NYC Mayor/2021 Megathread

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

Eric Adams is really, really bad

Why?

• advocated for racial profiling as an NYPD officer
• was a staunch supporter of Louis Farrakhan
• was a self-described conservative Republican and ally of Giuliani until 2002
• called Herman Badillo a race traitor for marrying a Jewish woman
• helped bring about Giuliani’s victory by telling black people not to vote for Dinkins because he condemned the Nation of Islam
• defended domestic abuser Hiram Monserrate until this February

Absurd smears here:

• Eric Adams was literally a victim of police brutality before becoming a police officer and he was part of separate Black police officer organizations aligned with Dinkins that were always critical of police brutality, racism in policing etc. This is possibly the only consistent part of his record as a politician.
• Jesse Jackson publicly campaigned with Farrakhan until it was inconvenient to do so as well in 1984. Eric Adams being aligned with Farrakhan for a time mostly tells me that he's a Black politician.
• Eric Adams was certainly race-baiting against Badillo but implying that he was being anti-Semitic is strange given that his race-baiting would have applied if Badillo was married to an Italian or Irish.
• Everyone knows that Eric Adams supported Dinkins in 1993.

Eric Adams is certainly a sketchy character but I do not find the narrative against him to be particularly compelling. The most intense detractors of Eric Adams imply that he is both a closet Republican reactionary while also being a vicious anti-Semitic Black separatist. Partial bits of information are aggregated to glide over the fact that Eric Adams was a pretty typical Black cop (aligned with Dinkins, critic of police brutality), that he was an early supporter of same-sex marriage (this defies the idea that he's some kind of clear-cut separatist bigot or whatever), that he was an early opponent of "Stop and Frisk" etc.

Basically all of these candidates are awful so haters of Eric Adams are aware that they have to paint him as the worst possible piece of excrement in order to make him seem undesirable. The truth is far more complicated than that. Adams is a political chameleon who is currently running as a man of the people. Considering who his opponents are, this is a very potent message. I do not foresee the others being able to stop him...

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

I was canvassing for a DSA candidate and a 70 year old West Indian woman told me she appreciated his stances on tenants issues but couldn't vote for him because of Breadtube infighting.

Implying they'd vote for him anyway

She said she would. Him and Eric Adams.

DSA Electing LEOs Caucus Time

If the DSA wanted, it could probably easily find retired Black police officers who embrace social democratic politics and police reform. If I had to guess, Krasner easily won a majority of retired Black police officer votes.

If you want police reform, it would probably help to have a large number of personnel in police departments who are aligned with your agenda. Activist left often flails around because it sees some of these institutions as being inherently icky. This attitude is absurd.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

At the end of the day, you'll have a hard time convincing me that any of the other candidates are worth supporting. This is one of the worst fields that I've ever encountered over the past 15 years. Shaun Donovan is mentally subnormal, Andrew Yang is a MLM scammer, Wiley is much the same (neither of those two have qualifications to be Mayor and are jokes), Stringer is almost certainly some kind of criminal (sex pest, corrupt or both), Adams is a political chameleon and sketchy character who is qualified to be Mayor but also probably some kind of criminal.

In light of this, I find it hard to take seriously epic takedowns of Eric Adams as some kind of uniquely bad candidate. This is mostly because it strikes me as being dishonest. He has a track record in politics so he has baggage. Other candidates lack baggage because they are newcomers to politics. This does not really make them better - I'm sure Andrew Yang or Maya Wiley would have an unbroken string of failures or hypocrisies if they were in politics for 30 years. Frankly, the same goes for Garcia as well.

I don't think any kind of social democrat or socialist has anyone to support in this race. Pick your poison I guess. If you want to start hyping Wiley or Stringer, go ahead but I don't think it's worth wasting your time. 

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

At the end of the day, you'll have a hard time convincing me that any of the other candidates are worth supporting. This is one of the worst fields that I've ever encountered over the past 15 years. Shaun Donovan is mentally subnormal...

bruh lmao

Somehow even worse than the Democratic primary in 2020 when there were exactly three credible candidates in the end - Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar, two of whom are geriatrics on the constant verge of death and one of whom is mentally unstable. At least in that race there were credible candidates though and one of them is one of the best politicians of the past 50 years...

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

The most intense detractors of Eric Adams imply that he is both a closet Republican reactionary while also being a vicious anti-Semitic Black separatist.

While I broadly agree with the rest of your post, black separatism and NoI rhetoric are inherently right wing. Black separatists, Israelites etc are anti interracial marriage, homophobic and extremely xenophobic. Farrakhan is only associated with the left because of clueless media personalities who think Black radical automatically = leftist.

It's right-wing but not in the way that a Republican is right-wing, which was my main point.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

AOC endorsing Wiley is a pretty embarrassing error.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

I think it's pretty important to state that there's a consensus that increased levels of policing result in reductions in crime but that the specific causal mechanism for this isn't entirely clear. Is it because an increased police presence acts as a deterrent or is it because the police lock more people up who would otherwise commit crimes? If you feel comfortable with the latter, you're basically endorsing "pre-crime" policing tactics, where we punish people for doing things correlated with committing violent crime, like selling loose cigarettes or jaywalking while being an underclass Black man and failing to pay the fee for that. I feel that this is actually a form of fascist authoritarianism and I have no time for people who think this is okay.

