My kids were all obsessed with Hamilton a few years ago so I’ve heard the soundtrack 50 times. There’s a song in that show where Alexander Hamilton’s critics, including Aaron Burr, are expressing their frustration because it feels like Hamilton’s closeness to George Washington means he is politically untouchable. And so they sing this catchy refrain:
“It must be nice, it must be nice…to have Washington on your side.”
That came to mind this morning as I read a story about Mayor Mamdani’s wife. A paraphrased version started rolling around in my head:
It must be nice, it must be nice…to have the media on your side.
Mamdani’s wife Rama Duwaji, as I described here and here, has written all sorts of awful things on Twitter in the past. She appeared to celebrate the 10/7 attack on Israel and liked posts about a pro-Palestinian rally that was condemned by AOC and Mamdani himself as being too extremist. She also liked posts suggesting the claims of rape by Hamas on 10/7 were a hoax.
In even older posts, going back to when she was a teen and in her early 20s, she used the N-word and celebrated other terror groups. In 2017, when she was 20 years old, she posted an adoring statement about “infamous Palestinian terrorist Leila Khaled” who is known as the first female hijacker. “If it does good for my cause, I’ll be happy to accept death,” Duwaji wrote, borrowing a phrase from the female terrorist. Everyone needs someone to look up to.
Mayor Mamdani was asked about all of this and his response was only to say that a) he loved his wife and b) she was a private person. And that was it. No more questions. Move on, please.
That answer might have worked about a single one of these comments if someone had overheard it as part of a private conversation, but all of this stuff was posted online. It wasn’t private. It was Duwaji’s public face.
Yesterday, Duwaji finally apologized for her comments during an interview with a hand-picked art critic. Only, her apology was pretty limited.
Rama Duwaji, the wife of Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City, apologized in an interview published on Wednesday by the art site Hyperallergic for using the N-word as a 15-year-old in social media posts that a conservative news site recently unearthed.
The news site, The Free Beacon, also reported that when Ms. Duwaji was 15, she had tweeted an abbreviation of a slur for gay people.
“When a tabloid recently published old tweets I wrote as a teenager, I felt a lot of shame being confronted with language I used that is so harmful to others,” she said. “Being 15 doesn’t excuse it. I’ve read and seen a lot of what others have had to say in response, and I understand the hurt I caused and am truly sorry.”
So she’s sorry about the N-word and the gay slur when she was 15. And look, even I said that no one really cares about things she said when she was 15. Every 15-year-old says dumb things. What about the pro-terrorist stuff when she was 20 or praising Hamas even more recently?
Asked to explain which social media posts Ms. Duwaji was apologizing for, a spokeswoman for the mayor declined to comment…
Ms. Duwaji also did not appear to address some of her more recent social media activity that has also drawn criticism.
She had liked posts appearing to celebrate Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel, right after Oct. 7, 2023…
She also attracted scrutiny for providing an illustration for a story included in a compilation curated by Susan Abulhawa, a Palestinian American author who has described the Oct. 7 attack as “a spectacular moment that shocked the world.” On Wednesday, Ms. Abulhawa posted on X that “Israelis and all zionists are parasitic filth.”
They mayor “declined to comment” and Ms. Duwaji just refused to apologize for praising hijackers and Hamas. They already know this is going to just go away.
It must be nice, it must be nice…to have the media on your side.
No wonder Mamdani is a fan of Hasan Piker. Piker reminds him of his wife. All of which sort of raises questions about his own views and why he’s so comfortable around people who praise terrorists. But as long as he keeps smiling and saying the right things, the media is happy to pretend there’s nothing to see here.
We’re literally in a moment where major outlets are asking “How did the media miss the fact that Eric Swalwell was a creep?”
This is how.
Right now, what you’re doing with Mamdani and his wife is how you miss these stories that eventually burst onto the scene and become career-ending. The mayor is married to an unrepentant terrorist sympathizer and is friends with other similar people. At some point we might learn that he is personally sympathetic to Hamas or was before saying so became inconvenient to his plans to run for office. There are people out there with stories to tell but no one in the media is asking. They don’t want to know. On the contrary, they love this guy and they are rooting for him.
If this all blows up in their faces a few years from now, they’ll be running stories asking how they could have missed it. But this is how. Their bias toward Democrats leads to incuriosity and a willingness to stop asking questions just when they should be doubling down.
Needless to say if a Republican mayor’s wife had praised right-wing death squads or something equally extreme, the media would act like dogs fighting for a bone. The mayor would be asked about nothing else until a fulsome apology was made. And even then they cast the couple as villains. But Ms. Duwaji is going to walk back into Gracie Mansion and no one is ever going to bother her or the mayor about it. He’ll continue to be a media darling and so will she.
It must be nice.
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