New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Thursday put to rest any lingering doubt about whether or not he is a communist, when he said, to the disgust of people worldwide who have lived under the boot of socialist tyranny, “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” Hardest hit, however, although they will never, ever admit it, much less issue a retraction or an apology, are the many leftist establishment media news outlets that insisted during Mamdani’s mayoral campaign that he was not really a communist at all.
Mamdani’s statement during his Thursday inaugural address came as no surprise. Mamdani made his authoritarian inclinations clear last November, when he won the New York City mayoral election and said this during his victory speech: “We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve and no concern too small for it to care about.” It was also clear several years before Mamdani ran for mayor, when in 2021 he reminded a socialist audience about “other issues that we firmly believe in, whether it’s BDS or whether it is the end goal of seizing the means of production.”
As Intifada on the Hudson: The Selling of Zohran Mamdani shows, Mamdani has also made his communist tendencies clear on numerous other occasions. On his rapper Instagram account “bayaye27,” where he posted from 2015 to 2019, he used as the featured image not a photo of himself, but of the rapper Lil Wayne wearing a red shirt emblazoned with the word “COMMUNIST.” Nevertheless, the establishment media has been determined to ensure that whatever you may think of Zohran Mamdani, you must never, ever get the idea that New York City’s new mayor is a communist. Why, the very idea is absurd!
The establishment media has been particularly avid to brand this idea absurd because one of those who was advancing it was none other than President Donald Trump. On June 25, 2025, the day after Mamdani defeated Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary, Trump called Mamdani a “100% Communist Lunatic.” When asked if he really was a communist, as Trump had asserted, Mamdani was definite: “No, I am not.” He claimed that “Donald Trump is attacking me because he is desperate to distract from his war on working people. We must and we will fight back.” Mamdani also implied that Trump’s real motive was (of course!) racism and xenophobia.
Mamdani could also be sure that the establishment media would run interference for him, and it did so with alacrity. Deutsche Welle (DW) informed the world that “political scientists and experts agree that the ‘communist’ label is inaccurate. Mamdani does not advocate for state control of all industries or the abolition of private property — core tenets of communism.”
DW did not mention Mamdani’s notorious statement about the “end goal of seizing the means of production.” Neither did the Associated Press, which made the same false claim about Mamdani not believing that the state should own everything: “While Trump and other opponents keep calling Mamdani a communist, he identifies as something different: a democratic socialist. He believes government should play a role in reducing economic disparity, but he doesn’t advocate for a communist system where property is collectively owned.”
The Observer, which identifies itself as “the independent newspaper serving Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s and Holy Cross,” commanded: “Stop calling Mamdani ‘communist.’” And here we were told yet again: “Mamdani is not advocating a centrally planned economy; thus, he cannot be a communist.” Yet there is no record of Mamdani ever having retracted, repudiated or regretted his 2021 statement about seizing the means of production.
On Dec. 25, 2020, the Communist Party of India in the Puducherry territory, which adds the clarifying term “Marxist” to its name in parentheses, posted praise on Twitter for the youthful Marxist mayor of the city of Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala: “Comrade Arya Rajendran, age 21 new Mayor of Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. She will be the youngest mayor of a major city in the world. Here she leads a detachment of Red Volunteers in @CPIMKerala. #CPIM #LeftAlternative #Communist.”
Related: Russian Official Uses Simpsons Meme to Mock ‘Comrade Mamdani’
Mamdani shared this tweet from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) Puducherry with this comment: “them: so what kind of mayor does nyc need right now?” Mamdani followed this with “me:” with the colon indicating that what followed would be his recommendation for the kind of mayor that New York City needed. He then quoted the tweet from the Indian Marxists, indicating that in his view, the kind of mayor that New York City needed was someone like the Marxist Arya Rajendran. Someone like, say, Zohran Kwame Mamdani.
Will the international media apologize for misleading its still considerable audience about what Zohran Mamdani is all about? Come on, man!
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