Maya Wiley

The New York City mayoral race is split between two factions of Democrats: those who cut a tempered figure offering government solutions to the nightmares their own party created and stoked over the last year — and the kooky true-believers with the thousand-yard stare who continue to preach fire and damnation. The current, term-limited mayor, Bill de Blasio, belongs to the latter camp, though most of his fire dances not from brimstone but just above the slide of a bong. His ideological successor, race-hustling civil rights lawyer Maya ‘Defund the Police’ Wiley, who was recently endorsed by her sister-from-another-mister in Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, isn’t doing so great in the most recent polling, though still rounds out the top four.

Defund the police! The clarion cry of protesters and middle-class warriors everywhere never fails to stir Cockburn’s passions. Slashing police budgets, cutting resources and further increasing crime rates is the most logical step to improving our societies and neighborhoods. Isn’t it? But it transpires that calling for the police to be fleeced of their budgets comes easier if you are Maya Wiley, Democratic candidate for New York City mayor, who lives in a $2.7 million brownstone in a Brooklyn precinct where the crime rate has plummeted in the past year. And Wiley’s partner Harlan Mandel, CEO of the non-profit Media Development Investment Fund, has been paying for a guard to patrol their tiny neighborhood.