i came up with the coolest idea for a birthday present for my husband and i swear to fucking god if he doesn’t like it i will do something dramatic as hell
Mamdani: There is a term so often used to describe our nation and those who have shaped it: American exceptionalism.
American exceptionalism, the conventional wisdom tells us, makes our freedom a little more free, is how we dug the Erie Canal and irrigated the West, is why children in far away lands grow up dreaming of one day moving here.
And yet the irony is that the story of America has so often been written by those who were told by others with power and influence and wealth that they were anything but exceptional.
For generation after generation, we have been told that when the world has sent its people to our shores, it has not sent its best. It sent Puritans and Sikhs and Quakers and Muslims and Jewish people who were banished for praying the wrong way, worshipping the wrong Gods, angering the wrong people. It sent peasants and serfs from who were treated as less because they hardly owned clothes, let alone land. It sent immigrants for whom power was something someone else had.
We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else.
The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place. The frontier may be closed, we may have walked on the moon, but the work of fulfilling the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence-that work endures, my friends, and it belongs to us all.
It belongs too to our newest Americans, those standing here with me today, all of whom were recently naturalized. Nearly a decade ago, I too felt what you feel— the joy of no longer being just a New Yorker, but an American too.
Mamdani: There are some who respond to those who ask for more from America with a simple refrain: Love it or leave it.
But patriotism has never been about pretending our nation is without flaws. Patriotism is every act of righteous dissent. It is every march led under the heavy sun. It is every protest held a decade before its time. It is precisely because we love this nation, that we will not leave it.
Trump: "On July 7, it's going to be approximately 107 degrees out. And I'm gonna go and I'm gonna make a really long speech, just to show I can do anything."
It’s a pretty widely accepted fact that stupid people are happier and less aware of the world around them, so it’s always weird when maga thinks this is a mic drop.
We are NOT talking enough about the fact that Donald trump is a child-raping pedophile. We simply are NOT. It is just INSANE to me that we are expected to just go about our business when everyone knows that the president* of the United States raped children.