NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani delivered his July 4 speech sitting behind George Washington's desk inside New York City Hall -- calling out the Donald Trump administration for its anti-immigrant policies. “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,” he said, surrounded by a group of recently naturalized American citizdns holding American flags.
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“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.”
Mamdani condemned the “small,” “weak” and “unoriginal” ideologies that have sought to define America within “the 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 said.
Mamdani, born in Uganda, became a US citizen in 2018.
