Six on History: NY CITY ELECTIONS underway
panaritisp
Welcome back to Six on History.
PS: If you like what you find on the "Six on History" blog, please share w/your contacts.
Click here for Detailed Search Help Thanks John Elfrank
.JPG?part=0.11&view=1)
1) Early Voting Underway In New York City For Primary Election, Gothamist
"Over the next nine days, voters can head to the polls to vote for mayor, comptroller, public advocate, borough president, and Council races.
There are also races for Manhattan District Attorney, and civil court judges. For the first time in the city's history voters will decide who will run City Hall through ranked-choice voting, which allows them to pick up to five candidates instead of just one. (While the citywide elections will be decided through ranked-choice voting, voters will not be able to decide their next Manhattan DA through that process.)
READ MORE: Early Voting Starts Saturday: Here's What You Need To Know
The city Board of Elections approved to expand voting sites, adding 16 more than the 2020 presidential election, bringing the total to 104 sites. Polls, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, have been open since 8 a.m. on Saturday—early voting hours vary each day.
Laura Skoler was waiting outside the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center at 7:45 a.m. She was the first and only person on line, explaining she was there early because of the long lines for early voting during the presidential election last year.
When thinking about who to vote for mayor, Skoler said she was picking "someone who knows how to run this crazy, wonderful, marvelous city."
READ MORE: Policy Cheat Sheet: Where The Democratic Mayoral Candidates Stand
Mayoral candidate Andrew Yang and his wife Evelyn were greeting voters near the Lincoln Center site. "The fact that after all these months of campaigning, people can finally make their voices heard, it's a really exciting occasion," he said.
Mayoral candidates Shaun Donovan and Kathryn Garcia were seen voting early. Their rival, Ray McGuire, was spotted outside the Met early Saturday morning before making his way to an event at the National Action Network headquarters. He was joined by Eric Adams, along with Yang, and candidate and civil rights attorney Maya Wiley. Scott Stringer spent his morning in the Bronx, alongside Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.
Also n the Bronx, friends Elonia Lessington and Brenda Goodwin went to vote at the Bronx County Courthouse together.
"We wanted to make sure that our vote gets counted," Goodwin on why she ventured out early. "You should always have a choice."
In the Rockaways, Gabriel Evans and his wife Donna were among the first voters to cast their ballots at the YMCA. A retired therapist who wore his "Vietnam Veteran" hat, Evans said he preferred early voting.
"There is no crowd, especially because I am a disabled veteran. I was able to take my time and the instructions were very legible," he said. Both Evans and his wife cited experience as their biggest issue and ranked mayoral candidate Eric Adams as their top choice followed by Garcia and Scott Stringer." ...
"During my early career years in local television, most news directors and reporters clearly took their cues on coverage from the New York Times. Apparently, that’s still happening.
“These Eight Democrats Want to be Mayor of New York City. We Have Questions,” proclaimed a Times headline. But Republicans have not rated such attention. Local television, with rare exceptions, has followed suit, devoting an overwhelming share of political coverage to the Democratic Party’s candidates.
Be assured, I am a First Amendment diehard and defend the right of a news organization or an individual to report and speak freely. It is the bias and judgment of many media outlets that I’m questioning.
New York City’s Campaign Finance Board requires that qualified participants for city offices take part in televised debates. But the lion’s share of the attention is on the Democratic side of the ledger. NY1 hosted one debate between Curtis Sliwa and Fernando Mateo, the Republicans running for mayor, and televised a debate among the three Republican candidates for Staten Island borough president. But what about the other boroughs? I see Democratic debates for various offices, but virtually no coverage of Republican candidates or ideas.
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl., New York, NY 10011
phone: 917-435-9329
leo...@classsizematters.org
Follow on twitter @leoniehaimson
Subscribe to the Class Size Matters newsletter for regular updates at http://tinyurl.com/kj5y5co
Subscribe to the NYC Education list serv by emailing NYCeducationn...@groups.io
Host of “Talk out of School” WBAI radio show and podcast at https://talk-out-of-school.simplecast.com/
"On Wednesday morning, Eric Adams, the front-runner in New York City’s mayoral race, stood facing reporters outside a row house he owns in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, tears occasionally welling in his eyes. “How foolish would someone have to be to run to be the mayor of the city of New York and live in another municipality?” Adams asked.
