Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
With the grim anniversary of 9/11 just days away, Andrew Cuomo went after mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani for appearing on the show of megapopular Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who once said “America deserved 9/11.”
On Tuesday, Cuomo appeared near Ground Zero alongside a 9/11 first responder and his family in front of a pair of poster boards, one showing a photo of Piker and the 9/11 quote, the other showing Mamdani and Piker clasping hands and sitting together for a meal.
Hailed as “the left’s answer to Joe Rogan,” Piker is a charismatic Gen-Z streamer who broadcasts nearly every waking hour and has 4.5 million viewers across Twitch and YouTube. Piker has been a fierce critic of American foreign policy but previously acknowledged that his comments about 9/11 were inappropriate.
Still, the effort to tie those comments to Mamdani, who in June became the first Muslim major-party nominee for mayor, brought a ferocious response from his campaign.
“Andrew Cuomo knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s holding a press conference to suggest that Zohran Mamdani — who is poised to become New York’s first Muslim mayor — somehow supported 9/11. It’s vile, it’s dangerous, and it’s deliberate,” the campaign said in a statement. “Cuomo would rather you forget his own record: that he had to be pressured into ever setting foot in a mosque, that he’s repeatedly trafficked in Islamophobia when it suited him politically, that he’s used Muslims as convenient punching bags for decades. New Yorkers can see this for what it is — a cynical attempt to recycle the ugliest playbook in our politics. Cuomo is not protecting the memory of 9/11 victims; he’s once again desecrating it by weaponizing grief and pain for his own ambition.”
At the press conference, Cuomo did not explicitly bring up Mamdani’s appearance on Piker’s stream but did say the candidate’s lack of experience would render the city vulnerable to any number of tragedies.
“We’ve learned that in this city, we are a target on a number of levels. Any given day, you can have a natural disaster. Any given day, you can have a Hurricane Sandy. And any given day, you can have a terrorist attack,” Cuomo said. “And the mayor of New York is no place for on-the-job training.”
Cuomo’s press conference comes the morning that a new poll shows Mamdani with a more than 20-point lead in a four-way contest with Cuomo, incumbent mayor Eric Adams, and Republican Curtis Sliwa. But a head-to-head contest with Cuomo is virtually tied.
September 11 has traditionally been a day off from campaigning in contested city elections, but it remains to be seen how much weight the day carries with the current electorate. Polls this election year have consistently shown affordability and safety are the two biggest concerns among voters, while terrorism fears scarcely rank.
Related
Why Eric Adams Hates Andrew CuomoIs Trump Helping Cuomo or Mamdani?
From Intelligencer - Daily News, Politics, Business, and Tech via this RSS feed