New York City

New York mayor Eric Adams is discouraging asylum seekers from coming to the Big Apple by emphasizing the city's expensive cost of living.  The mayor’s office released flyers Wednesday asking asylum seekers to consider cities other than New York when choosing where to settle in the country. The flyers, which will be handed out to migrants at the border, warn that “cost of food, transportation, and other necessities in NYC is the highest in the United States.” They also say there is no guarantee of “shelter and services to new arrivals.”  In addition to the flyers, Adams announced a new mayoral directive Wednesday that requires single, adult migrants to reapply to stay in the city’s shelter system after sixty days if they cannot find alternative housing.

Daniel Penny is heading back to a New York courthouse today to face charges for the murder of Jordan Neely. Penny, with the help two other bystanders, held Neely, who had a criminal history and mental health issues, in a chokehold after Neely made repeated threats to other passengers on a subway car. Neely died during the incident — and Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg chose to indict Penny for second-degree murder, despite downgrading over 50 percent of felonies to misdemeanors in 2022. Crime has risen in New York City since 2020, and the city has done precious little to address it, though Mayor Eric Adams has been slightly more proactive than his predecessor, Bill de Blasio. Go back a few decades, however, and you find the Big Apple in an almost unimaginably worse situation.

Has Bill de Blasio become Bill de Blasé? Details regarding the former New York City mayor’s so-called “non-divorce” from Chirlane McCray, his lesbian wife of twenty-seven years, seem weird. For instance, their “trial separation” involves them continuing to live in the same house while they date other people. Still, compared to the headline-grabbing track record of de Blasio’s life, this latest revelation made Cockburn yawn. Even the way the couple arrived at the decision, “after another stale Saturday night of binge-watching television at their Brooklyn home,” is disappointingly run-of-the-mill.

There was nothing new about springtime wildfires in Canada until the wind shifted unexpectedly last week. That shift blew smoky air all over the northern and eastern US, producing memorably apocalyptic-like orange air in New York City. Not wanting to waste a crisis, the lamestream media jumped right in with both feet. They blamed the wildfires on the much-dreaded “climate change,” scared the daylights out of everyone about the air quality and then warned that more like it was on the way unless we changed our fossil fuel-burning ways. Not unexpectedly, the media’s knee-jerk take was all wrong. Wildfires and smoky air have always occurred wherever there are forests. At least eighteen of these dark or “yellow days” occurred in the US and Canada from 1706 to 1910.

Jordan Neely was given a hero’s funeral in Harlem last Friday, eulogized by New York’s most prominent race activists before an audience of the city’s Democratic elite. Neely died on May 1 on a New York City subway car, after being restrained by a Marine veteran who was trying to protect his fellow passengers from Neely’s psychotic outbursts.   Neely has been turned into a symbol of a racist system of law enforcement and of civilian values that exaggerate the threat of mentally ill vagrants to keep minorities down. Three weeks after Neely’s death, on May 21, another homeless man in New York City slammed a woman’s head into a subway car, likely paralyzing her for life, if she even survives.

New York City seems like a gag that’s gone too far. "First, we’ll release all the criminals because too many black bodies are in prison! Then we’ll denounce the police as Nazis and refuse to prosecute any suspects they arrest. The city will be overrun with violent criminals — raping robbing, assaulting and killing at will... But if anyone steps up to protect the citizenry from the mayhem that’s been intentionally inflicted on them, well, gentleman, then we’ll prosecute the hell out of that douchebag." This exactly how things are playing out right now with twenty-four-year-old Daniel Penny, the Marine veteran who subdued a deranged lunatic on the F train at the Broadway-Lafayette Street station in Manhattan on May 1.

Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg officially indicted Donald Trump on April 4 on thirty-four counts of “falsifying business records in the first degree... with the intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission thereof.” This makes Trump the first president in US history to be indicted on a criminal charge. Not willing to let any opportunity — however ignominious — go to waste, Trump is already selling t-shirts on his website featuring a digitally-created mugshot with the words “Not Guilty” emblazoned below and the prisoner code "45-47" (get it?). The former president was not required to take an actual mugshot by Bragg's office.

The immediate reaction to the indictment of Donald Trump by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg has been a run to support the former president from his fellow Republicans, including those who are or soon might be competing with him for the GOP's 2024 nomination. But underlying this unanimity of disgust at the flagrant disregard for historical precedent, and the inflation of glaringly weak charges by Bragg, there is an obvious split in the right's response to this new stage of lawfare against Trump — one which could become more obvious in the coming months. On the one hand, you have the right-of-center Americans who are just plain shocked at this development.

Here are six things to think about ahead of any indictment and arrest of Donald Trump: 1. What is Trump going to be indicted for? Trump may soon be indicted on a campaign finance law violation. This means Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg has convinced a grand jury there is enough evidence to charge Trump with the crime (federal prosecutors seem to have long abandoned the cheesy political revenge fantasy). 2. But I thought this was all about Trump having an affair with some porn star? Stormy Daniels allegedly had sex with Trump in 2006, which he denies, and which she and Michael Cohen also once denied. She then took money in 2016 to sign a nondisclosure agreement, or NDA, to keep silent.

New York City mayor Eric Adams’s first day in office started with a call to the NYPD. Waiting for the J train to take him from Brooklyn to City Hall, Adams spied three men beginning to tussle. When punches began flying, he dialed 911. He didn’t offer a name until the end of the call: “Adams, Mayor Adams.” The moment, so perfect as to seem choreographed, epitomized Adams’s agenda. Predecessor Bill de Blasio destroyed his credibility with the police department over his eight years in office. Adams, by contrast, was a former NYPD captain who had run on his pedigree, rejected his opponents’ calls to defund the police and promised to revive the plainclothes anti-gun unit disbanded by de Blasio amid the George Floyd protests. The message worked.