Victor Davis Hanson: Mamdani Is the Real Racist Polluting This Country

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.  

On July 3, the mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani—and I don’t quite know why the mayor seems to think he speaks for the entire nation—but he wanted to give a Fourth of July speech to the nation at large. It wasn’t a speech; it was an indictment. 

And what I could condense his speech [down to], it was essentially that America was ruled by white racists, and they had been very unfair in the past to everyone but themselves, including people, as he said, quote-unquote, the rest of us. He included himself in the group of people supposedly who had calloused hands, who did the work, but they were not paid fairly, or they got the raw end of the deal in a racist and unfair America. 

He also said it was based, it being privilege, was based on the right shade of skin and the right accent. And again, he included himself as if he had been a victim.  

There’s two things about Mamdani everybody should remember. One, he’s very, very wealthy, and he’s very, very privileged. Two, he’s very racist. 

Let me explain. Mamdani comes from the 1% expatriate, what he would call in Marxist terms, settler colonialists that went to Uganda to get rich. And today they only constitute about 60,000 or 70,000 people in a multimillion-person country, but they control 60% of the GDP. So, he came from Uganda, and he came to the United States. 

His father is an endowed professor at Columbia University, very richly paid. His mother is a subsidized—very successful, though—filmmaker. Both of them have expressed, like their son, Mamdani, anti-American sentiments, even though they came as immigrants asking the host to welcome them, which we did. She’s also a beneficiary of millions of dollars from illiberal Qatar, who pays a lot of her tabs. 

As far as race goes, there has been no one who is more racially insensitive than Zohran Mamdani.  

Let me explain. He said that he wanted to go into white, whiter neighborhoods and tax them—whiter, richer neighborhoods. If he really wants to go in and tax richer neighborhoods, I don’t know what he means by tax, then why did he have to say white? 

If he thinks that rich people are all white people, the largest poverty group in the United States are white. The richest ethnic group is Zohran Mamdani’s Indian Americans. They have the highest per capita and highest per family income. He could have said then, if he was not a racist, “We’re just gonna go in and look at richer neighborhoods,” or “We’re going …” 

If he wanted to talk about rich and race simultaneously and he wanted to be honest, he [would have] said, “We’re gonna go in and look at richer and more Indian American groups like my own, who are the richest in the United States.” Of course, he wouldn’t do that. 

He’s also said that AIPAC, a Jewish advocacy group, are monsters. 

He doesn’t say that CAIR or any Muslim group or any other group. Only Jews are monstrous. He had a housing secretary, a person who’s in charge, or would be in charge, of all public housing in New York—thousands of apartments. She said housing is a weapon of white supremacy. I don’t know what that means. 

Apparently, she thinks too many white people have saved, put down a down payment, make their mortgage payments regularly and in full, and therefore they exercise white supremacy. I don’t know what she means about that.  

She’s also said that she doesn’t want to see any more whites in office platforms. In other words, she wants to adjudicate who is running New York by the color of their skin. 

Remember, this comes from a man who lectured us about the shades of people’s skin. He had an appointment secretary who has a long name, but I’ll just shorten it to Catherine Da Costa. She had said on other occasions that whites must be defeated. 

Imagine if you had—if any other mayor said blacks must be defeated, or Asians must be defeated, or Hispanics must be defeated. 

That’s about as racist as you can get. This is Mamdani’s appointment secretary. She also termed Jews as money-hungry. 

And then there’s Mamdani’s wife. I wouldn’t single her out, except that she’s playing a very prominent political role in his administration. After the Oct. 7 massacre, she went on social media and said she liked over seventy different posts that celebrated the slaughter of 1,200 Jews. 

She offered illustrations for a book, a very antisemitic, hateful book, written by an author who had termed Jews ruthless ghouls and soulless vampires. 

So, what does all this mean? It means that leftists, when they lecture America, they’re usually projecting their own sins, as Mamdani is doing. He’s talking about America being racist when he has expressed more racist sentiment in his first six months in office than any mayor has in the history of New York. 

And when they talk about people being exploited by a capitalist unfair system, they’re usually what? Racist and wealthy. Wealthy. The Mamdanis are multimillionaires. They were multimillionaires in Uganda, and when they came here, they got even richer. 

And so, when we look at these new democratic socialists and they start to lecture us on race or they lecture us on wealth, go back and look at their past, and what will we find? 

That they’re racist themselves and they’re quite wealthy.  

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