UNLOCKED: Eric Adams
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Michael. Peter. What do you know about Mayor Eric Adams? All I know is that this man's greatest political feat is making me say the words, I miss Michael Bloomberg.

This episode was like inevitable, but also the result of a very deliberate series of choices. I like our Peter's Obsessions episodes. I like this thing where it's like, okay, what is Peter obsessed with? And then how can we pretend that this is in some way in keeping with the show? Peter's been watching clips of Eric Adams say dumb shit and giggling to himself for...

Months straight. This is like half of our text message conversations is just clips of Eric Adams. I have many friends who like I'll just send a clip of Eric Adams to them and they just like don't respond. But I keep doing it. So...

Eric Adams is the 110th mayor of New York City. He's one of the weirdest guys in history. And he is the mayor at one of the weirder times in history. And this has resulted in me being fascinated with him. This is the part where you're pretending that this has something to do with him.

Just say you want to watch a bunch of clips and dunk on this guy. It's fine. I do. Now, throughout this episode, I am just going to every now and then randomly send you a clip of Eric Adams saying something weird because I think that the only way to truly comprehend him is to understand how odd this guy is. Yeah. And the only way to understand that is to just listen to him talk a bunch. So...

Start off with this one. Oh, good. Okay, we're starting. We're going right in. We're going to do a clip right off the bat. I love it. Everyone knows that...

Oh, man. I know.

I mean, God bless him. It's so perfect. The only one that doesn't make sense is New York is the soul of America, which might be a reference to Korea, or he might just be like making a metaphor. Yeah, I wanted to clarify that one because that almost made sense. But no, he's referring to Seoul, South Korea. Yeah, because you can tell that he's in these countries. Like when he says we're the Zagreb of America, he has a Croatian flag.

These are various ethnic celebrations that occur in New York City. And Eric Adams, more than any other mayor, likes to show face at them. These are not events that your average mayor shows up to, but it'll be like Croatian Pride Day and Eric Adams will show up. And then he says that about whatever day it is.

Also, it's funny to see them all in a row because all he's actually saying is like, we're a big city. We're a big city. Like we're the Istanbul in America just means like, yeah, well, that's the biggest city in Turkey. New York is the biggest city in America. Yeah. Although a lot of those cities are the capitals. And so it sort of loses some of its explanatory power. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's also Eric Adams in that it's like half incorrect. So just to sort of scope this episode out.

All I want to do is provide like a really high level of his life and career, because for a lot of New Yorkers, he came out of left field a bit. All of a sudden he was the front runner for mayor and then he was our mayor. And then he's just, you know, publicly saying shit like that. And you're like, what's going on? What happened? He's the South Sudan of New York politics. He's brand new. Really, really new. And suddenly they have a competitive Olympic basketball team. What's happening? Yeah.

So there has been some great reporting on Adams, and I'll be pulling on a lot of it. So shout outs up top to some journalists who have profiled him. Ian Parker for The New Yorker, Emma Fitzsimmons for The Times, Michael Powell at The Atlantic. Oh, no. Shoulders of giants and regular sized people as well, I guess, in the case of Michael Powell. Yeah. So.

Let's start off with Eric Adams' early life. One thing to note about his early life is that it is told to us primarily through the lens of an unreliable narrator, Eric Adams. Once he said at a Dominican Day celebration, I may have been born in Alabama, but I'm Dominican, baby. Which is a weird thing to say, especially because he was born in Brooklyn. Yeah.

That's another fun thing about Eric Adams is just the weird lying about things that don't matter that much. A large part of this episode is colored by the fact that Eric Adams is constantly lying. Yeah. He loves to just tell a story. He has said this in interviews that like what he does is tell stories to people and that's how people that's how you relate to people. What he doesn't quite admit is that that means nothing.

that he lies all the time. Yeah, they're supposed to be true. The relating part comes from them being true. It's funny that the gay community has not claimed him as one of our own as a community of compulsive liars. You said it. Actually, I have no idea what this stereotype is of gay liars. It's not even a stereotype. It's just true.

