Despite his ambition to govern America's largest city, New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has no gratitude for his adopted nation, J.D. Vance said in a rousing speech over the July 4th weekend.

Accepting an award from the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank, Vance read Mamdani's bitter July 4th message aloud and questioned if the Uganda native has any affection for America and the people who made it great.

"I wonder, has he ever read the letters from boy soldiers in the Union Army to parents and sweethearts that they'd never see again?" Vance continued.

"Has he ever visited the grave site 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 were it not for the generosity of a country he dares to insult on its most sacred day?"

"Who the hell does he think that he is?" Vance said.

Mamdani's hatred

Mamdani's father, a Columbia University professor, fled to America after Ugandan dictator Idi Amin expelled the Indian population from that country.

By all accounts, Zohran Mamdani enjoyed a comfortable and privileged upbringing in the United States. But his sour July 4th message stuck to the progressive template, offering backhanded praise for America as a deeply flawed nation.

"America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country, even as we constantly strive to make it better," Mamdani said.

Mamdani's criticism angered Vance, who asked pointedly if Mamdani is grateful for the country that saved his family from a foreign dictatorship.

"Zohran Mamdani’s father fled Uganda when the tyrant Idi Amin decided to ethnically cleanse his nation's Indian population," Vance said. "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,’ and to its, as he calls it, ‘contradiction.'"

Third World politician

Elsewhere in the speech, Vance zeroed in on Mamdani's unusual interest in the affairs of the Third World.

Throughout his campaign for mayor, Mamdani emphasized the Israel-Palestine conflict and threatened to arrest Israeli's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the killing in Gaza.

Mamdani appealed to "carefully selected ethnic blocs carved out of the electorate using identity politics as the knife,” Vance said.

“That … explains Mamdani’s bizarre appeals to foreign politics intended to signal to one particular group of New Yorkers or another," he concluded.

Mamdani's worldview has been clearly colored by Third World resentment, as he made clear in a resurfaced photo that shows him giving the middle finger to a statue of Christopher Columbus.

Vance is right. Mamdani's hostility to America ought to be disqualifying - but will it matter to New York City's voters?