OPINION:
It’s 1 a.m. on a Friday. The mayor’s crowd rushes in. There’s a rapper sitting next to him, making love to his Moët & Chandon. Hours later, the 110th mayor of America’s largest city stood before the media in his bespoke suit to condemn the resettlements of illegals in New York without his notice.
Mayor Eric Adams whined, “We didn’t ask for this.” Apparently, the haze of the night before blurred the fact that New York is by choice a sanctuary city, where federal immigration laws are not enforced by local authorities. During this campaign in 2021, Mr. Adams tweeted his reaffirmation of the city’s own open border.
Today he says that we need to “ensure everyone is doing their part.” He willfully ignores the Biden administration’s secret flights of illegals to New York that began long before Texas Gov. Greg Abbott started busing them there.
Mr. Adams has a standing reservation at a tony midtown eatery where he wines and dines famous names. He’s a regular at an A-list club that he reportedly loves so much, he named its owner to the board of the Metropolitan Museum.
The new mayor turned heads at the exclusive Met Gala with a custom tuxedo festooned with a message about ending gun violence. Yeah, that worked.
Then there was the Vogue party where guests sipped scotch that was $2,900 per bottle. The list goes on.
New York’s party boy mayor is learning that talking about gun violence, homelessness, and providing sanctuary for illegals at a cocktail party is easy. Turning liberal fantasies into reality is hard.
Mr. Adams may be the king of New York nightlife, but his hypocrisy and apparent lack of seriousness are an affront to all New Yorkers bearing the brunt of the crime wave.
Bill de Blasio was an unabashed socialist who was out of his depth and rolled into the office at 10 a.m. Even Democrats came to realize he was incompetent.
The Big Apple has now traded inept for a limousine liberal right out of Al Sharpton’s old playbook of feigned outrage in a $3,000 suit.
As of 2021, there were estimated to be more than 500,000 illegal immigrants in New York City and nearly 60,000 homeless residents, yet Mr. Adams claims he’s been blindsided by migrant buses adding a mere 3% to that number.
In a city of 9 million people that has made rolling out the welfare welcome mat for decades regardless of its ability to pay for it, a population boost of 0.1% should be bearable. New York City already spends roughly $2.5 billion on homelessness and yet the problem only gets worse. Mr. Adams is now begging Americans for roughly $60,000 per new illegal in federal tax dollars but has no explanation for how that exorbitant sum would be justified.
Mr. Adams is clearly having a blast as mayor. This week he was caught on camera giggling like a middle schooler about someone smoking pot near his Times Square press conference. But his daytime reality is harsh.
He’s dealing with a mounting $90 billion public debt crisis and a real estate market teetering on the brink as office towers are still at a fraction of their pre-pandemic capacity. Businesses across the city are consolidating space due to hybrid work that is also straining support businesses from hotels and delis to high-end restaurants and shops.
Crime is up markedly in every major category. It’s no wonder he spends his nights clubbing. What New York needs is courage, not a clotheshorse.
When Gov. Kathy Hochul and the Legislature failed to reform the cashless bail laws, Mr. Adams could have pulled his political support. When Black Lives Matter threatened riots if he reinstituted the NYPD’s wildly successful plain-clothes Street Crimes Unit, he folded like a cheap suit. When the Biden administration opened the border and started funneling illegals into New York, he could have demanded limits.
Back in the 1970s during the period of urban decay, when New York was as much infamous as famous, the city was scrambling to deal with moral, social and physical corrosion brought on by the explosion of the welfare state. It was paralyzed. If New York again becomes ungovernable today, it will be due to willful blindness and cowardice.
Mr. Adams may be clearly enthralled by his own newfound celebrity. Reality, though, appears hard to handle for a man easily overwhelmed, and often outraged but more at home at the club than city hall.
• Tom Basile is the host of “America Right Now” on Newsmax TV, an author and a former Bush administration official.
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