The WaPo’s admission about Zohran Mamdani’s dark side comes a bit too late

Now they tell us. Or maybe I should say, “Now it can be told.”

In an editorial Sunday, The Washington Post informs us that New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is a dictatorial ideologue.

He ran an “upbeat campaign, with a nice-guy demeanor and perpetual smile papering over a long history of divisive and demagogic statements.” 

This might have fooled voters into thinking he was a feel-good technocrat who’d fix the city. But after being elected, the mask came off. 

New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani gives brief remarks during a Veteran’s Day event at Volunteers of America – Commonwealth Veterans’ Residence on Nov. 11, 2025, in the Bronx. Getty Images

“Across 23 angry minutes laced with identity politics and seething with resentment,” the editorial says, Mamdani made clear that he wants to identify “class enemies” — like landlords, and “bosses” who exploit workers — and set about  “crushing them.” 

His goal, it notes, isn’t to increase wealth, but to redistribute it to his supporters. He didn’t mention “growth” once. 

Even Democratic talking heads Van Jones and David Axelrod criticized Mamdani’s “character switch” and his divisive speech.

What a surprise. Who knew Mamdani would turn out to be such an almost Hugo Chavez-like, figure?

Well, anyone paying attention, actually. 

Certainly more people would have known had The Washington Post covered his “long history of divisive and demagogic statements.” 

By telling us now, the editors are engaging in a longstanding ritual of the Democrat-supporting legacy media: The post-election purge, where they report all the stuff they didn’t share, or at least soft-pedaled on, back when it might hurt Democrats.

That’s what they do. Over a decade ago, blog humorist Jim Treacher tweeted: “Modern journalism is all about deciding which facts the public shouldn’t know because they might reflect badly on Democrats.” 

We’re told The Washington Post is going to focus more in the future on things that promote free minds and free markets. Perhaps this editorial is a sign of something new at the paper, not a coverup for inadequate pre-election reportage.

Perhaps.

But the national press has a long history of glazing up Democratic candidates — especially young, photogenic ones — while suppressing public knowledge of their flaws. 

Journalists bent over backward to cover up JFK’s infidelities and health problems while promoting his youth and vigor. 

They even performed similar services for the not-so-photogenic Lyndon Johnson, and they did their best to cover for Bill Clinton, but he was too much of a challenge so they settled for buying his excuses, or pretending to.

This propagandizing isn’t just done on behalf of candidates, of course. 

The press peddled — quite deliberately — one-sided narratives on COVID, trans issues, the post-George Floyd racial shakedowns and Hunter Biden’s (and Joe Biden’s) outright corruption, even freezing out this paper’s reporting on Hunter’s laptop revelations. 

Then-mayoral candidate Mamdani during the NYC mayoral election at the PS 20 The Clinton Hill School, in Brooklyn on November 4. REUTERS

The press did so because it wanted to help Democrats, or at least didn’t want to hurt them. 

And even those reporters and editors inclined to tell the truth were afraid of being mobbed by their colleagues if they did. 

The New York Times, after a staff revolt, sacked an editor simply for running a 2020 op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) calling for the president to use troops to put down race riots in major American cities.

The press eventually admitted that, yes, the COVID narratives were wrong, trans hysteria was just that, Black Lives Matter was an organization run largely by grifters and the Bidens had, in fact, been massively corrupt.

Always, of course, when it was too late for their admissions to make a difference. 

In a particularly stark example this weekend, the BBC finally confessed that it deceptively edited a Trump speech to make it sound like he was encouraging a riot on Jan. 6, 2021; several leading figures have been forced to resign. 

Again, long after the admission ceased to matter.

People do notice, though, which is why trust in the press has plummeted, particularly as social media — like blogs, and particularly X — have allowed policing of media lies, and non-coverage. 

But to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time — and if you know what you’re doing, that should be enough.

Well, it was enough to elect Zohran Mamdani. 

Good luck, New York.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.