New York City’s Communist Twelver Shi’ite Mayor Zohran Mamdani has bestowed upon a waiting world his speech commemorating America’s 250th anniversary, and it is just as small, petty, grievance-laden, fantasy-based, and angry as you’d expect a speech from a man who hates America to be.
The visual effect was even worse, as Mamdani delivered the speech while seated at a desk that seemed to be turned the wrong way around, while surrounded by a social studies-book array of glum-looking, unsmiling, unhappy people, all black and brown and hijabed and whatnot and all forlornly holding small flags of the country their mayor despises, with a single grim-faced white guy standing in the back (as is his place). But even if one didn’t avail oneself of the joys of watching Mamdani, who was just as grim as his prop companions, what the young Commie mayor said was bad enough.
America, in Mamdani’s view, is a sad place where heartless, racist, xenophobic plutocrats rule the roost and oppress the rest of us to the degree that you wonder why anyone from elsewhere would want to immigrate in the first place. Mamdani does hold out some hope in the end, saying that the foes of these cruel tyrants can throw off their yoke and remake this unhappy land in their own image. And that, of course, is just what Mamdani has set out to do.
Mamdani began by painting a verbal picture of the “land, lush and teeming with life” to which newcomers arrived, only to encounter “men waiting at the docks to take them into bondage” and “tenements rife with squalor.” As you’d expect, he claimed that the Declaration of Independence established “the ideals our nation still strives to fulfill,” with no indication of how marvelously it has fulfilled them already, or how it has inspired the world in doing so.
The mayor goes on to fill in all the expected blanks, telling the story of how a freed slave made a new life for himself, thereby showing America to be “a place each of us has the power to make.” Immigrants poured into America, not yet seeing “the nativism they would face — the jobs they would be refused, the landlords who would not rent to them, and the abject labor and living conditions they would withstand.” Still, they kept coming.
Mamdani goes on to mock and misrepresent the idea of American exceptionalism, and here he begins to claim that “we are told” a series of things that few people, if any, have ever been told. “We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else.” On the contrary, in less fractious days, we were told that we were “richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else,” because we were a uniquely just society in which anyone could make something of himself.
Mamdani, however, couldn’t possibly admit that without betraying his Marxist ideas, which tell him that America is inherently oppressive, and his Islamic beliefs, which tell him that only a Sharia society is truly just.
Keep reading
You must be logged in to post a comment.