"Boogeyman narrative": Columbia professors call out Eric Adams over "outside agitators" trope
"A pathetic attempt to discredit the political investments and moral conscience of this movement," professor says.
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He was interviewed on NPR's Morning Edition today. My favorite part of the interview was when they asked how he knew there were "outside agitators" and he said "I just had a gut reaction".
My second favorite was when they asked what made him decide to go in, and he said "when I learned that one of the outside agitators's husband was arrested for federal terrorism charges".
Not someone who was actually there, not someone who was tried or convicted or sentenced, but one person who was present is married to someone who was once arrested for federal terrorism charges, and I assume released with charges dropped since he only said "arrested".
https://www.npr.org/2024/05/02/1248634146/columbia-university-mayor-eric-adams-nypd-student-arrests
I like a lot of things about New York, but they really don't know how to pick a mayor.
He won by 7k votes in a city of 8 million.
404,513 to 397,316.
I would've preferred Wiley but either her or Garcia would've made loads better as a mayor.
Problem is there was this constant barrage of news stories tilting the election in his favor: deliberate fearmongering about crime to pump up his popularity.
Such bullshit but it was definitely enough to swing 7k votes... if not 70k+.
The population of NYC is 8 million, and they had fewer than 1M votes for mayor? That, like, 12.5%.
Even if you limit it to just citizen population, I found that number to be 6-7 million. Thats still only a 14-16% voter turnout.
The fuck?
That was technically the primary. That's 1M registered Democrats - which you had to be to vote.
Okay, but he's not exactly the first terrible mayor New York has had in the past 50 years or so.
He's not, but he's the first one elected using ranked choice.
The only "outside agitator" I've heard them refence is a 63 year old woman who's been involved in peace and environmental protests. They obviously can read her Wikipedia page the same as us, but choose to only refer to her with boogeyman terms. She's exactly what you'd expect a 63 year old female peace activist would look like but they want you to conjure up images of a grizzled Antifa veteran clad in black and tossing Molotov cocktails.
I'm not from the US so I've been finding this story a little hard to track. It's so weird. I was on a Joe Rogan sub (I don't usually follow) and commenters were saying that over 60% of arrests were 'outsiders'. No idea where they go that stat.
They might be being deceptive/deceived. There have been some protests where their policy is to only arrest non-students, so counting people who were "arrested" will have a different sampling than the people who are protesting. I certainly haven't seen any reputable claim that most protesters on campuses are non-students.
Never trust any statistics you haven't personally forged