New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani sat at a desk to commemorate America's semiquincentennial, and the socialist wasted little time turning the occasion into an anti-America lecture. He told his audience they each hold "the power to determine what America means," then spent the rest of the speech explaining what it means to him, and it was mostly bad.
"The powerful have always known their answer," Mamdani said. "America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal."
He claimed these unnamed villains believe America "belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin," and dismissed them with a sneer. "How small they are, how weak, how unoriginal," he said.
He even dragged Thomas Paine into it, quoting the Common Sense author's description of America as an asylum for the persecuted before taking a thinly veiled shot at President Donald Trump's immigration enforcement policies, accusing the Trump administration of running a nation "that persecutes those seeking asylum."
The grievance parade kept on coming.
"We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world, one where children go to sleep hungry while the world's first trillionaire hungers for more," Mamdani said. "We see monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs who buy elections. We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans."
Mamdani kept going, aiming for just about every industry in sight. "Yes, we see America in a health insurance industry that exploits the sick," he said, before moving on to blast "corporate landlords for whom negligence is a business model" and complain about a country that spends "our tax dollars on bombs and bailouts."
Ironically, Mamdani begged and received a $4 billion bailout from New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to help fund his agenda.
He praised Americans who resist immigration enforcement as the true patriots of the moment. "We see America each time neighbors link arms with neighbors without asking how long they have lived here or what papers they have as ICE invades our neighborhoods," he said.
According to Mamdani, federal law enforcement "invades" American neighborhoods while the people obstructing it embody the national spirit.
He wrapped up by addressing the critics who might suggest that a man with such contempt for the country could find somewhere else to live.
"Love it or leave it, they say," Mamdani said. "But patriotism has never been about pretending our nation is without flaws. Patriotism is every act of righteous dissent. It is every march led under the heavy sun. It is every protest held a decade before its time."
Then came the big finish, which sounded like a warning. "It is precisely because we love this nation that we will not leave it," he said.
Zohran Mamdani is the Democratic Party's brightest rising star and its new kingmaker, busy remaking the party from the ground up with far-left candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America. And this is how he chose to honor America on its 250th birthday: by tearing it down. His speech rebranded resistance to federal law as the truest form of patriotism, and that framing tells you exactly where his wing of the party plans to take its message.