this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2026
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This is a good statement tbh. moving passed the "maduro is a dictator" shit and getting to the point that this is insanely illegal is important.
Perhaps an unpopular take, but that one time he called Maduro a dictator was literally on MyCultura, an iHeartRadio podcast network basically for gusanos. Should he have said that shit? No, obviously not.
But also I saying that trash is basically a requirement for getting to speak on the gusano podcast, Laser sights trained on your forehead if you don't. Unfortunately, that medium is how you reach a lot of Spanish speaking New Yorkers. Anti-communism runs deep and the "freedom of speech" that hogs love to screech about continues to be wholly hypothetical.
He didn’t say it on the podcast, he waffled and pretended to not know enough about Cuba and Venezuela. It was his post pod follow-up where he called them dictators
This is a detail many people seem to have missed, which IMO made the whole incident reflect much worse on Mamdani. It wasn't a concession extracted under pressure during an interview, it was a considered and prepared statement after the fact.
some advisors probably evaluated that saying that shit would help with gusanos and libs more than it alienated us
nice to see he's less daft as actual mayor than he was as a candidate/ the mayor elect.
Certainly possible, though I'd argue that allowing that kind of calculus for an election that he had already functionally won doesn't reflect well on him either. It's possible that he saw some backlash after that and that informed this statement too.
So far I agree, hopefully this trend doesn't reverse. If his statement on this had been any less than what it was it would have been beyond unacceptable.
reasonable
He didn't say it on the podcast, he said it 2 weeks later after the podcast host convinced him Venezuela and Cuba are bad.
"When New York Assembly member Zohran Mamdani finally decided to speak publicly about Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro and Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel, he didn't do it in a press conference or a statement through his office but on a podcast. He was being interviewed by none other than Emmy Award-winning journalist Jorge Ramos and his daughter, political commentator Paola Ramos"
-The Latin Times
I think he said it on the podcast, babes
I wouldn't be condescending about a podcast I didn't listen to. He was ambivalent in the interview, dodging the dictator question, and saying he didn't know enough but that his democratic socialism was different from Maduro's. Then he followed up afterwards explicitly calling both Maduro and Diaz-Canel dictators. It's in the article you posted btw
He spoke publicly about them on the podcast (as your quote says), but he didn't call them dictators on the podcast, as I said.
Quoted below from the linked article, emphasis added by me.
I was mistaken about the timeline, it was a few days rather than 2 weeks. The point is that he successfully went on the podcast and spoke to that audience (in my opinion still making distasteful concessions) and then after that he worsened his stance and called them "dictators".