“The Charlie Kirk Show” on Sunday published the final long-form interview that Charlie Kirk conducted, during which he and his guest, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Rob Henderson, discussed Democratic New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s harmful beliefs.
Kirk recorded the roughly 80-minute interview with Henderson shortly before he was assassinated on Sept. 10, according to the description of the episode. They discussed the concept of “luxury beliefs,” which are elitist views that do not affect elites, but hurt average Americans, particularly focusing on Mamdani as an example.
“They talk about Zohran Mamdani as the avatar of luxury beliefs, the ‘success sequence’ that can bring people out of poverty, the ‘Dark Triad,’ and more,” the description stated. “It’s a wide-ranging conversation that touches many of the themes Charlie cared about most in his life.”
Kirk highlighted Henderson’s June 25 piece, titled, “Zohran Mamdani’s Luxury Beliefs,” which the host called “phenomenal.”
“The first line is really amazing,” Kirk said before reading it.
“The luxury belief class has just done the equivalent of plucking a random grad student from an Ivy League Hamas encampment and nominating them for mayor,” Henderson wrote.
Kirk asked his guest to elaborate.
“Well, if you look at the political views of the people who were forming these encampments at places like Yale and Columbia and elsewhere, they held very far-left, progressive, radical views,” Henderson said. “And a lot of people by now … have seen the social media posts of Mamdani from 2020 and 2021. What I found very funny about the Mamdani posts from that era was they weren’t just the sort of normal boiler plate woke stuff.”
“It wasn’t just ‘defund the police,’ it was ‘defund the police’ as a queer feminist issue … things that you wouldn’t see anywhere else unless you passed through these institutions where it’s not enough to just say ‘defund the police,’” he added.
Henderson noted Mamdani had backtracked on his radical social views to focus on “overt economic socialism,” but he argued they were “intertwined.” He added that Kirk and others have noted “wokeness is a kind of variant of Marxism.”
“It is,” Kirk replied, adding, “He’s a Marxist.”
Mamdani had advocated in a June 28, 2020, X post for defunding the New York City Police Department, describing the department as “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.”
We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.
What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD.
But your deal with @NYCMayor uses budget tricks to keep as many cops as possible on the beat.
NO to fake cuts – defund the police. https://t.co/2RCXU8heg2
— Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@ZohranKMamdani) June 29, 2020
The New York City mayoral election is being held on Tuesday, and Mamdani holds a significant lead over independent candidate Andrew Cuomo and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa.
Henderson told Kirk that wealthy, white progressives largely voted for Mamdani in the primary and predicted that many would leave the city if he won and their quality of life declined.
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