Zohran Mamdani posted a short video this week to admit that, despite his best wishes, he lacks the authority to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu when the Israeli prime minister visits New York in the fall to attend the United Nations’ General Assembly.
Go ahead: Pour yourself a strong cup of coffee, sink into a comfortable chair and watch the mayor’s missive.
Because few documents give us a more coherent or compelling peek into the mind of the man who now governs America’s largest city.
Leaning over a desk as big as his ego, the mayor wasted no time before getting to the point.
“Benjamin Netanyahu,” he thundered, looking less like a serious elected official and more like an actor auditioning for the role of an assistant district attorney on “Law & Order,” “is a war criminal.”
Why bother with saying so when there’s nothing the mayor can do about it?
And, more poignantly, why should the mayor of a large and demanding American city spend so much time and city resources fretting about a conflict unfurling thousands of miles away?
The answer to both questions is the same, and it’s one that’s probably obvious to any 12-year-old with an iPhone: He’s doing it for the clicks.
Sure, the mayor is genuinely no fan of the Jews; he and his wife have been obsessively demonizing the Jewish state for years while cheering on those meek humanitarians over at Hamas.
But, as Tuesday’s video makes all too clear, the mayor’s own biases are a sideshow, not the main attraction.
At heart, he’s a theater kid starved for attention — and he knows that nothing gets his base more riled up than squawking about death, war and suffering: the video received 2.3 million views the day Mamdani posted it on YouTube.
It’s politics as imagined by a narcissistic, solipsistic, dim millennial whose privileged upbringing featured so little by way of real-world experience that he felt compelled to find purpose elsewhere.
And he found it, like all too many members of his screen-addled generation, in the cheap and meaningless validation that comes with chasing clicks and likes online.
He is hardly alone in this scam.
The mayor’s bestie, the online toddler influencer known as Ms. Rachel, recently took a sharp turn into politics, posting less about the ABCs and more about “Palestine” — and amassing a fortune along the way.
The numbers tell the story.
In 2023, before Hamas’ marauders crossed into Israel to behead babies, rape teenage girls and kidnap hundreds of innocent civilians, Ms. Rachel enjoyed a sizable but solid audience of about 5 million viewers.
Once she started posting and speaking incessantly about Gaza — offering only grudging empathy, at best, to the Israeli children slaughtered in their beds or held hostage in dark tunnels by vile terrorists — her numbers zoomed: As of this year, her channel boasts more than 20 million subscribers.
Because preening about war while showing no real interest in its causes and making no real effort to help bring about a resolution is one heck of a business model.
Mamdani, the drama club’s alpha dog, was paying attention.
He’s realized that if a dimwitted kids’ entertainer with a YouTube channel can turn “caring about Gaza” into a multimillion-dollar empire, and if a petty provocateur like Hasan Piker can use it to brand himself as the Democrat Party’s new kingmaker, then a clever and ambitious cad with no moral scruples can catapult the same sentiment into a stellar political career.
And that’s the real tragedy of Mamdani’s latest video.
It proves, as if more proof was needed, that the mayor doesn’t really care about New York, or about Gaza, or about solving any real-world issue.
He cares about turning death and suffering into Internet attention for his own fun, fame and fortune.
And we New Yorkers are, tragically, the captive audience to his puerile theatrics.
Liel Leibovitz is editor at large for Tablet and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
