Dave Rubin’s Rubin Report recently aired a direct-message clip that pulled back the curtain on Zohran Mamdani, exposing a side of the Democratic socialist mayoral hopeful many New Yorkers should find alarming. In the short clip Rubin and his guests tear into Mamdani’s worldview and highlight a pattern of radical alliances and rhetoric that aren’t just academic — they have real implications for running the largest city in America.
At a recent campaign rally Mamdani openly invoked the words of Thomas Sankara, the Marxist Pan?Africanist, telling the crowd that “fundamental change only comes from the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future.” Quoting a leader who seized power in a coup and whose regime is intertwined with violent upheaval is not a harmless history lesson — it’s a flashing warning sign about the kinds of ideas he admires.
Thomas Sankara was no benign reformer; he was a Marxist revolutionary who came to power in Burkina Faso in a 1983 coup and was assassinated during another coup in 1987. Sankara’s legacy is wrapped in rhetoric about seizing power and remaking societies by state force, and that history matters when an American politician chooses him as rhetorical ballast. Americans who cherish liberty and rule of law should find the admiration of such figures deeply troubling.
Zohran Mamdani is not some fringe gadfly — he’s a DSA?aligned politician who has parlayed leftist organizing into real political power and a legitimate run for New York mayor, campaigning on heavy?handed policies like expanded public ownership, rent freezes, and big new entitlement guarantees. Voters should judge those policy prescriptions in the light of the ideological company he keeps and the intellectual influences he elevates to the podium. This isn’t academic hair?splitting; it’s about whether New York will be governed by prudence or by an experiment in social engineering.
To his credit Mamdani has tried to soften certain lines in TV interviews and apologize for past rhetoric, but that only underscores the danger: radical ideas get repackaged and sold as “practical” until their logic is put into practice and the consequences arrive. When a candidate who once called for dramatic economic restructuring now promises free buses and universal childcare without clear, conservative checks and balances, citizens have every right to be skeptical and demand specifics about funding and accountability.
This moment is a test for New Yorkers who still believe in free markets, public safety, and common?sense governance: will you hand the keys to a city to someone who champions the words of revolutionaries and flirts with ideas that historically lead to instability? It’s time to scrutinize not only Mamdani’s promises but the revolutionary lineage he borrows from — and voters should reject experiments that put our families, businesses, and hard?earned prosperity at risk.
