‘We Welcome Everyone,’ Liberal Comic Says — Then NYC Terror Suspect Throws Bomb Over His Head

Liberal comedian Walter Masterson stood in front of Gracie Mansion, home of Democratic socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and shouted at anti-Islam protesters, “We welcome everyone!” Seconds later, terror suspect Emir Balat threw a bomb over his head into the crowd.

Masterson, a Democratic comedian and political satirist, posted video from the incident that took place on Saturday — an incident that is being investigated by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force after both suspects professed their allegiance to ISIS upon being apprehended.

“I was in the middle of saying ‘as a born and raised New Yorker, we welcome everyone into this city’ when he threw that over my head,” Masterson commented on the video.

WATCH:

I was in the middle of saying “as a born and raised New Yorker, we welcome everyone into this city” when he threw that over my head. pic.twitter.com/i5iD3MVf7h

— Walter Masterson (@waltermasterson) March 8, 2026

“We were born and raised in New York, and we want everyone to stay in New York,” he said into a megaphone, shouting at the protesters gathered there. “You don’t get to come from outside and then tell everyone else —”

As he was speaking, someone else began to scream. Masterson appeared to instinctively duck down slightly, at which point Emir Balat — one of the suspects who was quickly apprehended — ran right up behind him and tossed something over his head.

People responded to Masterson’s video, suggesting that maybe he’d learned a valuable lesson that day – but Masterson, who claimed that he hadn’t been scared because the bomb looked fake, doubled down: “I’m the guy who didn’t run when a bomb was thrown over his head, I also didn’t become a xenophobic bigot.”

Masterson attempted to justify Balat’s actions — because he was targeting January 6th defendant Jake Lang — saying in an X post, “A terrorist jumped over my shoulder to throw an explosive at a pardoned terrorist from January 6th.”

In what appears to be a bizarre coincidence, Masterson appeared three years earlier at a school board meeting in the Pennsylvania community from which the New York City suspects had come.

There to mock parents concerned about pornographic materials in school libraries and LGBTQ propaganda flooding classrooms, Masterson pretended to be a concerned conservative parent and complained about, among other things, a book that showed two penguins holding hands.

He also claimed that “The Giving Tree” was an overt reference to communism, and argued that all PRIDE flags should be replaced with copies of the Declaration of Independence: “It’s not just a piece of paper, it’s a map that leads to a treasure of Templar gold. That is why Nicolas Cage tried to steal it. As these liberals try to steal our Constitution the only way to stop it is to steal it first.”