The Candidate from Tehran: A Study in Denial

With a guest appearance by a famous New York conservative

The Candidate from Tehran: A Study in Denial

And look who shows up when most needed

By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com

Preamble:

This one took a turn.

I began by reading Cynthia Farahat’s scorching report on Zohran Mamdani, New York’s socialist nominee for mayor.

But the deeper I went, the more I heard another voice — elegant, amused, and slightly appalled — drifting in from another decade.

By the end, I realized New York’s ghost had returned.

Our guest may have put it this way: “New York once knew the difference between sophistication and surrender.”

I. The Case

New York has always been the city of firsts — the first to dream, to dazzle, to self-destruct with flair.

Now, it may also be the first great American city to elect a man whose sympathies lean east of the Constitution.

Cynthia Farahat’s American Greatness essay lands like a classified report that somehow made it to print.

She warns that Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani — a 33-year-old democratic socialist and Shi’a Twelver Muslim — brings more than youth and diversity to the race.

He brings the theological DNA of Iran’s theocracy and the political habits of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Her case is detailed and devastating:

• Mamdani’s sect, the Twelver Shi’a, recognizes the Ayatollah of Iran as its living authority — the “guardian jurist.”

• His campaign has been funded and flattered by Brotherhood-linked groups like CAIR and ICNA.

• He’s been photographed with clerics who praise Hamas and imams who defended the 1993 World Trade Center bombers.

• He once released a rap track glorifying the “Holy Land Five,” convicted of funneling $12 million to Hamas.

• His mother’s nonprofit took millions in Qatari funding, and his own campaign accepted illegal foreign donations.

• His economic plan is a hymn to redistribution — free buses, city-owned groceries, a $30 minimum wage by 2030 — all financed by a shrinking 1%.

Farahat’s question is simple: Who rules Mamdani?

If his faith and his friends point toward Tehran, then New York’s next mayor might not be serving New Yorkers at all.

II. The Rebuttal

Cue the chorus.

The Left doesn’t refute; it reframes.

First comes the diagnosis: “Islamophobia.”

Question the man’s ideology and you’re told you’re sick.

Then comes the moral diversion: “You can’t hold a Muslim accountable for other Muslims’ crimes.”

A trick of equivalence: to note theological allegiance is “bigotry,” but to ignore it is “tolerance.”

Next, the sentimental alibi:

“He’s for human rights, not Hamas.”

“He’s criticizing Israel, not Jews.”

“He met an imam; he didn’t endorse one.”

And finally, the economic incantation:

“Free buses aren’t extremism — they’re compassion.”

Each response is a solvent designed to dissolve the argument before it hardens into fact.

The method is always the same: move the question from security to sensitivity, from evidence to emotion.

In this way, reality itself becomes an act of bad manners.

III. The Reckoning — Buckley Returns to His City

Somewhere above Park Avenue, the ghost of William F. Buckley Jr. looks down and winces.

His city — the one that once defined civilization in motion — is flirting with theocratic socialism and calling it progress.

He knows this pattern; he’s seen it before.

New York has always had a taste for noble ruin. But this time, the appetite feels terminal.

Buckley loved this town — the tap of shoes on wet pavement, the espresso steam at dawn, the intellectuals arguing in ten languages before noon.

He built National Review here, wrote here, fenced and sailed and sparred here.

He debated liberals not because he hated them but because he refused to surrender the city to stupidity.

And so, if the Left now rushes to canonize Zohran Mamdani — a man whose theology kneels to Tehran and whose economics genuflect to Havana — Buckley would rise from his chair, adjust his cufflinks, and begin again.

“It is the fate of civilized men,” he’d say, “to defend their civilization even after it forgets why it’s worth defending.”

He’d find the whole spectacle grotesquely familiar — the self-congratulating tolerance that calls treason diversity, the sentimental press that mistakes naiveté for virtue.

He’d see Mamdani not as a candidate, but as a symptom — of a city so proud of its openness it’s left the doors unguarded.

And then Buckley would smile that faint, aristocratic half-smile — the one that always preceded the strike:

“New York,” he’d murmur, “was once the mind of America. Now it risks becoming its conscience — and there’s no faster way to lose both.”

He might linger another moment, savoring the silence, before delivering one more flourish — the line that turns analysis into sentence:

“The tragedy of liberalism,” he’d add softly, “is that it mistakes its own decay for moral growth — and calls that enlightenment.”

Then, with a final nod to his city, he’d turn away — leaving the air heavy with grammar, logic, and grief.

IV. Epilogue — Bob’s Return

And somewhere, Bob exhales.

He’s not trying to out-think Buckley; he’s just grateful the old ghost showed up for one more round.

“Still works,” he says quietly.

“Still cuts clean.”

Because what Buckley understood — and what this city keeps forgetting — is that once you invite delusion to dinner, it never leaves.

And if New York hands itself to Zohran Mamdani, it won’t just lose a race.

It will lose its reflection — the thing that once made it the city that knew better.

Thanks for dropping by, Bill — New York needed that.