Zohran Mamdani’s Skeletons Are Coming Out of the Closet

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We’ve talked before about the front-runner in the New York mayoral race, Zohran Mamdani. And we’ve mentioned before that he talked about “seizing the means of production,” which comes right out of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ “Das Kapital,” “The Communist Manifesto.”

We talked about his claims that he never advocated defunding the police, even though there’s an extensive social media trail where he advocates just that.

He talked about going into “richer” and “whiter” areas and taxing them, specifically, at a higher rate. Kind of ironic, as we mentioned that the highest income group in the United States by ethnic background are people from India, Indian Americans. Mamdani’s parents, for example. He didn’t say, in other words, richer and Indian American, he just used the word “white” because he is trying to cater himself to the African American vote.

All that being said, because he is such an extremist figure and because he has been pampered and grown up very rich, he was never really required to go out and get a job and go through audits. He’s been a rapper. He’s been an activist. He’s tried to run for office. He has an extensive left-wing record. And now that he’s in the public realm, everything is starting to come out.

Just to give you a couple of examples: His father was in a discussion—you know, a conference discussion—and said that Adolf Hitler’s idea for the final solution and many of his policies toward the Jews came from Abraham Lincoln, the way Lincoln supposedly treated Indians on reservations. That’s crazy.

Anwar al-Awlaki, I don’t know if you remember him, al-Awlaki. He was an American citizen that went to Yemen. And he advocated killing Americans. And he was a terrorist. Barack Obama, when he was president, ordered a predator hit team on him and killed al-Awlaki in a targeted assassination—who was, by the way, an ISIS supporter, but he was also a U.S. citizen. So, we assassinated him without habeas corpus. Be that as it may, that was Obama’s decision.

But now we learned, in 2015, years after that Obama hit on this ISIS figure—was one of the captains of ISIS and living in Yemen—Mamdani was defending him and saying, basically, he turned radical because the FBI surveilled him. That’s like saying that FBI Director Kash Patel turned radical because the FBI surveilled him. People don’t become terrorist kingpins because the American FBI thinks you’re a person of interest.

He has some other disturbing things as well. He posted a video on his social media of Indian Americans dressed as if they were Hasidic Jews. And they were making fun of the Hanukkah celebration. And they had a menorah there. And they were chanting, as if they were rap music. It was very derogatory toward Jews. Yet, why would he put that on his social media account?

That’s not the end of it. He’s very sensitive about the African American and Latino vote—which I don’t think he’s going to win. But now we learn that when he applied to college, to Bowdoin—and I think, further, to graduate school, in which he was not admitted—he claimed that he was an African American.

And you know, as someone who was in academia for three decades, I used to have students that were from North Africa, Egypt, or Morocco, or Algeria, but were not African American. That is, they were not blacks. And they tried that trick. And they were not successful. Neither was Mamdani.

But imagine, he’s giving lectures—moral lectures, sanctimonious lectures, self-righteous lectures—about how unequal the United States is. And then, yet, he tries to mimic or pass on an Elizabeth Warren or a Ward Churchill-like fraud that he’s African American, that he is a black African.

Just because his parents, who were Indian and immigrants to Uganda and were one of the 1% elite in that country, and they were thrown out as refugees, he’s now claiming that he should have had special—I shouldn’t say he’s now claiming—he claimed that he should have had special preference in admissions because he was black.

You add all of this up and I guarantee you more will come out every day because he’s a pampered, privileged, angry, young socialist/communist. He’s had no experience. He’s out of depth. And he has a long social media record.

And the only question that I have for you, the audience, and me, because I’m genuinely puzzled about it, the more that we hear that he’s a lunatic and unhinged and anti-American and socialist, does that help him or does that hurt him, given the demographics of New York?

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