He’s not the only one asking. The previous day, a pair of Politico reporters, Sally Goldenberg and Joe Anuta, published an article detailing their attempts to find out where, exactly, Adams rests his head at night. The reporters compared official records to Adams’s public statements and conducted a stakeout of Brooklyn Borough Hall, where Adams works as borough president. Goldenberg and Anuta found a lot of inconsistencies and general weirdness. Adams’s voter-registration file, for instance, lists his address as the first-floor apartment of the Bed-Stuy row house, but other documents list a tenant living on that floor. Last summer, state records show, Adams listed a different apartment in Brooklyn as his address when he made a political donation to a member of the State Assembly. (His campaign said that, years ago, Adams signed over his share in that apartment to a former girlfriend.) There’s also a co-op in an apartment tower in Fort Lee, New Jersey, that Adams co-owns with his current girlfriend. Before the pandemic, Adams would occasionally sleep in Fort Lee, a campaign representative told Politico, but he hadn’t been there in months. The Politico reporters spent several recent nights observing comings and goings from Borough Hall—as did operatives working for rival mayoral campaigns, apparently—and, several times, they spotted Adams entering the building late at night and not leaving until early the following morning.
What was going on here? Adams had garnered friendly headlines in the early spring of 2020, after the pandemic hit, by announcing that he was bedding down in his office in Borough Hall. (He told New York magazine that sleeping in his office helped him stay “in the game-time mind-set,” and that after 9/11, when he was still an N.Y.P.D. officer, he had spent time sleeping in his precinct house.) But the situation was portrayed as a temporary one, brought about by the extraordinary work demands created by the covid crisis. Was it still the case that the potential next mayor of Gotham, despite owning multiple properties, was sleeping in his government office? Or, worse—was he secretly a New Jerseyan?
Adams’s rivals pounced. “WTF?!?!” Maya Wiley’s campaign manager said in a statement. “Why won’t you release your EZPass records?” Andrew Yang’s co-campaign managers asked. (Yang’s response was particularly aggressive; he has been criticized by Adams and others for spending time during the pandemic in his second home, in upstate New York. That criticism often bled into the suggestion that Yang was not a “real” New Yorker, which Yang, reasonably, considered a racist allusion to his Asian heritage.)
For weeks, Adams’s opponents have watched polls indicating that crime has become the defining issue of this election. A poll released on Monday of New Yorkers likely to vote in the Democratic primary found that nearly half considered “crime/public safety” a top priority for the next mayor, and Adams was considered the best candidate on the issue by far. As a cop, in the nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands, Adams spoke out against racist and abusive policing; as a candidate, he has offered a spirited defense of policing as a profession and as a societal necessity. This balance is appealing to many voters, and, meanwhile, his opponents have mostly scrambled to respond to this year’s spike in shootings in the city, and the spate of anti-Asian and anti-Semitic hate crimes that have recently been in the news. Now they’re trying to change the subject. “This is just the most recent in a series of significant ethics allegations,” Ray McGuire, the former Citibank executive, said in a statement issued after the Politico article appeared. He was referring to recent reporting on Adams’s cozy relationships with donors, and prior Politico reporting on Adams’s failure to report rental income from his properties from 2017 to 2019. “How do we explain these repeated examples of questionable behavior to our children?” ...
Days into his term, de Blasio read Wiley’s article and called her in for a meeting; soon after, he asked her to join his administration, as counsel to the Mayor. She was an unorthodox choice. Typically, an elected official’s counsel provides legal protection the way a security detail provides physical protection. (“I keep him out of jail,” Wiley once joked.) But Wiley—whose previous jobs included stints in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan, George Soros’s Open Society Institute, and the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund—was nobody’s fixer; her background was in activism and policy. When de Blasio announced her appointment, he said that she would take on “some of the issues that are core to our agenda and need to be led from City Hall.” He cited broadband access as one of those top priorities.
During the next two years, Wiley had a hand in sending billions of dollars in city contracts to businesses owned by women and minorities. She helped shape New York’s sanctuary-city laws. In early 2016, she published another column in The Nation, touting the progress the city had made in “bridging the digital divide.” Seventy million dollars had been earmarked in the city budget for Internet access. The administration was getting tough with the big telecom firms. Several public-housing developments had been wired for broadband. “We won’t stop there,” Wiley wrote.
