When Zohran Mamdani won the primary election for mayor of New York City, the Trump Regime Media went into meltdown. The Media Research Center did as well, of course, starting with a Nicholas Fondacaro hate-watch of “The View.” Cue the fearmongering, Nick:
In the Wednesday wake of far-left Democratic extremist Zohran Mamdani winning the Democratic Party’s mayoral primary in New York City, some of the liberal ladies of ABC’s The View shared their praise. Far-left co-host Sunny Hostin was excited that Mamdani was a “democratic socialist,” and pretend independent Sara Haines let the mask slip as she hyped how he wanted to jack up taxes on New Yorkers and freeze rent.
Interestingly, an unlikely duo in co-hosts Alyssa Farah Griffin and Joy Behar voiced opposition and fear of how Mamdani will harm the city.
Clay Waters complained that PBS wasn’t freaking out about Mamdani like he was:
Zohran Mamdani, the controversial leftwing Muslim candidate who last night won the Democratic primary in the New York City mayoral race and will take on incumbent Eric Adams this fall, was celebrated on PBS’s News Hour Monday, before Election Day
At least both co-anchor Geoff Bennett and field reporter William Brangham called Mamdani a “socialist,” though the label would be hard to deny, given Mamdani is running under the party line of the Democratic Socialists of America. Even the New York Times editorial page fretted that Mamdani, a NYC Assemblyman representing Queens, “offers an agenda that remains alluring among elite progressives but has proved damaging to city life.”
By contrast, Brangham took the promotional angle. The story opened at a Mamdani phonebank, featuring voice-overs of two women wearing Islamic headcovers.
[…]Liberal journalist Jonathan Chait wrote a story on Mamdani for The Atlantic headlined “Why Won’t Zohran Mamdani Denounce a Dangerous Slogan? — The New York mayoral candidate’s defense of “Globalize the intifada” is very telling.” The day after Hamas invaded Israel and massacred and kidnapped over a thousand Jewish citizens, he issued a statement that criticized Israel’s government, not the terrorists of Hamas.
This celebration of a radical Israel-hating candidate was brought to you in part by Raymond James.
Curtis Houck whined that non-right-wing media (mostly) wasn’t rushing to trash Mamdani like he was:
The “Big Three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC were ebullient Wednesday morning in celebrating far-left, “young, charismatic, socialist” New York State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani emerging as the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor as a “seismic…possible harbinger” for America’s future because of his “populist” views “meeting people where they are” with “solutions.”
And, remarkably, prior to their flagship morning news shows on Wednesday, there was only one news brief in the week prior to Election Day.
Unsurprisingly, ABC’s Good Morning America was all-in and the key demographic of shallow, wealthy elites.
[…]Shifting to CBS Mornings, co-host Gayle King extolled Mamdani for having “pulled off a huge upset…which may tell us something about the state of national politics here.”
It took until correspondent Jericka Duncan to apply an ideological label, but she only deployed the “socialist” label as “self-described.” Instead, she herself called him “a progressive Muslim American immigrant” with “social media savvy” and rode “a wave of anti-establishment sentiment to a shocking victory.”
[…]As he often does, co-host Tony Dokoupil provided welcome common sense: “It’s also who are those people. The Democratic Party is changing. He’s an elite guy with elite parents, and is getting elite voters. He’s losing demographics that used to be the core of the Democratic Party, low-income voters and black voters in particular. Cuomo won both groups.”
For Houck, “welcome common sense” means right-wing talking points.
Mark Finkelstein, meanwhile, was in full meltdown mode:
Zohran Mamdani ran on and won NYC’s Democrat mayoral primary on the most lunatic, destructive, left-wing agenda this side of Pyongyang.
CNN This Morning host Audie Cornish had a perfect opportunity today to grill a Democrat from the leftist fringes on the party on it. Cornish’s guest was Debbie Dingell, a Michigan congresswoman and a leader of the House Progressive Caucus.
Cornish punted.
Instead of putting her on the spot, Cornish let Dingell run away from Mamdani’s pie in the sky. Audie allowed Dingell to focus instead on the tactics of Mamdani’s campaign, rather than the substance. Zohran was “out and about.” He was “talking to people,” and employing “new media.”
When Cornish described a couple of Mamdani’s planks as focusing on “affordability,” Dingell was only too happy to agree: “Affordability is what we need to be talking about.”
Those plans of Mamdani that Finkelstein is so freaked out about? As he detailed, it involves “Free bus fare on every route in the city,” “free childcare for all” and “a network of city-owned grocery stores.” He didn’t really explain why those things were bad; instead, he ranted about how much such things might cost:
And how to pay for his lunatic ideas? Why, tax the rich and those gr-e-e-e-dy corporations–borrowing a favorite adjective from Mamdani’s endorser, Bernie Sanders. But it will be hard to hammer those golden-egg laying geese when they’ve decamped to Florida and other low-tax states.
Again, Cornish had every opportunity to force Dingell to try to defend fellow progressive Mamdani’s catastrophic plans. Instead, she murmured about “affordability” and let Debbie utterly off the hook.
And this was all from June 25, the day after Mamdani won the primary. There were more meltdowns to come.