In the basement of the Brooklyn Central Library on Thursday evening, two organizers who helped mobilize young voters for Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral run opened their sticker-plastered laptops and prepared to reintroduce themselves.
The group, formerly known as Hot Girls 4 Zohran, is rebranding as Hot Girls Organize. Gone were the Bushwick bars and sticky, disco-lit dancefloors where they had once gathered. In their place was a wood-paneled auditorium lined with green velvet seats — a deliberately dignified choice for a town hall meeting signaling recalibration.
“We wanted to create this cool aesthetic that brought in a revolutionary aspect,” said the organization’s co-founder Cait Camelia, who wore pink tinsel in her hair, red cowboy boots, and a long-sleeved lace top.
Without the uniform Zohran merch, most attendees were dressed down and wearing pink to watch the new group rollout, which included five new guiding principles, like “Hot Girls Melt ICE,” as well as fights against climate change, AI, landlords and AIPAC — a much broader focus from the movement’s original mission.
Camelia and her friend Kaif Kabir founded Hot Girls 4 Zohran in March 2025 to rally support for Mamdani. They quickly became pioneers of a new type of political canvassing that was playful, sexy and perfectly engineered to appeal to Gen Z. Their messaging was facetious, their events were not just traditional speeches but DJ sets and comedy shows, and the free T-shirts they handed out at their rallies — which spelled out the group’s name in a kitschy orange font — became it girl fashion statements worn by celebrities like Emily Ratajkowski and Reneé Rapp.
After Mamdani’s victory, and once the group was permitted to turn a profit — which lawyers advised against during the campaign because the group wasn’t a registered political action committee — members sold 2,000 shirts, bringing their income to around $12,000.
“The goal has always been for us to make sure that our voices are in tune with culture,” Kabir said. “Sometimes that does require us to be a little more provocative in order to get out our message.”
Since January, profits from T-shirt sales and crowdsourced donations have been used to register the group as a formal nonprofit and finance its rebrand. What began as a grassroots organization operating independently from the official mayoral campaign has now taken on an institutional formality. The group has retained legal consultants and is in the process of registering as a 501(c)(4).
The library meeting was a presentation to lay out their new strategy.
“After Zohran was elected, I went into a really deep depression for a month-and-a-half,” Camelia told agreeing participants, explaining how the combination of the Trump administration policies and not having consistent political work left her bereft. “But if you realize you can do something, something will change.”
“Electoral politics is only one way to get free and we need to be approaching this from all angles,” Jes Visconte, 29, an attendee who helped canvass for Zohran, told Gothamist. “We can’t just wait for an election to defend our neighbors against ICE, we need that right now.”
In Camelia’s presentation about opposing ICE, she discussed giving members ICE watch training, self-defense classes, first aid training, and gun safety lessons. “It’s like adult Girl Scouts,” she said, describing the group’s new boots-on-the-ground approach. “I felt a lot safer after I learned to shoot a gun.”
“Hot Girls Against AI” speaker Ashley Liao suggested “get off our phones, get educated and whip out the digital cameras,” as well as increasing the knowledge of AI’s harms through social media outreach and hosting picnics in the park, where attendees wrote future letters to themselves.
Pink PowerPoint slides about toxic landlords and taxing the rich mixed seriousness with humor, featuring GIFs, graphics and a lot of hearts. But the mood was serious, with a lot of ruminations about the situation in Minneapolis. Each presenter offered not just on-the-ground plans in their respective areas (canvassing, events, trash pickup and composting), but also Signal group chats to coordinate efforts and member support in the form of yoga classes, breathing guides, happy hours and park hangs.
“We have to be able to strike a balance in terms of things like ICE,” Camelia told me, reflecting on how the group reconciles playful marketing tactics with tackling serious issues. “It’s less about making it something that’s cool and cute and tongue in cheek and really centering it on this idea of it’s not hopeless.”
The afterparty was the perfect antidote to that. The group drifted through the icy streets of Prospect Heights to The Barlow, a neighborhood bar, where members spent the rest of the evening unwinding from the goals set out in the meeting and creating vision boards. Some drank spiked hot chocolates, others beers, and all seemed to enjoy some respite before the busy weeks of organizing that lie ahead.
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