Watch: Comedian Pete Davidson Calls Out Mamdani on 'Jimmy Kimmel Live' - Right Before the Mayor Walks Onstage
Comedian Pete Davidson passed along a question that he wanted asked of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani while appearing shortly before him on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” Monday night.
And the question highlights the problem with big, inefficient, often corrupt government that Mamdani only wants to make bigger under his socialist policies.
Kimmel, who is filming his show in New York City this week, asked Davidson, a native of the Big Apple, if he had a question for the new mayor.
“Yes, could he fix the f***ing BQE, please?” Davidson answered.
BQE is short for Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
The audience responded with raucous applause and cheers.
“You hit on something,” Kimmel observed.
“That’s the loudest response I’ve ever gotten,” Davidson, a former “Saturday Night Live” cast member, replied.
“The BQE has been under construction since before I was born. And here’s my problem with it,” he noted. “They’re never doing anything. Someone’s just standing there eating a sandwich or on the phone, and there’s all these cones around.”
“So I don’t know what mob front or whatever, who’s getting money from whatever, but just fix it, please,” Davidson added. (11:50).
Kimmel promised that he would ask Mamdani about it.
As the host neared the end of his interview with the mayor, he said, “One more thing.”
“Hit me,” Mamdani confidently shot back.
“Pete Davidson wants to know what’s going on in the BQE,” Kimmel said. “He says he drives by it and he sees nobody doing anything. He said it’s been like since before he was born.”
Mamdani replied, “We’re gonna be putting a multibillion-dollar plan to actually repair the part the city owns, which is the part that is currently the most at risk, and that’s going to be proceeding over the next 10 years. Full safety. No diversion of traffic into local neighborhoods and actually bring it back.”
Kimmel wryly responded, “So you’re saying Pete’s [9-month-old] daughter will also be complaining about this,” drawing laughter from the crowd.
Nice to see Kimmel actually getting back to some good-natured political humor and away from his constant Trump Derangement Syndrome-fueled stuff.
Davidson, who supported Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016 and still has a tattoo of her on his leg, actually highlighted something conservatives would agree with: big government is inherently inefficient at best, and enables rampant fraud and corruption at worst.
As I wrote about in my book, “We Hold These Truths,” Charlie Kirk would have had a heyday with Mamdani’s exhortation during his inaugural address in January for Americans to join New Yorkers in replacing “the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”
Kirk told me during a 2020 interview with The Western Journal that he found two questions to be effective in disabusing younger Americans of their starry-eyed view of socialism. “You ask the question to a student, ‘Do you trust the government?’ Traditionally, their answer will be, ‘No, I don’t trust the government. The government’s horrible,’” he said.
“You ask the next question, ‘Then why do you want to make government bigger?’ ‘Well, I don’t want to make government bigger,’” is the normal response, Kirk explained. “Then you’re not a socialist,” he informed the person. It took him about 15 seconds for the entire back-and-forth.
Perhaps Pete Davidson is on his way to becoming more conservative.
As Winston Churchill, who flipped from conservative to liberal and back to conservative during his political career, reputedly said, “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.”
I would add the caveat: Thankfully, many younger Americans discover their political brains earlier than their 30s.
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