The Smile That Ate the City: The Parable of Mamdani

[Red Square]

By Oleg Atbashian
First published at the American Thinker

Even if you haven’t watched the new Amazon series Malice, the piece makes the case for why it’s worth your time - and why it resonates beyond TV.

The smiling Zohran Mamdani look-alike in the series poster is actually Adam - a gifted sociopath and pathological liar who prostitutes himself to rich old men he hates, then worms into wealthy families and methodically wrecks them from within to avenge “capitalism’s unfairness.” The facial resemblance - and the smile - are purely coincidental. Or are they?

I just finished watching Malice on Amazon (6 episodes / 2 nights). Tell me I’m not the only one who sees it as a parable for how we keep ending up with Mamdani-types atop the power pyramid.

Propelled by the “eat-the-rich” mindset, a charming tutor/nanny infiltrates a wealthy family, wins their trust, then systematically sabotages dad (Duchovny) and the kids - class-revenge cosplay in a five-star setting.

The Greece getaway and glossy wealth-porn are the bait. The switch is gradually engineered “equity”: arrests, career hits, family fractures. Malice marketed as justice.

But Adam’s motive isn’t justice so much as a nurtured grudge dressed up as morality. In his case, his father’s collapse becomes a permanent permission slip for revenge (see Obama’s “Dreams from my Father” and other anticolonialism drivel).  It doesn’t even need to be personal - any abstract “unfairness” will do, provided the target is prosperous enough to deserve it (as in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione).

The show leans hard into our politics-by-resentment moment: it’s White Lotus meets Ripley, but with fewer brakes and more rhetoric.

Call it a meme of today’s equity crusades: break something whole, call it fairness, and blame the target for bleeding.

In that sense, Adam isn’t just a fictional character; he’s a malicious policy platform with a disarming smile - a warning to all of us that might have arrived a little late.
 

[Red Square]

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald ... rcna245309