It just isn't something that's great people know about, but it's absolutely accurate. So Adams' childhood is hard to piece together because of these little lies. He once said that when he was six or seven, his dad would take him to see a man who he later realized was Malcolm X, speaking in Harlem. But Malcolm X died when he was four. Okay. So it's unclear if that's true or not.

In 1973, a 10-year-old boy named Clifford Glover was shot and killed by police in Queens. It was a very big deal. Adams said he was marching and leading the protests against the killing. But in 1973, Adams was 12 years old. Leading the protests. So there's no evidence that he was at any protests, let alone that he was

leading them. Wait, so he is the Atlantis of mayors because he's a made up place. He published a book in 2009 where he told the following story, which I'm going to send you. When I was a child, a friend of mine brought a gun to school to show off to the rest of the students. This was my first time seeing a real gun.

Yeah, this would have been like a days-long news story if this had happened.

So in January of this year, Byline, publication Byline, ran a piece that went through this book and pointed out this little anecdote. And then Adams was asked about it. He said, quote, I never fired a gun in school. And that, quote, the co-author of the book may have misunderstood. Oh. He also said the book, quote, never got into print because it never went through the proofreading aspect of it. Journalists prophesied.

pretty quickly found out that not only had the book been reported on before, but it was available on Amazon and at Barnes & Noble when he said this. And also, this is exquisitely proofread. There's no typos in this. It's just false. It's just not true. But, you know, welcome to the Eric Adams episode. It's also such a baffling lie, too. It's one of these things where it's like, you don't have to do this. He told one interviewer that he played football for Bayside High School in Queens and

So he's just like a one-man Rashomon.

It's just his own perspective. Who can say what's real? One thing that we do know to be true is that when Adams was a teenager, he was involved in what is kind of a street gang, the Seven Crowns. It seems like they weren't notably violent. They were just sort of a crew. He has claimed that when he was a young teen, he was, quote, one of the top officers.

illegal numbers runners in the city. Numbers runners are the people who carry the cash and betting slips between illegal gambling outlets. I'll trust you. It's not crazy that a young kid

in a gang would be doing this in the 70s. But he has also said that he was completely broke at this time in his life. It's just not clear what's true here and what's not. So it is like interacting with a homosexual and that any story they tell you need documentary proof before you really accept it. I'm just leaning into creating this stereotype. I wish that I could riff on this, but I have never heard this stereotype before in my life.

This is just based on like the last three guys you went on dates with. Literally, yes. You're like gays, the most lying piece of shit people on earth. Gays will tell you they work in the financial sector when they actually manage a payday lender. A different person on this podcast gets to be homophobic for once. So his youth does result in what is basically his political origin story. The story that he has long told.

is that when he was 15, he and his brother broke into the home of a prostitute to steal money that she owed them for running errands. And they were arrested. A few years ago during his mayoral run, he changed the story and said it was the home of a go-go dancer who had broken her leg and they were helping her out. That feels like an obvious lie meant to make the story more palatable. Yeah. And it's also the sort of lie that Adams consistently tells, right? These like little fables.

meant to appeal to whoever his immediate audience happens to be. And very Trumpian in that it seems like he's trying to kind of win the interaction on like a minute to minute level, but it doesn't need to be like internally coherent. I do think that that's a good comparison. And I constantly, while like outlining this episode, wanted to make Trump comparisons. But also I feel like just because someone's like a lying dumb asshole doesn't

Doesn't mean that they're just like Donald Trump or it shouldn't mean that. But maybe it does. I don't know. Maybe that these are maybe this is all one type of guy. I will say the fact that he's a funny, dumb asshole is what does it. That's true. That's true. Trump lying about not knowing about Ruth Bader Ginsburg dying is so fucking funny. Yeah.

