UNITED BY HATRED: Vance Rips Mamdani, Exposes The American Left’s Contradictions

Speaking to attendees at the Claremont Institute over the weekend, Vice President JD Vance took aim at New York Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, explaining that he embodied all the contradictions within the American Left.

Referring to Mamdani as a “33-year-old communist running an insurgent campaign,” Vance posited that Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic mayoral primary revealed “interesting threads” that were “reflective of where the broader American Left is at this moment in time.”

Vance spoke of how President Donald Trump’s victory represented a “broad working-and-middle-class coalition,” while Mamdani’s coalition was “almost the inverse of that.”

Vance pointed out that Mamdani “won high-income and college-educated New Yorkers, and especially both young, highly educated New Yorkers, but he was weakest among black voters and weakest among those without a college degree.” He added that Mamdani “did particularly well in the Bangladeshi areas of New York, but he did particularly poorly with non-Bangladeshi Asian immigrants, particularly Chinese-Americans.”

“His victory was the product of a lot of young people who live reasonably comfortable lives, but see that their elite degrees aren’t really delivering what they expected, and so their own prospects with all the college debt may not in fact be greater than those of their parents,” he said.

“We have to be honest about where his coalition is,” Vance opined. “It is not the downtrodden. It is not poor Americans. It is not about dispossession. It’s about elite disaffection and elite anger. The party of highly educated, but downwardly mobile elites … they comprise a highly energetic activist base, but it’s important because it’s not just the elites, the college-educated New Yorkers, that base was supplemented by carefully selected ethnic blocs carved out of the electorate using identity politics as the knife.”

Vance noted that Mamdani’s desire to appeal to ethnic blocs was reflected in his “bizarre appeals to foreign politics, intended to signal to one particular group of New Yorkers or another.”

“Let us ask ourselves why is a mayoral candidate in our nation’s biggest city whining about banning Bibi Netanyahu, a country whose population is about the same size as that of New York, and threatening to arrest a foreign leader if he tries to come to New York City?” he asked. “Why is a New York mayoral candidate attacking Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, as a war criminal? Why is he talking about ‘globalizing the intifada’?”

“But what might seem like a contradiction makes a little bit of sense if you peel back the onion,” he speculated. “Consider a movement that rails against the billionaire class, despite the fact that the billionaire class remains firmly in the corner of the modern Left; a movement that idolizes foreign religions, even as it rejects the teachings of those faiths. It rails, this new modern Left against white people, even as many of its funders and its grassroots activists are privileged whites themselves.”

“What unites Islamists, gender-studies majors, socially liberal white urbanites, and Big Pharma lobbyists … isn’t the ideas of Thomas Jefferson or even of Karl Marx; it’s hatred,” he stated. “They hate the people in this room. They hate the President of the United States, and most of all, they hate the people who voted for that President of the United States in the last election in November. This is the animating principle of the American far-Left.”

“That’s why Mamdani himself is such an appealing instrument to the Left,” Vance said. “He captures so many of the movement’s apparent contradictions in a single human being; a guy who describes the Palestinian cause as central to his identity yet holds views like abortion on demand or using taxpayer-funded money to fund transgender surgeries for minors. These views, of course, are completely incomprehensible on the streets of Gaza. This guy represents that contradiction.”

“He’s trying to tear something down and he’s very effective at articulating all of the things that the far-Left hates in modern America,” he concluded.