by Victor Davis Hanson
Mamdani’s Independence Day message says more about his own politics than the country that gave his family extraordinary opportunity.
Zohran Mamdani, New York’s self-described socialist
mayor, could not resist using the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration
to trash the very country that he and his parents voluntarily sought
out.
As is his custom, Mamdani speaks in stereotypes and
generalities, offering few if any examples, all laced with his
accustomed unctuous hypocrisy.
Let’s deconstruct his incoherent July 4 riff:
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. How small they are. How weak, how unoriginal . . .
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.
Thus spoke the pampered rich kid from Uganda, who
immigrated to America with his now-endowed professor father and elite
filmmaker mother, the latter reportedly supported by millions of dollars
in grants from the Qatari royal autocracy.
Upon arriving, the Mamdanis joined what is
statistically America’s wealthiest and most highly credentialed ethnic
group: the enormously privileged Indian American community. (But how was
that possible in Mamdani’s version of a racist America that supposedly
detests the wrong accents and skin colors?)
When this nepo baby includes himself among the supposedly “victimized” (“the rest of us”), should we laugh or cry?
If Mamdani wishes to invoke the tired Marxist oppressed-oppressor binary (“how small they are” versus “the rest of us”), then, by his own revolutionary vocabulary, he once belonged to a settler-colonial Indian expatriate elite.
After all, although Uganda’s Indian community
comprises only about 1 percent of the population, it still controls
roughly 60 percent of the nation’s GDP.
Mamdani melodramatically alleges of America: “The
rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to
visit. How small they are. How weak, how unoriginal.”
I would argue that the United States has asked nothing
of the Mamdanis, much less demanded gratitude from a family whose
books, films, and activism have consistently reflected anti-Americanism.
Far from demanding that the Mamdanis express
gratitude for exchanging Uganda for America or begrudging their rapid
rise to multimillionaire status, America might reasonably ask why
Mamdani is so angry at the country that welcomed his family and afforded
it such extraordinary opportunities. Why is he so eager to slander it
as xenophobic and racist?
Does he think there is less opportunity—but more
oppression, misogyny, and religious and racial intolerance—in America
than in Uganda or India?
In any case, what is so objectionable about assuming
that foreign nationals who wish to immigrate and become American
citizens might feel gratitude toward a country that welcomes them?
Americans welcome more immigrants each year than any
other nation, and they have long admired legal immigrants who enriched
the country by assimilating, acculturating, and integrating—not by
carving out near-permanent ethnic enclaves.
Yet Americans are understandably astonished when
recent immigrants from failed states—plagued by caste prejudice,
dictatorship, endemic racism, religious intolerance, Marxist-induced
poverty, antisemitism, systemic violence, misogyny, and homophobia—begin
lecturing their American hosts about America’s supposed shortcomings.
Stranger still, many of these angry socialist
immigrants were either far less critical of the countries they left
behind or, in some cases, actually belonged to the privileged—and
despised—ruling castes that presided over those failed societies.
Moreover, is it unreasonable to expect that no
immigrant community engineer more than $1 billion in welfare fraud, as
we have seen with the disproportionate number of Somali immigrants
charged or under investigation in Minnesota?
What is so difficult about applying for legal entry
into the United States instead of swarming the border under the
assumption that illegal entry will be rewarded with generous housing,
education, food, medical care, and other public subsidies?
Is it too much to expect that the roughly 500,000
convicted criminal immigrants living in the United States—many of whom
entered the country illegally—not commit crimes against the citizens of
the country that admitted them?
Can Mamdani explain why this supposedly racist and
nativist America has since the mid-1960s admitted millions of
immigrants—the overwhelming majority of them nonwhite—if it is so
systematically xenophobic and racist?
If America is as hostile toward people of Indian
ancestry as Mamdani alleges, why have some 5.4 million Indians
immigrated here, making them one of the nation’s largest and
fastest-growing foreign-born populations? Why do roughly 150,000 more
choose to come to this racist hellhole each year? Do they come to be
insulted—or to become prosperous, educated, privileged, and secure?
As for the alleged cruelty shown toward those with
different accents or skin colors, Mamdani reveals a remarkable ignorance
of America’s long tradition of self-criticism and self-correction.
Consider the diversity visa lottery, the hurdles
confronting legal immigrants, and the de facto amnesties often extended
to illegal immigrants. An alien visitor from another planet studying the
demographics of the past seven decades might conclude that America is
indeed racist—against immigrants from Europe and other English-speaking
countries.
As for America’s past sins, some 165 years ago,
roughly 700,000 mostly white Americans slaughtered one another in a war
to abolish slavery—an ancient and evil institution that had brought ten
times as many Africans to Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Latin America
as to the American South, while more than 15 million others were sent
into the Muslim world through slave trades facilitated by African rulers
who sold rival tribes into bondage.
To address the toxic legacy of segregation in the
American South, Americans have spent roughly $25 trillion on income- and
race-based entitlements for the poor and for nonwhites since the War on
Poverty and Great Society programs began some six decades ago.
Yet for decades, federal and state governments
ignored civil rights laws and court rulings prohibiting racial
preferences, allowing race-based college admissions, separate
dormitories, safe spaces, and graduation ceremonies to flourish. Mamdani
himself understood the system well enough to attempt to game it by
claiming minority status as an “African”—at least Columbia rejected the
claim.
As for Mamdani’s charge that “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,” such
tactics of divide and conquer are precisely what he himself has mastered
in demonizing whites and Jews. Indeed, such racialism has become a
hallmark of his Democratic Socialists.
Few contemporary politicians have done more than
Mamdani to exploit racial division in pursuit of political power—except,
perhaps, others in his own movement who are similarly maniacally
obsessed with castigating whites and Jews.
After all, who proposed targeting “whiter neighborhoods” with higher taxes? Who called AIPAC “monsters”?
Mamdani’s housing czar, Cea Weaver, declared that
homeownership was a “weapon of white supremacy.” She also endorsed a
platform calling for “no more white men in office.”
One of Mamdani’s former campaign operatives, Darializa Avila Chevalier, attacked white women as “ugly colonizer women.”
Mamdani’s newly appointed director of appointments,
Catherine Almonte Da Costa, resigned after her past comments resurfaced
about “money-hungry Jews” and the importance of ensuring “that white
people feel defeated.”
Mamdani’s own wife, Rama Duwaji, reportedly liked
more than 70 Instagram posts celebrating the October 7, 2023, massacre
of 1,200 Jews. She also illustrated a book by the infamous and
antisemitic Susan Abulhawa, who has called Jews “supremacist vampires,”
“rootless soulless ghouls,” and “dual-loyalty Zionists.”
The projectionist Mamdani should look in the mirror.
Few contemporary politicians in America have done
more in so short a time to exploit race and antisemitism in pursuit of
political power.
That such rhetoric comes from a member of a
remarkably privileged elite is less ironic than fitting. Mamdani has
already described himself: “Those who led through exclusion and
isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us
against one another.”
That fits Mamdani to a T.
Victor Davis Hanson
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/07/07/mamdanis-embittered-fourth-of-july-rant-to-america/
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