Adam seems to lie in exactly the same way where it's like anyone with an ounce of intelligence is like, OK, you're obviously lying here and not aware of it. Maybe the similarity is not merely that they are dumb lying assholes, but that they are also goofballs in this way. So what happens next in this little story is that Adams and his brother are severely beaten by two white cops in the precinct and then a black cop intervenes. This, according to Adams, triumphs.

triggers his lifelong interest in both policing and police reform. The narrative he tells about this story is kind of hazy. It changes depending on the audience. Sometimes he says that the black cop intervening made him realize he wanted to join the force and reform it from within. Like, here's a black man who has influence over these white men. And I've never really seen that before. Sometimes he says that even when he was like

the victim of the cops violence, he was sort of like in awe of it. Right. He craved the power that they had. He's like, you can beat up teenagers and not get in trouble. I also want to be a cop. Right. I mean, you know, this is a kid who's in a gang and then he encounters a very powerful gang in the NYPD. Right. That's sort of one of those tales he tells.

Maybe one or both or neither of these are the correct narrative. But again, welcome to the Eric Adams episode. Let's move into his professional career. He becomes a transit cop in 1984, basically just like working a beat on public transit. This is when the transit cops were separate from NYPD. This is also before smartphones, so they couldn't just sit there and play Candy Crush the whole time.

No, they had to actually walk around harassing people. It was very exhausting. He was fairly outspoken, especially for a cop, about racism in policing throughout his career. And he was also sort of bumping up against like black radicals who were sort of problematic in their own way. In 1993, he caught some flack when he criticized Herman Badillo, a Hispanic diplomat.

Democratic congressman who was running as a Republican alongside Giuliani for mayor for being married to a white woman. Oh, basically being like, if you care so much about Hispanic people, why are you married to a white woman? That white woman was also Jewish, which is a problem because Adams had some ties to Farrakhan and

who was making waves at the time and pretty openly anti-Semitic, right? In 1994, he tries to challenge Major Owens for Congress. The main reason he disliked Owens was that Owens had criticized some of Farrakhan's anti-Semitic remarks. And, you know, Adams liked Farrakhan. They were allies. Adams' candidacy never gets off the ground because he was unable to collect the required number of signatures. But there's a bit of a twist here.

Adams alleges to the press that he did have the signatures, but someone affiliated with Owens had stolen them from the campaign office. OK. The Owens camp says that that's bullshit. An investigation turns up nothing. And so ends Eric Adams' first run at public office. This is the problem with all New York politics is that it's totally plausible that massive corruption going on and it's totally plausible that

the people alleging corruption are fucking lying. Exactly. It's impossible from far away to determine what's going on. So in 1995, Adams starts a group of black police officers called 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. Ugh.

Easily the worst name for any organization I've ever heard in my life. Yeah, Bill Wooka? No. So the group gets into some trouble for escorting Mike Tyson from prison when he was released after serving his sentence for rape. Oh. So if you recall at the time...

Tyson himself had become a Muslim in prison and was sort of buddy-buddy with some Nation of Islam types in this era. When Amadou Diallo is shot by NYPD in 1999, it's this big nationwide story. It's like the biggest excessive force story since Rodney King. Yeah, it's really awful. Adams wants to use the opportunity to highlight the NYPD Street Crimes Unit's use of stop-and-frisk. This is like well before stop-and-frisk was like

constantly in the headlines, right? He appears at a city council meeting alongside Yvette Walton, who is part of the street crimes unit, but is disguised because she's not allowed to speak publicly about police policy. Within an hour of the meeting, she's identified and quickly fired. There are lawsuits and investigations following this, which reveal that NYPD is surveilling the group as well as Adams himself.

He's represented by NYCLU, the New York chapter of the ACLU. He builds ties with people in those circles, which is important because those ties will become relevant for his mayoral run. So at this point, he has a public reputation.

as a reformer and police view him as a troublemaker, right? They're actively monitoring him. Wait, Peter, question. Do you have a sense of like why he did that original political run? Like why did he want to get into politics? Like what was driving that? So there are verified stories that basically say that Eric Adams has always wanted to get into politics and that this was always part of his goal.

arc in his own mind that even in the 80s, he was talking about becoming the mayor. At least a couple of people have said like, yeah, Eric Adams was always a guy who wanted public attention and was interested in politics. Even if even at times when he wasn't pursuing public office, he was someone who was, you know, angling for the cameras at the very least and like looking to sort of looking to do shit, you know, looking to make a name for himself.

