New York City socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani marked America’s 250th anniversary Friday by painting a dark, sinister picture of the greatest country on earth. Mamdani delivered a speech in which he invoked the history of immigrants who came to America’s shores, describing them as “weary from long journeys” who were greeted by “a towering monument to freedom, her torch glowing worldwide welcome.” He soon turned toward the dark: “Each of these new arrivals peered through portholes onto a city that was changing as fast as the nation. They saw merchants peddling their wares on the docks, streets being laid out on a grid, buildings rising into the clouds. They could not yet see 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.” He then twisted history, insisting that immigrants did not freely seek to come to America but were sent by the world: “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, worshiping the wrong gods, angering the wrong people, it sent peasants and serfs from slums and shtetls who were treated as less because they hardly owned clothes, let alone land.” He then revealed what he believes America truly is: “It sent immigrants from whom power was something someone else had. … You each hold a special power, the power to determine what America means. 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.” He continued, “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, though those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress.” His depiction of modern America was equally bleak: 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 massed 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. … We see America in corporate landlords for whom negligence is a business model. … We see America when we spend our tax dollars on bombs and bailouts, when we sell our elections to the highest bidder. After claiming that “ICE invades our neighborhoods,” he issued a call for action: “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. After all, who loves America more than those who have sacrificed so much to make it free?” Take note: this is the same mayor who signed off on a budget that cut funding for the Department of Veterans’ Services by roughly $1 million.