What Mamdani Means for NYC: VDH’s Warning

Victor Davis Hanson warned Americans to not be fooled by Zohran Mamdani’s charming smile.

Hanson joined Mark Levin on Fox News’ “Life, Liberty, & Levin” Saturday night and broke down three main factors contributing to the leading mayoral candidate for New York City’s popularity.

“I think he feels that he’s a creature of an off year, low turnout election in New York,” Hanson said. “Number two: The demography of New York has changed when people fled it after COVID. And then he’s going to run on this Obama-like charismatic smile.”

There’s “a million or a million and a half less conservative voters” after COVID, Hanson explained. And then with his charming front, Mamdani appears like “he is not going to be dangerous” because he “doesn’t scream and yell like Elizabeth Warren” does, for example.

“That fools a lot of people,” Hanson said. “He appeals to the upper, upper middle class who feel that their intellectual abilities or their degrees entitle them to a certain lifestyle, and they don’t have it in New York.”

Hanson added that he doesn’t think Mamdani’s supporters “expect what he’ll do.”

“We’re really talking about the upper, upper middle class in a low turnout election with a divided ticket with Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa, and he [Mamdani] thinks he can sneak in, and I think he’s right,” Hanson predicted. 

There could have been a united front against Mamdani, however, “with a center-right candidate,” Hanson said. Candidates like former New York City Mayors Mike Bloomberg, or better yet, like Rudy Giuliani, “would’ve won … but they didn’t have that.”

“He [Mamdani] smiles a lot, and he lies,” Hanson said. “He wants to disarm everybody in New York. He wants to outlaw guns, but he doesn’t want to disarm Hamas. It makes no sense, but it does make sense if he’s a radical Marxist, which he is.”

Mamdani is actually a very “privileged” person who “grew up with advantages” because his parents are a “multimillionaire professor [and a] filmmaker,” Hanson said.

“He seems to hate the very system that empowered his entire family,” Hanson said. “He’s a very dangerous person because he is charismatic.”

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