You could feel the air go cold on the left when Ben Shapiro pulled up the receipts and let the facts do the talking. A recent clip shared by Dave Rubin showed Shapiro presenting the plain words from a CNN appearance and watching liberal commentators like Bakari Sellers and Ana Kasparian scramble for an answer as the room fell silent.
The quote at the center of the panic was crystal clear: when asked on CNN whether he likes capitalism, mayoral contender Zohran Mamdani answered, “No. I have many critiques of capitalism.” That line—spoken on national television—should alarm every American who believes in free enterprise and the American dream.
Shapiro didn’t manufacture outrage; he simply pointed to Mamdani’s own words and exposed the ideological rot the media refuses to name. On his program he used the same clips to explain why voters should be wary of electing someone who openly rejects the system that built New York into the world’s financial engine.
Predictably, the predictable pile-on followed from left-wing outlets trying to gaslight the public about what Mamdani actually said, but the original video is the truth and it speaks for itself. The mainstream reaction ranged from mockery to damage control, and conservatives rightly called out the hypocrisy of a candidate who benefits from capitalism while denouncing it in public.
Make no mistake: Mamdani is not a harmless reformer with a smattering of policy ideas—he proudly labels himself a democratic socialist and ran on a platform that includes heavy-handed interventions in housing, taxes, and markets. That is exactly the sort of agenda that will drive businesses and jobs out of cities that adopt it, and yet too many on the left cheer.
Even CNN’s own coverage captured the economic alarm bells—discussing how the flight of capital and talent is not hypothetical when politicians flirt with anti-market policies and rhetoric. Americans who pay the bills should be frightened when leaders say they do not like capitalism while promising to control and redistribute other people’s earnings.
This moment was a reminder that conservatives still win when we stick to facts and refuse to be bullied by the media’s moral preening. Call out the rhetoric, show the receipts, and remind your neighbors that prosperity, opportunity, and dignity come from freedom, not from top-down experiments in social engineering. The silence from the left when confronted with truth is the sound of their ideas collapsing.
