Bill O’Reilly says Zohran Mamdani ended the debate over whether he’s a communist – or a democratic socialist, as the New York City mayor-elect calls himself – with a single five-word phrase.
“Mandani won. He will be once sworn in the mayor of New York City. He’s a communist. And most people don’t know what that means,” O’Reilly said at the top of the segment, and didn’t pull his punch, saying the word “communist” a total of 17 times in 13 minutes.
“Everybody when I was growing up knew what it meant because we were in a Cold War with the Soviet Union,” he continued. “They were communists. They were bad. We were good. We were capitalists. Everybody knew. Now they don’t know.”
O’Reilly walked through several of Mamdani’s past campaign promises and policy comments, but zeroed in on one in particular, playing a clip of the victorious state assemblyman’s own words.
“If we’re talking about the cancellation of student debt, if we’re talking about Medicare for all, these are issues which have the groundswell of popular support across this country,” Mamdani said. “But then there are also other issues that we firmly believe in, whether it’s BDS, or whether it’s the end goal of seizing the means of production.”
O’Reilly perked up at that: “Seizing the means of production,” he said. “There you go. You have to seize by force. OK, that’s what communists do. That is the crux.”
O’Reilly also focused on Mamdani’s use of “BDS.”
“That’s boycott, divestment, sanctions – against Israel,” O’Reilly said. “Thirty-three percent of Jewish voters in New York who cast ballots voted for Mandani, and he hates you guys. Thirty-three percent. It’s stunning. It’s absolutely stunning.”
As he tends to do, O’Reilly dragged the media for pushing back on the word “communist” when referring to the mayor-elect.
“Here’s a display on CNN,” he said, showing a clip from the network of anchor Laura Coates objecting to a contributor’s use of the word, and insisting that Mamdani is a socialist.
“Madam, with all due respect, when you say you’re going to seize the means of production, that’s communism,” O’Reilly said. “Socialism is redistributing income. That’s taxing me, O’Reilly, right up to here — 80, 90 percent — and then giving that money to people who don’t have a lot of assets. That’s socialism, and you do that through balloting, through voting. So you vote for progressive left candidates. That’s what they want to do. Communism isn’t that.”
O’Reilly said the forceful taking of assets includes punishing those who refuse – “and in extreme cases like Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam — all communists — they’ll hurt you. And that’s what Mandani wants. He would seize the means of production.”
He called that definition “self-explanatory.”
“The largest city in the world — the center of capitalism all over the world, New York City — now has a communist in charge,” O’Reilly said. “That’s bizarre.”
Watch the entire clip in the video above.
