Sam Carter

JUST IN: NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani used America’s 250th anniversary to sharply criticize the country, accusing the U.S. of allowing children to go hungry while billionaires and “oligarchs” gain more power. He said America’s wealth was built by working people with “calloused, dirt-streaked hands" while accusing the country of allowing the wealth built by workers to be concentrated in “the soft hands of a precious few.”

Mamdani: There is a term so often used to describe our nation and those who have shaped it: American exceptionalism.  American exceptionalism, the conventional wisdom tells us, makes our freedom a little more free, is how we dug the Erie Canal and irrigated the West, is why children in far away lands grow up dreaming of one day moving here. And yet the irony is that the story of America has so often been written by those who were told by others with power and influence and wealth that they were anything but exceptional. For generation after generation, we have been told that when the world has sent its people to our shores, it has not sent its best. It sent Puritans and Sikhs and Quakers and Muslims and Jewish people who were banished for praying the wrong way, worshipping the wrong Gods, angering the wrong people. It sent peasants and serfs from who were treated as less because they hardly owned clothes, let alone land. It sent immigrants for whom power was something someone else had. We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else. The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place. The frontier may be closed, we may have walked on the moon, but the work of fulfilling the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence-that work endures, my friends, and it belongs to us all. It belongs too to our newest Americans, those standing here with me today, all of whom were recently naturalized. Nearly a decade ago, I too felt what you feel— the joy of no longer being just a New Yorker, but an American too.

On the very day Americans are celebrating 250 years of our nation’s history, this man chooses to weaponize that very history against us. America welcomed someone who wasn’t born here, gave him the opportunity to become mayor of the richest and most influential city in the world, and entrusted him with extraordinary power and influence. Instead of showing even a shred of gratitude, he uses every opportunity to lecture Americans, shame Americans, and use our own history as a weapon against the country that made his success possible. You don’t have to believe America is perfect to recognize what it gave you. But turning Independence Day into another opportunity to talk down to the American people is disgraceful. Shame.

Mamdani: There are some who respond to those who ask for more from America with a simple refrain: Love it or leave it. 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. It is precisely because we love this nation, that we will not leave it.

Everyone should watch this speech from NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani!!!!! MAGA folks are having a meltdown over this speech!!!!!

Communist NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who just came to this country, chose to become an American, is deciding he is the foremost authority to tell Americans what it means to be American. He has the AUDACITY, on America's 250th birthday, to call our great nation "an arena of supremacy" — a nation that "persecutes," ruled by "oligarchs." He sneers that his fellow Americans are "small, weak, unoriginal." He says “ICE is invading our streets” while he endorses and welcomes an invasion of third-world savages. Millions dream of the gift he was given. A man who spends his time burning the most American city to the ground does not deserve to be America, let alone dictate to others what it means to be an America.

Zohran Mamdani delivers a hopeful vision for the future as he celebrates America's 250th anniversary: Those ideals upon which our nation was built—they are strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime, but only if we reach for them. Therein lies the work of America—the striving, the bettering, the reaching towards perfection. What power each of us holds, to bring America ever-closer to the greatness so many have seen when they looked upon these shores—the greatness that, for 250 years, has been America.

Mamdani: The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal. America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. 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. Division is the oldest trick in politics, and the cheapest. But time and again-including 250 years ago-those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress. And yet today, too many of our leaders do not believe in a vision of this nation as an asylum for the persecuted-but rather as one that persecutes those seeking asylum. As we mark 250 years, what do we see?  We see a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions. 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. 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. We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked hands —those who toil on factory floors and chisel into stone —and we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft hands of a precious few.