A New York State Assemblyman says he was silenced during a budget hearing in Albany last week after pressing New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on a 182 percent surge in antisemitic incidents during the mayor's first month in office.
Assemblyman Ari Brown, an Orthodox Republican representing a Long Island district, used his allotted time to question Mamdani about antisemitism and the mayor's failure to unequivocally condemn the slogan "Globalize the intifada" — a phrase critics say encourages violence against Jews. Assemblyman Gary Pretlow, a Democrat from Mount Vernon, intervened with a warning:
"Don't go on – this is a budget hearing. Have respect for our mayor."
Brown's microphone and allotted time were then cut.
Neither Mamdani nor Pretlow responded to requests for comment.
Budget hearings are where elected officials exercise oversight. That's their purpose. Members get time, they ask questions, and the officials sitting before them answer. What happened in Albany wasn't a procedural correction — it was a shutdown.
Brown wasn't filibustering. He wasn't grandstanding about an unrelated topic. According to the New York Post, he was asking the mayor of New York City about a staggering spike in hate crimes against Jews — during a hearing where the mayor was already seated and accountable. Pretlow's instruction to "have respect for our mayor" tells you everything about whose comfort mattered in that room.
Brown didn't mince words about what happened:
"They silenced me for demanding answers about rising hate against the Jewish community. Every New Yorker should understand exactly how dangerous that is."
"That is not debate, that is intimidation. They want to shut me down."
He's right that the optics are brutal. A Jewish lawmaker wearing a yarmulke—who says he's the first yarmulke-wearing Republican ever elected to state office in New York — gets his mic killed for asking a Democratic socialist mayor about antisemitism. You couldn't write a more damning scene if you tried.
Brown offered a theory about why his colleagues fell in line so quickly. It wasn't about procedure. It was about survival.
"They want to prove to Zohran that they hate the Jews because Zohran is controlling the [Democratic Socialists of America]."
Brown described some of his colleagues as "pure communists" and estimated that nearly half of the Democratic members in the chamber are "terrified" of being primaried from the left. That fear, he argues, creates a dynamic where even mainstream Democrats defer to the most radical voices in the room — not out of conviction, but out of self-preservation.
"No matter how far left they go, there is always a more radical communist waiting to primary them, so they fall in line and try to silence anyone who challenges the agenda."
This is the ratchet effect that has consumed Democratic politics in deep-blue states. The base doesn't pull the party left — the primary threat does. Elected officials don't have to believe the DSA's worldview. They just have to be afraid of the DSA's voters. The result looks identical either way: silence on antisemitism, deference to ideologues, and microphones that go dead when someone breaks ranks.
Upstate GOP Congresswoman Elise Stefanik responded on X, framing the incident as part of a larger pattern of one-party dominance in New York:
"Welcome to single party Socialist rule in NY … where elected members in legislative bodies conducting oversight on behalf of their constituents are NOT permitted to ask certain questions."
She went further, calling the mic cut an "unprecedented power grab" by "NY Socialist Dems" and accusing the chamber of shutting down "an important question regarding antisemitism being propped up (and funded!) by the new Mayor."
Stefanik's language is sharp, but the underlying point is straightforward: oversight doesn't work if certain questions are off-limits. A budget hearing where a member can't ask the mayor about a 182 percent increase in hate crimes isn't oversight. It's a theater.
Lost in the procedural drama is the substance Brown was trying to surface. Antisemitic incidents in New York City surged 182 percent during Mamdani's first month as mayor. That number sat in the room, unaddressed, while a Democrat told a Jewish assemblyman to stop talking.
Mamdani didn't answer questions about it at the hearing. He didn't respond to press inquiries afterward. The silence is consistent — and it's the whole story. When a mayor presides over a near-tripling of antisemitic hate and his allies' only move is to shut down the people asking about it, the silence becomes its own kind of answer.
Brown invoked Ronald Reagan to frame the moment:
"Communism only works as long as you can force people to obey."
Then he added his own line:
"When a microphone gets cut in a legislative hearing instead of questions being answered, that warning stops sounding like history and starts sounding like right now."
Albany didn't answer the question about antisemitism last week. It answered a different question — about who's allowed to ask.
