The following is an edited transcript excerpt from The Michael Knowles Show.
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Zohran Mamdani is very, very upset because the federal government has reportedly removed the rainbow gay pride flag from the Stonewall National Monument.
Here’s what Mamdani had to say:
I am outraged by the removal of the Rainbow Pride Flag from Stonewall National Monument. New York is the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, and no act of erasure will ever change, or silence, that history.
Our city has a duty not just to honor this legacy, but to…
— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) February 10, 2026
Credit: NYCMayor/X.com
First of all, this is a bit of vindication for me because when everyone was saying that Mamdani was going to establish Sharia law in New York — saying he’s some kind of Islamist terrorist — I said, you know, would that it were so simple. In some ways it would be preferable if he were a serious Muslim; you can kind of talk to a Muslim.
I think it’s worse. I think he’s not just a far-leftist but a millennial leftist who plays up the Muslim thing because of identity politics. He knows it will help win over some immigrants. There’s also a radical Left and Muslim alliance because they have a common enemy, which is America and the Church and the white man or whatever — you know, the usual enemies of the Left.
And so, I said that’s true. But if push comes to shove, he’s going to side with leftism over Islam. Just like when push comes to shove, Joe Biden says he’s Catholic and he’s liberal. But when there’s a conflict between the two, he always picks liberalism. He never picks Catholicism. So his real faith is liberalism.
And that was my argument with Mamdani. And I think I’m totally vindicated in that.
Now, Mamdani is very upset because Trump took the pride flags away from Stonewall.
What is Stonewall? The Stonewall Inn was a filthy, truly degenerate, disease-ridden, Mafia-run bar. It was a hive of crime, decadence, and debauchery in New York City. And then, when the cops raided the filthy, illegal Mafia-run bar — not illegal because it was hosting gay people — when that happened, a bunch of sexual deviants, including famously a trans-identifying guy, started chucking bricks at the cops. As a result, we now side with the gay Mafia bar attacking cops. That is the thing that we’ve exalted as a national monument. But because it’s a national monument, the federal government has a say over it.
And Trump has come out and said, look, you can fly the US flag at federal properties, you can fly certain military flags like missing-in-action, prisoner-of-war flags, but that’s basically it. You know, the flag of the Army or the Navy or something where that’s appropriate, but that’s it. We’re not doing the BLM flag. We’re not doing the gay flag. We’re not doing the trans flag. We’re not doing the terrorist trans flag — I call that the terrorist gay flag. So the federal government said we’re not doing that.
But it begs the question: why do we have a national monument to Stonewall in the first place? What do we have a national monument to weird sex stuff? And why is a liberal New York politician, the most prominent left-wing New York politician, why is he all of a sudden so concerned about tearing down monuments?
The left has spent ten years tearing down monuments to all of the men who built this country. Monuments to Christopher Columbus — there was a big push for that in New York — constantly defacing the Columbus monument in Columbus Circle. There were also attacks on even Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, Thomas Jefferson, and certainly on Robert E. Lee.
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So all these guys — we’ve got to tear down all these monuments — and the only monument we have to keep up, the only monument we can’t tear down, is the weird sex flag on the weird sex place, which was actually a bar run by the Mafia.
Now, before Republicans get too high on our horse, I just want to point out what the libs are doing is destroying history and tearing down the traditions and fabric of our country, in some cases tangibly, which is bad.
But we want to tear some things down too — maybe not in as blunt a way as the libs do, maybe not in as blunt a way as the Taliban does. We’re not blowing up the Buddha statues, okay? But we do want to tear things down in the way that you prune a garden, not the way you blow up a Buddha in Afghanistan, but the way you prune a garden. I do want to get rid of the Stonewall National Memorial. It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous that we have a monument to a Mafia-run gay bar best known for assaulting police officers and for spreading diseases. We should not have a monument to that. That’s degrading to our country.
You can be nice to people who have some weird sexual behaviors. You can be nice to them. You can be somewhat tolerant of that without putting up a freaking monument to the Mafia gay bar. That’s insane. Not only should we be taking the pride flag away from that, we should be removing that as a national monument.
I don’t want monuments up to people like Malcolm X or Angela Davis. Even if they’re figures from American history, they represent bad stuff.
I don’t want monuments up to the Rosenbergs who were communist spies.
I don’t want a monument to someone like Alger Hiss.
I don’t want them. I don’t want monuments to people who are bad for this country.
Once again, I made this point in my book Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds about speech. The false dichotomy when we’re talking about free speech is between free speech and censorship, when really the real battle is between competing sets of standards, because all societies have standards.
The same thing is true here. The real debate is not: Do we tear down the statues or do we leave them standing? The real question is: Who is worthy of a statue? Who’s worthy of a monument? Who’s worthy of veneration as a political matter?
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