A few years before World War I, the man who I am named for left a remote corner of the sprawling Russian Empire and hopped a steamship across the Atlantic Ocean.
It’s lost in family lore and century-old records whether my great-grandfather left Eastern Europe as Alexander Zhdanov, Alexander Zhdanowski, or something else entirely. Yet from shortly after he landed on Ellis Island until the day he died, he was Alexander Zdan.
Recommended Stories
My great-grandfather embraced his new nation. He opened a tailor shop. He raised a family who respected and revered American traditions like independence, service, and humility. He contributed. He assimilated.
Alexander Zdan stood in stark contrast to the petty spite of Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the destructive future his socialist horde aspires to.
Mamdani’s July 3 speech, delivered without irony behind George Washington’s desk and using recent immigrants as props, was insulting, historically illiterate, and deceptively radical. It attempted to erase our founding facts in place of a narrative that paints the American nation as a hostile oppressor to be conquered.
“George Washington was the last to leave Brooklyn,” Mamdani’s retelling of the August 1776 Battle of Brooklyn Heights went. “With the sun beginning its rise, he would have looked over the waters and seen what so many have seen in the 250 years since.”
In fact, Washington saw little of the city that morning. What he saw was a miracle.
Fog had descended on the East River. At the moment when the infant nation was on the ropes, the weather had dealt Washington a divine rescue plan, concealing his army’s escape from the advancing British. Like the hand of the Lord offering a gentle baptism on the Patriot cause.
Mamdani doesn’t want you to think about that because it runs against his core argument against American exceptionalism.
Communists, and collectivists, and cultists rewrite history. Without accuracy, without facts, without God.
Their only God is the one-way wheel of the state, which drags citizens-turned-prisoners toward their idea of conformity.
That won’t be our America.
In Mamdani’s hands, the American story is one of suffering rather than opportunity. Of union workers battling in the streets, and burning police vehicles, and sacking businesses. Of bitter division only solved by the final triumph of a race that’s only mastery lies in it not being white, Christian, or heterosexual. Of conquest rather than collaboration. Violence over votes.
In casting Washington’s gaze as the same sightline immigrants have had, the same sight Alexander Zdan saw sailing into New York Harbor, he ignores another historical truth. The men who made America in 1776 — Washington and those who sat 80 miles away drafting the Declaration of Independence, did not consider themselves immigrants.
They were colonists in a British holding. Most of them considered themselves Englishmen. Many were descendants of British subjects sent to the New World with the express goal of being a footprint of empire.
And their genius is they turned on that empire when their natural rights to life and liberty were threatened. When they recognized throwing off a faraway monarch’s oppressive yoke would allow them to create a republic with the combined aspects of Ancient Athens, the Roman Republic, and Enlightenment ideals.
The colonists who were the Founding Fathers opened the door to the America that my family embraced. Passing through that lamp-lit door led to generations of opportunity. And yet it’s the place that their fellow immigrant, Mamdani, denigrates and denies. He sees it as a mirror maze inside a palace of suffering. He casts the Founding Fathers in the first of a long line of American oppressors, in his mind, leading inexorably to President Donald Trump.
“Division is the oldest trick in American politics. And the cheapest.”
Quite right, Mr. Mayor.
This Independence Day, reject Mamdani’s vision of a predator empire. Embrace the story of a country — never perfected, but greater than any other — whose Founders’ command is to reject the very ideological shackles of guilt and rage he seeks to use for submission.
TWO AMERICAS: MAMDANI AND TRUMP GIVE SPEECHES AHEAD OF INDEPENDENCE DAY
Embrace the story of innovation and opportunity that stems from a exceptional nation whose fate was kissed by Almighty God. Live your resistance to socialist ideals. Participate in every level of representative government from school boards to town councils to Capitol Hill. Get married. Have babies. Start a business. Innovate. Create. Live the American dream for yourself and those you love – without any apology.
Happy 250th, America.
Alex Zdan is a former Republican candidate for the United States Senate in New Jersey and the founder of the Authentic Leadership PAC.
