After New York City’s race for mayor catapulted Zohran Mamdani from state assembly member into one of the world’s most prominent progressive voices, intense debate swirled over the ideas at the heart of his campaign.
His critics and opponents painted pledges such as free bus service, universal child care and rent freezes as unworkable, unrealistic and exorbitantly expensive.
But some have hit back, highlighting the quirk of geography that underpins some of this view. “He promised things that Europeans take for granted, but Americans are told are impossible,” said Dutch environmentalist and former government advisor Alexander Verbeek in the wake of Tuesday’s election.
Verbeek backed this with a comment he had overheard in an Oslo café, in which Mamdani was described as an American politician who “finally” sounded normal.



FOX is pushing HARD to paint him as a communist foreigner dictator.
Its working perfectly on my parents who swear he is the anti Christ. While they worship drumpf.
Help.
I would lead with your values and ask questions like why they think childcare or public transit are bad things.
Oh, it’s not that they think those things are bad, just that they want to be the arbiters of who deserves those things. They’re not against social programs, they just want to put their churches in charge of them so they can police behavior.
So (their) churches should run childcare facilities and public transit? In a country founded as a secular nation, no less. That must make for some wild conversations. I’d sure love to know more about how that would be funded, never mind the implementation.
Questions like: how do we decide which churches are worthy? There are approx 45,000 denominations of Christianity and that’s just Christianity…