Six months later, Wiley was gone. That spring, amid official inquiries into de Blasio’s fund-raising, she helped craft an unsuccessful legal strategy to keep e-mails between the Mayor and outside consultants from becoming public, on the premise that the consultants were “agents of the city”—a phrase that dogs her to this day. Reportedly frustrated about being cut out of decision-making, Wiley resigned in July. (She then spent a year as chair of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the beleaguered city agency that tries to provide independent oversight of the N.Y.P.D.) The seventy million dollars that had been set aside for Internet access went unspent, and progress on the issue stalled.
When the covid-19 pandemic arrived, a reliable Internet connection became, for many, the only way to attend work or school, or to see a loved one’s face. Yet, at the start of 2020, more than one in three New Yorkers lacked either a mobile phone or a home Internet connection. More than one in six—one and a half million people—lacked both. Tens of thousands of children in the shelter system were thrown into a year of remote learning without access to Wi-Fi or mobile devices, or both. Internet access was an equity issue. Wiley had known it, and she’d gone to City Hall to try to do something about it. But the problem remained unsolved.
We sat down at a shaded picnic table under a tree; people passed by, walking their dogs. “Look, there’s one progressive in this race who can win this race,” she said. “And it’s me.” “Progressive,” as even Wiley concedes, is a stretchy term. Pretty much every candidate in the crowded Democratic primary has invoked it at some point in the past six months. Three of those candidates—Eric Adams, Kathryn Garcia, and Andrew Yang—are outpacing Wiley in polls. Adams and Yang also have an edge over her in fund-raising. Garcia has been riding high since receiving the Times’ endorsement, in May. All three are running on platforms that propose measures which could be called progressive—Yang’s “People’s Bank of New York,” for instance, or Adams’s call for adding hundreds of thousands of affordable apartments to the city’s housing stock. But all three have rejected arguments made by activists, reform groups, and the city’s upstart new left on issues ranging from policing to education and development. And all three have courted constituencies opposed to progressive goals.
Wiley has courted the activists. Only a fraction of the city’s voters will cast ballots in this year’s Democratic primary, and even a small edge with one reliable voting group could make a difference. Early in the race, Wiley seemed well positioned to attract the kind of coalition that had elected de Blasio: Black communities from across the city plus “very liberal” voters of all races. With only a few weeks to go, many Black voters appear more receptive to Adams, a former N.Y.P.D. captain long involved in the city’s debates over policing. Among reform-minded lefty voters, allegiances are split. Two other candidates who occupied the capital-“P” progressive space, Scott Stringer and Dianne Morales, had recently had their campaigns upended: Stringer when a former campaign volunteer accused him of making unwanted advances twenty years ago (on Friday, a second woman, who worked at a Manhattan bar Stringer once co-owned, came forward with similar accusations); Morales when several members of her campaign staff quit and others organized a work stoppage. For a lot of Morales’s and Stringer’s voters, Wiley said, “I was already their No. 2.”
When Wiley gets going, she speaks in long paragraphs, her sentences running clause to clause—a lawyer exhausting all avenues of appeal. “And I’m proud,” she said, “that I worked inside a City Hall where I was able, thanks to the Mayor being on mission and focussed, to get women- and minority-owned business contracts up from five hundred million when we walked in the door, and I got handed a title, frankly, with no staff and no resources, because the infrastructure hadn’t been built for it, in previous administrations, to actually get that up to $1.6 billion in one year.”
I asked her about Internet access—what happened there? On the campaign trail, she has often touted her work on the issue. The “Meet Maya” page on her Web site reads, “As Counsel to the Mayor, she delivered for New York City on civil and immigrant rights, women and minority owned business contracts, universal broadband access and more.” But had she really delivered on “universal broadband access”? What happened to that goal?
“Look, I left the administration five years ago,” she said. “I can’t speak for what happened in the administration over the last five years. I can talk about what I will get done.” O.K., I said, then what was her plan for getting this done if she were elected? How would she do things differently? “Let’s start by acknowledging that no city has created universal broadband,” she said. Creating it would require pulling on “multiple levers.” Ultimately, she believed that it would come down to persuading Washington to let the city use federal dollars for this purpose: “The reality is that cities can’t do it all by themselves.”
