NYC, NY state politics live updates: Mayor Zohran Mamdani snubs Christopher Columbus in America 250 address

Is Hizzoner literally on the wrong side of history..?

Mayor Zohran Mamdani delivered his short America 250 address from George Washington’s desk Friday morning — and appeared to be sitting on the wrong side, with the desk drawers facing away from him.

Older than the Oval Office’s Resolute Desk, it was used by Washington when it sat in Federal Hall, the US’ first capitol building, where Washington was inaugurated as the nation’s first president.

Whoops.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani claims America’s ideals are “strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime.”

“But only if we reach for ours as a nation working each day towards the perfection in which it was conceived, a nation striving each day to better itself,” he said.

Mayor Mamdani said that masked agents are “terrorizing our streets” in his July 4 speech.

“We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before springing them away in unmarked vans,” he said, seemingly referencing ICE agents while lamenting the “contradictions” in America.

“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 stones, he continued.

Mayor Mamdani used his soapbox during his Fourth of July speech to decry landlords, American capitalism and attack our foreign involvement in wars.

“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. 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,” the mayor added.

“Yes, 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 arm to Israel.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani kicked off his America 250 address with a nod to explorers Giovanni da Verrazzano and Henry Hudson — but notably left out Christopher Columbus.

“Season after season, year after year, the tides have come in and out of New York Harbor,” he said.

“Long before the name ‘New York’ had ever been spoken, Lenape dugouts crossed these currents. It was on these waters that tall masts crested the horizon, captained by explorers like Verrazzano and Hudson after whom we’ve named our bridges and rivers.”

Read more Exclusive | James Dolan steps away from Rangers, hands control of team to son Quentin

Mayor Mamdani used his 250th anniversary address to attack the rich, saying the country is a “nation of contradictions” with the first trillionaires being created.

“As we mark 250 years, what do we see?” he said.

“We see a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions. 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,” he continued.

“We see masked 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 in the soft hands of a precious few.:

Mayor Zohran Mamdani takes aim at the wealthy and powerful in his America 250 address.

“We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, and more powerful than everyone else. I disagree,” he claimed, adding, “America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place.”

Mayor Mamdani took aim at the powerful, saying it has separated US citizens.

“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, the more strangers we invite in. 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,” the mayor said.

“How small they are, how weak, how unoriginal. 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—those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress.”

Mayor Mamdani, who was born in Uganda, said he and his family saw the Statue of Liberty like so many others when he came to the USA.

“My family did not arrive by boat, although we saw the Statue of Liberty from the window of the plane. 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.”

Mamdani highlights freed slave James Weeks and Weeksville, which still stands today.

“In 1838, 11 years after New York outlawed slavery, a recently emancipated Black man named James Weeks sought to begin anew as well—and to help hundreds of others do the same. He bought property in Brooklyn, won himself the right to vote, and sold lots to others newly freed. When they landed in New York Harbor, they knew they had something waiting for them that they had never had before: a home.”

Weeksville still stands today—a living, breathing testament to what we know America to be: a place each of us has the power to make.”

Mayor Mamdani said the Big Apple has changed greatly over the last 250 years.

“The city I see today looks very different than the one that greeted George Washington. In July of 1776, our city simmered under the yoke of oppression,” the mayor says.

“The British had imposed a colonial rule so repressive that 250 years ago, 80 miles south, a small group of newspaper editors, farmers, and soldiers signed their names on a document declaring truths that feel self-evident now but were revolutionary then, establishing the ideals our nation still strives to fulfill.”

Mayor Zohran Mamdani kicks off his address, calling the USA a “grand experiment.”

“Tomorrow, our nation marks 250 years since we declared our independence. 250 years of a grand experiment in self-governance — an experiment so audacious that some in 1776 doubted it would last more than a few years, let alone a quarter of a millennium.”

Read more Boyfriend desperately performed CPR on hiker killed after Florida alligator’s ‘death roll’: medical report