There’s a good chance that this November, New York City will elect an openly declared socialist, Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani isn’t American in any meaningful sense — he’s from Uganda and preaches ideas that are fundamentally incompatible with our republican form of government. Still, he has a good shot at winning, partly because his ideology taps into the same grievance that animates leftists everywhere: the myth of settler colonialism.
To these young, naive ideologues, America is an evil place because it was founded by colonizers, and this is “stolen land.” We’ve all heard the claims before. It’s the same reason leftists use to justify their hatred for Israel. To them, Israel (like America) is an example of settler colonialism, rotted to the core. But the real threat isn’t settler colonialism — it’s settler immigration.
Self-described political anthropologist Arsalan Khan posted on X that “Mandani argues that the difference between a settler and an immigrant is that the settler aims to create an entirely different society that fundamentally subordinates and excludes the native.”
Unironically, Khan was not trying to describe Mamdani himself, but that’s exactly what his post did.
Mamdani, like so many other foreign-born politicians in America, aims to create “an entirely different society that fundamentally subordinates and excludes the native.” Our reckless immigration policies — legal and illegal — have invited in not just people but entire ideological movements that want to dismantle America and remake her into something unrecognizable.
One way this is done is through the endless repetition of the lie that Americans live on “stolen land” and therefore are oppressors by birthright. Mamdani demanded that a statue of Christopher Columbus be taken down. Mamdani’s own father, Mahmood, said in 2022 that America is the “genesis of what we call settler-colonialism” across the globe, as reported by Fox News.
These comments are the embodiment of a dangerous trend where foreign-born radicals are using our open door to undermine our very foundations.
Somali-born Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar said in a 2018 post on X that “we’re a country built on stolen land and the backs of slaves.”
Then there’s Rashida Tlaib, born to Palestinian immigrants, who said in a 2024 Thanksgiving message that “this Thanksgiving, we mourn the Indigenous people killed by European settlers and the United States in order to steal their land. From here to Palestine, we stand in solidarity with all Indigenous people as they fight for freedom on their own land.”
It’s a message meant to demoralize Americans, to strip them of patriotism and guilt them out of loving their country, history, and heritage. After all, who could possibly love a nation so irredeemably wicked?
Sadly, the message is working.
Just five years ago, Americans watched in disbelief as statues of our greatest men — Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and countless others — were torn down, defaced, or smeared in the name of justice.
“There is no point in having these statues. All they do is remind everybody of the history of the United States and its role in perpetuating white supremacy and the institutionalization of anti-blackness,” 21-year-old Rosario Navalta, the daughter of Filipino immigrants, told The Washington Post.
“Jefferson is not ‘the’ father of this nation,” she said. “We cannot sit there pandering to the past.”
But what does the daughter of immigrants from a third-world country know about this nation? Clearly nothing if she believes Jefferson’s legacy begins and ends with the fact that he — like so many others worldwide at the time — enslaved people.
But never mind the facts. The truth is that our open-door immigration policies have flooded this country with either newcomers themselves or newcomers who raise children who despise what makes America, America. From Mamdani and Omar to Tlaib and Navalta, the result is the same: These are settler immigrants who want to do exactly what Khan described — create an entirely different society that fundamentally excludes the native people and ideas.
And once you delegitimize the founders, you delegitimize the country itself, paving the way for a new type of America — you know, the kind Mamdani promises. An America not steeped in natural rights, but an America in which there are no natural rights and therefore no system of government to protect those natural rights.
If Americans are taught by foreigners (and their children) to hate the men and ideals that birthed liberty, they will never fight to protect it when the next settler immigrant tries to take it away. That’s the real threat, not some invented myth of “settler colonialism” but settler immigration — foreign-born radicals who come to America not to embrace and protect her, but to erase her.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
