Societal crazes are curious things. Sometimes they appear out of nowhere and disappear just as rapidly.
We obviously know where lefty agendas come from, but they appear to go nowhere for decades, then just as suddenly the societal immune system against them collapses, and then, when the damage is bad enough, the immune system seems to reappear.
A year ago I would have told you that New York City’s mayoral election was hopeless. And now the two leading candidates, Andrew Yang and Eric Adams are competing over which of them is more opposed to police defunding.
“The truth is that New York City cannot afford to defund the police,” Yang said near the site of Saturday’s wild shooting, which injured three innocent bystanders including a 4-year-old girl in the hot spot to shop for toys.
“When I talk to New Yorkers I get a very different message every single day,” he said.
“New Yorkers are concerned about rising rates of violent crime, petty crime, street homelessness. This is what we are seeing, and we need our city’s leaders to step up right now.”
“Nothing works in our city without public safety, and for public safety we need the police,” Yang said. “My message to the NYPD is this: New York needs you. Your city needs you. We need you to do your jobs professionally, responsibly, and justly.”
Eric Adams, the Brooklyn Borough President, who is a former NYPD captain, took shots at Yang and insisted he has his own plan to fight crime, while aggressively laying into police defunders.
“When you start defunding, hey, the cop is no longer on your corner,” Adams continued in his New York Magazine interview. “That cop is no longer in your lobby. That cop is not standing outside when you leave your Broadway play. And I have never been to an event where the people were saying we want less cops. Never.”
Adams said he first heard the term when he was at a Black Lives Matter protest over the summer, where he was confronted by a young Black man and a group of white friends.
“They are not living in the community that you are living in,” Adams told the young man at the time, in his recollection for the magazine.. “Go back to your community, where there is real violence, and tell me you still want to defund the police.”
Meanwhile, I love the part of this where no one is paying any attention to MSNBC’s Maya Willey who is exactly the kind of leftist shill who, if the media and activists had their way, would be leading in the polls.
Adams reiterated his ongoing call for NYPD to re-form a plainclothes anti-crime unit focused on removing illegal guns from city streets — a proposal dismissed as “lazy” and “violent” by liberal mayoral hopeful Maya Wiley during her own press briefing.
“Even Commissioner Shea called it an outmoded model of policing that was based in the stop-and-frisk era,” Wiley said Sunday. “My gun violence prevention platform is invest in trauma-informed care — because when we invest in the mental health services our young people need, violence comes down and graduation rates go up.”
New Yorkers have been DeBlasioed out.
What does this election mean beyond New York City? Who knows. It’s dangerous to generalize from one place to another, but New York City was an early tipping point for restoring law and order under Giuliani. The dominant candidates this time are law and order types.
New Yorkers are sick of the violence and crime. Does this mean anything larger for the nation as a whole? St. Louis is putting police defunders at the wheel. But hopefully New York is more representative of the trend and the tide is turning.
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