Fresh off his stunning win in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary last month, Zohran Mamdani is facing incoming from all sides.
The New York Times of all places was the first to report on how the self-described democratic socialist misrepresented his race on college applications, while Vice President J.D. Vance offered a blistering takedown of the state assemblyman’s Fourth of July message.
On Tuesday’s show, Megyn was joined by the hosts of the RealClearPolitics podcast – Tom Bevan, Carl Cannon, and Andrew Walworth – to discuss the growing controversy surrounding Mamdani and whether he will win in November.
Vance Takes on Mamdani
As Americans celebrated the Fourth of July holiday on Friday, Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and immigrated to the U.S. when he was 7 years old, took to social media to express his thoughts on the day.
“America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better, to protect and deepen our democracy, to fulfill its promise for each and every person who calls it home,” he wrote. “Happy Independence Day. No Kings in America.”
Let’s just say the vice president was not impressed. During a keynote speech for the Claremont Institute on Saturday that was obtained by Blaze News, Vance explained how Mamdani’s candidacy is a slap in the face to the culture, history, and generosity of the country that has allowed him to succeed.
“The person who wishes to lead our largest city had, according to multiple media reports, never once publicly mentioned America’s Independence Day in earnest,” Vance said. “But when he did so this year… there is no gratitude in those words. No sense of owing something to this land and the people who turned its wilderness into the most powerful nation on earth.”
“Zohran Mamdani’s father fled Uganda when the tyrant Idi Amin decided to ethnically cleanse his nation’s Indian population. Mamdani’s family fled violent racial hatred only for him to come to this country, a country built by people he never knew, overflowing with generosity to his family, offering a haven from the kind of violent ethnic conflict that is commonplace in world history, but it is not commonplace here,” he continued. “And he dares, on our 249th anniversary, to congratulate it by paying homage to its incompleteness and to its, as he calls it, contradiction.”
“I wonder, has he ever read the letters from boy soldiers in the Union Army to parents and sweethearts that they’d never see again,” he asked. “Has he ever visited the gravesite of a loved one who gave their life to build the kind of society where his family could escape racial theft and racial violence? Has he ever looked in the mirror and recognized that he might not be alive were it not for the generosity of a country he dares to insult on its most sacred day? Who the hell does he think that he is?”
Megyn praised Vance for articulating what was on the minds of many Americans. “I think he is tapping into a sentiment everybody in the Republican Party feels, which is patriotism,” she said. “Not so much on the left, according to the polling.”
Cannon said it is an issue the Democratic Party must deal as immigrants like Mamdani and progressive Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) rise through the ranks. “Instead of gratitude, they have this resentment,” he noted. “He came here as a kid. This country has given him everything. And this halting, say the bare minimum that you can come up with about America… I don’t understand it.”
Race Controversy
Mamdani’s Fourth of July post came on the heels of The New York Times reporting he checked boxes for “Asian” and “Black or African American” when asked for his race on a 2009 college application to Columbia University where his father was a professor.
The state assemblyman’s application was leaked to the Times after a cyberattack on the university led to sensitive information being exposed to the hackers. The outlet said it subsequently verified the application with Mamdani himself before publishing the story.
Mamdani, who is of Indian descent and was born in Uganda, told the Times that he felt boxed in by the check boxes. “Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans, so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background,” he claimed.
Unlike Mamdani’s supporters who have rushed to defend the explanation, Megyn wasn’t buying it. “In the same way Elon Musk was born in Africa but is white, Zohran Mamdani was born in Africa but is Indian… You cannot say your race is ‘black or African American.’ Everyone knows what that means,” she explained. “We are talking about skin color and a certain background that might entitle you to an extra feather in your cap on the application process because, before the Supreme Court ruling, you used to be allowed to account for that in a way that would give somebody a leg up.”
Mamdani did not get into Columbia and went to Bowdoin College instead, which Megyn said might be because he didn’t play his cards right. “One-hundred percent he was checking it to get in, and he still didn’t get in,” she noted. “He also checked the box that read ‘Asian,’ which just shows he is a stupido because only one of those boxes gets you into college… This is the racism of the left… So, he didn’t have it quite figured out.”
Can He Win?
Mamdani won the primary with a coalition of mostly white high-income, college-educated voters and young people living in some of New York City’s most gentrified neighborhoods. That second group, Cannon said, is particularly ignorant to the realities of socialism.
“What I don’t understand about this fixation – not just with this guy, but all these young Gen-Zers who think they like socialism – is it is not like socialism disappeared off the face of the earth. Venezuela tried it, and it wrecked their economy,” he noted. “There is this disconnect between the facts of the real world and this rhetoric. I don’t know who you blame for this – the press, public school system… Instagram – but it is right there in front of us.”
While Mamdani has been trying to portray himself as a man of the people who favors a $30 minimum wage, free buses, rent freezes, city-run grocery stores, and boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, Bevan noted he is actually the “very privileged” son of an acclaimed filmmaker mother and political scholar father. “He is about as privileged as you could possibly be,” he said. “He is very charismatic, but he is selling this sort of bill of goods to the people of New York that he is for the downtrodden and he is going to create the socialist utopia.”
But Walworth said Mamdani has history on his side. “The vanguard of the proletariat always comes from the elite. We know that from [Vladimir] Lenin,” he explained. “He is in a very solid tradition of the leftist. It is never truly a man of the people that comes up and runs the revolution because the proletariat are not capable of doing that. That is why you need people like Mamdani who understand the theory and everything and can actually make it happen.”
“So in that regard, he is a textbook leftist in that regard,” he concluded. “And I think he has a pretty good chance of pulling this [election] off, even with all the little stuff that is going to come out about his background and stuff.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Bevan, Cannon, and Walworth by tuning in to episode 1,103 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.