Skinnyfat Mamscrawny

Why Zohran Mamdani's failure to bench a single plate will make him more, not less, attractive to leftists

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Zohran Mamdani was at the annual Men’s Day event on the streets of Brooklyn this Saturday when he was cornered and forced to lay down on his back and do something he had clearly never done before. Yes, Zohran Mamdani was forced—to do a bench press.

This is the kind of unrehearsed public stunt politicians and would-be politicians dread, even more than being forced to eat in front of a camera (unless you’re Pete Buttigieg, that is, and you manage to make devouring a cinnamon roll look like… whatever the hell that was).

For the first time in his expertly curated campaign, which had seen him ride the subway train with insufferable hipster faggots and play up as many braindead Gen-Z memes as possible, Mamdani was way out of his comfort zone, totally off script, and boy did it show.

The bar was loaded with one plate on either side—a whopping 135 pounds, the full weight of Sydney Sweeney’s cleavage—and out it came from the rack, with the expert guidance of a heavily muscled spotter.

Mamdani’s arms were shaking like the quarterback’s knees on prom night.

The bar went down, then surprisingly it came back up. It went down again, and surprisingly it came back up again.

Of course, neither of the two reps was actually performed by the candidate for New York mayor. He got up, laughed and patted the spotter on the back, before fleeing the scene. Later, he was pictured with his designer boots off kicking a soccer ball.

Mamdani’s opponents in the mayoral race, including the incumbent Eric Adams, pounced on his pathetic display.

Mayor Adams headed to the exact same spot and filmed a video himself banging out multiple reps without any aid from the man who had spotted Mamdani.

Adams posted the video to X and crowed, “64 vs 33. A lifetime of hard work vs. a silver spoon. The results speak for themselves.”

“The weight of the job is too heavy for ‘Mamscrawny,” Adams continued. “The only thing he can lift is your taxes.”

Not bad, Mayor Adams. Not bad. But we’re still only talking about 135 pounds, for God’s sake. This is a warmup weight.

Andrew Cuomo, whose brother Chris is no stranger to the gym, also chimed in.

“It’s easy to talk, it’s hard to carry the burden,” he wrote on X.

“This guy can’t bench his own body weight, let alone carry the weight of leading the most important city in the world.”

My favourite response, however, came from Starting Strength, the chain of weightlifting gyms.

“Strength. One of the few things you can’t take from others and redistribute.”

Amen; although Mamdani did a pretty good job of seizing the means of force production from his spotter.

But as embarrassing as Mamdani’s attempt at bench-pressing was, and as much as it may revolt you or me or any man with an ounce of testosterone in his body, it probably makes him more, not less, attractive to leftists.

A study published in May this year, in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, found that “left-wing authoritarians are less likely to support physically strong men as leaders.” Left-wing authoritarians are those who “favor strong social control but in pursuit of progressive goals.”