As the rapper formerly known as Young Cardamom, Zohran Mamdani donned fatigues and brandished a handgun in a music video for a song glorifying militant violence. As a politician, the socialist has called for a ban on “all guns” to remedy the “scourge of gun violence.”
The video for the 2016 song “Wabula Naawe” is “set in the Luwero Triangle in 1981 during the days leading up to the Ugandan Bush War,” our Jon Levine reports. It “opens with a spray of gunfire” before depicting “armed militants shooting firearms from the back of a truck—to the words ‘let’s get together and settle this thing once and forever.’ It later portrays a man being shot in the head at point-blank range as Mamdani raps lyrics like, ‘I’ll finish you like food on a plate,’ ‘You are about to run like a chicken,’ and, ‘You’ll pray for death.’”
“Mamdani has taken a more critical stance on firearms since entering politics,” writes Levine. As a state assemblyman, he called to “ban all guns” and voted for a bill placing restrictions on firearms marketing. He has since pledged to spearhead a “nationwide ban on assault rifles.”
Hellbound and Down 