Flag removal video falsely linked to Zohran Mamdani's election win

"Muslims ripping down American flags in NYC… You get exactly what you voted for…" CPAC, which operates an annual gathering of top Republicans, said in a June 26, 2025 post on X.

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Screenshot from X taken July 2, 2025

The organization shared the same message on Facebook and Instagram, quoting a since-deleted post from Heritage Foundation media fellow Tim Young (archived here). Similar posts spread across platforms, including in Spanish.

The posts appear to reference the surprise victory that Mamdani, a self-declared socialist, pulled off in New York City's June 24 Democratic mayoral primary when he defeated scandal-scarred former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. 

Mamdani embraced his Muslim identity throughout the campaign, courting New Yorkers of his faith with frequent visits to mosques and community centers. If elected mayor in November, he would become the first Muslim to hold the office.

But the 33-year-old's meteoric rise in the US financial capital and the Democratic Party has left him battling a wave of attacks, with President Donald Trump branding him a "pure communist" and other Republican lawmakers taking aim at his religion and race.

He has also been targeted by disinformation online, where social media users have misrepresented multiple videos from Islamic religious processions in Iraq as scenes of Mamdani's supporters celebrating his primary success in New York City.

The clip of a person scaling one of the city's light poles and tearing down American and United Nations flags is similarly unrelated.

Reverse image searches surfaced the same clip posted online as early as November 11, 2023, in relation to a pro-Palestinian protest that erupted in the city a little over a month after war broke out between Israel and Hamas in Gaza (archived here).

Fox News and other media outlets shared separate footage of the incident captured from different angles (archived here and here).

The protest was also detailed in news reports (archived here).

In a July 1, 2025 email, the New York Police Department (NYPD) confirmed to AFP that the scene took place late at night on November 10, 2023, on the corner of East 43rd Street and Lexington Avenue.

The NYPD said the perpetrator, 17, was taken into custody after he climbed approximately 10 feet and removed and damaged several flags atop the pole.

The same flag-decorated lamp post and individual -- identifiable by his attire -- also appear in photos taken by Selcuk Acar for the Turkish news agency Anadolu, dated November 10 (archived here and here).

AFP has debunked other disinformation about US politics here.