Wiley still sees a path to victory in the race, and there are reasons to not rule her out. In February, she won the backing of Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union, the largest union in New York City and a crucial lift to de Blasio’s campaigns. Hakeem Jeffries, New York’s highest-ranking House Democrat, endorsed Wiley’s candidacy last month. George Soros, Wiley’s former employer, has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in support of her campaign, and Local 1199 is doing the same. This week, several prominent figures of the new left—including State Senator Julia Salazar, who had previously backed Stringer—announced their endorsements of Wiley. On Saturday, she received the coveted endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who spoke outside City Hall, in Manhattan, and praised Wiley’s commitment to racial and climate justice, saying, “It’s so important that we come together as a movement and rank Maya No. 1.”
How the House Democrats, in the face of certain defeat, presented the case for impeachment.
Wiley’s theory of the case is that many voters are just “tuning in” to the mayor’s race and that the dynamics can change dramatically in the closing weeks. Something similar had happened in 2013, when de Blasio won. Her pitch works with prospective voters, she said, when she makes it directly—they get it, even on contentious issues like policing. “I’ve talked to real-estate developers who said to me, ‘But do you support defund?’ And then, when I tell them what I’m going to do, they were like, ‘Oh, that makes sense,’ ” she said. “And then I talked to people on the left who said, we just want you to use the word ‘defund.’ And I said, I’m going to talk about what I’m going to do. Here’s what I’m gonna do. And they go, ‘O.K., that makes sense.’ Then I go into the Black community, with the folks who have the highest rates of gun violence, and they say, ‘Do you support defund or not?’ I was like, let me tell you what I’m gonna do, and then they say, ‘O.K., that makes sense.’ ” Wiley has proposed cutting a billion dollars from the N.Y.P.D. and “actually” investing in communities, while also staking out a tricky position as a defender, but not a member, of the defund-the-police movement.
More than any policy, Wiley said, what people want from the next City Hall is “courage of leadership.” But is there enough time left, even if she is right, to have this conversation, directly, with all the people she needs to have it with? “That’s why you have ads,” she said. “That’s why you have debates. That’s why you have surrogates. All that stuff matters.”
As we got up and walked away from the picnic table, Wiley conceded that she had thoughts about the de Blasio administration that she didn’t feel she could share. In other interviews, she has said that she doesn’t want to betray the Mayor’s “confidences.” Wiley, in this sense, is still acting as de Blasio’s representative, even as she seeks to be the people’s. I wished that she would say more, but our hour was up."
Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, is as well-positioned as any candidate to be the next mayor of New York City. That does not mean he will win on June 22nd, but it does mean the coalition for a slim but significant victory could be coming into place if there are no more last-minute surprises or damaging news cycles.
Rising in the polls, Adams appears to be gaining great traction with Black voters and winning over more moderate whites in the outer boroughs, particularly older voters worried about rising crime. White liberals, increasingly wary of him, still may rank him on more ballots than Andrew Yang, who faced months of media scrutiny that Adams never endured.
In a recent media appearance, I was asked, quite bluntly, which candidate was worse for the Left: Eric Adams or Andrew Yang. Another person on the show argued Yang was worse, citing his ties to the left-hostile, tech-friendly consultant Bradley Tusk. I argued that Adams would be, in the end, more detrimental. Repeating a version of what I told New York Magazine, I said the Left can probably gain more from a Yang administration because he would enter office with weaker institutional ties and be more willing to engage with activists and organizers. Lacking a clear base of his own, Yang would be far easier to pressure, and his knowledge deficit could be used to the Left’s benefit if they organized well enough.
Adams, conversely, would be strong enough to tell the socialists, the progressives, the Working Families Party, the NGO’s, and the ordinary activists shouting outside Gracie Mansion that he does not need them to run the city. Adams does not have to listen to them at all. He would enter office with strong support from middle class Blacks, organized labor, and a large number of Democratic politicians and organizations. He is a former police captain who has stated he is willing to carry a gun on him at all times. He will not be intimidated and he will not be moved. He would be a machine mayor, with his own constituencies, far more insulated from outside pressure. Yang, for the Left, would be a manageable opponent. Adams would do his best to crush them altogether.
Adams has another weapon to deploy: identity. Traditionally, the Left—the socialists, the elder Marxists, the unionists—too often neglected the struggles of nonwhite groups, insisting loudly that class—and only class—matters. This is not true, of course, not in the United States of America where Blacks were enslaved until the 1860s and did not gain full legal recognition from their government until the 1960s, when the federal government forced the end of Jim Crow brutality. This is not true in an America where de facto slave labor, much of it Chinese labor, built the national railroads, and Japanese Americans were later thrown into internment camps. America has come a long way from those dark days, but we cannot forget them either. Racism has not left us.
