New York City

Austin Simon, the thirty-five-year-old convicted felon who assaulted a bodega worker in the Hamilton Heights section of Manhattan earlier this month, might still be alive today — if it weren’t all but impossible for law-abiding New Yorkers to obtain a firearm. Simon — dressed in diamond jewelry and a $300 T-shirt — stepped behind the counter to assault sixty-one-year-old Jose Alba, after Simon’s girlfriend’s EBT card was declined when she attempted to purchase a bag of potato chips. A single shot to the leg would have neutralized Simon long enough for law enforcement and paramedics to arrive. Instead, a gory, now-viral, confrontation ensued.

I saw the look on the Uber driver’s face as he dutifully started putting on his mask. “You don’t have to do that for me, buddy,” I let him know. “Thank God,” he smiled, and we were off. Sitting on the parking lot we New Yorkers ironically call the Brooklyn Queens Expressway I thought back to a hungover morning in the winter of 2020, when an email popped up amid my coffee and cigarette. It was from Lyft: there was a picture of me in it, maskless, and a stern warning not to do it again. What a difference two years makes. Today in Gotham, for all intents and purposes, Covid is over. To any sane person, this sounds like good news, but not to the New York Times: the Gray Lady is worried.

If you had "Trump goes to jail" in the office pool, you just lost. The end of any possible criminal prosecution out of New York over Donald Trump's finances has come as the grand jury seated to find them has sunsetted. The possibility of a civil penalty, likely a fine, looks poor, but anything is possible. This is all a long way from predictions that the walls were closing in back when these cases were initiated in the Southern District of New York (SDNY). Dems, dragging all their Biden baggage along, are going to have to beat Trump at the ballot box, assuming anyone can afford the gas to drive out to vote.

Crime is on the rise in cities across America and the left is asleep at the wheel. Democrats are set to be routed in the upcoming midterm elections, but instead of getting onboard with tough-on-crime policies, they've focused their efforts on measures that are wildly out of touch with even their own voters. To start, Democrats have their pandemic lockdowns to thank for at least some of the crime crisis. Carjackings are up in cities, which experts attribute to teenagers who are not in school or extracurricular programs. James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, said that the pandemic has given people too much free time, which can lead to an uptick in crime.

New York mayor Eric Adams lifted the vaccine mandate for all of the workers in New York City on Thursday. It was a unifying moment for a city in desperate need of some good news. Just kidding! Eric Adams did not lift anything. Instead, Bill De Blasio’s successor offered a group of New Yorkers an exemption from having to take the Covid-19 vaccine. According to CBS, “New York-based performers and athletes who play for New York's home teams will be exempt from the city's vaccination mandate for private businesses.” This is great news for wealthy Yankees players and insufferable celebrity attendees of this year’s Met Gala. After all, nothing says VIP treatment like being able to make your own medical decisions. Now for the bad news.

Last spring, Yiatin Chu joined a series of protests against the spike in unprovoked assaults on Asian Americans in New York City. Prominent New York Democrats, including Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, were in attendance and spoke at the rallies. Senior party figures expressed their solidarity with the Asian community. They drew connections between the violence on New York’s streets and the xenophobic language of former president Donald Trump. And sometimes they blamed the violence on something less specific: white supremacy. After a while, Chu, a politically active Democrat, stopped going to the protests. “I was just really turned off by the messaging,” she tells me.

Faced with some high-profile crimes, our law enforcement authorities are finding it hard to say what has prompted “suspects” to pursue deadly violence. Even President Biden found himself baffled by what would lead a known Islamist terrorist to invade a synagogue on Saturday night and hold a rabbi and other members of his congregation hostage. The FBI likewise for a period expressed its bewilderment. The hostage taker had demanded the release of Aafia Siddiqui, a convicted Islamic terrorist held in a Texas prison, but the FBI wasn’t about to draw any inferences from his choice of hostages or his principal demand. The FBI professed to know nothing of his motives — and President Biden nodded in agreement.

At the stroke of midnight on January 1, Bill de Blasio — New York’s bumbling, mildly sinister but profoundly incompetent mayor — got laughed out of office as his second term came to an end. Don’t let the door hit ya, the city collectively sneered...despite voting for the man twice. The new administration couldn’t even wait until morning to flip the official @NYCMayor Twitter account. One minute after midnight, it changed all its pictures over to ones of Eric Adams, before the man had even been officially sworn in. An image of the smiling new mayor loomed over de Blasio’s final message: a photo of he and his wife walking in shadow down a long hallway with their backs turned on a city they abandoned long ago.

As we near the final days of his term, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is taking his final shot at children by implementing an indoor vaccine mandate. This means that kids will not be able to dine indoors at restaurants, visit museums or do any number of other cultural activities around the city. Additionally, children ages five to eleven will no longer be able “to participate in high-risk extracurriculars including sports, band, and dance.” The new rules are as cruel as they are pointless. Twenty percent of New York City children ages five to eleven are vaccinated against COVID-19. That number is actually pretty high as kids face an extremely low risk of any kind of poor COVID outcome.