New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani attended the 25th anniversary 9/11 remembrance ceremony at Ground Zero on Friday, and his critics are furious about what happened while the names of the dead were being read aloud. According to an account published by American Thinker, Mamdani was captured on video laughing alongside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez during the reading of the 2,753 names of those killed in the attacks.
A clip circulated by conservative outlets showed the two Democrats — both members of the Democratic Socialists of America — sharing a joke and laughing while the ceremonial reading was underway. The moment, according to the American Thinker piece, came as a shock to those watching an event defined by silence and grief.
The backstory: a petition he decided to ignore
Mamdani had already generated headlines by choosing to attend the memorial at all. According to American Thinker, a petition signed by a number of 9/11 victims and joined by roughly 100,000 other people asked the mayor not to come to the remembrance ceremony. He attended anyway.
The petition reflected a years-long suspicion among some New Yorkers — especially those who lost relatives in the attacks — that Mamdani’s past remarks on the subject of 9/11 were not sincere. Showalter notes that his prior statements had been marked by what she called “whataboutism,” and that even his earlier remarks ahead of this year’s ceremony were seen by his critics as an attempt to paper over that history.
Before the names were read, Mamdani did deliver remarks that, on their face, seemed appropriate. He reflected on the 25 years since the attacks and called on the city to be “worthy of their courage” — the courage New Yorkers showed in the aftermath of that day. The American Thinker piece acknowledges that the speech avoided the reflexively comparative framing that had characterized his earlier 9/11 comments.
Whatever goodwill that speech might have generated, it did not last long.
A laugh during the reading of the names
The memorial ceremony’s centerpiece is the reading of the names — a slow, hours-long recitation of every person who died in the towers, at the Pentagon and aboard Flight 93. For the families who attend, it is the one ritual that has remained unchanged for a quarter-century. During that part of the ceremony, in view of television cameras, Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez were seen laughing together.
Showalter is blunt about what she believes the episode reveals. In her reading, Mamdani “couldn’t sit still” through the reading, treated the moment as a chance to trade a joke with a political ally, and gave away how he actually feels about the victims. She describes the mayor as having contempt for the New Yorkers whose lives were destroyed by an attack that reshaped the country — and, in her view, wanting to claim some of the ceremony’s gravity for himself while showing none of the reverence it demands.
She also raises the possibility that the laughter was not accidental. It’s conceivable, she writes, that it was intended to provoke the victims’ families who had made clear they didn’t want him there — done in a deniable, plausibly-off-camera way. Even if it wasn’t planned, she argues, the effect was the same: imagine being a family member listening as a loved one’s name is read aloud, and hearing the mayor of New York laughing in the background.
Some commentators compared the moment to other public displays of emotion at 9/11 events that they considered calculated rather than genuine — the sort of performance of grief that turns out to be just that. The comparison was less an accusation of a direct link than a way of describing what they saw as a familiar pattern of political theater at solemn occasions.
The mayoral comparison that keeps coming up
The American Thinker piece invokes a name that looms over any discussion of New York’s response to 9/11: Rudy Giuliani. In Showalter’s telling, Giuliani was a portrait of courage and resolve amid the rubble of the collapsing towers — and, when Prince Alwaleed bin Talal offered a $10 million donation tied to Palestinian grievances, Giuliani told him to keep the check. For the author, that is what a New York mayor used to look like.
Now, she writes, the city has “a giggling creep” in the office. The line is a conclusion about a single videotaped moment, and it’s the kind of conclusion that gets argued about for years afterward. But it reflects a specific, and widening, rift in the city: the sense among many 9/11 families that the current mayor’s relationship with the memory of the attacks has never been fully honest, and that this year’s ceremony — the 25th anniversary, the last major round-numbered observance at which most survivors of that morning will still be present in force — confirmed it.
The American Thinker piece closes by saying the families were right not to want Mamdani anywhere near the memorial to their loved ones. They knew, the author says, that he would find a way to insult them. For those who supported the petition, the laughter only proved the point.
Whether the incident becomes a durable political problem for the mayor, or is memory-holed before the next news cycle, is a question that will be settled by voters and by the next round of argument over what the office of the mayor of New York is supposed to mean. For now, the image — Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez laughing on camera while 2,753 names were read aloud — is the one his critics intend to keep in circulation.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/the-giggling-mamdani-whoops-it-up-with-aoc-at-9-11-memorial-as-victims-names-were-being-read/