There’s a peculiar ritual we perform every time a radical gets elected, where we scramble to “uncover” what they really believe, as if we’ve stumbled on some smoking gun that will finally open voters’ eyes to the truth. The latest case is Zohran Kwame Mamdani, a New York assemblyman and trust fund child whose social media reads like a communist manifesto.

Why? Because it basically is. He paraphrases Karl Marx — unironically — while defending pro-jihadist groups and echoing anti-American, anti-Israel, anti-Western drivel you’d expect to find in a fringe online forum moderated by people who think Osama bin Laden was misunderstood, with added posts like the obligatory middle-finger photograph to a statue of Christopher Columbus, calls to defund the police, and demands to seize the businesses and properties of the wealthy.

By wealthy, Mamdani presumably means people slightly richer than his filmmaker mommy and Columbia University professor daddy.

So, after Mamdani won New York City’s mayoral primary race, the confused among us naturally rushed to dig up receipts. “Look at this!” they said, pointing to Mamdani praising literal terrorism as resistance. “Look at that!” they shouted, as if a Marx quote is some kind of gotcha. And while, yes, we should always expose extremism, I have a much more terrifying — and unfortunately, more accurate — theory: This wasn’t a secret. Voters aren’t going to have their eyes opened up to some unknown truth. They already knew, and they voted for him anyway.

This is the part most people can’t wrap their heads around. On both sides of the aisle, the assumption is always that voters have been tricked, and if they can only be helped to discover the truth, they will immediately vote for the “right” candidate. But what if they haven’t been fooled at all? What if they see Mamdani’s antisemitic, anti-American, pro-jihadist views not as a disqualifier, but as a selling point?

What if this isn’t a bug, but a feature?

Let’s be honest: New York City isn’t some middle-of-the-road swing district that accidentally elected a radical. This is a place where people protest in support of Hamas after a massacre, and where “Death to America” has become commonplace. Mamdani’s key demographic includes those who are proudly, vocally anti-Israel, and increasingly hostile to the very values that define the West — free speech, individual liberty and capitalism — and he represents them perfectly.

And yet both conservatives and moderate Democrats are somehow shocked when someone like Mamdani gets elected. “But look at what he said in 2020!” they’ll cry. OK, but he said it in public, all while waving a red flag (literally and ideologically) for years. And still, his constituents pulled the lever for him. So what’s more likely? That they didn’t notice — or that they agree?

We’re in an era where apologizing for Western civilization is trendy and romanticizing violent anti-colonialism is intellectually fashionable. Where students cheer on terrorists and academics pretend Hamas is a bunch of raping, pillaging, burning, torturing and murdering freedom fighters. Mamdani isn’t some outlier. He’s the face of a growing political movement that hates America, hates Israel and sees the West not as a beacon of freedom, but as an empire to be torn down.

Mamdani is nothing but a symptom. This isn’t about one man. It’s about a culture. A movement. A terrifying political reality where radicalism isn’t something to hide; it’s something to celebrate. Stop pretending voters didn’t see the truth. The truth was on the ballot. And they chose it.

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