On Friday, News Hour didn’t feature the candidate’s left-wing promises to defund police and provide freebies to residents, but instead condemned the conservative reaction to him.

Said featured liberal commentator Jonathan Capehart, “I’ll start with the Republican response. It’s shameful, it’s hateful, it’s disgusting.”

From Friday’s PBS News Hour:

NEWS HOUR HOST AMNA NAWAZ: I got to ask you both, too, about Tuesday night’s events in New York City, the Democratic mayoral primary contest the entire country was paying attention to when Zohran Mamdani, who was a little-known state assemblyman, went on to beat the former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani’s 33 years old, he’s a self-described Democratic socialist, and his win, we should point out, has really fueled a hateful response from some on the Right. There’s a major MAGA voice named Charlie Kirk, who posted this: ‘24 years ago a group of Muslims killed 2,753 people on 9/11. Now a Muslim Socialist is on pace to run New York City.’”

Tennessee Congressman Andy Ogles actually called for Mamdani, who was born in Uganda, as a naturalized U.S. citizen, to be denaturalized and deported. Jonathan, what does Mamdani’s win tell us about Democrats and their message, if anything, and what does the response tell us about Republicans and theirs?

JONATHAN CAPEHART: Well, the response, I’ll start with the Republican response. It’s shameful, it’s hateful, it’s disgusting. It also tells me that Republicans are deathly afraid of their prospects in the 2026 midterm elections. Especially if they’re going after a guy who just simply won the primary in a municipal election. The other thing folks need to understand, the reputation of New York City is of a liberal bastion, and it’s a city where there’s a six-to-one Democratic registration advantage over Republicans. And yet this city, that has a reputation of being a liberal bastion, elected Rudy Giuliani twice and Mike Bloomberg three times, the first time as a Republican, the next two times as an independent. And so, what I take from Mamdani’s win, above all else, is that he went out there and asked New Yorkers for their votes. He did not do a Rose Garden strategy. He asked people for their votes, and he gave them something to vote for, and that’s the thing Democrats should emulate. Ask people for their votes.

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Brent Baker, the Steven P.J. Wood senior fellow and vice president for research and publications at the Media Research Center, explained our pick: “In pleading for donations in the wake of the effort to end taxpayer funding of PBS, the News Hour website ludicrously claims ‘your gift supports America’s #1 most trusted news source in providing intelligent, balanced and in-depth reporting.’ This coverage of Mamdani is just the latest proof of the hollowness of that promise, a pledge PBS has never made any genuine effort to provide. Where’s the balance in ignoring the elephant in the room of Mamdani’s extremist views while treating conservative reaction to him as the most important event that must be condemned?”

Rating: FOUR out of FIVE screams.