At the same time, there's plenty of evidence that an increased police presence acts as a deterrent. The UK's Coalition experiment is pretty suggestive that reducing police employment and cutting back on the courts reduces to increased levels of crime in a context where the law isn't very harsh or applied in nasty ways like it is here.

I think it's critical to draw a distinction here because few Blacks or Hispanics would agree with the idea of imprisoning people who are likely to commit crimes because that could imply their son or cousin being incarcerated for selling loose cigarettes or smoking crack. They are interested in justice and police protection. I should also add that they are very supportive of interventions that do not involve the police, like after school programs and the like.

Another piece of evidence that's worth mentioning: Martin O'Malley's grad campaign to reduce the murder rate in Baltimore involved locking up as many Blacks as possible and it worked but the plan was counter-productive in the long-run because Black jurors started nullifying just about every trial in the city and cooperation with the police plummeted. This is a massive danger of trying to pursue mass incarceration instead of justice.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

AOC endorsing Wiley is a pretty embarrassing error.

Why?

Maya Wiley might win and then AOC would be sandbagged for the rest of her career by her association with Wiley, who would be disastrous. Even if you support police reform, Wiley is exactly the sort of candidate who'd cause the NYPD to catch a strong case of the "blue flu". Tbh, she reminds me a lot of Hardesty in Portland...

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

The motives for enforcing a curfew at Washington Square Park seem pretty murky to me. Some news outlets say the notion is to "prevent rowdy parties", others say that it's primarily because there has been drug use at the park and it seems that there's some violent crime happening at the park.

Overall, I can't say I feel comfortable with imposing a curfew to stop parties in a public place, even if they involve some drug use but I suppose I am unusually libertarian about this sort of thing.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

Basically every study conducted on the matter shows that an increased police presence in an area reduces crime rates in that area! Unless you believe that people are mentally subnormal and do not respond to incentives, the belief that policing has no effect on crime is basically nonsensical.

For instance, it's pretty clear that totalitarian regimes are very effective at curbing political speech through the use of police, that political prisons reduce covert political activity etc. Why wouldn't this also be true for violent crime or property crimes?

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

I support the trash lady. Hopefully she wins and is unable to destroy unions, which I assume she would try to do as most public administrators are nasty in this way. Unfortunately, the alternatives are even more unsavory than her.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

I applaud Yang for wanting to pour resources into the number of psych beds, which would de-facto bring institutionalization back and would ultimately be a good thing. At the same time, the mentality he evinces is both terrifying and despicable, betraying both an inability to understand mental illness and its consequences. Homelessness is as much a cause of mental illness as an effect of mental illness. Simply housing the mentally ill would go a long way towards reducing their symptoms and this is even true for those with schizophrenia or a more extreme form of bipolar disorder.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

As has been pretty obvious based on my posts in this thread, I was very excited to discover that Eric Adams had given his opponents a hard thrashing on the basis of working class people of all backgrounds supporting him because he pledged to be a "blue collar mayor", took public safety seriously and touted his labor union endorsements. In my view, the triumph of Eric Adams is a triumph of an old school machine politician over vacuous upper class liberalism in all of its varieties. Whether it is radical, moderate or center-right, it stinks and repulses people who aren't freaks.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

I think it's a mistake to see parallels between Koch and Adams. Ed Koch is a classic reformist/"clean politics" liberal who drifted towards the right over the course of his career, a rather typical trajectory for politicians of his type swept into office in the 1960s and 1970s.  Eric Adams is a political chameleon and opportunist of the old school (19th Century), a classic working class/"common man" politician who is basically self-schooled and plays the game to earn his bread - these people do not exist anymore! Even in the distant past, they weren't particularly common.

This is all to say: yes, I think Adams' victory is important and very meaningful nor does it represent what his critics or "friends" think it does. Adams has articulated the meaning of his victory in the eyes of his supporters. The point of his victory is that New Yorkers want a Mayor who both looks like them and who is working class, who understands their concerns.  

Here are some ads that nicely sum up his campaign:

https://youtu.be/CLXuSHoj1Z0

https://youtu.be/1NlyTLdR-iY

I honestly expect that he'll be a mediocre or possibly an awful Mayor but the alternatives were just as bad. The benefit of Adams winning is that it's an expression of alienation and disgust with Democrat voice.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

Koch was also a die-hard Manhattanite and Adams is the antithesis of Manhattan.

I think this really controversial comment nicely sums up Eric Adams as a politician and why he was victorious:
"You were here before Starbucks, you were here before others came and decided they wanted to be part of this city. Folks are not only hijacking your apartments and displacing your living arrangements, they displaced your conversations and said that things that are important to you are no longer important and they decide what's important and what's not important. Go back to Iowa, you go back to Ohio. New York City belongs to the people that were here and made New York City what it is. I'm a New Yorker. I protected this city. I have a right to put my voice in how this city should run." - Eric Adams

Reminds me a lot of angry talk about limousine liberals coming from the white ethnics!

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

Eric Adams is a...classic working class/"common man" politician who is basically self-schooled and plays the game to earn his bread

And jaichind was supporting him in the primary...

jaichind supporting populists is hardly out of character. Frankly, I do not understand this.