Zo say can you see…
Mayor Zohran Mamdani used a Friday address marking America’s 250th anniversary to deliver a pointed critique of capitalism and U.S. foreign policy — all while seated at George Washington’s desk.
In the 15-minute speech, Mamdani appeared alongside newly naturalized U.S. citizens and struck a balance between criticism of the country’s present-day inequities and praise for what he described as America’s enduring “grand experiment in self-governance.”
The democratic socialist mayor framed the nation’s history through the struggles and contributions of those often pushed to the margins, including enslaved people, Continental Army soldiers and generations of immigrants, contrasting their sacrifices with what he portrayed as the limited vision of the powerful.
“We see a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions,” he said. “We see the wealthiest nation 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.”
Mamdani also directed criticism at President Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement agenda, as well as at billionaires and corporate power.
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“We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans,” he said. “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 in the soft hands of a precious few.”
He went on to criticize the health insurance industry, landlords and U.S. involvement in overseas conflicts, using the anniversary speech as a platform to argue that the country’s founding promises remain unfinished.
“I see America in a health insurance industry that exploits the sick, but that is not all I see when I look for America,” he said. “I see, too, the nurse who works a double shift and then stops on her way home to check on an ailing neighbor.
“Yes, I see America in corporate landlords for whom negligence is a business model,” he continued. “I see it, too, in the father who tucks his children into bed beneath a ceiling stained with leaks, wakes before dawn to go to work, and still believes this country can do better by them.
“I see America when we spend our tax dollars on bombs and bailouts, when we sell our elections to the highest bidder,” he continued.
Mamdani has been a staunch opponent of the US providing military funding to Israel, painting it as an “affordability” issue.
New York City itself featured less in the speech than Mamdani’s press team had initially promised. He invoked the city’s role during the Revolutionary War and beyond, when it became a haven for freed slaves such as James Weeks and waves of immigrants — including himself as a young boy coming from Uganda — greeted by the Statue of Liberty.
“My family did not arrive by boat, although we saw the Statue of Liberty from the window of the plane,” he said. “Even from the air, we could make out the promise of America—the promise of the beautiful, patriotic work of rendering America, year after year, a little more faithful to its founding ideals.”
