Victor’s Letter to Mamdani: You’re a Product of Privilege, At Least Act Grateful

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Victor Davis Hanson: [Zohran] Mamdani, I know what you mean by people not having because of the color of their skin.  

I mean, we had a president, poor guy, he had to be president, Barack Obama, for eight whole years. And then he left office. And you know what, Mamdani? He’s only worth 100 million bucks. That is so racist. And he has four mansions. Why, why can’t he have six? Why not seven? 

And then, you know, look at the NBA. LeBron James, poor guy, he’s so underpaid. The guy is worth 10 billion. He’s only worth a billion dollars. And I don’t know.  

You should know about race, Mamdani, because you tried to game the system. Why did you say you were an African American when you applied to Columbia a few years ago? 

Was it because African Americans are systematically discriminated, like you just said? So then therefore, you decided to show your solidarity with African Americans by lying that you were one so that you would ensure you would not get into Columbia?  

The fact that you didn’t get into Columbia wasn’t because you weren’t African American. It’s because you lied, and they found out you weren’t African American.  

So, if you think that people of color are being discriminated, then why do you keep identifying as a person of color? Why do you think that you got so much attention? Because you were really the first Indian American mayor, and you went to town with that. 

And you know another thing he said was America, they will tell you—I don’t know who says that, Jack—but he says, belongs only to those with the right accent or right shade of skin. The rest of us—notice this, us—the rest of us, insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit. How small they are, how weak, how unoriginal. 

Thus spoke the settler colonialist from Uganda where the Indian community, which is not native or indigenous, believe me, came to Uganda as colonial settlers and now controls 60% of the GDP of that country and they comprise one, Mamdani, 1%. You were the 1%.  

And no sooner did you leave the 1% as a settler colonialist than you came in as a, I don’t know, you said you were a visitor. 

Maybe you would use your own Marxist terminology. You came in as more settler colonialist to another country. And what happened there? Your father was an endowed professor at Columbia instantaneously, and your mother was a heavily subsidized filmmaker who was very critical of her host in those movies. 

And guess who her chief funder was? Millions and millions of dollars from Qatar, one of the most illiberal places in the world.  

And then you were a product of that privilege and I’ve said this before, you belong to the wealthiest, richest, most privileged of all ethnic minorities in America, the Indian-American community whose per capita income soars above so-called white people. 

And so you say that you’re exploited. 

Another thing that really got me is when he said the rest of us should be grateful, grateful. I think all we ask is you come legally, and we don’t have 20 to 30 million people who are here illegally.  

And the other thing. All we ask is that you show some gratitude. So that if you’re Ilhan Omar, you don’t compare us negatively as a dictatorship, which we’re not, to Somalia, which it is, in which her father was a member of a genocidal dictatorship, as were a lot of the refugees who fled to Minnesota. 

That’s an untold story, Jack, why we let in so many people who were connected with the Siad Barre dictatorship in Somalia. We let in his son, reportedly. He’s here.  

Jack Fowler: Yeah. In Columbus, Ohio.  

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, why did we let them in? Because we surely didn’t let people come in from the Nazi government or the Japanese militarist government. 

We didn’t let them come in.  

So this whole idea that this beloved community came over as refugees being oppressed is not the story. In many, not all, but many cases, they were part of what the Marxists call the victimizer-oppressor binary.  

And then they would have stayed there and enjoyed their privilege, except Siad Barre killed so many people, over 200,000, in a civil war that he lost power. 

And when he lost power, his regime collapsed, and the people who had been dealt an injustice wanted their revenge and started to go after the Siad Barre people, who then fled. And the gracious America, for some reason, allowed them to come in. And now they are saying that we are racist and we’re hostile to people of color. 

Jack Fowler: Did you see the Somali flag, the stories about them flying over Boston, Buffalo, other city halls?  

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, I did. I did. But why is he so angry, though? That’s what I don’t understand. He got every privilege in the world, and he’s—and he says he—we don’t want to divide him,  

I was just looking at his— He said that so-called white people try to leverage race. This is what he said. So he called AIPAC monsters, and then he said he wanted to go after richer, whiter neighborhoods. 

And then he had to put in the word whiter because if he said just richer, he would have had to go out after, first of all, his own community. 

Which is the richest of all.  

And then, remember the housing czar with that weird name, Sia Weaver? 

Jack Fowler: Oh, that chick. Yeah. Yeah. Weirdo. Yeah.  

Victor Davis Hanson: She claimed that homeownership was a weapon of white supremacy. And in the past, she said she approved of the agenda that there should be no more white men in office platforms. 

And then he had, He endorsed, remember this [Darializa Avila] Chevalier— 

Jack Fowler: Why don’t you say Chevrolet? Chevalier. Yeah.  

Victor Davis Hanson: Miss Chevalier.  Chevalier, I should say. Yes, and she said that white women who dated people of color were ugly colonizer women.  

And then he had Catherine Almonte Da Costa. Now, she was his newly appointed director of communications appointments, excuse me. 

And she had gone in on the past, Jack, as saying that there were money-hungry Jews. And she said it’s very important that white people must be defeated.  

So what I’m getting at is he surrounded himself with racist people and antisemitic people, and he used race himself, and now on the Fourth of July, he trashes the country that took him in, and more importantly, he accuses white people of being divisive and using race to leverage people when that is his mother’s milk. 

That is all he has done. That’s all his father has done. That’s what his mother has done. That’s what he does. They bring in race, race, race, race, race, oppression, and they’re multimillionaires. Multimillionaires, just like the Obamas. And I think we’re all tired of it. We’re fatigued.  

Jack Fowler: It’s a great—Yeah, it’s a great example of the Left’s projection. 

If they are, in this case, he is attacking division when he himself is the master of division.  

Victor Davis Hanson: That’s how he got power. He got power by organizing about 10% of the resident population who were very upset and angry. Partly, they were racist because he used race a lot, and that appealed to them. 

Partly, they were like him. They were prolonged adolescents that were affluent, and had gone to college, and they expected that their degree would translate into $200,000-a-year job. And it didn’t for Mamdani, and he was a rapper. He kind of floated around in campaigns, and he was subsidized by his parents. 

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