Zohran Mamdani: Eloquent, Telegenic —and "Much" More

From Trump’s abrasive slogans to Mamdani’s euphemisms, America’s political pendulum keeps swinging, but the words we normalize matter more than ever.

Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, is telegenic, extremely well-spoken, and full of bold ideas. He’s got a magic touch with words—capable of teasing out true meanings from phrases that lesser minds barely grasp.

We are still in the thick of Donald Trump’s influence, and his relationship to language is anything but ordinary. His rhetoric is brash, improvisational, and often dismissive of fact. He tends to turn slogans into shields and uses language less to persuade than to dominate. For many, his rise marks an erosion of civic discourse—and rejecting that erosion has become its own kind of political and moral anchor.

But the pendulum doesn’t stop swinging. And if Trump represents one form of truth-bending: loud, impulsive, and abrasive—Mamdani may represent another: polished, purposeful, and cloaked in idealism. His distortions don’t shout; they glide in quietly, under cover of moral aspiration. His slogans aren’t crude; they’re softened and stylized, tailored to sound like justice.

He wants us to believe, for example, that “Globalize the Intifada” isn’t what we think it is—not what we’ve seen on college campuses and city streets around the world. He assures us that—even in the aftermath of brutal acts like the May 21 shooting outside the Capital Jewish Museum, where Israeli embassy staff Yaron Lischinsky (30) and Sarah Lynn Milgrim (26) were murdered as their assailant reportedly shouted “Free, free Palestine!”—this phrase remains anodyne. Merely an expression of solidarity, not something Jews should fear.

Then there was June 1 in Boulder, Colorado, when Mohamed Sabry Soliman hurled Molotov cocktails at a Walk for Israeli hostages, injuring fifteen people—including a Holocaust survivor, and later stated plainly that he “wanted to kill all Zionist people.” And still, Mamdani treats “Globalize the Intifada” as a harmless call for change.

But to describe it that way is to engage in dangerous euphemism. It’s the same linguistic sleight-of-hand used by tyrants throughout history:

· Heil Hitler—defended as a simple nationalist greeting.

· Mao’s “Let a hundred flowers bloom”—a call for free thought that led to mass purges.

· Pol Pot’s “Year Zero”—promised as renewal, delivered a genocide that killed nearly two million Cambodians, including countless intellectuals, artists, and perceived opponents of the regime.

· Stalin’s “Building Socialism in One Country”—a mask for gulags, famine, and terror.

· Ayatollah Khomeini’s “Independence, Freedom, Islamic Republic!”—a slogan that welcomed a theocracy, war, and the ideological imprisonment of millions.

When pressed to explain “Globalize the Intifada,” Mamdani cited an Arabic-language article from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum that used the word intifada in reference to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He leveraged that etymological overlap to suggest the phrase simply means “uprising”—glossing over the fact that in modern history, it has come to symbolize suicide bombings, shootings, and mass terror campaigns that killed thousands of Israelis—and culminated in October 7. Even the Holocaust Museum itself rejected his comparison.

Polling better among voters making over $100,000 a year than those earning $50,000 or less, Mamdani’s campaign platform promises sweeping transformation: a rent freeze on stabilized units, fare-free buses, city-run grocery stores (ask Venezuelans what city-run grocery stores have done for them), 200,000 new publicly owned homes, $65 million for gender-affirming care, and a $30 minimum wage by 2030, funded by raising corporate and millionaire taxes. Critics warn this could backfire: high-income earners and businesses are already leaving the city. Between 2020 and the end of 2025, New York is projected to lose nearly $9 billion in taxable income to low-tax states like Florida, a trend that undermines the very revenue this plan depends on.

What’s more, most of these reforms aren’t even within the city’s power to enact. New York can’t raise income taxes on its own, can’t run deficits like the federal government, and is required by law to balance its budget each year. Mumdani knows this. His supporters may too—but many don’t seem to care. For them, the appeal lies less in the feasibility of the policies than in the posture itself. They’re drawn to the language of transformation, even if the reality never arrives.

But behind the poetry lies something far more troubling. Mamdani has yet to issue a direct public call for the release of Israeli hostages. He has refused to condemn a slogan long associated with bloodshed. And he has aligned himself—tacitly, and at times explicitly—with movements sympathetic to Hamas.

His nomination, let alone his election, would set a new and dangerous precedent: normalizing language and behavior that is dangerous for Jews, of course, but also for Americans who understand that a utopian experiment in extreme socialism, carried out in the largest city in the country at this historical moment, would only deepen the fractures of an already polarized nation.

We are living in a time when the pendulum of politics and culture swings wider with every election: from Obama to Trump, from Biden to Trump again, and the next leader—who knows?

But this much is clear: the moment calls for deep and serious reflection. For bridging the yawning maw. For words that clarify rather than conceal. And for something more enduring than slogans: the development of faith—faith in America to heal itself, and in God, in Whom we are enjoined to trust.

(below is a post from Zohran K. Mamdani — time stamped: 10/8/2023 take a good look)