These days, all factions of the Left acknowledge and celebrate identity. This is necessary. To win power, multiracial coalitions must be built, and that means appealing to Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and other groups of marginalized people on their own terms. It means recognizing difference and diversity. It means, to borrow a term from the faculty lounge, being intersectional. No version of the Left can succeed without that.
But you can sense, from my tone and my writings, I am skeptical of a politics that subsumes class, that centers itself almost entirely around identity. This is the kind of politics that allows large corporations to hire wealthy consultants to conduct diversity trainings that serve to shield them from discrimination lawsuits while further policing their beleaguered workforce. It is the kind of politics that allows Nike, Apple, and other mega corporations to be seamless social justice allies, even as they crack unions and rely on oppressed foreign labor. Unfortunately, in elite politics and academia, it is the kind of politics that is now ascendant. It relies on bosses and human resource departments, not collective action. It elevates language to the level of physical violence, constricts discourse, and increasingly disregards the First Amendment.
It flattens the reality of America. If identity is elevated far beyond class, there is no common cause to be made between poor whites, who still make up the large plurality of the nation’s impoverished, and poor people of color. Diversity consultants replace union drives. Candidates who seek universal, redistributive policy goals are shamed by elite liberal commentators for not talking enough about race. Instead of a politics of solidarity and working class uplift, there is woke capitalism, forever the preferable mode of operation for tax-skirting billionaires everywhere.
Yang, who is Asian American, has had an uneasy relationship with identity politics, but Adams has not. For Adams, a Black former police captain, the Left’s pivot to identity has been a godsend. These days, left-liberals and socialists alike are hyper-focused on it, particularly in the wake of George Floyd’s death. Adams is adept at taking this very real and worthy reckoning over race in America and using it for his own ends.
Like Yang, Adams has been willing to fundraise aggressively from the real estate industry and promote a developer-friendly agenda. But the two candidates, competing as moderates in the Democratic primary, have taken very different rhetorical approaches to the one area of housing policy the mayor does directly control: how much rent gets hiked on rent-stabilized apartments. Earlier in the year, Yang spoke out in favor of the Rent Guideline Board’s rent freeze during the pandemic and supported the eviction moratorium. In the last few days, I pressed both Adams and Yang on a particular, and very pertinent, question for the one million rent-stabilized tenants in the five boroughs: would they appoint members to the Rent Guidelines Board who would freeze or even rollback rent in the future?
Yang on Saturday told me he was open to the idea. Progressives, of course, are right to be skeptical of him with so many Michael Bloomberg alums hovering around—Bloomberg’s board hiked rents repeatedly—and should be prepared to aggressively hold him accountable if he wins. “We should not be raising people’s rents during this time. There are still a lot of people that are struggling, a lot of people that are out of work and we do have an ongoing homelessness crisis that we need to address,” Yang said. “I would be trying to keep New York City as affordable as possible.”
Adams, in response to my question, had a very different answer. “The greatest wealth of Black and brown people in this city is in their property. So when we start making any decisions on small property owners, we need to factor that,” Adams said. “Because if we’re not going to freeze mortgage payments for small property owners, if we’re not going to rollback their mortgage payments, then we need to be careful.”
“Those who are idealistic about this issue must be realistic,” Adams continued. “Because Ms. Jones at 80 years-old, trying to pay her mortgage—you start talking about freezing her rent, you start talking about rolling back, you start talking about no rent, she’s going to lose her home and you’re going to see the greatest loss of wealth of Black and brown immigrant people in this city and that is going to be a problem for me.”
“So we need to have smart people on the Rent Guidelines Board making the right decisions, protect tenants, and protect those small property owners at the same time.”
Adams’ answer is both brilliant and deeply wrong. Rent-stabilized units that the Rent Guidelines Board sets the rent for have little, if anything, to do with the kind of single property-owners—the theoretical Ms. Jones—that Adams cites. Rent-stabilized apartments are typically in buildings built before 1974 that have more than six units. Would Ms. Jones, at 80, be trying to pay her mortgage while owning six or more apartments? Not likely.
