March 17 (UPI) -- A French lawmaker says the United States should return New York's Statue of Liberty because America now sides with "tyrants."
"We're going to say to the Americans who have chosen to side with the tyrants, to the Americans who fired researchers for demanding scientific freedom: 'Give us back the Statue of Liberty,'" Raphael Glucksmann, a member and founder of France's Place Publique party, said Sunday at a political party convention.
He said America no longer encapsulates the values that "Lady Liberty" represents.
"We gave it to you as a gift, but apparently you despise it," he added. "So, it will be just fine here at home."
The statement came amid sweeping layoffs and other firings by the Trump administration and billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency in a number of federal agencies and departments.
That was coupled with President Donald Trump's embrace of dictators like Russia's President Vladimir Putin and open hostility to Ukrainians during a contentious Oval Office meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky.
"The second thing we're going to say to the Americans is: If you want to fire your best researchers, if you want to fire all the people who, through their freedom and their sense of innovation, their taste for doubt and research, have made your country the world's leading power, then we're going to welcome them," Glucksmann, 45, said of the wave of mass firings and workers' potential emigration to France.
Glucksmann previously was married to former Georgian and Ukrainian politician Eva Zguladze.
On Monday, White House press secretary Caroline Leavitt called Glucksmann a "low-level politician" and claimed that thanks to U.S. intervention in World War II, "the French are not speaking German right now."