PolitiFact Says Mamdani Is Not A Communist. The Expert They Cite Is A Socialist.

If you wanted to assure the American public that a rising political star wasn’t a communist, you probably wouldn’t turn to an avowed socialist for his “expert” analysis.

But that’s what PolitiFact just did for Zohran Mamdani, who won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City in a bombshell upset last month.

After his win, critics immediately raised the alarm that Mamdani would bring communism to the Big Apple. The self-described democratic socialist has proposed radical policies like government-run grocery stores, rent freezes, and converting housing from private to public.

President Donald Trump called Mamdani a “100% Communist Lunatic,” and New York Rep. Elise Stefanik and a number of conservative commentators branded him a communist as well.

So, PolitiFact geared up to defend him.

Two days after Mamdani’s victory, PolitiFact published a “fact check” stating that claims he is a communist are “false.”

To support its claims, PolitiFact interviewed Geoffrey Kurtz, a political science professor who has taught for 18 years at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York.

“The idea that Mamdani is a communist is an absurd slander,” Kurtz told the outlet.

But Kurtz isn’t just a professor. He was a socialist activist in college and remains a socialist today.

Kurtz was involved with the campus chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America while earning his bachelor’s at New College of Florida, according to the school’s student newspaper.

The campus chapter’s pamphlets reportedly addressed members as “dear radicals.”

Kurtz continued to be involved with the organization after he graduated college, when he was an editor of the Democratic Socialists of America’s Religion and Socialism Blog.

The professor has also written multiple times about being a “religious socialist.”

The authors of the PolitiFact “fact check” did not respond to a request for comment.

In the end, PolitiFact concluded that Mamdani’s platform is “not akin to communism, a system in which the government controls the means of production and takes over private businesses.”

“We rate this statement False,” PolitiFact stated.

Hilariously though, PolitiFact failed to acknowledge Mamdani’s own social media posts talking about workers seizing the “means of production,” a key Marxist concept.

“If we want everyone to be full participants in the economy, we need worker ownership of the means of production,” Mamdani posted on X in 2020.

On Thursday, PolitiFact added an editor’s note saying the White House had alerted them to Mamdani’s old posts. The outlet said it re-interviewed several experts, but still decided Mamdani still isn’t a communist.

“We found the significance of [Mamdani’s] comment inconclusive and not reflective of his 2025 mayoral platform, so our rating remains unchanged,” the editor’s note reads.

Go figure.

“I had the impression that Mamdani intended that phrase as lighthearted hyperbole. I see no reason to assume that the phrase conveys anything precise about what he thinks,” Kurtz, the socialist professor, told PolitiFact when they interviewed him again.

Hyperbole, huh? Well, as Xi Van Fleet — a survivor of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in Communist China — wrote for The Daily Wire last week, there’s nothing lighthearted about Mamdani’s political platform.

“The danger of Communism is not that it comes all at once, but that it creeps in gradually, wrapped in words like ‘justice’ and ‘equity,'” Van Fleet wrote. “But behind the slogans lies a brutal reality: misery, scarcity, and repression.”