By The New York Post Editorial Board
Zohran Mamdani’s sheltered life — not just his privileged upbringing, but his whole adult “career” — is on display whenever someone asks him a real question, such as why he’s besties with a guy who thinks “America deserved 9/11.”
That came Wednesday, at a Bronx event that the campaign staged to let him demand that somebody hand out free tickets to the World Cup Final: A reporter asked him why he hangs out with Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who has “said some nasty stuff.”
The candidate missed a beat, then flashed his trademark grin and replied, “I’m here to talk about the World Cup.”
Sure, that’s what you want to talk about, Zoh, but reporters don’t work for you — nor do the voters.
Mamdani and his operatives act baffled whenever anyone asks a direct question about the candidate’s past statements and alliances.
Bring up his career-long demands to defund the police, close jails, arrest Bibi Netanyahu and offer sex-change operations to kids on demand, and Mamdani & Co. sing in unison, “That’s not his campaign!”
As if we’ve entered some new world of politics where candidates aren’t responsible for positions they proudly held until 10 minutes ago.
“It’s not our campaign” is a heck of lot different from “I’ve realized I was completely wrong, let me explain my error.”
It’s a tale of two Zohrans.
One Mamdani is on the record as a socialist firebrand who quotes Soviet-backed anticolonial guerrilla revolutionaries as inspiration, rails about Zionism and praises the confiscation of private property.
Never mind all that, his campaign demands: Look at this other Mamdani who’s only about this free stuff (and magically “making the rich pay”); asking anything else is somehow irrelevant, impertinent and offensive.
He may really believe he’s entitled to this “no off-topic questions” privilege: Mamdani has lived his whole life in a bubble of praise.
He was raised to smile patronizingly at “incorrect” political opinions in his leftist parents’ many homes, then did his “adulting” deep in the same ideological comfort zone: pricey, ultraliberal Bowdoin College; a self-indulgent rap “career” plus Democratic socialist struggle sessions — then a cushy spot in the Legislature’s progressive supermajority.
Answering even slightly challenging basic questions about his (and his friends’) revolting opinions is a strange new thing.
Yet the questions will keep coming; the only mystery is whether the voting public will ever hear any straight answers.
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