FROM THE MAGAZINE
Anarchy in New York?
One senses order slipping away.Autumn 2020After Attorney General William Barr designated New York, along with Portland and Seattle, as “anarchistic” cities, Gotham mayor Bill de Blasio expressed outrage. He characterized it as a political attack on “black and brown cities”—though Portland and Seattle are two of the whitest cities in the nation—and denied that New York is remotely lawless or otherwise anarchic. Now the mayors of the three jurisdictions, facing the loss of federal funding, have sued the administration, calling the designation false and illegal.
It’s true that New York City wouldn’t be confused for Tegucigalpa or Mogadishu. And its violent crime rate, while soaring, is still much lower than that of Baltimore or St. Louis, for instance. But comparing New York today with the New York of even a few years ago makes clear that the city is undergoing a serious fracturing of civic order—one trending toward further disintegration.
One late summer Sunday morning, Demetrius Harvard, a 30-year old Bronx man, stood on a subway platform in Greenwich Village and methodically threw construction material onto the tracks. Bystanders tried to stop him, and someone even went into the train well to remove the debris, but Harvard persisted in his sabotage. Eventually, he succeeded in derailing an uptown A train, injuring several passengers.
You had to read to the end of tabloid news reports to get the real story. Two weeks earlier, in the same neighborhood, Harvard had tossed a steel bench through a bus window. He was arrested, charged with criminal mischief, and immediately “ROR’d”—released on his recognizance—with no bail.
This cycle is now all too common in New York, where public order and safety have been buffeted by chaotic forces. Criminal-justice reform at the state level removed bail as an option for all but the most heinous charges. Locally, the NYPD has stopped enforcing many quality-of-life laws. The city council passed a law forbidding cops from applying pressure to the chest or back of an arrestee while trying to handcuff him, on the premise that this tactic is tantamount to asphyxiation; officers dealing with a resisting suspect would thus potentially face assault charges if they attempt to restrain him with vigor.
The Covid-19 pandemic led to the release of inmates from jails and prisons across New York. “The number of New Yorkers held in NYC jails has plummeted, shrinking by 27% in ten weeks, a steeper population decline than in all of last year,” boasted the mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. “The jail population is at a number not seen since 1946.”
That would be good news if the incarcerated population were tracking the crime rate, but the exact opposite is true. Crime is up dramatically, as released inmates, now adjusted to a climate of permissiveness, resume criminal activity. Advocates for reform sneered at the suggestion that bail reform or pandemic-related releases were responsible for the lawless surge, but arrests have plummeted across the city. It goes against common sense to assume that the rise in crime has nothing to do with the release of thousands of career criminals into the community.
In New York City, it feels as though things are getting out of control. When wildcat protests can take over the streets, blocking traffic at will while cops indicate they have been ordered to stand down, one observes a lack of order. Homeless drug addicts set up camp on lower Broadway and shoot up openly—a sight hard to imagine not long ago, but now common. Hotels on the Upper West Side have been converted into homeless shelters; when neighbors complain about random crime, public defecation, and harassment, local elected officials excoriate them as racists.
Late one night in July, I was walking my dogs around Washington Square Park. Earlier that day, I had noticed a car with Florida plates and a curious open storage area on its roof, jerry-rigged together with brackets and chicken wire, holding an array of clothes, camping gear, and household goods. As I neared the car that night, I noted that its front door was open and that someone was sitting sideways in the driver’s seat, holding something between his knees. As I passed, he raised a large, compound crossbow, took aim at me through its scope, and pivoted in his seat, tracking my movement.
As soon as I was out of his range of fire, I called the police, who arrested him. They seized his crossbow—loaded with a quarrel, or bolt—and also a machete. He was charged with menacing with a deadly weapon, a class A misdemeanor that could result in up to a year in jail. He was RoR’d immediately, the only condition being that he had to agree to the conditions of a temporary restraining order keeping him from contacting me.
I looked him up on the Internet. He has a significant criminal history, including sexual violence and assault charges. He is also—in layman’s terms—out of his mind. His Facebook profile includes a video of him demonstrating how long he can hold his arm over fire, titled, “I demand my retribution,” as well as rants about Jesus, the devil, and the true meaning of AIDS.
It took about ten minutes to find out that this guy is seriously disturbed and has a documented history of criminal violence. Yet a few hours after he had pointed a loaded deadly weapon at a stranger, the justice system in New York City turned him loose, back to live in his illegally modified car.
All this may not amount to “anarchy,” in a purist’s sense of the word. But it isn’t the New York City that Bill de Blasio inherited, either.
Andrew Cuomo might be a sociopath: a book
review
by Tiana Lowe, Commentary Writer |
With the sole exception
of potentially China, no other nation in the world suffered as many per capita
deaths from the novel coronavirus than the state of New York. From Albany to
Manhattan, no state or country was worse served by its governance than the New
Yorkers who suffered a COVID death rate that killed one of every 1,000
residents of the Big Apple. Of course, you'd hardly know this if you watched the
media bend over backward to lionize Gov. Andrew Cuomo for the hellscape of the
past year. And you certainly wouldn't if you took the career politician's
deranged victory lap of a memoir about a pandemic threatening to reshutter his
state as fact.
In case you were
wondering how Cuomo managed to crank out some drivel for personal profit while
dealing with no real end in sight for the coronavirus, the explanation is
simple: Cuomo published a deranged diary, one with the tact and prose of a
sociopath, and the promise of a politician so cynical that he's preparing for
an even more authoritarian rule to result from his pandemic-justified tyranny.
