NEW YORK ISN'T DEAD, YET

 NEW YORK ISN’T DEAD YET

Eric Adams, the Mayor-elect of New York City, is ludicrously being assailed by the left for planning to reimpose some policing measures they consider to be “racist,” never mind that he himself is black. He correctly points out that the now-discredited BLM is just a fringe group, and encouragingly is standing his ground instead caving, the way liberals always do, to the radical left. The reality is that his election was the least racially-tinged election in the history of the city, having been chosen by a majority of both black, white and every other middle and working class constituencies in the city. But the left continues to perceive everything through a racial lens, primarIly because it is composed mostly of self-hating white people. 

If Adams continues to resist the prevailing positions of the dominant elite, who otherwise don’t represent anyone, the prospects for a NYC recovery have brightened considerably after the terrible diBlasio administration. I believe that will likely be true in the state as well with prospect that Lee Zeldin will become our next Governor. Like many I have considered leaving, but having lived here all my life I’ve decided I’m not going to abandon my homeland without a fight, and these prospects indicate there is at least one last chance of turning things around after years of corrupt, dysfunctional government. The challenge is still daunting but it may just come about, despite the still-dominant rotten elite. 

For it has never been true that New York is especially “liberal,” and certainly not “left.” It has little in common with some of the loonier places on the west coast. That is a myth that basically ends at the borders of Manhattan and a few other shore points facing it. Most of the city consists of a myriad of vibrant, fairly conservative residential neighborhoods. It is worth noting that Manhattan was the only place Adams didn't carry in the Democratic Party primary, which simply indicates the extent to which the elite who dominate Manhattan are not only out of touch with the country, but the rest of the city as well. It is only monotonous control of the media that creates that impression.

But even there exceptions exist, like the oldest newspaper in America- the New York Post, founded by Alexander Hamilton 220 years ago. For despite pages of frivolous “celebrity” nonsense, it is much more than a feisty tabloid and has arguably become the leading, and often lone, voice pursuing the truth and exposing scandals that the rest of the media ignores or suppresses outright for ideological reasons, like the Hunter Biden story they censored during the last election campaign or the Cuomo nursing home catastrophe. But they won’t get Pulitzers, which nowadays are just prizes liberals like to give themselves, along with so many other once-prestigious awards, (and we really need to start delegitimizing them as such). 

Many years ago, during a disastrous NYC newspaper strike that many never recovered from, Eric Sevareid, then a nightly commentator on the CBS Evening News, worried that the strike might take down the New York Times, which he pompously declared was our “nation’s most necessary newspaper,” which was laughable even then. But today there is a paper that does fit that description, one of the few that has kept the notion of a free and independent press alive, and which virtually alone did not bury the truth but exposed it, the New York Post. 

No one knows what the fate of city it covers will be, and things could still get worse from external factors even if the state is finally well-governed again, nor am I even predicting a certain turnaround, but now there is at least a chance that abysmal mismanagement will no longer be a leading cause of decline.