New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants voters to believe he has moved past his "defund the police" days, but his 2020 calls to dismantle the NYPD remain on the record, and Republicans say progressives cannot simply walk away from the damage.
At a press conference on Wednesday, Mamdani fielded questions about whether the so-called "Woke 1" era was, in his view, out of bounds. The question followed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's appearance on ABC's "This Week" the previous Sunday, where she quoted an unnamed city councilman's line, "Woke 1 was crazy", and urged voters to judge candidates on what they say now rather than what they said then. Her comments went viral, and reporters wanted to know whether the mayor agreed.
Mamdani did not reject the "Woke 1" label outright. Instead, he offered a carefully worded pivot. "Each person has a responsibility to tell New Yorkers, to tell Americans when they're running for office what they believe," he said. "And sometimes, what you believe can change. It can develop. It can grow."
He then drew a bright line between his current position and the one he held five years ago. Fox News Digital reported that Mamdani told the press conference crowd he has "made very clear that I do not believe in defunding the police, that I will not be defunding the police, and that to me, delivering critical public safety also looks like working with our police department alongside many other partners."
He pointed to crime statistics from the first seven months of his administration, claiming New York City recorded its fewest murders and fewest shooting incidents on record during that stretch.
The mayor's current posture stands in direct conflict with his own words from the summer of 2020. On June 28 of that year, Mamdani, then a state Assembly candidate aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America, posted on what was then Twitter:
"We don't need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD. But your deal with [New York City mayor] uses budget tricks to keep as many cops as possible on the beat. NO to fake cuts, defund the police."
Six months later, in December 2020, he went further:
"All this misery. All for money. In the last budget, the City Council tried to make the NYPD reduce its overtime budget by half. They simply refused. There is no negotiating with an institution this wicked & corrupt. Defund it. Dismantle it. End the cycle of violence."
Those posts did not call for reform. They called for dismantlement. Mamdani described the NYPD as "wicked & corrupt" and "a major threat to public safety", the same department he now credits with delivering record-low violence.
Before the Wednesday press conference, Mamdani used a Friday radio appearance to put additional daylight between himself and the DSA's platform. He told listeners that his administration accepts the role of police, prisons, and jails in delivering safety. "New Yorkers need not choose between" safety and justice, he said, explicitly distancing himself from the DSA's abolition stance.
The shift is notable. The DSA's platform calls for the abolition of police, prisons, and jails, a position Mamdani's 2020 tweets enthusiastically endorsed. Now, as mayor, he frames these institutions as partners. He offered no explanation for the reversal beyond the general claim that beliefs "can change."
That framing mirrors Ocasio-Cortez's own advice. On ABC, she said, "I think that what's important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now." The implication: voters should grant a clean slate. But a clean slate requires more than a change in talking points. It requires an accounting of what the old position cost, and neither Mamdani nor Ocasio-Cortez has offered one.
David Laska, communications director for the New York State Republican Party, was not buying the makeover. In a statement to Fox News Digital, Laska rejected the idea that progressive leaders can simply shed their past positions when those positions become politically inconvenient.
"Americans will never forget and never forgive the radical extremism of the 'woke' era, in which countless people had their livelihoods ripped away for espousing conservative values, including the overwhelmingly popular positions that men have no place in women's spaces and that our border should be secure."
Laska went on to call the rebranding effort "utterly shameless," arguing that DSA-aligned candidates routinely obscure their views once they begin running for broader office. "We see radical DSA candidates lying about their views once they start running for office because they know that Americans would reject them," he said.
He described Mamdani as "a defund-the-police, Hamas-supporting radical socialist" and urged voters to "fight back" by supporting Republican candidates. Fox News Digital noted it reached out to Mamdani's office for comment on Laska's characterization but did not immediately hear back.
The tension between Mamdani's DSA roots and his current governing posture is not new. A Clinton-era official recently warned that Democratic Socialists will damage the broader Democratic Party unless its leaders draw a firm boundary against the movement's most radical positions.
Mamdani's record has drawn scrutiny on other fronts as well. Republican senators backed a petition from 9/11 families seeking to bar the mayor from the Ground Zero anniversary ceremony, a dispute rooted in concerns about his past statements and affiliations.
AOC's willingness to call "Woke 1" crazy marked a rare public concession from one of the progressive movement's most visible figures. But the concession came with a built-in escape hatch: judge candidates on what they say now, not what they said then.
That standard, applied consistently, would erase accountability for every politician who rode a wave of radical sentiment to office and then reversed course once the political winds shifted. It asks voters to trust the updated version without explaining why the original version was wrong, or what consequences flowed from it.
In Mamdani's case, the original version was not ambiguous. He did not merely question police budgets. He called the NYPD "wicked & corrupt," demanded its dismantlement, and labeled it "a major threat to public safety." Those were not careless words. They were a governing philosophy.
That philosophy shaped a political movement that, as Laska noted, pressured institutions and individuals across the country during 2020 and beyond. Critics have called out Democrats for refusing to confront their party's radical fringe, and the current round of rhetorical repositioning may be the clearest evidence yet that the fringe knows it overplayed its hand.
Mamdani's own timeline makes the contradiction hard to miss. In 2020, the NYPD was too corrupt to negotiate with. In his current term, the same department is a valued partner delivering historic safety gains. Both claims cannot be true. And the mayor has not explained which version of his judgment voters should trust.
His critics have also pointed to his absence from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing memorial, raising broader questions about whether the mayor's public gestures match his private priorities.
Mamdani's central defense, that beliefs evolve, is not, on its face, unreasonable. Politicians do change their minds. Voters can weigh that evolution at the ballot box.
But evolution implies a reckoning. It implies acknowledging that the prior position was wrong and explaining what changed. Mamdani has done neither. He has simply adopted new language while leaving the old posts on the record and offering no apology to the officers he once called a threat to public safety, or to the New Yorkers who lived through the crime surge that followed the defund movement's peak influence.
Ocasio-Cortez, for her part, acknowledged the era was "crazy", but stopped well short of accepting responsibility for her own role in it. And her proposed solution, assess candidates on what they say now, conveniently benefits every progressive who needs a fresh start heading into the next election cycle.
Laska framed the choice in starker terms. "Zohran Mamdani is a defund-the-police, Hamas-supporting radical socialist. We know that because he's told us," he said. Whether voters agree with that characterization or accept Mamdani's updated pitch will depend on how much weight they give to a politician's words, all of them, not just the latest ones.
When a politician asks you to forget what he said, the fair response is to read it back to him. Mamdani's own tweets do that job better than any opponent ever could.
