Mamdani’s Sour Independence Day Address Showed How Little He Understands America

This Independence Day, countless Americans celebrated our country’s 250th anniversary in countless jubilatory ways, from grilling in the backyard, to going to fireworks shows, and even traveling to Mt. Vernon to pay respects to the Father of Our Country.

But a certain socialist mayor of New York City took the occasion to deliver a speech in a tone that made it seem like he was turning in a homework assignment on a topic he hated.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s speech before the July 4 festivities was an epic downer, a perfect example of aspirational leftist rhetoric masking a notable dearth of genuine patriotism.

It’s not nearly as important as the content but the optics were bad too.

As a man once said, you’d find more cheer in a graveyard. You’d think Mamdani would get some extras who at least looked like they wanted to be there.

Mamdani’s wife didn’t even show up, though it’s doubtful she would have brought up the energy level. She reportedly went on an “Islamic spiritual wellness” retreat in Spain rather than stay for the Independence Day events. It was a coincidence, I’m sure.

So, this was a solemn, dour occasion in which even when Mamdani tried to squeeze out some praise for America, it was laced with straw men and passive-aggressive contempt.

I’m not exaggerating, it really was terrible.

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

Mamdani obviously doesn’t spend too much time with people who believe America is exceptional.

Being rich and powerful are merely byproducts of America’s greatness.

However, if you’ve gone through life believing that Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” is true, then this is the kind of phony image of our self-conception you might come up with.

Mamdani’s intent was clearly to draw a line between his false version of America’s past as greedy and rapacious compared to its assumedly more generous, borderless socialist future that he and his friends intend to usher in.

We are supposed to believe that by handing the keys to our future over to the perpetually aggrieved we’ll finally not be a bad country. And that hope is the only thing that keeps them invested in the place they apparently call “home.”

Mamdani continued to list in his speech a series of people who had escaped one oppression or another and ended up here in another land of oppressions that was maybe OK sometimes.

How inspiring.

The speech drew praise from some Democrat politicians and leftwing commentators, but it seems even Mamdani’s comms team knew that the vibe was off.

He followed up with a slightly more upbeat X post, that nevertheless defined patriotism as “every act of righteous dissent — because loving our country means fighting for the best version of it.”

The boys of Pointe du Hoc and the young men who suffered at Valley Forge are I guess a cut below on Mamdani’s patriotism scale because they simply fought for the America that was.

I’ll counter that America was great when we were nothing but a collection of bankrupt states clinging to existence at the edge of the world in the shadow of the British empire.

America may be a land of perpetual motion, but what makes it special is in part what’s fixed in place.

“If all men are created equal, that is final,” Calvin Coolidge said at America’s 150th anniversary. “If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.”

From that hinge point of our country’s creation, millions upon millions of Americans helped build the most extraordinary country that has yet existed.

Did everyone succeed, was every law just, did everything work perfectly? Obviously not. We live in America, not the Kingdom of Heaven.

Down here among the fallen we’ve done quite a bit better than the rest in our 250 years.

You wouldn’t think that listening to the mayor of New York.

You’d think the American experience was no more than a series of miseries, until a wealthy Indian child of a Bollywood producer and anti-colonialist professor settled here after a brief stop in Uganda, set up shop a hot second ago, and began to set things right.

Like so many others on the Left, his only fondness for America appears to be in what he hopes it will be, not what it is or has been.

When in power they are “patriots,” when they aren’t it’s nothing but sour faces and complaints.