Right. So he's partly genuinely wanting to make change and he's partly like attention seeking and narcissistic, basically like every other politician. Also like every other politician, the genuine desire for change part fades away over time. Right. In 2005, he spoke publicly about the timing of a terrorist threat level change, which he claimed was orchestrated by NYPD to help Bloomberg overhaul.

avoid a debate. Nice. He's brought up on disciplinary charges for this and found to have spoken on behalf of the NYPD without authorization. He retires the next week. Okay. He claims he put in to retire before being served with charges. That's probably not true. But that is where his career with the police ends and it's

It should be clear that like even though he's viewed as an NYPD ally now, that was not his reputation, right? He was a reformer. He was sort of a firebrand. He made a lot of enemies within the department during his tenure and a lot of allies among civil libertarians. And that's sort of where he is in the mid aughts. And then we enter phase two of his career, which

loosely entitled politics, I guess. Okay. How old is he at this point? He is in his mid-40s at this point. Okay. So he has like a whole life and career as an NYPD person. Like this is a longstanding career. That's right. That's right. He runs for state Senate in New York where he is elected and he serves two terms. He was a registered Republican until 2002, but he runs as a Democrat.

His early political career is weird and bumbling and a little bit corrupt, which like I guess is I guess his late career is like that, too. So never mind. It's his state Senate tenure that gives us one of the great pieces of Eric Adams media, which I'm going to send you. This is a PSA in

entitled Combating Gun Violence. And what this is, is advice for parents who are looking to ensure that their children are not getting into trouble. Interesting to learn.

What I would like to show here is to empower parents on how to search a room inside their home. You hear that Hans Zimmer score they got going here? What's inside your household? And no one can state that you can't search a room in your own home. You write the Constitution. There are no First Amendment rights inside your household. What? He means the fourth. Your house is inspected by your house and the members of your house.

The message is you expect your children to do what's right, but you always have to inspect what you expect. And that's the key to provide us some preventive safety. So if you come to a room like this, you can start out. I always recommend to start out in a periodic fashion.

This is the wildest room I've ever seen. It's just not a children's room. Pictures. Pictures.

You should always, when your child brings in his popular knapsack with many different locations, look through it to see what exactly is your child carrying in addition to a book.

Something simple as a crack pipe, a used crack pipe. Can he have found it on the street? That's quite possible. But this is a discussion piece where you should start speaking with him to find out what is he doing with it. And the whole use of drugs. This invokes conversation. Look at picture frames behind them. Cameras. Try to determine what's taking place.

Behind a picture frame, you can find bullets. A bullet? Wait, pause it. Can you pause it? All right. I'm sorry.

Loose bullets behind a picture frame. Oh, it's so good, dude. It's so good. It is preposterous. Something as simple as a crack pipe is a phrase that is stuck in my brain forever. Popular knapsack with many locations. Popular knapsack with many locations. Dude, everything out of his mouth is like just a little bizarre. I know. How? This room, there's no other way to put it. It's like...

an adult's office space. There's like books everywhere. That's like very antiquated. Yeah. He's like colognes. He's just like naming things that he's looking at. All right. Let's keep watching it. I'm going to be honest. I don't even remember what happens in the rest of this. I just have this like note in my outline that's like watch whole video. Yeah. We're definitely keeping going. Yes. Look at all the items inside the room and feel around and see what's the possibility. Something simple as a baby doll.

It could be just a baby doll, but also it could be a place where you could secrete or hide drugs. Run your hands over the pillows and see if you feel anything that's unusual. Like a pillow like this with a button is a perfect invitation to hide something. I've felt something bumpy. I would reach in, see what it is. This one could be hidden inside a pillow, a gun. Maybe something that you think that can't be hidden.

There's a massive gun inside of a pillowcase. It could be more than just books. Perfect place to hide...

