Powerful Mayor Turns on BLM: 'I Thought Black Lives Mattered'
In his most pointed attack on the city’s Black Lives Matter activists yet, New York City Mayor Eric Adams condemned the movement for not showing up on the streets to protest escalating gun violence, calling them “hypocrites.”
Adams’ remarks came in the wake of a mass shooting on board a Brooklyn subway car on Tuesday in which 10 people were shot.
Despite the fact the shooting has received massive media attention, less attention has been paid to the alleged shooter’s black nationalist rants online, which included posts promoting the Black Lives Matter movement.
(At The Western Journal, we’ll make sure America knows the truth about the shooter’s motivations when the establishment media tries to hide them. You can help us bring America the facts by subscribing.)
According to Politico, Adams was speaking to New York cable news station NY1 on Wednesday when he was asked about over a dozen other incidents of gun violence in the city between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning — and specifically, how he’d get a handle on gun violence in the city.
“By being consistent with our message. Here is my question that I put out to the city: I thought black lives mattered. Where are all those who stated black lives matter?” he said. “Then go do an analysis of who was killed or shot last night. I was up all night speaking to my commanders in the Bronx and Brooklyn. The victims were black. Many of the shooters were black.
“Why are 16, 17, 18-year-olds out on our streets armed with guns at 12:00 or 1:00 a.m.?”
“If black lives matter, then the thousands of people I saw on the street when [George] Floyd was murdered should be on the streets right now stating that the lives of these black children that are dying every night matter,” Adams added. “We can’t be hypocrites.”
This isn’t the first clash that Adams has had with the city’s Black Lives Matter activists, led by controversial Hawk Newsome.
Adams, a black former New York Police Department officer, won the mayoral race in 2021 largely on a law-and-order platform. That message was popular with voters who were increasingly distressed by a skyrocketing crime rate and progressive criminal justice policies.
One of Adams’ law-and-order proposals involved reintroducing a plainclothes-officer unit that was disbanded by former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the concomitant protests. Newsome, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter Greater New York, promised things would get ugly if the unit were recommissioned.
“If he thinks that they’re going to go back to the old ways of policing, then we’re going to take to the streets again,” Newsome said after a November meeting with Adams, then the mayor-elect. “There will be riots. There will be fire, and there will be bloodshed because we believe in defending our people.”
Not that this had any effect on Adams: “This is what I’m going to do. That was my promise and I’m going to keep it,” he said in response.
However, it’s clear more needs to be done, as Politico noted there has been “a dramatic rise in violent incidents since the start of his mayoralty.
“Major crimes are up 44 percent compared to last year, according to NYPD statistics from earlier this month. And shootings, which had already doubled over 2019, rose another 14 percent over the last year,” Politico noted.
“To make his focus clear, the mayor has traveled to crime scenes across the five boroughs to talk with victims and hold press conferences. However, during the subway attack that’s been the most serious incident of his tenure, he was quarantining in Gracie Mansion after coming down with Covid-19.”
“It was very difficult for me not to be at 36th Street and at some of our command centers,” Adams said Wednesday. “But I have to listen to the orders from our healthcare professionals.”
Newsome, however, wasn’t planning on taking to the streets to protest either the Brooklyn subway shooting or any other violence New York City is facing. Instead, he was still fighting Mayor Adams.
“He wants us to have a fight in the newspapers to distract people from the real issues,” Newsome said. “The mayor is great at press conferences and he is really good at making statements, but he lacks efficiency and the ability to lead our city in a safer direction.”
Newsome’s approach? A program called Black Opportunities, which Politico reported “is launching a number of community programs — including de-escalation training and neighborhood patrols — designed to reduce shootings and violence without having to rely on City Hall or the NYPD.”
“He called on us to do the job of the elected officials and the police department, who have a collective budget of billions,” Newsome said. “He wants to do this from a grassroots perspective. And on behalf of Black Opportunities: We accept his challenge.”
One wishes Newsome and BLM Greater New York the best of luck with that, but he still misses the point.
His organization refuses to mobilize in defense of the black victims of violence because black lives matter when they prove a political point. When those lives don’t, their safety is entrusted to the authorities that Black Lives Matter opposes.
Yes, the words Black Lives Matter form a sentence that expresses a coherent sentiment. When it isn’t actively fighting that sentiment, however, the activist organization is mostly indifferent about seeing it come to pass.
Funny how that works.
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