Cuomo's coronavirus
memoir, American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic,
should read as a mea culpa by a narcissistic politician looking to salvage his
future prospects. Instead, it makes the cold-blooded Cuomo seem even more
delusional than his half a year of gaslighting his constituents has already
proven him to be.
For starters, despite
Cuomo's repeated insistence that he wasn't covertly courting Joe Biden's
campaign in the hopes of becoming his running mate, the son of fellow famed New
York Gov. Mario Cuomo makes the same pseudo-self deprecating appeal to the
public all wannabe presidents make. He tries to prove that he wasn't actually
that privileged because he was an "outer-borough, middle-class guy."
Cuomo spends many pages waxing poetic about how his obsession with work leaves
him with no free time, social life, or even a girlfriend to replace the Kennedy
who divorced him.
Just as he describes
his personal life, Cuomo details his political calculations with endless
justifications and whataboutisms. When New York confirms its first coronavirus
case on March 1, Cuomo claims he knows in his gut that there were prior cases
in the state. But rather than follow the lead of political neophyte Mayor
London Breed of San Francisco, Albany wasn't stockpiling PPE en masse. Cuomo
saves his most shameless deflection of blame for the two highly fatal unforced
errors of his rule.
First is the matter of
masks. In the journal entry of April 15, Cuomo writes, "By now I was
convinced that masks were more effective than the experts initially said."
Presumably, Cuomo blames President Trump for this, but given the clear eyes of
his contemporaries, this is unacceptable. We all know that Trump's supposed
"experts," such as Anthony Fauci and Jerome Adams, overtly lied about
the outstanding role masks play in preventing the transmission of an airborne
respiratory disease. But recall, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti ordered
citizens visiting essential businesses to wear masks more than a week before
Cuomo's mask epiphany. Hell, I haven't taken a biology class in nearly a decade,
and I staked my reputation on the claim that yes, you
should wear a mask, on March 27, almost three weeks before Cuomo conceded
maybe blocking your spit and coughs would prevent new COVID cases. If Cuomo
couldn't Google the relevant studies about masks and bacteriophages similar in
size to coronavirus and confer with his own medical team about masks, that's
not on Trump. That's on him.
The only chapter in Cuomo's
tale more disgusting than the mask deflection is his outright lies about his
nursing home policy. At the start of the outbreak, Cuomo authored an executive
order mandating that nursing homes accept residents who tested positive for
coronavirus, leading the virus to run rampant in homes consisting of the
population most vulnerable to its fatal prospects. As a result, thousands of
seniors died due to horrific policy, and that number may even be in the five
figures if Cuomo ever conceded to any transparency in the matter.
And how does Cuomo
address this? By blaming Republicans.
"By early spring,
Republicans needed an offense to distract from the narrative of their botched
federal response — and they needed it badly," Cuomo writes. "So they
decided to attack Democratic governors and blame them for nursing homes."
"[The Trump
forces] needed to add a conspiracy, which was that [seniors] died because of a
bad state policy that ‘mandated and directed’ that the nursing homes accept
COVID-positive people, and these COVID-positive people were the cause of the
spread of the disease in the nursing homes," Cuomo continued. "It was
a lie. New York State never demanded or directed that any nursing home accept a
COVID-positive patient.”
The only liar here is
Cuomo. Here is a copy of Cuomo's murderous nursing home order shared by Janice
Dean, who lost both of her husband's parents in nursing homes under Cuomo's
coronavirus call.
It’s
not on his department of health website, (it’s been scrubbed) but here it
is! pic.twitter.com/8VLDKKC49F
— Janice Dean
(@JaniceDean) October 14, 2020
Even with all of this,
Cuomo may sound like your bargain barrel politician. Yet somehow, even his
supposedly humanizing moments manage to paint him as so much worse than any of
his colleagues along the coast.
When trying to defend
his humiliating appearances on his brother Chris's CNN show, Cuomo pleads that
he only went on to get Trump's attention and that trolling Trump's allies was
justified because neither of them pretended the interview was supposed to be
objective.
"The show really
did help get good information to people, but it also did something else. It
made people smile, and a smile can be the best therapy," Cuomo says of
palling around with his baby bro while exterminating his state's seniors and
businesses.
Responding to criticism
that he exploited prison labor to manufacture hand sanitizer in bulk, Cuomo simply
notes that, "of course, in New York you get criticized for
everything."
Plenty of pages are
dedicated to pushing back on the president's frequent invocation of the
"Fredo" nickname against Chris.
"The Mafia stigma
is one of the most painful and vicious of anti-Italian American
stereotypes," the super serious Cuomo writes. Echoing his perverse DNC
speech, Cuomo once again claims that the coronavirus "is in many ways a
symptom and not the illness." Nearly 33,000 dead New Yorkers and counting
would beg to differ.
Cuomo is at his most
sociopathic when he tries to convince you that decision-making failures aside,
he is actually very likable and very cool.
"I am funny,"
Cuomo writes with the empathy of a robot. "Many people don’t know that I’m
funny. But I am. Actually, I am very funny. But you’re not supposed to be too
funny as a governor."
In case you read this
review to find one shred of grace this writer has for Cuomo, I'll leave you
with this, the only section of Cuomo's entire book that I truly think he both
believes and is grounded in objective reality. Here's the Love Gov.
"I am a
controlling personality. At one time I opposed that characterization because it
has a negative implication. But you show me a person who is not controlling,
and I’ll show you a person who is probably not highly successful."
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