As I record this, Ziran Mamdani is being sworn in as the mayor of New York City.

It's an unprecedented and historic moment, not only because Mamdani is the first Muslim mayor of New York City,

but because it's a major victory for the Democratic Socialist

movement.

Nobody thought at the outset that Mamdani could win.

He was up against big money.

He was up against the incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, and a widely recognized, if not particularly liked, former New York

Governor, Andrew Cuomo. Namedani's victory has been a major achievement, and it has turned

American politics upside down in a certain way. Even Donald Trump appeared impressed with what

Mamdani accomplished. We're going to have a lot more on Mamdani's administration. We're going to have a lot

of reporting as this untested experiment in democratic socialist governance unfolds. We have reporters right now at the inauguration

who are going to be writing it up for current affairs. But today we'd like to revisit the interview

that we did with Zeram Dhani in fall of 2024. Now, at that time, the campaign had just begun

and it was unclear whether it was going to

pick up steam, whether it was going to go anywhere. And in fact, when the cameras stopped

rolling, I actually asked Memdani, can you reassure me, please, that this is a campaign that's

going to go out and win and not another left attempt to achieve power that ends

in a noble failure. And he promised me he'd go out and win, seem very unlikely at that point.

But then, as I watched over the next year, incredible, incredible things happened. They built an amazing operation, and they

beat the odds. And now the hard part begins, and they're going to have to govern. But it's a

good time to go back and revisit what Mamdani was saying back when the campaign had just

begun. So we hope you'll rewatch this early interview with Zaraan

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