The Disgraceful MamdanisBatya Ungar-Sargon 7/5/2026
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 he 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.
More:
https://www.batya-us.com/p/the-disgraceful-mamdanis
