During today’s episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson and Sami Winc talk about leading New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani posing with a controversial imam named an unindicted co-conspirator in the first World Trade Center bombing. They also discuss why the self-proclaimed socialist is likely to win.
This transcript has been slightly edited for clarity
Sami Winc: Victor, [Zohran] Mamdani has had some bad press recently this week for taking pictures with Siraj Wahhaj, who is an imam …
Victor Davis Hanson: Imam. Unindicted co-conspirator.
Winc: Unindicted co-conspirator. Yeah. That’s what the FBI called him.
Hanson: That means that you have enough evidence, in a non-legal sense, to know the person’s probably guilty, but you don’t have enough actionable proof to actually indict him. So, you try to mention that he’s associated with the other indicted people.
Winc: Before you go on, and I just want to add that his son was the guy that took a bunch of teenagers to New Mexico and was teaching him to be jihadis.
Hanson: Jihadis, terrorists. Yeah, he was.
Winc: And then he got arrested, I think.
Hanson: And remember, this guy Mamdani was attacking [Andrew] Cuomo and saying, “How many mosques have you gone to?” And, “I’ve gone to all these mosques.” Is Mamdani going to be bad on religion? Yes. He’s a Islamic chauvinist and he has shady associates, to say the least. He’s gonna be bad economically because he is a socialist, although those who call him a communist are not smearing him because he, in his own words, has said that he believes in seizing the means of production, which is a definition of communism, by Friedrich Engels, I suppose.
Politically, as I said, he is gonna be left-wing. Economically, he’s going to, if he starts bringing in food co-ops and free this and free that, the city that—basically is free anyway because nobody follows the rules. They jump turnstiles and stuff—it’s gonna be a disaster. And you’re gonna see a lot of people go to Miami or Palm Beach.
It’s going to be sad because New York’s the greatest city in the world. It’s located near Washington, D.C. It’s on the East Coast. It’s a window to Europe, and it’s the traditional financial hub of the United States. But if he does what he says he is going to do, there’s going to be a lot of people who leave.
Winc: Have you seen the argument over whether Cuomo or [Curtis] Sliwa should drop out? They say Sliwa should drop out because he doesn’t have a chance, and Cuomo is better. But then there are all those commentators who say, “Well, Cuomo’s got the bad numbers of dead from his earlier administration.”
Hanson: There’s two arguments if you’re in New York, and you’re scared to death of this—whatever he is, communist, socialist—Mamdani. Then you are presented with two arguments: Argument one, number one: You can’t vote for Cuomo. He’s not only a real Democrat, even though he is saying he is independent, but he’s obnoxious. He told everybody, “If you don’t want to be for abortion, then get out of New York.”
He said that when he was governor. He deliberately directed COVID people into rest homes where people were vulnerable and somewhere between 10,000 and 14,000 people died. And it wasn’t just one sexual harassment allegation, it was serial. So, he’s not a good guy, and he’s not only not a good guy, but he looks tired, weak, anemic.
He’s not the Andrew Cuomo who battled [President Donald] Trump in the first term, like 2017. He was on TV. He was fiery, quick on his feet. He looks tired. He looks like he’s confused, baffled, like, “Well, I woke up. I’m Rip Van Winkle. What world is this? This guy’s a communist socialist. I’m Mario Cuomo’s son. I’m Chris Cuomo’s brother. Don’t you know who I am?”
No, we don’t. I’m sorry. The world passed you by. I think he took 10 days off the campaign on vacation. So, that’s the argument. Don’t vote for him. But the Sliva argument is, “Well, I’m a conservative. I’m kind of crazy. I have a lot of things in my past I’m not happy about. They’re digging out a lot of this stuff.”
I mean, you don’t want to vote for this guy. You want vote for Sliwa because he’s the true conservative and only one candidate can make it. So, it has to be one. So, you might as well vote for the person who reflects your view.
The problem is this, that the guy who is more conservative has less of a chance to win. The guy that is abominable is not as bad as Mamdani, and if you take the actual numbers of both of them—not that everybody who would vote for Sliwa would vote for Cuomo—but if that were to be true, he has a four- or five-point advantage over Mamdani.
I’ve never seen anything like it. If they had just said to themselves, all the conservative Democrats, all the moderate Democrats, all the Republicans all had just gone said, “Look, this guy is nihilistic. He’s Satanic. Can’t we get somebody like a [Rudy] Giuliani or maybe if you think he’s too conservative, [Michael] Bloomberg, just get one person, an independent, and nobody else run and we will back him.”
I mean, that’s what the Democrats [did]. It’s kind of undemocratic, as I said about Joe Biden. They kind of selected him in 2020, but at least this candidate would actually have to get out of the basement and run. They could defeat him. So, it’s an off-year election. It’s a municipal election, and there’s no opposition, really, to Mamdani that’s credible.
So, there’s going to be a very, very, very low turnout. I bet you, of all the 9 million people, I doubt a million people show up. And out of that, the ones that show up are going to be energized people, mostly white and Asian, and they’re going to be upscale, you know, a hundred thousand dollars. Not that that’s upscale in New York, but middle class, upper-middle class.
And they’re going to say, “I’m educated. I went to Yale, I went to Brown, I’ve got degrees, but I work for The Washington Post,” or “I’m an intern at the hospital,” or “I’m a young lawyer at a prestigious [law firm], but I don’t make any money to buy a $3 million house up near Harlem. I’m sorry, and that’s not fair because I’m a genius, and I’ve got all the right letters after my name, and I’m a liberal, and I feel really bad about all the good things you should feel bad about, and yet my people don’t help me, so I’m going to vote commie.”
That’s basically what his support is.
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