When Zohran Mamdani secured his historic victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, voters sent an unmistakable message: they want leadership addressing their daily struggles: crushing rents, inaccessible public transit, soaring grocery prices, and deepening inequality. Yet, rather than grappling seriously with these urgent policy questions, political and media punditry immediately spiraled into a familiar, cynical circus of manufactured controversy, forcing Mamdani to endlessly denounce statements he never uttered, positions he never held, and beliefs he openly rejects.
Since Election Day, Zohran Mamdani has been mentioned 255 times on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, and local New York broadcast news in connection with Israel and antisemitism—compared to just 167 times with rent, 115 with groceries, and only 54 with buses (TVEyes). The balance is telling. It doesn’t reflect what Mamdani’s campaign was about, or what voters cared about. It reflects what the media chose to amplify.
This skew in coverage didn’t just misrepresent his campaign; it actively constructed a culture war narrative. It takes a candidate focused on transit and rent control and recasts him as a symbol of cultural clash. Because Mamdani is Muslim, supports Palestinian rights, and opposes U.S. weapons transfers to Israel, his campaign was transformed into a referendum on loyalty, belonging, and fear. The actual issues—housing, food costs, public infrastructure—get buried beneath a haze of moral panic.
The $30 million smear campaign by Cuomo’s allies to paint Mamdani as a radical extremist already failed at the ballot box. But the narrative limps on, because news coverage thrives not on clarity, but on conflict. And a brown socialist with a beard is easier to frame as a threat than to cover as a policymaker.
The politics of distraction is nothing new. In 2008, Barack Obama was thrust into national controversy over the sermons of Reverend Jeremiah Wright—not because the media wanted a serious conversation about race or religion, but because they wanted to raise the question of how voters would respond to Obama’s Americanness. Wright became a stand-in for the broader tradition of Black liberation theology and flattened into a caricature that forced Obama to answer for a Black man’s anger.
Obama responded with “A More Perfect Union,” a rare moment in presidential politics: a candidate confronting race, rage, and American contradiction with historical depth and moral clarity. He again denounced Reverend Wright’s most incendiary remarks, but refused to disown the man or reduce him to a caricature. Instead, Obama situated Wright’s anger in the broader context of Black American experience—formed by segregation, systemic injustice, and generational betrayal—while also calling out the limits of such “bitterness.” It was a speech that turned a media firestorm into a national conversation, asking Americans to hold multiple truths at once.
Obama’s speech did not end racism or anti-racism—nor was that its purpose. In an interview Hillary Clinton commented on Obama's attendance at Reverend Wright’s church, stating, "You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend." Crafted in the heat of a contested primary election, Obama’s speech was a political survival tactic aimed at reassuring white moderates. And yet embedded in Obama’s speech were contradictions that would later come into sharper relief. As the Black Lives Matter movement would later argue, calls for unity and dialogue may soothe, but it does not shift power. No speech—however soaring—can do the work of justice if it stops short of challenging the systems that sustain oppression and injustice.
For candidates like Obama, and for Black and Muslim politicians today, the terrain hasn’t changed much. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Speak directly about racism, and you risk being cast as divisive, unfocused, or extreme. Say nothing, and you allow conspiracies and distortions to fester. The disinformation fills the silence. Either way, the burden of explanation is often placed on the very people most targeted.
Mamdani now faces the same toxic playbook. Andy Ogles declared on social media that Mamdani should be “DEPORTED,” calling him “antisemitic, socialist, communist” and mocking him as “little muhammad.” Marjorie Taylor Greene posted an AI-generated image of the Statue of Liberty in a burqa. Nancy Mace warned that Mamdani’s victory signaled America had “forgotten 9/11.”
Rhetoric like this should end political careers. It spreads unchecked as part of a broader return to the post-9/11 playbook of normalizing Islamophobia. By turning Mamdani’s faith and immigrant background into campaign weapons, Republicans are trying to distract from their lack of answers on health care, housing, transit, and the cost of living. The more they paint him as a threat, the more they reveal how little they have to offer—and why the coalition that elected him is so necessary.
What’s most alarming is how little resistance Eric Adams has faced for one of the most cynical moves in recent political memory: creating a ballot line called the “End Antisemitism Party” simply to run as an independent and avoid a Democratic primary. The purpose was obvious. Adams took real fear about rising antisemitism and repurposed it as a campaign weapon to discredit his opponents.
Yesterday, when pressed by Jake Tapper, Eric Adams couldn’t name a single antisemitic remark made by Zohran Mamdani—despite building his entire campaign around that accusation. Instead, he deflected with vague lines like, “a little research and you’ll be able to find it,” while smearing Mamdani with baseless insinuations of terrorist sympathies. That Democrats have remained largely silent as Adams invokes antisemitism to malign a Muslim candidate—while hosting Holocaust deniers at Gracie Mansion—exposes a troubling tolerance for bigotry.
Eric Adams created a new political party called the “End Antisemitism” party—not to address rising hate crimes, but to avoid facing voters in a Democratic primary. He invoked the language of combating antisemitism not to protect Jewish communities, but to protect his own political career. He used it to smear a Muslim opponent and distract from his record. That is not moral leadership. It is a dangerous abuse of public trust. When real threats are reduced to campaign branding, the result is not justice. It is fear. It is division. And it puts the very communities politicians claim to defend at greater risk.
