New York City’s openly Marxist mayor has been running from one controversy to the next since taking office.
Now a nearly decade-old interview has crawled back out of the internet and landed squarely on his doorstep.
And the clip has conservatives asking a question that Zohran Mamdani apparently does not want to answer.
The Clip That Wouldn’t Stay Buried
A resurfaced 2016 radio interview featuring New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani sparked a wave of conservative mockery, with critics accusing Mamdani of adopting a “fake” Ugandan accent while promoting his mother Mira Nair’s Disney film, Queen of Katwe.
The clip comes from a 2016 appearance on South Africa’s Kaya 959 radio station tied to the release of Queen of Katwe. During the interview, Mamdani spoke about growing up between Uganda and New York, contrasting nightlife and dancing in the two places.
“The difference for me is I’m from Uganda, but I also grew up in New York. In New York, you go out, some guys are very hesitant to dance,” Mamdani said. “You know, if they’re not grinding, they’re just standing. In Kampala, you will just not find that. People are all dancing. Everybody’s dancing, men, women, and it’s fantastic that way.”
Within hours of resurfacing, the clip had crossed more than 4 million views, with viewers dissecting Mamdani’s accent and comparing it with how he speaks today.
Throughout the 11-minute interview, he speaks with an affected South African accent, at times adjusting his grammar to reflect the local patois.
And then there’s the nepotism angle. Mamdani told the Kaya FM interviewer, “I actually created a playlist for Mira, who also happens to be my mother — you know, nepotism and hard work goes a long way.” He said it with a smile. The accent, though, is a harder thing to laugh off.
The film, directed by Mamdani’s mother, Mira Nair, is based on the true story of Ugandan chess prodigy Phiona Mutesi. Mamdani is credited as the music supervisor and third assistant director and appears in a brief on-screen cameo.
The film was a commercial flop, grossing just $10.3 million of its $15 million budget, according to Box Office Mojo. While there appeared to be money in that budget for Nair and her son, there was none for Mutesi, who did not receive a dime from the film, WBUR reported in 2019.
Social Media Piles On
In a post on X, The Benny Show host Benny Johnson wrote, “UNEARTHED: Zohran Mamdani does an obviously fake Ugandan accent while promoting a Disney movie based in Africa. How many Democrats have been caught using fake accents at this point? They’re all frauds.”
Former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt posted on X, “Look at theater kid commie Mamdani running another fake accent and appropriating African culture. Communists are all frauds. EVERY single one. Don’t ever trust a communist, or else you’ll get Galloway’d and stranded in a gulag.”
“Anyone else notice Mamdani’s accent change? He must’ve studied at Obama University,” wrote X user Tara Bull.
The mayor’s office did not offer a public response to the backlash. Although the interview first resurfaced last year, the video spread widely online again recently, with conservative commentators piling on and accusing Mamdani of adopting an accent that they argued sounded different from his normal speaking voice.
But here’s the thing that makes this more than just a social media pile-on. Mamdani became a US citizen in 2018 while retaining Ugandan citizenship. He was born in Kampala, raised partly in South Africa, and then in New York. That’s a genuinely complicated biography. The question isn’t whether he has any connection to Uganda. He does. The question is why the accent seems to appear and disappear depending on the audience in the room.
A Democrat Party Habit
Mamdani isn’t the first left-wing politician to face this kind of scrutiny, and the timing of this clip’s re-emergence lands in the middle of a broader pattern that conservatives have been cataloging for years.
In 2024, Kamala Harris was slammed for using what critics called a fake Southern accent while speaking at a rally in Atlanta, and again during a Labor Day rally in Detroit that year. During her 2021 overseas trip to France, critics claimed Harris used a “French accent” while touring a COVID lab.
And it didn’t stop there. Conservative communications strategist Steve Guest argued that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had joined a long line of Democrat politicians accused of changing their speaking style depending on the crowd. “Hillary Clinton developed an accent. Kamala Harris developed an accent. AOC is developing an accent. It’s all patronizing,” Guest wrote.
The pattern is hard to ignore. Democrat politicians who build their entire brands around authenticity and speaking for the people keep getting caught sounding like entirely different people depending on who’s listening.
Mamdani has built his political identity around an unapologetic DSA platform — promising an unashamed Marxist platform of rent freezes, free public transportation, free child care, public grocery stores, a $30 minimum wage, and more. That’s the pitch: a man of the people, rooted in community, no pretense. But a politician who curates his accent the way a music supervisor curates a playlist is performing authenticity rather than living it.
And the DSA brand deserves a closer look here. The Democratic Socialists of America — the openly Marxist organization Mamdani belongs to — openly calls for government seizure of major corporations, abolition of the Senate, and the construction of a classless society. These aren’t fringe positions buried in footnotes. They’re the stated goals. Mamdani’s accent controversy is a minor embarrassment. His policy agenda is the real story, and New Yorkers are already living it.
The socialist left has spent years accusing conservatives of inauthenticity, of pandering, of saying one thing in public and doing another in private. But the mayors and the congresswomen and the presidential hopefuls keep getting caught on tape sounding like whoever they need to sound like in that moment. At some point, voters start to wonder what’s actually real.
For Mamdani, the clip is already out there. He has been through at least four accents in just a few years, according to observers tracking the footage. That’s not a multicultural background. That’s a wardrobe.
Sources: Fox News, Hannity.com, Washington Free Beacon, Trending Politics News, Twitchy, Washington Examiner, Yahoo News, RedState, InfluenceWatch