New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani sat behind George Washington’s desk and urged Americans to see patriotism as “righteous dissent” during his speech for the nation’s 250th anniversary.
Addressing what he believes to be unjust, wealthy, and powerful Americans, 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. 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.”
He called these individuals “small,” “weak,” and “unoriginal.”
Bashing ICE, immigration efforts, and the results of capitalism, the mayor declared, “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,” he condemned.
“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,” he added. “It is precisely because we love this nation that we will not leave it. After all, who loves America more than those who have sacrificed so much to make it free?”
Mamdani pressed that the ideas that founded America are “strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime, but only if we reach for them.”
