How the Media Lets Mamdani Get Away with his Misleading and Hateful Dog Whistle Campaign

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign isn’t fueled by workable policies or a credible plan to pay for them. It’s fueled by dog whistles — coded ideology slogans aimed squarely at energizing his woke base. And the reason he gets away with it is simple: New York’s media lets him.

The city’s pre-internet press once had the muscle to take down dangerous demagogue candidates like Mamdani. Not anymore. Liberal media outlets churn out his press releases as breaking news campaign coverage. Conservative media expose his hate words and fake policies, reach political insiders but too few voters to change elections. Even when major events occur and all the media focus in — like the death of a police officer — coverage of Mamdani’s radical NYPD plans and its implications, such as scrapping the Strategic Response Group, lasts only a day or two before the media moves on, leaving New Yorkers largely in the dark about what he would do with the NYPD or what he would do as mayor.

The result: Mamdani campaigns in two registers — one for his base, another for everyone else. His supporters catch the dog whistles, from “affordability” slogans to antisemitic tropes. Ordinary voters? They just see the glossy press releases and the carefully packaged candidate who only answers questions from friendly reporters.

Dog Whistles to his Supporters Unchallenged by the Media

During the primary, Mamdani aimed his dog whistles at “affordability.” He promised fantasy fixes — free buses, rent freezes, even cheaper groceries in city-run stores. None of it was real policy. Most of these schemes have already failed in other cities. They were code words — designed to rile up his base, pit New Yorkers against each other, and sell a socialist Utopia that won’t work and can’t be paid for.

And what questions about his so-called “affordability” plans has Mamdani dodged from the press? Plenty. No one’s asked if a rent freeze would push landlords to walk away — or even torch their buildings for insurance, like in the Bronx of the ’70s. No one’s asked the candidate about the long record of city-run stores collapsing in other cities.  And no reporters have asked him on the fallout from his plan to raise taxes on billionaires. Financial experts warn it would drive away the few billionaires and Wall Street firms still footing the city’s bills. Raise their taxes, and they’ve already said they’ll leave — blowing a hole in the city’s budget, resulting in slashing basic services, cutting the city’s workforce, and lowering New Yorkers’ quality of life.

Mamdani’s most dangerous dog whistle? Closing Rikers. He openly calls the prison system the “carceral state” and wants it dismantled. By 2027, he demands Rikers shut down — with no plan for the thousands of inmates left behind. His borough-based jails fit just 4,000, while Rikers holds over 7,000 today. So, what happens to the rest? Back on the streets with us. Rikers isn’t just about “reform” for him. It’s the first step toward dismantling the entire prision system — turning criminals into “victims” and leaving law-abiding New Yorkers to pay the price.

And now Mamdani’s crowd is floating Jamaal Bowman — another socialist darling dog whistle — as a possible Schools Chancellor. This is the same Bowman whose big claim to fame is yanking a fire alarm in Congress. Meanwhile, half of New York’s kids can’t read or do math. Mamdani wants to end the parts of the city’s school system that is working: Charter Schools and testing for specialized high schools. If that’s the résumé for fixing a failing school system, parents should be terrified

Mamdani even dog whistles Revolution.  In a resurfaced 2021 video from a Young Democratic Socialists of America conference, he made it crystal clear: this isn’t about public service — it’s about political revolution. For Mamdani, City Hall isn’t a job. It’s a launchpad to remake the city and bend it to his socialist’s ideological agenda.

Mamdani’s most used dog whistle is the NYPD. He doesn’t just want reform — he wants to defund and dismantle. His plan scraps the Strategic Response Group (SRG) and hands public safety to a so-called “Department of Community Safety” (DCS) run by his loyal operatives — an NYPD-lite designed to bleed the NYPD dry. Defunding the SRG means gutting the very unit that just stormed a Park Avenue office building during a mass shooting, including the death of a police officer. DCS is about the same “defund” agenda with a PR scrub — and one that could trigger even more chaos than Albany’s no-bail disaster, which Mamdani still refuses to change.  Voters have been left in the dark about how Mamdani would actually run the NYPD. If Mamdani gets his way, New York will be left with less protection than ever — and more crime than Albany’s no-bail disaster caused.

Most media outlets are ignoring Mamdani’s most hateful dog whistles aimed at the Jewish community — slogans like “Globalize the Intifada” and “From the river to the sea.”

And the press isn’t just ignoring Mamdani’s dog whistles — they’re ignoring his pressure tactics too. His supporters are literally protesting outside the offices of Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, degrading House Minority Speaker Hakeem Jeffries. trying to strong-arm Democrats who haven’t bent the knee. That’s not “activism.” That’s a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party. The reality: it’s intimidation politics — a warning shot to any Democrat who does not endorse Mamdani.

NYC Broken Media Allowed Mamdani to Win the Democratic Primary

Meanwhile, the few outlets that dare call out Mamdani’s radicalism — the NY Post, WABC Radio — get smeared as “partisan” by his supporters, their reporting walled off in echo chambers of conservative voters and NYC political insiders. But the real echo chamber is the rest of the city’s media, which dutifully reprints Mamdani’s press releases now targeting Trump, while refusing to dig into his past statements, unworkable policies, his dog whistles, or the dangerous agenda hiding behind his everyman smiling face, which is how he will govern.

New York’s once-mighty media has been gutted by the internet, splintered into little silos with no muscle or columnists like Jimmy Breslin, investigative reporters like Jack Newfield, unable to warn a city against real danger. For most voters, it’s as if Mamdani’s unworkable polices and hateful culture will do not harm to a city were taxpayers and Wall Street is already fleeing in large dangerous numbers.

This media silence is Mamdani’s greatest weapon. His “Defund the NYPD” tweets, his claims that “capitalism is theft,” his praise of communism in the very city that is the heart of American capitalism — all of it is still out there. But without a press corps willing to press him on the consequences, Mamdani floats above accountability.

Mamdani isn’t hiding his strategy. He’s been making impossible promises since his Bronx Science days, when he ran for class president on a platform of abolishing detention. The goal has never been governing; it’s performance politics, powered by dog whistles to win votes

But the real scandal isn’t Mamdani’s dog whistles — it’s the media’s failure to show New Yorkers just how scandalous and radical he really is. By lowering the bar, by normalizing hate and reliance on fake press releases or distraction like stopping Trump, instead of interrogating him and his policies, the press is paving the way for the most radical mayor in New York City’s history.

The media has ignored a basic fact: Mamdani has no management experience. As an Assemblyman, he’s passed just one bill — and even missed the vote on it, along with 231 other votes on bills. Before politics, he never held a job.

Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia gave New Yorkers the best advice for choosing a mayor: “It doesn’t matter if a mayor is a Democrat or a Republican, as long as they can pick up the garbage on time.” The real job of New York’s mayor isn’t hashtags and slogans — it’s managing a $115 billion budget, overseeing 306,000 city workers, and administering 362 million square feet of city-owned property. In short, the mayor needs the skills of a Fortune 500 CEO. Putting socialist Mamdani — with zero management experience — in charge of New York’s $115 billion budget is like putting the wolf in charge of the sheep.

If the media won’t do its job, Mamdani’s opponents don’t stand a chance. And neither do New Yorkers — or the city itself, which will both pay a tragic life-changing price.