Government Officials, Food, Music, and Right-Wing, Religious Bully Pulpit
‘Prayer Breakfasts’ Where Politicians Spread Vicious Tropes and General Stupidity
New York City Mayor Eric Adams is a Democrat and wildly popular with the city’s super wealthy, similar to the last two-term mayor, Mike Bloomberg.
When Adams won the big city government job, neoliberal columnists at The New York Times celebrated with cheap white wine, they now had a Jim Clyburn in far north in a big seat of power.
Jim Clyburn is the famous South Carolina political boss and the state’s U.S. Representative. Rep. Clyburn is a centrist or neoliberal, who demonizes socialists, and cites his Christian beliefs when browbeating beat Black men and women about so-called “black-on-black” crime, a vile talking point of the social conservative carny barker.
Conservative, white people love the centrist, religious Black political leader because they carry water for law-and-order policy. The neoliberal Democratic Party has peddled a Republican-like, law-and-order agenda since at least Bill Clinton’s occupation of the White House during the 1990s. (Clinton ripped a lot from President Ronald Reagan, who was another President Richard Nixon.)
Democrats want to win elections, who blames them. No one likes to lose. But tacking to the Right and co-opting right-wing ideals like love of U.S. policing is an outlandishly expensive price-tag for winning elections.
Nevertheless, Democratic voters are still putting faith in the law-and-order politician and lawmaker. There is a big chunk of white Democratic voters who buy the racist beliefs on crime in the big cities. Wisconsin is a good example — the U.S. Senate candidate Mandela Barnes was defeated by a campaign to paint him his anti-police and the Mayor Cavalier Johnson, a Democrat, is also a cop booster. Both cities have large white voting bases.
The election of Eric Adams in NYC was sad for any sane leftist and thoughtful progressive. Adams is a former NYPD chief, and rabid critic of leftists and their demands of policing reforms.
Remember the 2020 BLM protests after Minneapolis cops killed George Floyd? Adams does, the city is now paying millions in settlements to the protestors who were maimed, pepper-sprayed, beaten senseless, and jailed in mass during those protests over police killings and brutality.
Mayor Adams seeks no conciliation. He has given more power to the NYPD to handle homelessness in country’s largest city — by razing homeless encampments and tossing homeless people into bonfires on the streets.
With an alleged spike in crime this year, Mayor Adams is turning up the heat, reviving Bloomberg-era law-and-order fuckery, such as stop-and-frisk, where NYPD police officers feel-up Black men, women, boys, girls, and grandmothers, and then jail them for the fun of it.
Adams is also pulling a Jim Clyburn, sounding off on “moral” failings of Black communities and people — if only they could find the Lord, then haunting concerns would be solved i.e., poverty would ease, and police would become your friends.
In culture vulture fashion Mayor Adams is turning all Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell spreading tropes about public schools and secondary education in general.
The big one — that the Supreme Court “took” religion out of the public schools in the 1960s. This is white-lens loonery repeated for way too many decades now — it’s also Nixonian.
As The Guardian reports, at a recent “prayer breakfast,” where Adams worshipped with the city’s big-time monotheists he said:
When we took prayers out of schools, guns came into schools.
and
Don’t tell me about no separation of church and state.
and
State is the body; church is the heart. You take the heart out of the body, the body dies. I can’t separate my belief because I’m an elected official.
These are noxious tropes no person needs. The courts or “we” have not stripped religion from public schools, let alone private ones. Indeed, the Supreme Court ruled decades ago that public school students can form religious clubs, join bible readings, pray before the American Flag prior to the school day starting for example.
Indeed recently because of suspect litigation, the rightwing U.S Supreme Court ruled that it is fine for high school football coaches to prayer with their student-players before and/or after games.
Mayor Adams is lying about religion being yanked from the schools just like Donald Trump and dozens more rightwing Christian carny barkers before him.
Mayor Adams is flaunting and taunting progressives and leftists. To take on the tropes of rigid, mean, hateful right-wing Christians is beyond the pale.
It is time for Adams to come clean and announce his intention to join the Republican Party. Do a reverse Bloomberg and do it now Mayor Adams. You are making West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin look almost progressive.
