New York City has a new mayor, and he’s already making headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Zohran Mamdani ran as a self-described socialist, won with a fraction of the city’s eligible voters, and immediately started acting like he speaks for the whole country.
And now one of America’s most respected historians just torched him in a way that’s going to leave a mark.
Hanson Unloads on the Man Running New York Into the Ground
Victor Davis Hanson, the Hoover Institution senior fellow and host of the podcast Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words, has spent recent weeks cataloging what he sees as the staggering hypocrisy at the center of Mamdani’s political identity.
When co-host Sami Winc raised Mamdani’s claim that he was referring to all super PACs when he called AIPAC a “monster” at a rally, Hanson didn’t mince words: “He is such a liar. He’s such a liar. He’s such a liar. I hate to use that word, but every time he’s called on something, he does two things. He does not back down, and then he lies about what he said.”
Hanson pressed the point further, noting that Mamdani “did not talk about all PACs, and he talked specifically about AIPAC,” and that “AIPAC is not a fringe organization.”
That’s a historian who has spent decades studying how civilizations collapse, and he’s watching one of America’s greatest cities get handed over to someone he believes is running a con.
On Mamdani’s pledge to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visits New York City, Hanson let loose: “Mamdani, with that socialist smile and that oozy, unctuous personality, I thought he wouldn’t be so stupid to admit that he’s an absolute antisemite and hates Israel. Because any person who listened to his video and read what he wrote, the first question is, OK, you have a policy that anybody that you think, in your infinite wisdom, committed genocide can’t come into your city. He said, you can’t come into our city. It’s not your city. You’re an interloper. You had about 11% of the resident population vote for you.”
That number matters. Eleven percent. Mamdani didn’t win a mandate. He won a low-turnout Democrat primary in a city where most residents don’t bother showing up anymore because they’ve already given up on the process.
A Multimillionaire Lecturing Working Americans About Privilege
Hanson noted that Mamdani used the nation’s 250th anniversary to deliver what amounted to a national indictment, calling it “not a speech” but rather a condemnation, one that “essentially” claimed “America was ruled by white racists” who had been “very unfair in the past to everyone but themselves.”
Mamdani “included himself in the group of people supposedly who had calloused hands, who did the work, but they were not paid fairly, or they got the raw end of the deal in a racist and unfair America.”
That’s the part that makes Hanson’s blood boil. Because the facts of Mamdani’s background don’t line up with the victimhood narrative he’s selling.
Hanson pointed out plainly: “The Mamdanis are multimillionaires. They were multimillionaires in Uganda, and when they came here, they got even richer.”
Mamdani’s father is a Columbia University professor, and his mother is filmmaker Mira Nair. These are not the calloused hands of people who got the raw end of the deal. This is a family that arrived in America wealthy and left wealthier, now running the country’s largest city on a platform that treats the whole American story as a crime scene.
Hanson put it bluntly: “When we look at these new democratic socialists and they start to lecture us on race or they lecture us on wealth, go back and look at their past, and what will we find? That they’re racist themselves and they’re quite wealthy.”
Hanson also noted that before ascending to political power, Mamdani “was a rapper” who “kind of floated around in campaigns, and was subsidized by his parents.” Not exactly the working-class hero the identity politics Left needs him to be.
What Mamdani’s Rise Actually Means for the Country
Hanson has been making this argument across multiple platforms and it keeps getting sharper the more Mamdani opens his mouth.
Hanson put Mamdani’s socialist ambitions in historical context, noting that he “looks at ‘the squad’ and Omar and Ocasio-Cortez, and he thinks it’s his moment that we’re gonna go communist.” But Hanson reminded listeners that even in “a much more volatile period of immigration” a century ago, Eugene Debs ran for president five times as a socialist, was in jail during his last bid in 1920, and “only won 1 million votes out of about 130 million or 140 million Americans at the time.” The conclusion Hanson draws: “We have never had a grassroots socialist-commie movement.”
And yet here is Mamdani, sitting in City Hall, proposing a $127 billion budget that even the Washington Post’s editorial board mocked, noting that it would “hike taxes for over 3 million residents in the city” and acknowledging that Mamdani was asking his own constituents to “pay the price to finance his socialist agenda.”
That budget allocated an additional $1.2 billion for migrants in New York City. Ordinary New Yorkers, many of them working two jobs and watching their neighborhoods change faster than they can process, are being told to foot the bill.
Hanson sees what’s happening in New York as a preview of what the Left wants to do everywhere. He noted that figures like Mamdani are “first and second generation people that are immigrating here” from “failed states,” and yet “apparently they want to reenact the disaster they fled from.”
That’s not just a political critique. That’s a warning about where the Democrat Party is heading. The socialist wing isn’t a fringe anymore. It runs New York City. It has ambitions far beyond it.
Hanson described the playbook bluntly: “go act like you’re a moderate, and then once you’re in office, go full commie.” New Yorkers who thought they were getting a reasonable progressive mayor are learning what that actually means in practice.
And the rest of the country is watching. Because what gets normalized in New York doesn’t stay in New York. It becomes the template for every other city where the Left holds power and the media applauds whatever they do next.
Victor Davis Hanson has been studying how great civilizations make catastrophic choices for his entire career. He’s not panicking. But he’s not pretending this is normal, either.
Sources: Daily Signal, “Victor Davis Hanson: Mamdani Is a ‘Communist Full of Himself'” (June 26, 2026); Daily Signal, “Victor Davis Hanson: Mamdani Is the Real Racist Polluting This Country” (July 7, 2026); Daily Signal, “Victor’s Letter to Mamdani: You’re a Product of Privilege, at Least Act Grateful” (July 7, 2026); Daily Signal, “Why Mamdani’s Netanyahu Arrest Plan Has No Legal Basis” (July 24, 2026); Daily Caller, “Joe Rogan Calls Zohran Mamdani ‘F*cking Psychopath'” (February 19, 2026); Wikipedia, “Mahmood Mamdani.”
