The Disgraceful Mamdanis

What makes America great, according to Zohran Mamdani, and the only thing that makes it great, is that it can be fundamentally changed by people like him.

Like many of you, I’m sure, I spent our national birthday in a state of bliss. What other frame of mind is appropriate when God has granted you the privilege of being one of the 350 million freest human beings to ever walk planet earth?

You might think that immigrants, people we chose to allow to join our sovereign nation out of the goodness of our hearts, might be even more blissed out, even more grateful, even more celebratory, even more willing to thank America and God for the great privilege of belonging to the only nation to exist in the history humanity that’s built on the idea that our rights are not a gift of government but a covenant with God that may never be broken.

In the case of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, you would be wrong.

Mamdani decided to give an Independence Day address from behind George Washington’s desk in City Hall (a City Hall that was obviously cooler than the 78 degrees he told the rest of the city to suffer through during this heat wave).

Surrounded by a host of grim, unsmiling immigrants like himself, “new Americans who came to this country,” as he called them, Mamdani did not celebrate the U.S. on our 250th birthday. Instead, he went to great pains to point out everything wrong with it, to paint a dark picture of what sees as all our flaws, and to insist that it was the job of immigrants to fix America and reshape it in their image. And they must do this over the protestations of special interests and racists.

For Mamdani, America isn’t the greatest, freest nation on earth. “At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another,” he said. In today’s America, children go hungry and “undocumented neighbors” are spirited away in unmarked vans. New arrivals didn’t find access to the American Dream but “nativism.”

And yet, “That legacy of every generation of Americans insisting that the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness extends to them, too, is no relic of the past. It carried millions of Black Americans north during the Great Migration; it drew hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans to New York City after the Second World War; it invited countless others from the West Indies, and South Asia, and West Africa, and across the world.”

It’s notable that Black Americans are barely mentioned in Mamdani’s speech, except as one example of many types of immigrants who faced exclusion and oppression. Yet they were not immigrants. Comparing Black Americans coming north during the Great Migration to immigrants from Africa is an erasure of Black history; the only real White Supremacy that existed in America was exercised against them—native born citizens. But this offensive erasure is the price you pay when you want to make immigrants the true oppressed—and the true saviors of America, as Mamdani went on to do.

The villains of his talk were all the usual suspects that he and his fellow socialists like to demonize: the rich, “masked agents terrorizing our streets,” wealth concentrated “in the soft hands of a precious few,” the “oligarchs who buy elections”—an ironic reference given the fact that over the last two weeks, his own endorsed candidates won four elections by securing the votes of wealthy voters.

To the powerful, Mamdani said, America “is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal. America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit.”

This is a caricature of why people find him so offensive. It’s not based on skin color or accent that they oppose his program, but based on the fact that as this very speech makes clear, he is blind to the values and culture that make this the greatest country on earth, and intent on casting the United States in the most relentlessly negative light.

“The work of fulfilling the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, that work endures, my friends, and it belongs to us all. It belongs too to our newest Americans, those standing here with me today, all of whom were recently naturalized. Nearly a decade ago, I too felt what you feel—the joy of no longer being just a New Yorker, but an American too. You each hold a special power: The power to determine what America means.”

For Mamdani, it is immigrants who will determine America’s future, America’s values, America’s nature. They hold a “special power . . . to determine what America means.”

This right here is the great divide in America today:

Should immigrants redefine America in their image—or should they assimilate into this great nation that is already great, and has been since its founding?

Is America, founded on freedom and liberty, a nation with values, a people, and a culture worth protecting—or is it merely a strip of land for any enterprising individual who manages to cross our border to reshape in the image of the culture they just fled?

Are you here to join a great nation or merely to take advantage of its gifts while changing it into a place like the one you came from—less perfect, less free, less American?

“We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else,” the Mayor said. “The truth, my friends is that America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place.”

What makes America great, according to Mamdani, and the only thing that makes it great, is that it can be fundamentally changed by people like him.

He accuses the bad “supremacists” on the other side of believing that “America . . . becomes less the more people it welcomes,” and yet, he is literally seeking to make America less American: less free, more socialist, less invested in free enterprise, less proud of our history, less attached to each other, and more blind to our achievements.

“Ours is a nation working each day towards the perfection in which it was conceived, a nation striving each day to better itself,” says Mamdani. “Therein lies the work of America: the striving, the bettering, the reaching towards perfection.” The implication seems clear: Just one more immigrant becoming mayor of a great American city and reshaping it into a socialist city like where they came from and we might be perfect!

This is the kind of talk that makes normie Americans see red. Americans are extremely generous people, but they draw the line when someone has been granted the gift of joining us and the immense privileges of American citizenship and an American education, and then turns around and from the supreme status that netted them, throws that gift back in our faces by insisting that America on its own is trash—and it now needs them to reshape us in the image of the place they left to come here in order for us to achieve our destiny.

And on our 250th birthday, no less!

Just, no.

But the Mayor was not even the most disgraceful Mamdani on Independence Day.

Mrs. Mamdani, Rama Duwaji, fled the United States completely—for a Muslim retreat on flowers in Spain.

She literally could not stand to be in the United States for this great milestone.