Zohran Mamdani, New York’s self-described socialist mayor, could not resist using the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration to trash the very country that he and his parents voluntarily sought out.
As is his custom, Mamdani speaks in stereotypes and generalities, offering few if any examples, all laced with his accustomed unctuous hypocrisy.
“America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit. How small they are. How weak, how unoriginal.”
“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.”
Thus spoke the pampered rich kid from Uganda, who immigrated to America with his now-endowed professor father and elite filmmaker mother.
Upon arriving, the Mamdanis joined what is statistically America’s wealthiest and most highly credentialed ethnic group: the enormously privileged Indian American community. (But how was that possible in Mamdani’s version of a racist America that supposedly detests the wrong accents and skin colors?)
When this nepo baby includes himself among the supposedly “victimized” (“the rest of us”), should we laugh or cry?
If Mamdani wishes to invoke the tired Marxist oppressed-oppressor binary, then by his own revolutionary vocabulary, he once belonged to a settler-colonial Indian expatriate elite: After all, although Uganda’s Indian community comprises only about one percent of the population, it still controls roughly 60 percent of the nation’s GDP.
America might reasonably ask why Mamdani is so angry at the country that welcomed his family and afforded it such extraordinary opportunities. Why is he so eager to slander it as xenophobic and racist?
If America is as hostile toward people of Indian ancestry as Mamdani alleges, why have some 5.4 million Indians immigrated here, making them one of the nation’s largest and fastest-growing foreign-born populations?
Why do roughly 150,000 more choose to come to this racist hellhole each year?
Do they come to be insulted — or to become prosperous, educated, privileged and secure?
Americans welcome more immigrants each year than any other nation, and they have long admired legal immigrants who enriched the country by assimilating, acculturating and integrating.
Yet Americans are understandably astonished when recent immigrants from failed states — plagued by caste prejudice, dictatorship, endemic racism, religious intolerance, Marxist-induced poverty, antisemitism, systemic violence, misogyny and homophobia — begin lecturing their American hosts about America’s supposed shortcomings.
Can Mamdani explain why this supposedly racist and nativist America has since the mid-1960s admitted millions of immigrants — the overwhelming majority of them nonwhite — if it is so systematically xenophobic and racist?
As for America’s past sins, some 165 years ago, roughly 700,000 mostly white Americans slaughtered one another in a war to abolish slavery — an ancient and evil institution that had brought ten times as many Africans to Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Latin America as to the American South, while more than 15 million others were sent into the Muslim world through slave trades facilitated by African rulers who sold rival tribes into bondage.
To address the toxic legacy of segregation in the American South, Americans have spent roughly $25 trillion on income- and race-based entitlements for the poor and for nonwhites since the War on Poverty and Great Society programs began some six decades ago.
Few contemporary politicians have done more than Mamdani to exploit racial division in pursuit of political power — except, perhaps, others in his own movement who are similarly maniacally obsessed with castigating whites and Jews.
The projectionist Mamdani should look in the mirror.
That such rhetoric comes from a member of a remarkably privileged elite is less ironic than fitting.
Mamdani has already described himself: “Those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another.”
That fits Mamdani to a T.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
