In the lead-up to the historic federal indictment of Mayor Eric Adams, New York’s top progressives have been circling like piranhas.
Public Advocate Jumaane “Everyone’s racist” Williams practically has his Interim Mayor sash on, while state Sen. Zellnor Myrie (D-Brooklyn), architect of the state’s disastrous criminal justice reforms, is itching to run in a special election.
In fact, everyone poised like a leopard to spring into Adams’ role as soon as he steps down is ideologically to his far left, including current and former city Comptrollers Brad Lander and Scott Stringer and state Sen. Jessica Ramos (D-Queens).
The advocacy gushing from progressives up to and including Queen Woke herself, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), to get Adams out ASAP demonstrates just how much the mayor, with all of his management and other (emerging) failures, has been keeping the wingnuts at bay.
This means New York is in a precarious position: The ideologues jockeying for Gracie Mansion are some of the key champions behind policies that have made this a more dangerous, more divided (socioeconomically and racially) city.
New Yorkers desperately need a fuggedaboutit candidate — a leader who respects the city’s core live-and-let-live hustle, who will speak about policies in terms of outcomes and not in terms of ideals.
The very fact that our political bench is saturated with woke warriors is an indictment of how long we have been seduced by the special interests who put the elusive goal of “equity” ahead of the real-life imperatives of education, safety and economic success.
What many Gothamites do not realize is that New York City’s functioning is still crippled by infrastructure put in place under uber-progressive former Mayor Bill de Blasio — and which Adams lacked either the political capital or the discernment to shuck off.
At the center of this remains Executive Order 45, signed by de Blasio in 2019.
This mandate reoriented the performance of the city’s agencies away from real-world metrics for providing effective services, and toward hitting goals around the “race/ethnicity, gender identity/expression, income, and, where available, sexual orientation” of the citizens they serve.
EO 45 was like a de Blasio “dream board”: It literally manifested a woke agenda to override the city’s most basic responsibilities.
Since then, city agencies have been beholden to the wackadoo witch hunt that deemed “structural, historic, multigenerational, intersectional and complex actions and inactions that produce disparities should be addressed, and equitable outcomes should be pursued.”
What has this meant in real life?
It’s pitted the city itself against things like cops and rigorous educational standards, the investigation of abusive parents, the enforcement of transit fares, and stringent safety in homeless and migrant shelters.
It’s made the progressive vision of “the perfect” the enemy of real New Yorkers’ vision of the good.
At the heart of this shift has been a perverted lens for determining which data matter.
EO 45 mandated a new priority for city agencies: “To determine whether particular data collection practices are effective for measuring equity.”
The universal application of this reframing is gut-churningly evident in the subsequent annual Mayor’s Management Reports that assess agencies’ performance.
This month’s 2024 report, for instance, uses the word “equity” an average of more than once per page over the 558-page document.
Each of 46 agencies — from the Department of Probation to the Taxi and Limousine Commission — has a single introductory summary of its work, and each one of them is titled “Focus on Equity.”
Not “Focus on Safety,” not “Focus on Health,” not “Focus on Learning.”
No wonder a recent Manhattan Institute poll of likely NYC mayoral voters found that 68% believe the city is on the wrong track — including 60% of Democrats.
City agencies are not actually focused on the city’s overall success, because the mayor’s official framework prohibits it.
The kicker: Not only are its agencies underperforming in their core missions, the city has become less equitable by navel-gazing so myopically on identity metrics.
Greater racial disparity has emerged, from our jails to our educational outcomes to our drug overdose rates — and our university system is spewing antisemitism.
Will you hear about this structural failure from would-be mayors Jumaane Williams, Brad Lander or Myrie Zellnor?
Not. A. Chance.
They will seize upon growing disparity itself as a reason to double down on the failed woke policies that got us here.
Adams hurt New York by choosing shady cronies to run agencies — and by his own alleged shadiness.
But these agencies need more than a Justice Department cleanup to bring back a thriving Big Apple.
They need new priorities from a mayor who demands more effective services — not more hamstringing in the name of social justice.
New Yorkers don’t give a rat’s tiny hiney about identity bean-counting.
With Adams’ potential imminent exit, they must find and rally behind a mayoral candidate who follows basic street smarts, rather than ideological delusions, to make the city successful for everyone.
Hannah E. Meyers is a fellow and the director of policing and public safety at the Manhattan Institute.