Vice President J.D. Vance eviscerated Democrat New York City mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani’s lack of gratitude toward the U.S. during a Saturday speech at the Claremont Institute’s Statesmanship Award Dinner.
Mamdani on Friday stated that the U.S. is “contradictory,” “unfinished” and that he loves the nation even though people are “constantly” striving to improve its democracy. In response, Vance, in a clip first reported by The Blaze and released in a Tuesday press release by the White House, shamed Mamdani for “daring” to insult the country that took his family in as refugees from the racial hatred they endured in Uganda.
“There is no gratitude in those words. No sense of owing something to this land or the people who turned its wilderness into the most powerful nation on Earth,” Vance said. “Zohran Mamdani’s father fled Uganda when the tyrant, Idi Amin, decided to ethnically cleanse his nation’s Indian population. Mamdani’s family fled violent, racial hatred only for him to come to this country, a country built by people he never knew, overflowing with generosity to his family, offering a haven from the kind of violent ethnic conflict that is commonplace in world history, but it is not commonplace here.”
“And he dares, on our 249th anniversary, to congratulate it by paying homage to its incompleteness,” the vice president continued. “And do it as he says it, contradiction.’ I wonder, has he ever read letters from boy soldiers in the Union Army to parents and sweethearts that they’d never see again? Has he ever visited the gravesite of a loved one who gave their life to build the kind of society where his family could escape racial theft and racial violence? Has he ever looked in the mirror and recognized that he might not be alive if it weren’t for the generosity of a country he dares to insult on its most sacred day. Who the hell does he think he is?”
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The mayor hopeful, who is a self-described democratic socialist, claimed that the U.S. has failed to live up to its promise for every American and its democratic principles.
“America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better, to protect and deepen our democracy, to fulfill its promise for each and every person who calls it home. Happy Independence Day. No Kings in America,” Mamdani’s statement read.
Mamdani’s father, Mahmood, was expelled from Uganda in 1972 under the dictatorship of Idi Amin. He later returned to Uganda, where he met his wife, Mira Nair, who is a filmmaker. Her filmmaking projects brought the family around the world, including South Africa, where Mahmood was the director of the African Studies center at the University of Cape Town, according to The New York Times.
Mamdani marked himself as both “Asian” and “African American” on his application to Columbia University in 2009. But during an interview with The New York Times, he said that he does not consider himself as either African or Asian American, but as “an American who was born in Africa.”
The Democrat nominee intends to implement rent freezes, create government-run programs such as buses and grocery stores, and has doubled down on his stance to increase taxes on wealthier neighborhoods, which he described as “richer and whiter.” He received endorsements from independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Democrat New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
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