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New York City socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani cruised to victory on Tuesday night, defying the laundry list of critics who railed against him over several high-profile controversial stances and statements.
Communist label
Mamdani dismissed the “communist” label throughout the campaign, maintaining that he is a democratic socialist.
His past comments promoting the abolition of private property, seizing the means of production, claiming billionaires shouldn’t exist, and calling for free government programs earned him the communist label from some, including President Donald Trump.
Mike Gonzalez, the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told Fox News Digital earlier this year that Mamdani is “absolutely a communist” who “repeats lines out of the ‘Communist Manifesto’ and other writings by Karl Marx.”
“When Marxists today say they are socialists, they usually want to convey the impression that they believe in elections and not just in shooting your way into power,” Gonzalez added. “Of course, that election often ends up being the last free and fair one. Witness Venezuela.”
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Anti-Israel positions
Days before the election, an antisemitism research institute released a comprehensive report that summarized its concerns about Mamdani’s stances on Israel and concluded he shouldn’t become the next mayor of New York City.
Mamdani faced heated criticism on the campaign trail, including hundreds of rabbis signing a letter opposing him for positions dating back to his time in college co-founding his school’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter all the way up to this year when he was hesitant to definitively condemn the term “globalize the intifada.”
Mamdani sparked a political firestorm last month, drawing outrage from the law enforcement community after posting a smiling photo with Imam Siraj Wahhaj, a Brooklyn cleric who served as a character witness for the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and has been a longtime defender of convicted terrorists, raising funds for their legal defenses.
Mamdani, a 34-year-old New York state assembly member, has been an outspoken critic of Israel and has even vowed to have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrested if he visits New York City.
“I call Zohran Mamdani a jihadist because he is. Zohran Mamdani is a raging anti-Semite,” New York GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik said in August.
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“Mamdani is the definition of a jihadist as he supports Hamas terrorists which he did as recently as yesterday, when he refused to call for Hamas terrorists to put down their arms — the same Hamas terrorist group that slaughtered civilians including New Yorkers on October 7, 2023.”
In July, a Jewish advocacy group blasted Mamdani for sharing a video mocking Hanukkah Jewish traditions on social media.
Mamdani also faced criticism over the anti-Israel positions of his Columbia University professor father, Mahmood, who previously compared Abraham Lincoln to Adolf Hitler and appeared sympathetic to suicide bombers in a book he authored.
“I think critiques of the state of Israel are critiques of a government, as opposed to critiques of a people and of a faith,” Mamdani told MSNBC this week. “And my job is to represent every single New Yorker, and I will do so no matter their thoughts and opinions on Israel and Palestine, of which millions of New Yorkers have very strong views — and I’m one of them.”
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Defunding the police
Public safety was one of the most talked about issues on the campaign trail, resulting in a constant debate about Mamdani’s calls in 2020 to “defund the police.”
Before his mayoral campaign, Mamdani called the New York Police Department “racist” and said in 2023, “We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.”
“I think what scares a lot of New Yorkers about the policy positions taken by Zohran Mamdani over the years is that he has exhibited not just a lack of appreciation for the men and women that stand on that [police] line, but a visceral disdain for them, which has led him to push for things like defunding and dismantling the police,” Rafael A. Mangual, senior fellow and head of research for policing and public safety at the Manhattan Institute, told Fox News Digital in August, shortly after a gunman killed four people in midtown Manhattan, including a NYPD police officer.
“It’s not so much as just that he said, well, I wanna allocate some of this money to other places. He has gone so far as to say that we should dismantle the entire department.”
Mamdani attempted to distance himself from his previous positions on the campaign trail and apologized to them in a Fox News interview in October.
“Will you do that right now?” Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum asked.
“Absolutely,” Mamdani said, turning to face the camera directly. “I’ll apologize to police officers right here because this is the apology that I’ve been sharing with many rank-and-file officers. And I apologize because of the fact that I’m looking to work with these officers, and I know that these officers, these men and women who serve in the NYPD, they put their lives on the line every single day. And I will be a mayor.”
Columbus Day incident
In July, Mamdani sparked a social media firestorm after a post resurfaced of him giving the middle finger to a statue of Christopher Columbus.
“Take it down,” Mamdani posted in June 2020, along with a photo showing what is presumably his gloved hand raising the middle finger toward a statue of the famed Italian explorer in Astoria, New York.
In a post around the same time, Mamdani asked his followers in a poll who should be honored instead of Columbus with options that included, “Tony Bennett (Astoria native, music icon) Walter Audisio (Communist partisan, killed Mussolini) Sacco & Vanzetti (Executed due to anti-Italian sentiment).”
The winners of the poll were Sacco and Vanzetti, two anarcho-communists executed in 1927.
Some in the Italian community took offense to the post, according to a New York Post report, including Columbus Heritage Coalition President Angelo Vivolo.
“We will defend Columbus Day and Columbus statues,” Vivolo said.
“He is being disrespectful to the Italian American community.” Vivolo added. “If you offend one community, you offend all communities.”
Despite the criticisms and opposition from high-profile lawmakers across the country, Mamdani’s campaign focused on affordability, pushing back against Trump, and taxing the rich guided him to a commanding victory on Tuesday night.
Mamdani’s victory is expected to be a rallying cry for Republicans as they look to paint him and his socialist agenda as the face of the Democratic Party heading into next year’s midterms.
“The Democrat Party has surrendered to radical socialist Zohran Mamdani and the far-left mob who are now running the show,” National Republican Committee Spokesman Mike Marinella told Fox News Digital on Tuesday night.
“They’ve proudly embraced defunding the police, abolishing ICE, taxing hard-working Americans to death, and replacing common sense with chaos. Every House Democrat is foolishly complicit in their party’s collapse, and voters will make them pay in 2026.”
Fox News Digital’s Deirdre Heavey contributed to this report.
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