Sorry to invade your inbox again today, but New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani just gave an address about America on this eve of our 250th anniversary, which is the opposite of the speech Trump is expected to give tomorrow. A naturalized citizen born in Uganda to parents of Indian-origin, Mamdani sat behind a desk used by George Washington, with naturalized immigrants standing around him holding American flags.

I want to share parts of Mayor Mamdani’s address with you. The full address can be viewed here. (link below)

“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, worshipping 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. It sent immigrants for whom power was something someone else had.

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. The frontier may be closed, we may have walked on the moon, but the work of fulfilling the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence—that work endures, my friends, and it belongs to us all….

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.....