Bill Maher: “Radical” Mamdani Represents “Straight Up Communism,” “He’s Going To Be The Mayor of New York”
HBO’s Bill Maher said New York mayoral hopeful Zohran Mamdani quotes Karl Marx and represents “straight up communism” on Friday’s broadcast of “Real Time.”
BILL MAHER: The guy he just brought up, that’s who you’re all going to have to answer for. So I’ve got to get your answer. This is Mamdani. If you’ve been not following the news, he is. He won the Democratic primary in New York, so he is certainly likely to be the next mayor. We don’t know. I mean, there’s a lot of opposition because we’ve never had someone this radical. Some of the things he says, you know, he quotes Marxists, each according to their need. I mean, that’s straight up communism. Whether you call it the abolition of private property, you call it housing guarantees, it’s preferable to what is going on right now. I mean, just the phrase abolition of private property, not something we usually hear in America. Prisons were obsolete. What purpose do they serve? I can think of a couple. The NYPD is racist, anti-queer, and a major threat to public safety. I think most people think cops are protecting their public safety, even though there’s issues and problems with the police department. Do you like capitalism? No. We’ve never had a guy quite like this. REP. JASON CROW (D-CO): I thought you were going to say that beards and politics are back, but, you know. MAHER: Let me ask the question. You’re going to have to answer everything like this. They’re going to ask every single Democratic politician. It’s not just Mamdani. CROW: That’s never new. That’s never new. I mean, there’s always a villain. There’s always people. They always try to create a villain, is my point. They always try to create some boogeyman or boogeywoman. If it wasn’t this one, it was going to be somebody else. MAHER: These are quotes. I’m not creating anything. I’m quoting. CROW: And I’m not defending the policies. There are plenty of things that I disagree with there and that I don’t come down on. But the point being, we see this every cycle. I’ve now been doing this long enough to know that every single cycle, there’s some contrived villain or boogeyman. And if it wasn’t this one, there’s going to be somebody else. MAHER: He’s not contrived. He’s going to be the mayor of New York.
