Just days before New York City voters head to the polls, a bombshell revelation about socialist mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani has emerged that cuts to the heart of his American identity. The candidate leading in the race to govern the nation's largest city has a mother who once publicly declared that her son is "not an American at all."
The mother of New York City socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani gave an interview when he was a 21-year-old American college student discussing how her son is "not an American at all" while using terminology that some view as derogatory toward the United States.
"He is a total desi," filmmaker Mira Nair told the Hindustan Times in a 2013 interview, when her son Zohran was 21 years old. At the time, Mamdani was attending Bowdoin College, where he co-founded the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter and was pushing for academic sanctions against Israel.
"Completely. We are not firangs at all. He is very much us. He is not an Uhmericcan (American) at all. He was born in Uganda, raised between India and America. He is at home in many places. He thinks of himself as a Ugandan and as an Indian."
In Hindi and Urdu, "firang" is an informal term historically used to describe foreigners or Westerners.
The timing of these comments proves particularly revealing. When his mother made these declarations, Zohran was attending Bowdoin College, where he had already thrown himself into anti-Israel activism by co-founding the school's Students for Justice in Palestine chapter and pushing hard for academic sanctions against the Jewish state. According to Nair, her son was "born in Uganda, raised between India and America," and "thinks of himself as a Ugandan and as an Indian." Conspicuously absent from that list of identities? American.
It gets worse.
The language Nair used carries deeper meaning than you might realize. In Hindi and Urdu, the term firang is far from harmless. Mehek Cooke, a GOP consultant and attorney who was born in India, said the term is a slur, not some harmless cultural term.
"It’s the word used back in India to mock outsiders, to say you don’t belong," Cooke said. "Using it here about your own child raised in the United States carries the same tone as calling someone a derogatory word — or worse. It’s flippant, divisive, and dripping with contempt for the very country that gave your family a better life."
What makes this particularly galling, according to Cooke, is the context. Describing a child raised in the United States this way comes across as flippant, divisive, and dripping with contempt for the very country that gave your family a better life.
Cooke explained, "When Mamdani’s mother says her son was ‘never a firang and only desi,’ it’s a rejection of America. It’s ungrateful, disrespectful, and frankly repulsive to live in this country since age seven, receive every freedom, education, and opportunity America offers, and still deny being American."
Nair made clear in the interview that maintaining distance from American culture was deliberate, emphasizing that “we only speak Hindustani at home.” She described Zohran using another loaded term — a “very chaalu fellow” — which translates roughly to savvy or street smart but carries connotations of someone who knows how to work the system. According to one dictionary, it means someone of loose morals, sly, crafty, dishonest, and untrustworthy.
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The apple apparently hasn't fallen far from the tree when it comes to the Mamdani family's worldview. Zohran's father, Mahmood Mamdani, teaches at Columbia University and has faced his own firestorm of criticism for controversial positions. The elder Mamdani sits on the advisory council of an anti-Israel organization that promotes boycotts and sanctions while routinely accusing Israel of genocide. A video of him claiming Adolf Hitler drew inspiration from Abraham Lincoln went viral recently, racking up millions of views after Fox News reported on it back in July.
When a candidate’s own mother publicly states he’s “not American at all” while using culturally loaded language that mocks Western identity, voters should be asking hard questions about where his loyalties truly lie. This isn’t some ancient comment dug up from childhood; Nair made these statements when Zohran was already an adult activist working against American interests on a college campus we helped pay for. His parents’ anti-American and anti-Israel views aren’t merely embarrassing family baggage; they’re the ideological foundation upon which this socialist candidate built his entire political identity.
New York City is about to make a choice that will define its future for years to come, and voters deserve to know whether their next mayor sees himself as governing Americans or merely managing a useful platform for advancing a foreign worldview wrapped in democratic socialist clothing.
Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is still ongoing, and polls are now showing Americans are increasingly blaming the Democrats for this mess, but we can’t let them spin their way out of it.
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