Actor Robert DeNiro recently said he can’t love America when Trump is president. Really? I never stopped loving America, even when Joe Biden was allowing millions of illegal immigrants to enter our country, suppressing free speech, and governing incompetently.

I came here in the bicentennial year of 1976. The whole country was celebrating and recovering national pride after a decade of domestic division and failure in Vietnam. Notably, the all-time lowest percentage of foreign-born Americans was in 1970, at 4.7%. Today, it’s over 15%.

Some young people think their country is the source of all evil and should be destroyed. Capitalism, the engine of prosperity that built prosperity unimaginable to our founders, is suspect to them. They envy wealth creators rather than wanting to emulate them.

That some of our own kids are Gaza-gazing socialists is sad but not surprising, given the leftist dominance of teachers from kindergarten to college. What’s more aggravating is the people who arrive here already trashing us and trying to change us into the very thing they left to escape.

A few of these America-lasters are from Europe. Supercilious English talk-show host John Oliver comes to mind. His rant about New College Florida, an institution nearly destroyed by woke ideologues but resurrected under Gov. Ron DeSantis, sums up his leftist worldview.

But the vanguard of America-hating migrants comes from the “global south.”

Among them are Zohran Mamdani, now mayor of New York, and his pal Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian (via Syria) perpetual student and protester. Then there are Imran Ahmed and Mehdi Hasan, who pulled up shallow roots in the United Kingdom and came to the United States. Ahmed, a former adviser to Britain’s ruling Labor Party, is CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which was founded in 2017 supposedly to fight “disinformation” and online hate speech.

But our State Department says CCDH has instead censored Americans’ free speech. Secretary of State Marco Rubio put visa sanctions on Ahmed and tried to deport him for leading “efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose.” Ahmed got a temporary restraining order preventing his arrest or detention. The case will drag on. 

Mehdi Hasan was born in Britain and moved to the U.S. in 2015 to work for Al Jazeera and the Guardian. He got his own show on MSNBC but left in 2024 due either to low ratings or his obvious anti-Israel bias, depending on who you believe. The Washington Free Beacon calls Hasan a “Hamas Apologist,” so of course Georgetown University recently hired him as a visiting fellow. He now has his own media outlet, Zeteo.

Zeteo bills itself as “a movement for media accountability, unfiltered news and bold opinions,” which, considering Hasan’s obvious bias, is a bit rich. Of the three quotes of praise on their homepage, one is from Peter Beinart, a fierce critic of Israel, and another from Joy-Ann Reid, whose hatred of America was palpable on her now-canceled MS Now show.

Academia is already dominated by the far left, but even those they import come pre-programmed. Take Kiran Asher, from India. She now offers seminars on feminist theory, Marxist thought, and environmental justice at UMass and nearly became a professor at UNC before the board blocked her hire. Asher brought her left-wing views intact from Mumbai, writing that “the political task of working toward liberation, decolonization, and social justice must accompany scholarly and academic tasks of analysis.”

Prominent among first- and second-generation immigrants who hate capitalism, Europeans, law enforcement, and other American bedrocks are some recent winners of Democratic primaries.

Socialists Illapa Sairitupac and Aber Kwas won the Democratic primaries for New York state House and Senate, respectively. Sairitupac is a proud queer, indigenous, housing activist who said “whatever issue comes up … I want to always look at it from a socialist perspective.” That does not bode well for beleaguered landlords in New York.

In this clip, Kwas calls for reparations, says 9/11 was “a terror attack that, like, a couple people did,” and blames “capitalism, racism, white supremacy … Islamophobia,” and “U.S. policies” for the world’s ills. Her accent is pure New York and her ineloquence typical millennial, but she seems to have brought her grudges from ancestral Palestine. She won the primary, no doubt thanks to voters such as anti-Israel coffee-shop owner Parviz Mukhamadkulov.

‘THE RIGHT WAY FORWARD’: IMMIGRATION AND NATIONAL IDENTITY

Kwas and Sairutupac will be state officials. But democratic socialists Merat Kiros in Colorado and Darializa Avila Chevalier of New York have won their primaries for U.S. Congress. Kiros worked as a lawyer for a few years until being let go for excessive pro-Palestinian zeal. Chevalier, like Mamdani, has never had a real job, having been in college for over a decade. In deleted X posts, she advocated “abolishing police, prisons and borders, as well as seizing private property and nationalizing major industries.” These two make the “Squad” look conservative.

As in Europe, the combination of home-grown and imported radicals who want to abolish capitalism and replace it with a multicultural socialist utopia is enough to win local elections. In time, if conservatives fail to win over the young or stem the tide of mass migration, these radicals may take the White House.

Simon Hankinson is a senior research fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center at the Heritage Foundation.