And yet, instead of condemning this cynical and corrosive ploy, too many Democratic leaders have echoed it. Rather than speak the truth, they have spread false insinuations and disinformation about Zohran Mamdani—knowing full well there is no evidence to support the claims. That silence is not neutrality. It is complicity. If Democrats truly want to confront antisemitism, they must start by rejecting its weaponization. They must say, clearly and publicly, that smearing a Muslim elected official with false charges of hate—without evidence, without accountability—has no place in a party that claims to stand for justice.
Yet many Democratic leaders have mirrored Republican tactics, offering innuendo and silence instead of principled leadership. No formal condemnation. No calls for accountability. Instead, many turned their criticism toward Mamdani himself. It is a quiet acceptance of the same MAGA-style politics of division and distraction that Democrats routinely denounce in their opponents.
Congressman Dan Goldman immediately implied—without evidence—that Mamdani was somehow insufficiently opposed to antisemitism. Not to mention that Mamdani and Brad Lander won 69% of Goldman’s Congressional district. Congresswoman Laura Gillen explicitly accused Mamdani of making "calls for violence against Jewish people," providing no substantiation. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand falsely suggested Mamdani endorsed "global jihad," later admitting under scrutiny that she had "misspoken." Congressman Eric Swalwell said "I don't associate myself with what he has said about the Jewish people” without naming what Mamdani has allegedly said about Jews. Such unfounded insinuations don’t merely degrade political discourse; they reduce the serious issue of antisemitism into a factional political weapon.
At the heart of this controversy is a striking double standard. The Anti-Defamation League, under Jonathan Greenblatt’s leadership, has demanded that Zohran Mamdani publicly disavow slogans shouted by strangers and tweets posted by anonymous accounts—an impossible standard no other politician is asked to meet. No one expects Republican lawmakers to disown every inflammatory remark from NRA supporters, or asks Senator Sheldon Whitehouse to answer for the most provocative edge of the environmental movement. Yet Mamdani alone is treated as responsible for the words of anyone remotely aligned with his cause.
Constantly asking Mamdani to prove he’s not antisemitic isn’t about getting an answer. It’s about keeping him on trial. The line keeps moving, the question keeps changing, and the goal is never clarity; it’s exhaustion. If you can force someone to spend their whole campaign defending themselves, you never have to prove the lie—you’ve already won the argument by setting the terms. The test isn’t meant to be passed; it’s meant to keep him running.
And then there’s the irony: a group formed to fight defamation has become a source of it. The ADL now seems less focused on identifying actual antisemitism than on enforcing ideological boundaries, equating criticism of Israeli policy with hate. The result is not safety or clarity, but distortion—undermining its credibility and weakening the broader effort to confront real antisemitic violence. When an organization tasked with protecting a community becomes an instrument for policing political speech, it doesn’t just lose its moral authority. It makes the work of justice harder for everyone.
M. Gessen warns precisely of this danger. Politically motivated conflation of antisemitism with legitimate debate and critique of US-Israeli policy actively undermines genuine efforts against real hate, reducing antisemitism to mere factional, political theater. Organizations like the ADL appear seemingly more interested in ensuring Mamdani’s administration fails, due to their very obvious policy agreements, than in genuinely safeguarding communities. They weaponize identity, undermining meaningful moral discourse and preventing serious accountability.
And here’s the question no one on TV seems to ask: Do Muslims, Arabs, or Palestinians ever get to ask if they feel safe and heard? If Eric Adams signing an executive order adopting a controversial definition of antisemitism—one that equates criticism of Israel with hate speech—makes them feel targeted? If Andrew Cuomo, who never visited a mosque during his entire career, or Adams, who has amplified the idea that criticizing U.S. weapons transfers to Israel is itself bigotry, ought to do more to prove they aren’t Islamophobic?
We return, then, to Toni Morrison’s powerful insight about racism’s deepest harm: distraction. Racism is a waste of all of our precious time. Every minute we spend on manufactured controversies is time we lose to address the urgent crises New Yorkers face—housing insecurity, economic unfairness, crumbling infrastructure, entrenched inequality, and public safety. Yet powerful forces aligned against Mamdani prefer to deploy a corrupted form of identity politics as a blunt weapon rather than engage seriously with these complexities.
Hate crimes surged to a record 669 incidents in New York City in 2023, including alarming increases in antisemitic, anti-Muslim, anti-Asian, anti-Black, and anti-LGBTQ+ attacks. Mamdani has offered concrete policies that address these realities head-on, proposing an 800 percent increase in funding for hate violence prevention, restorative justice programs, comprehensive bias response in schools, and targeted community investment.
What Mamdani’s victory reminds us is that the American project is still open—unfinished, but not unworthy. It affirms something both simple and profound: that a multiracial, multifaith democracy is not a fantasy, not a threat, but a living promise. That voters can see through fear, look past smear, and choose a leader who speaks to their daily lives. That a Muslim immigrant, standing shoulder to shoulder with Jewish, Black, Latino, and working-class New Yorkers, can run on housing, transit, and human dignity—and win. That is not just a campaign story. It is a glimpse of the America we are still capable of becoming, if we have the courage to choose it.
Whether it’s Eric Adams or MAGA Republicans in Tennessee, politicians reach for division when they have nothing left to offer. When they can’t deliver safety, or prosperity, or stability, they turn to fear. But New Yorkers saw through the $30 million smear campaign and chose something else. They chose Mamdani’s vision: a city that is affordable, inclusive, and built on mutual respect. It is a call to reject distraction, to reject cynicism, and to embrace the harder work of turning shared values into shared power. New York Democrats made their choice. It’s time for Democratic Party leaders—and the media—to catch up.
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