Zohran Mamdani wants to have his cake — freshly baked at his local government-run grocery store — and eat it, too.
The 33-year-old son of a Columbia professor and an acclaimed filmmaker has made the transition from unknown state assemblyman to New York City mayoral frontrunner by riding a wave of enthusiasm for his unapologetic, far-left agenda.
But now that he has to close the deal in a general election, he’s desperately trying to soften his stances.
After Mamdani’s triumph last week, President Donald Trump marveled “It’s finally happened, the Democrats have crossed the line” — then deemed the political wunderkind a “100% Communist Lunatic.”
Mamdani objected to the label during a Sunday morning interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker, to whom he insisted he is merely “fighting” for “working people.”
“When we talk about my politics, I call myself a democrat socialist,” he added.
And as a matter of course, the pseudoscientific professional fact-checking industry erected to assist the Democratic Party swung into motion to back him up.
“Accusing Democrats of being communists or communist sympathizers is a frequent misleading attack line by some Republicans. It is a red scare tactic that has existed in US politics for decades,” asserted PolitiFact under the headline “Zohran Mamdani is favored to win NYC mayoral primary. Claims he’s a communist are False.”
Rolling Stone slobbered over Mamdani’s interview with Welker, lauding him for having confronted “Trump’s misinformation.”
Al-Jazeera, the Qatari-owned propaganda factory with a strong interest in Mamdani’s success given his virulently anti-Israel views, reprinted PolitiFact’s thinly veiled contribution to his campaign.
Unfortunately for Mamdani and his media allies, there aren’t enough semantic tricks in existence to make up for his own damning words.
PolitiFact insists that “Mamdani’s platform is not akin to communism, a system of government which calls for government takeover of private property and control of industry.”
But in 2020, Mamdani rebuked the Democratic Party for stating that “the Biden-Harris administration is committed to rebuilding an economy that welcomes everyone as full participants.”
He pushed back in response: “If we want everyone to be full participants in the economy, we need worker ownership of the means of production.”
In a 2021 address to the Young Democratic Socialists of America that he doubtless now wishes he could erase, Mamdani took off the mask completely — and identified his ‘“end goal” as “seizing the means of production.”
In other words, he hopes to see the tools and resources used to produce goods and services in America forcibly reallocated to the working class.
Just like the Bolsheviks did back in 1917, or the Cubans in 1959.
Are we to be impressed that he’s not openly calling for the mass murder sanctioned by Lenin or Castro?
Is that the supposed distinction between communism and Mamdani’s brand of “democratic socialism”?
Then again, Mamdani doesn’t appear to recognize that distinction when he’s not trying to dodge the political traps he’s set for himself.
After all, he celebrated the anniversary of the Russian Revolution — which gave way to the establishment of the Soviet Union — with approving tweets in both 2023 and 2024.
And in 2020, he previewed his own mayoral run by posting that the Big Apple needed a mayor like 21-year-old Arya Rajendran, a member of the Communist Party of India, adding a link to a hammer-and-sickle-bearing party account that dubbed her “comrade.”
As if that wasn’t enough to make “Mamdani the Commie” stick, consider: According to Marxist theory, socialism is just a stepping stone on the way to communism.
“Communist society passes through two phases of development: the lower phase known as socialism, and the higher phase known as communism,” explains an archived textbook from the Soviet Union’s Academy of Sciences.
“Socialism and communism are two stages of maturity of the new communist form of society.”
So Mamdani’s touting of socialism — even in its supposedly kinder, gentler, democratic form — isn’t some kind of rebuttal to the communist charge.
It’s an admission to it.
Democrats in politics and the press know that should he prevail in November, Mamdani will almost automatically become a power player as their party’s freshest new face.
The ascendant, energetic, historically illiterate Democratic base is fully on board with those city-owned grocery stores, still more price controls on rent, free transit and childcare, and a minimum wage of $30 an hour.
But the general electorate recognizes Mamdani’s agenda as a Great Leap Backward into an amoral, statist society.
Mamdani and his Pravda-esque friends in the Fourth Estate want to make that leap while denying ever having left their feet.
Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
