I've observed - tartly and sarcastically, but not without at least a grain of seriousness - that most of the modern Left's communications appears to be aimed at people who are perhaps well-credentialed, but not very big on critical thinking or asking questions.
It's a broad, mostly satirical brush.
But I read things like Rolling Stone's apologia "fact-checking" the "misinformation" about Zohram Mamdani, and I can't help but think "evidence for the plaintiff".
• Mamdani is not in the country illegally
— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) July 2, 2025
• He does not have any connection to 9/11 or jihadist terrorism
• Mamdani hasn’t actually said or done anything antisemitic
• He did not call to ‘globalize the intifada’
• He’s not a communist
More: https://t.co/DwtpGZzXju https://t.co/djtXP4fAH1
The piece doesn't so much "check" facts as obfuscates them.
Let's go over the points, one by one:
"Mamdani is not in the country illegally"
I'll give them this one - this was apparently Trump, freestyling as he is wont to do.
Trump knows what a generation of Democrat leadership have known and practiced; to paraphrase Mark Twain, a lie will travel around the world while the truth is waiting on its avocado toast". If you get your opponent to defend against a raft of accusations, they are distracted from making their own positive case for themselves. See also Harry Reid slandering Mitt Romney over his taxes; it was a lie, but it did the job.
Anyway - Mamdani's a citizen, more's the pity.
But we're not even started yet.
"He does not have any connection to 9/11 or jihadist terrorism"
If someone were not literally a member of the German war machine eighty years ago, but wrote a country-western song about "the unjust sham of the Nuremberg tribunals", might you question the sincereity of their rejection of the defendants' ideology?
No?
Here Mamdani "rapping" about the Holy Land Five - convicted for supporting Hamas:
Side issue: Vanilla Ice should send Mamdami a thank you note.
If you know, you know.
"Mamdani hasn’t actually said or done anything antisemitic"
Forget for a moment Mamdanis' long, luxuriantly-documented record of agitation against Israel:
This statement depends wholly on the statement "anti-Zionism isn't anti-Semitism" - which asks one to accep that seeking to forcibly liquidate a country formed by Jews, in the Jews' ancestral homeland, expressly to give Jews a place to where they wouldn't get murdered for being Jews" is completely benign.
If you ignore that?
His response to October 7, issued while Israelis were still being raped and murdered, should put a spike through that idea:
This is Zohran Mamdani's statement about October 7, 2023 the day after the largest single-day slaughter of Jews - babies, children, young adults, elderly - since the Holocaust. Mamdani clearly blames Israel for the atrocities and war crimes of torture, rape, and murder by Hamas -… pic.twitter.com/lXchsCbb1V
— Adam Mossoff (@AdamMossoff) June 26, 2025
You can say that's not "saying or doing anything antisemitic". You can also try to play frisbee golf with a duck, for all the good it'll do you.
"He did not call to ‘globalize the intifada’"
Imagine an interview where a candidate is asked "do you repudiate the Ku Klux Klan", and they answered "let's not go policing free speech!"
What would you think?
"He's a weasel who is trying to refuse to repudiateg the Ku Klux Klan by wrapping himself in the Constitution" may be the most charitable thing you'd think; less charitably, you might say "refusing to condem evil is condoning evil".
So look at this:
As if "free speech" that calls for murder can't be simultaneously free to exist, and subject to moral consquences from people who have moral compasses.
Calling for global mass murder is, indeed, the kind of speech candidate can be, and routinely are, called upon, not to "police", but to repudiate as moral actors seeking political power.
The fact that he won't is instructive.
The fact that Rolling Stone is trying to minimize it is depraved.
"He’s not a communist"
I remember sitting on a bus listening to a couple of teenangers debating the musical geneology of the band "Korn".
Where they rap metal?
Or were they "nu metal"?
It was a topic that led to a dissection of style, "substance", musical heritage, production and attitude that would have made a Talmudic debate at an elite Yeshiva sound like a couple of valley girls talking about eyeliner.
It's the same vibe you get listening to leftists describe the difference between communism, socialism, and (Mamdani's self-applied label) "democratic socialism", itself a term with some turbulent etymology. The term is usually associated with placid European welfare states like Denmark and Sweden (who actually abandoned socialism while they still had some productivity to lose, in favor of a vigrous free market with a large welfare state, and have been up front about why, to Bernie Sanders' chagrin), in America the term has been absorbed by the "Democratic Socialists of America", who are Bernie Sanders' often-Maoist, not remotely Scandinavian moral and ideological offspring.
Mamdani favors government controlling the means of production, a city-controlled command economy, and enforcing ideology via taxation. Is he communist, socialist or "Democratic Socialist"? Or maybe nu-metal?
There are many open questions.
Maybe Mamdani could nationalize Rolling Stone.
