THE NEW YORK TIMES: Right-wing media warns of socialism and chaos after Mamdani victory

What will become of New York City now that Zohran Mamdani is the mayor-elect? For the right-wing media outlets covering his victory, the future seems obvious: crime, chaos and calamity ahead.

On Fox News, Mamdani’s victory has signaled the specter of looming socialism. One after another, the channel’s conservative hosts warned that a radical-left takeover of New York was nigh.

“We always go, ‘We don’t want to turn into Havana,’ and then we started saying, ‘We don’t want to turn into Caracas,’” the “Fox & Friends” co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy said Wednesday morning, seated in her show’s midtown Manhattan studio.

“Believe me, in about four years, everybody is going to say, ‘We don’t want to turn into New York City,’ because that will be the next example of what a socialist disaster looks like.”

As is often in the case in these matters, the screaming front page of the New York Post, the city’s mischievous tabloid that like Fox News is controlled by Rupert Murdoch, summed up the conservative id.

The cover of its Wednesday edition depicted the mayor-elect in a red jumpsuit, triumphantly holding aloft a hammer and sickle, next to a punny headline: “On your Marx, get set, Zo! Socialist Mamdani wins race for mayor.”

That neologism “Zo” could soon become part of the New York lexicon — the Post helped popularize “Blas” as a nickname for former Mayor Bill de Blasio — but it also signalled that the tabloid, which has skewered Mamdani for months, was likely to remain a prominent thorn in his side as he takes office.

Even in today’s atomized new-mediascape, the Post can break through: The “Zo” quickly circulated on television and social media. Some liberals said they wanted a copy of the newspaper to ironically frame.

The conservative media image of Mamdani, who is a democratic socialist, as a harbinger of a Soviet-style dystopia echoes the rhetoric of Andrew Cuomo of New York, the former governor, whose rival campaign released artificial intelligence-generated videos warning New Yorkers of a similar fate.

In the wake of his defeat, Cuomo also felt the wrath of the right. Sean Hannity, on Fox News, blamed the former governor’s “very lackluster” campaign for contributing to Mamdani’s win, dinging Cuomo for having “spent way too much time out in the Hamptons.” (Hannity’s city-dwelling friends, he told viewers, were “depressed and scared.”)

On a Wednesday morning podcast, influential right-wing host Megyn Kelly called Cuomo’s efforts “stilted, cold, arthritic.”

She added: “Good luck, New York.”

Some of the harsher right-wing attacks on Mamdani have been marked by Islamophobia. Steve Bannon, a right-wing podcaster and provocateur, has called Mamdani a “neo-Marxist jihadist”; on a livestream Tuesday, he called Mamdani’s victory the product of “40 to 50 years of visa scams” and “illegal alien invaders coming in” to the country.

Kelly recently told her listeners that Islam “is totally incompatible with Western values, and I don’t think people who practice Islam should be the leaders of America. I just don’t.” Breitbart News carried a large headline reading, “Muslims Gloat Over Zohran’s Win.”

On Wednesday, the Post invoked a different media outlet — one it typically disdains — to advance its attacks. The Post ran a lengthy item on CNN’s reaction to the mayor-elect’s victory speech, including a comment by analyst Van Jones that Mamdani had undergone “a little bit of a character switch.”

“I think he missed an opportunity,” Jones said on CNN on Tuesday night. “The Mamdani that we saw on the campaign trail, who was a lot more calm, who was a lot warmer, who was a lot more embracing, was not present in that speech.”

The major cable news networks, including Fox News, carried Mamdani’s half-hour-long address on Tuesday night in full. Mamdani sounded fiery at times, directly challenging President Donald Trump in his remarks.

He also embraced his immigrant identity and heritage, and flashed some of the energy and joy that galvanized more than 1 million New Yorkers into supporting his youthful and progressive message.

His media champions praised those remarks as inspiring — “a powerhouse victory speech,” as Rachel Maddow put it on MSNBC. Her colleague Jen Psaki called it “a proud embrace of exactly who he is.”

Ari Melber, another MSNBC host, noted that Mamdani had walked onstage to a Ja Rule song, perhaps as a rebuke to Ja Rule’s rival, rapper 50 Cent, who has criticized Mamdani’s plans to raise taxes on the wealthy.

Kelly Loeffler, Trump’s small-business administrator, offered a different take during an interview on Fox Business on Wednesday.

“It’s shocking to see a communist be a mayor of the capital of capitalism,” she told the Fox host Maria Bartiromo, adding that Mamdani was “talking about seizing the means of production.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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