Will the real America please stand up?
This Fourth of July weekend, in between barbecues and fireworks and celebrations galore, the country was treated, naturally, to two speeches by our headliner politicians: New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani and President Donald Trump. The speeches were built up by pundits as a political doubleheader, offering twin visions of America present, past, and future, one from the left and the other from the right.
But if you were to judge the weekend by their blustering words, you’d find, lamentably, that the land of the pilgrims’ pride was nowhere in evidence as we celebrated the semiquincentennial of this great and godly nation. Instead, we got two tumescent orations, vastly divergent in tone and content, yet both reminding us just how much work we’ve ahead of us as we struggle to live up to the Founders’ sacred vision.
First, Hizzoner.
Sounding very much like a Temu Barack Obama as he spoke from City Hall on Friday night, Mamdani delivered a speech thick with Grimace purple prose that read like someone prompted an AI chatbot to pull heavily on the heartstrings.
“From Lexington to Los Angeles, Selma to Seneca Falls, Morrisania to Midwood, Americans will come together for a day, just as we do each year,” thundered the rapper formerly known as Mr. Cardamom. “Families will gather around the grill. Fireworks will fill the night sky. This will be no ordinary day of celebration. Two hundred and fifty years presents a rare opportunity for more than 340 million people to turn together—both toward one another and toward ourselves, to take measure of who we are as a nation. When we look at America, what do we see?”
Coming from Mamdani, it’s a fascinating question. The mayor’s father, Columbia University professor Mahmood Mamdani, has given us his answer: He sees a nation uniquely evil, so demonic, in fact, that Adolf Hitler waxed drew his “inspiration” for the Holocaust from Abraham Lincoln. The mayor’s BFF, Democrat Party kingmaker Hasan Piker, once poetic that America deserved 9/11. What, then, does the mayor see when he looks up at our beautiful for spacious skies? You’ll be shocked—shocked, I tell you—to hear that the man who launched his political career by setting up a branch of Students for Justice in Palestine at Bowdoin College sees. . . mainly imperialism and stuff. Mamdani began by delivering a brief history of the Red, White, and Blue, in which white baddies were guilty of lording their power over the gorgeous mosaic of oppressed immigrants who remain the true authors of America’s greatness.
f you could get past the not-so-subtle land acknowledgment—“Long before the name ‘New York’ had ever been spoken,” said the mayor solemnly, “Lenape dugouts crossed these currents”—you were treated to a story of monied and murderous men who everywhere and always oppressed their fellow Americans. Sweatshop fires that killed helpless women? Check. Government quotas robbing poor immigrants of their American dreams? Check. Accusations of “supremacy”? No progressive pageant would be complete without them.
Never mind that Mamdani found a way to make American history about himself, gushing about his own experience as an immigrant, because everyone knows that when Emma Lazarus asked for the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses, she had in mind the child of a Columbia professor and an Academy Award–nominated film director who grew up in a three-bedroom, three-bathroom corner apartment on the Upper West side.