[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]

It is hard to believe at this late date, but there are still people out there who trust the establishment media and rely on it for accurate news. Yet the establishment media continues to go from bad to worse, becoming ever more obviously a propaganda organ for the hard left. Now the Associated Press (AP), which like so many others was once a reliable news source and today is a source for little, if anything more than Democrat Party talking points, has published a lengthy defense of Zohran Mamdani, the Twelver Shi’ite Marxist who is very likely the next mayor of New York. He really isn’t as bad as Orange Man Bad and the other evil right-wingers say, you see.

The fact that the AP article even exists is astounding in itself. For how many candidates does AP provide this service, of reassuring jittery supporters and answering objections, so as to make it easier for those who read the article to vote for the candidate in question? It has likely done this sort of thing for all manner of leftists, but has AP ever provided a helpful explainer detailing how, say, Donald Trump is not really a fascist dictator in the making, or a pawn of Vladimir Putin, or the leader of an “insurrection”? To ask the question is to answer it.

Regarding Mamdani, however, AP pulled out all the stops on Saturday, assuring those hapless few who still take it seriously that poor little Mamdani is really not all that bad: “President Donald Trump calls him a ‘communist.’ His critics say he wants to defund the police. Zohran Mamdani insists he’s just a guy trying to make New York City more affordable.” Aw, the poor guy! What could be wrong with that?

AP gives us the truth behind those nasty attacks from patriots, explaining that “while Trump and other opponents keep calling Mamdani a communist, he identifies as something different: a democratic socialist. He believes government should play a role in reducing economic disparity, but he doesn’t advocate for a communist system where property is collectively owned.”

Is that so, now? In late Feb. 2021, Mamdani was a featured speaker at the online Winter Outreach Conference of the Young Democratic Socialists of America, which on its logo featured three primary slogans: “Cancel Student Debt,” “Defund the Police,” and “Covid-19 Relief.” Mamdani, who had been a member of the New York State Assembly for a few days shy of two months, spoke about some of the left’s pet issues of the day and then told attendees: “there are also other issues that we firmly believe in, whether it’s BDS or whether it is the end goal of seizing the means of production, where we do not have the same level of support at this very moment.”

This is not a rumor. It is not a conspiracy theory. It is not Trump making unsupported claims, as he is so often falsely accused of doing. It is on video: Mamdani called for one of the central tenets of Marxism, the seizure of the means of production, and has never retracted that call. Nor has anyone who calls himself a “journalist” ever bothered to ask him to do so, but AP nevertheless confidently tells its readers that Mamdani is not really a communist, that’s just something that bad old Trump says about him.

This is not news, or anything even close to news. It’s propaganda. And as is so often the case with this sort of thing, there’s more.

AP explains that while Mamdani has called in the past for defunding the police, “he has softened his overall rhetoric around law enforcement.” When asked on July 30 (after a crazed leftist gunman murdered four people in Manhattan, including a police officer) if he regretted his calls to defund the police, Mamdani equivocated: “My statements in 2020 were ones made amidst a frustration that many New Yorkers held at the murderer of George Floyd and the inability to deliver on what Eric Adams of all people described as the right for all of us to be able to enjoy safety and justice. That we need not choose between the two.”

All right. So if Mamdani’s leftist friends and allies cook up another George Floyd scenario, will Mamdani again call for defunding the police? Again, no “journalist” will ask him.

Mamdani is indeed a communist, and his hostility to law enforcement is abundantly clear. AP, however, really, really wants New Yorkers to vote for him. Now, why might that be?