In a resurfaced 2016 interview, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks for the entire time in an African/South Asian accent that sounds like a mix between Trevor Noah and Apu from "The Simpsons." It is absolutely bizarre, but it is also telling.
At the time, he was promoting a Disney movie that he had worked on as a dance adviser, one of the few actual jobs hizzoner has ever held. His signature smile is on display, but when he opens his lips he sounds like someone we have never heard.
With his sing-songy affected voice he decries how in Africa everybody dances, but in New York the men "just grind," but don’t dance. It is a performance entirely in character, he even imitates some Bollywood-style dance moves.
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This is not Hillary Clinton’s voice getting a bit twangly when she speaks in the South. This is a full-on acting job, and further proof that the theater kids have taken over the American Left.
There is nothing inherently wrong with theater kids. I myself plied the boards in New York for many years before my career in journalism. But I never did an entire interview with a fake accent as if it was how I actually spoke, and neither did anyone else I know.
Because that is simply downright bizarre behavior.
This is not the first time we have seen different versions of Mamdani that seem like entirely different people. We have also seen him furious and screaming while protesting against ICE in a way that is entirely antithetical to the calm, never flustered, smiley character he plays now, as mayor.
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Mamdani’s defenders say that he is merely "code-switching," and that so-called marginalized people will subconsciously speak one way with their own group and another way outside of it. Sorry, but this accent was so perfected and performative that there is zero chance he didn’t know he was doing it.
It does raise an interesting question though: Is the African accent how Zany Zohran really talks, behind closed doors? Could it be his American accent that is the performance? We can’t really know.
In a way, this goofy accent incident is a good metaphor for Democratic Socialism writ large. For outside audiences, they speak in Americanized, vague terms about helping the working class, but you get these same people on a private Zoom call and it's blood and guts communism all the way down.
How many times have we heard "Oh, they aren’t really socialists, they are Democratic Socialists," as if there is one scintilla of difference once they start talking about abolishing the Senate, controlling the housing market and seizing the means of production?
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One does have to admit, though, that the casting directors at the DSA hit the ball out of the park with Zohran. His fake plastic smile is the pitch-perfect mask for his Marxism. But who really lies underneath? The African choreographer? The furious protester? All of them?
The overwhelming sense one gets with these DSA candidates, like Mamdani, and Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and even Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, is that they are carefully curating just how radical they can appear to be to normal, everyday Americans, while their diehard supporters are in on the joke.
This was on display at El-Sayed’s victory party, last week, when he and podcasting antisemite Hasan Piker were talking to a supporter who told them, "People are stupid. This politics of no translation is going to be the way forward, money out of politics, money in your pocket, Medicare for all. No one has to decipher what that means." Piker and El-Sayed both appeared in agreement.
Mamdani and the DSA have proven that they will adopt any accent, don any garb, and utter any platitude to get the only thing that they really want, which is power over our lives.
The problem for New Yorkers and Americans is that we can have no idea what really lies beneath the many masks of Mamdani, whether he is the calm smiley American guy, the frothing lunatic protester, or the goofy African choreographer.
In fact, it seems like Mamdani is simply whoever he thinks you want him to be at any given moment. But it's getting old. As his budget numbers fail to line up and rents keep soaring, Gotham needs a leader, not a character actor.
Please, Mr. Mayor, we are all asking you, will the real Mamdani please stand up?
