video’s description. “It will probably only get worse over the next decade or two as it becomes more violent and flails around like the dying empire that it is.”
In the same video, Hovagim claimed that “undoubtedly” most of the political violence in the U.S. is “perpetrated by far-right extremists.” Minutes earlier, he referred to the Sept. 10 assassination of Turning Point USA (TPUSA) founder Charlie Kirk as “a certain event.”
“But, America ended up here because of our culture around economic development,” he continued, appearing to refer to American free-market capitalism. “The way we’ve structured our economy incentivizes short-term individual gains over long-term collective progress. The United States as a project has no long-term vision. There is no unity among Americans because the very core of the nation is rotten.”
One way ticket to the Zulag https://t.co/beezSSnEq1 pic.twitter.com/NF6hWLSVtk
— Eric Hovagim (@EricHovagim) November 2, 2025
Hovagim boasts just shy of 35,000 subscribers on YouTube, almost 30,000 X followers, and 15,500 Instagram followers. He currently works both as a full-time YouTube creator and a full-time freelance web developer, according to his LinkedIn profile, which displays his pronouns as “he/him.” He graduated from UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering in 2019, according to his LinkedIn.
Hovagim’s LinkedIn page does not appear to mention his involvement on Mamdani’s mayoral campaign.
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