Let’s run a brief thought experiment before we get into the details.

In May 2024, the New York Times ran a front-page story about Martha-Ann Alito, wife of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who had flown an upside-down American flag outside their home in January 2021. The Times followed that story with another front-page piece about a different flag Mrs. Alito had flown — an Appeal to Heaven flag — at their vacation property. Congressional Democrats demanded Justice Alito recuse himself from January 6-related cases. Media coverage ran for days. The flag. The wife. The implications for the Court.

Martha-Ann Alito flew flags her husband didn’t control. That was the story.

Now meet Rama Duwaji — 28 years old, Houston-born illustrator, and the new First Lady of New York City.

Duwaji, who married Mayor Zohran Mamdani in early 2025, ran a Tumblr account under the pseudonym ‘diimashq.’ In 2017, she posted a photo of Leila Khaled — a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a State Department-designated terrorist organization responsible for multiple aircraft hijackings — with the caption: ‘If it does good for my cause, I’ll be happy to accept death.’ She celebrated the First Intifada. She posted content glorifying the PFLP.

That was the old material. The recent material is worse.

On and immediately after October 7, 2023 — the day Hamas murdered 1,200 Israeli civilians, took 251 hostages, and committed documented mass rape — Duwaji liked social media posts celebrating the attack. She liked posts supporting the street protests that erupted in support of Hamas the day after the massacre. She liked posts describing reports of Hamas rapes as a hoax.

She also illustrated for a book that has been described as antisemitic, and dormant social media accounts resurfaced containing use of a racial slur.

When confronted at a press conference, Mayor Mamdani called his wife ‘a private person’ and said she does not influence his policies.

Martha-Ann Alito flew a flag. That was not private enough for the New York Times.

The media treatment of the two cases is not a matter of interpretation. It is a documented, measurable double standard that reveals exactly whose spouses are considered legitimate subjects of public scrutiny.

https://twitter.com/ScottJenningsKY/status/2034445523097473142

Justice Alito’s wife flew flags at their personal residence and vacation property. She made no public statements about the cases before the Court. She issued no public declarations of political allegiance. She flew flags — and the Times put it on the front page twice, Congress demanded recusal, and the story consumed a week of the news cycle.

https://twitter.com/ScottJenningsKY/status/2034447206586212363

Rama Duwaji published explicit support for a State Department-designated terrorist organization on a public social media platform. She liked posts celebrating the worst antisemitic massacre since the Holocaust. She called documented Hamas rapes a hoax. She is now the First Lady of the most powerful city government in the United States — a position that comes with staff, budget influence, and a platform her husband controls.

The Washington Free Beacon broke the initial story. Jewish Insider followed. CBS News covered it — which prompted Democrat apologist journalists Ben Rhodes and Taylor Lorenz to publicly express frustration that anyone was covering it at all. The same media figures who amplified every detail of Martha-Ann Alito’s flagpole choices want this story to disappear.

CNN’s Scott Jennings warned Democrats last November that Mamdani’s victory would be ‘terrible’ for the party in the long run. The wife’s social media history is exhibit A for why. ‘You all own this now,’ Jennings told Democrats after Mamdani won. The resurfaced posts are the receipt.

Zohran Mamdani is a democratic socialist who won the New York City mayoral race on a platform of rent control, expanded public ownership, and a foreign policy posture openly hostile to Israel. His wife’s social media history is not incidental to his politics — it is consistent with them. A man whose wife posted terrorist propaganda and called October 7 rape reports a hoax is not a mainstream Democrat who stumbled into office. He is the face of where a significant portion of the Democratic Party’s activist base has moved.

The Democratic Party owns Mamdani now. Every senator up for reelection in a swing state, every House Democrat in a competitive district, every candidate who wants independent voters to see them as reasonable — they now share a party with the man whose wife celebrated Leila Khaled on Tumblr.

The media will continue to give Duwaji the privacy it never extended to Martha-Ann Alito. That tells you everything you need to know about whose spouses matter and whose don’t — and about exactly what the rules are when the right team is in power.

The posts are documented. The likes are documented. The double standard is documented. The only thing missing is the front-page story.