Like other real estate-aligned politicians, Adams continues to spread a favorite myth of landlords—that any kind of law helping tenants punishes blue collar property-owners who are just trying to get by. The talking points Adams employed were wielded repeatedly as Democrats fought successfully in 2019 to strengthen tenant protections in New York, including repealing a destructive law that allowed landlords to rip units from the rent-stabilization program.
Adams and the landlord lobby are lying because most owners of rental properties in New York City are not small. They are behemoths. The average apartment in the five boroughs belonged to a 21-property, 893-unit portfolio, according to city data crunched by JustFixNYC. Landlords owning more than 20 buildings were associated with more than half of these apartments across the city. Large landlords carry out evictions more aggressively than small landlords.
Roughly half of all rent-regulated buildings were owned by landlords with 21 or more buildings in their portfolio, a staggering number. For landlords with more than 60 buildings, rent-regulated properties represented more than 50 percent of the homes that they owned collectively. Less than one-tenth of the properties small landlords owned, conversely, were rent-regulated.
Adams, though incendiary, is a very smart man. If he doesn’t know these statistics off the top of his head, he is at least aware of them. But to espouse such logic—an elderly woman paying off her mortgage is somehow also a landlord of rent-stabilized housing—is to engage cynically with municipal politics in a way that is very familiar to him. Without any prior knowledge of how housing works in New York City, Adams’ opinions on rent-stabilization seem to make sense. There are a lot of Black, middle class homeowners, especially in outer borough Brooklyn and Queens. They do care about property taxes and may be less moved by issues facing tenants, since they themselves are not. Very few of them, though, would be impacted by any decision made by the Rent Guidelines Board. Their mortgages would not be affected. Adams is aware. It does not fit his politics, though, to evince such awareness.
Why would race come into a discussion of rent-stabilization as a way to safeguard the interests of inordinately wealthy landlords who, by and large, are not Black at all? The most powerful landlords in the city are white men like Steven Schwarzman, the CEO of Blackstone, and the Related Companies’ Stephen Ross, a Trump supporter who owns the Miami Dolphins and remains one of the world’s leading real estate developers. These are the men who have the most to lose from a large and incredibly organized tenant movement that hopes to, one day, socialize a great deal more of housing in New York.
Equating rent-stabilization with anti-Blackness is dangerous and deserves far more attention. The millionaire and billionaire landlords hungrily waiting out Bill de Blasio’s second term would want nothing more than a prominent person of color defending their predatory practices and tactics, a person who can speak up for their interests against an ascendant Left movement that has prioritized the struggles of working-class tenants in New York, many of whom are Black, Latino, and Asian. Mayor Eric Adams would be the apotheosis of woke capitalism. Stephen Ross could ask for nothing more.
All policy criticisms of Mayor Adams, in the coming years, can be reduced to race if he so chooses. This is the terrain many liberals wanted to play on, and now they will compete with a master. Do you care about transportation issues, like how cars with city-issued placards can park illegally, creating dangerous hazards for pedestrians and cyclists? Adams thinks you’re a white supremacist. Do you wonder why he sleeps at Borough Hall and spends time at an apartment in New Jersey? You’re a racist. Concerned about Adams’ oversight of nonprofits that seem to have created glaring conflicts-of-interest? Well, you’re unfairly maligning a Black man when there are plenty of white politicians who get away with corruption. Adams will be a far more deft opponent than the Left realizes. He is schooled in the logic and the rhetoric. He is ready for this fight.
Running with the strong support of the city’s tabloids—he won the New York Post endorsement outright and nearly nabbed the backing of the Daily News—and tailoring a tough-on-crime message that appeals most to the “if it bleeds, it leads” coverage from local television news, Adams will have media organs to bolster him in these coming clashes. They will be there to validate his narrative, to mock the Left as white, wealthy, and out-of-touch. Imagine tenant activists marching on Adams’ Gracie Mansion, demanding a rent-freeze or a rent-rollback. They will be diverse, as tenant activists are, but Adams need not see them that way. He will amplify another message, one of tremendous cynicism and cunning: these organizers are attacking Black wealth. They are here, at the gates of a Black mayor, to steal what it is the middle class, over time, has struggled to accumulate. It will be a message, delivered in Adams’ baritone, entirely divorced from reality. But a relationship with reality, in this age, is not a prerequisite for success."
