Vice President JD Vance took aim at New York City Democrat mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani in a speech he gave over the weekend, saying that Mamdani, an avowed socialist and pro-Palestinian activist, has no gratitude for the nation.

Calling Mamdani a communist, Vance pointed out that Mamdani “never once publicly mentioned America’s Independence Day in earnest.” This year, Vance said, Mamdani did acknowledge the day, and Vance quoted his words.

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

Mamdani had made the statement on social media, and it went on to say “…to protect and deepen our democracy, to fulfill its promise for each and every person who calls it home. Happy Independence Day,” he said. “No Kings in America.”

The “no kings” comment references a series of protests that were organized across the United States to say that Trump is a “king” and that this is unacceptable.

“There is no gratitude in those words. No sense of owing something to this land and the people who turned its wilderness into the most powerful nation on earth,” Vance said.

In his comments on Mamdani, who won the Democratic Party primary in New York City against former Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mamdani’s ally, comptroller Brad Lander, Vance said that his win was an example of “how much the voters in each of the respective parties have changed.” 

Democrats used to embody the values of the working class and labor, but they’ve now embraced the overeducated and their luxury beliefs on socialism, Vance pointed out.

“If our victory, if President Trump’s victory in 2024 was rooted in a broad working and middle class coalition, Mamdani’s coalition is almost the inverse of that. If you look at his electoral performance precinct by precinct, what you see is a left that has completely left behind the broad middle of the United States of America.

“This is a guy who won high-income and college educated New Yorkers and especially both young highly educated New Yorkers, but he was weakest among black voters and weakest among those without a college degree. That’s an interesting coalition,” Vance said.

“His victory,” Vance said later in his comments, “was the product of a lot of young people who live reasonably comfortable lives, but see that their elite degrees aren’t really delivering what they expected. And so their own prospects with all the college debt may not in fact be greater than those of their parents.

“And I say that not to to criticize them because I think that we should care about all the people in our country, particularly those those downwardly mobile college educated people who feel like the American dream is not quite all it’s cracked up to be. But we have to be honest about where his coalition is. It is not the downtrodden. It is not poor Americans. It is not about dispossession. It’s about elite disaffection and elite anger.”

Vance pointed out that many of the college educated have been experiencing downward mobility, as it turns out their degrees do not provide an advantage in the marketplace. He also noted Mamdani’s apparent contradictions:

“The far-left doesn’t care that BLM, the Black Lives Matter movement, led to a spike in violent crime in urban black neighborhoods. And it did because that same movement also led to anarchy in middle class white neighborhoods,” Vance said.

“They do not care that Islamism hates gays and subjugates women because for now it’s a useful tool of death against Americans. And they don’t care that too many pharma companies are getting rich from experimental hormonal therapies because in the process they’re destroying the so-called gender binary that has structured social relations between the sexes for the whole of Western civilization.

“And they certainly don’t care that deporting low-wage immigrants will raise the wages of the native born because they don’t mean to create higher living standards for those who are born and raised here. Whether they’re black, white, or any other skin color. They mean to replace those people with people who will listen to their increasingly bizarre ethnic and religious appeals. They are arsonists and they will make common cause with anyone willing to light the match.

“And that’s why Mamdani himself is such an appealing instrument to the left. He captures so many of the movement’s apparent contradictions in a single human being. A guy who describes the Palestinian cause as central to his identity, yet holds views like abortion on demand or using taxpayer funded money to fund transgender surgeries for minors.

“These views of course are completely incomprehensible on the streets of Gaza. This guy represents that contradiction. How can you believe in the cause of the intifada while also holding views that are completely anathema to those people? And the answer is because he’s not building a positive program. He’s not trying to build prosperity. He’s trying to tear something down. And he’s very effective at articulating all of the things that the far-left hates in modern America.”