He's holding a baggie that looks like it has $10,000 worth of cocaine in it. All right.

I also love that he picks the worst possible argument for this. He's like, this is a violation of somebody's rights, but they don't have those rights. Yeah. Like he's not just being like, where can kids hide shit? He's giving you like his philosophy on children not having any privacy rights. Right. It's so perfect. The fact that a kid has like a weird like 44 Magnum, like an old timey police pistol and then

The only place they can think to hide it is in their fucking pillowcase that they sleep on every night. And then the kid is also hiding the bullets separately behind the picture frame. Separately for convenience. For his revolver. Yeah, all of that to the score to Interstellar. Yeah.

He also gives us in this era a little bit of foreshadowing by getting into some campaign finance trouble. In 2009, he was the chair of the Racing and Wagering Committee. And in that capacity, he was overseeing a bid for some government contracts related to like slot machines.

He hosted a fundraiser for his campaign where not only did he invite multiple bidders for those contracts, he thanked one publicly for donating to his campaign, which compelled the other one to donate as well. And then after the bid was given to one of those parties, he showed up at the celebratory party that the winning bidder is having. So this triggers an investigation. He was deposed and hits them with a bunch of like do not recalls.

nothing ever really comes of it. He maintains that it was a political hit job. Although that's, it's also one of those things where he's like, it's a political hit job, but then like the undisputed facts are clearly a violation of the law. What he really means is like, yeah, I did that, but my, but I'm a nice guy. I mean, to be fair, this is my understanding of like how all New York politics works. It's just like a bunch of Brown envelopes going around. It's basically 1800s over there. How dare you?

Disparage our beautiful city. In 2014, he is elected Brooklyn Borough President. This is mostly like a ceremonial position, a lot of just shaking hands, taking pictures, shit like that. There are a lot of profiles of him.

that point out that like, this is what he likes the most. You know, he's not someone who really likes to do the work of governing. He loves to, he likes to show face, meet people. That's why he's going to all those ethnic celebrations in the city and shit like that. He's a retail politician, but it's almost like he views, uh,

retail politics as an end in itself. This is why we need a royal family in America or these other ceremonial positions so that we can shunt off these people who like just want to glad hand and like cut ribbons and shit and like keep them as far away from actual political power as possible and let the like weird looking introverts

Like do the actual policymaking. Maybe, but that system is obviously just what the UK does. And I don't think that they're doing that much better than us. Well, yeah, that's true. So before we get to his mayoral run, I want to touch on a big Eric Adams subplot. This is what I'm calling the guru stuff.

Adams sometimes presents himself as sort of like a crunchy health and lifestyle guy. Very famously, he's a vegan. He started eating a plant-based diet to combat his diabetes, and he claimed that it worked to the point where he has minimal or no need for medicine. As borough president, he promoted plant-based diets like meatless options in schools, shit like that. In 2020, before he was mayor, he published a book.

about his lifestyle. I'm going to send you something. He's really the Zagreb of diet influencers. Really feels more like an Esten Bowl to me, but sure. He says, it was really amazing to me when you look at all of the scientific evidence that is hidden in plain sight, says Adams. You know the old Greek term, let food be thy medicine, let thy medicine be food.

And I decided that I wanted to use the power of food because I was really reluctant to have to use insulin. But all the doctors I sat down with to get alternatives basically said, Eric, this is your new norm. And one doctor, my endocrinologist, I remember sitting down with her and she said it was impossible. And I said, well, I'm just going to try. Well,

Well, she saw my number reverse in my A1C. What is the indicator of your sugar level? She said, wow, the medicine must be working. And I remember placing all the medicine on the table unused and said, no, I didn't use the medicine. I went on a whole food plant-based diet. Oh, so he's doing the thing when they bust drug dealers, how they like lay out the Ziploc baggies with all the drugs that they find. He did that with his insulin. Got him. This is what he told to Vice. Sometimes when he tells this story, he...

says that he actually consulted with a doctor on the switch. But either way, you can sort of see the like crunchy anti-Western medicine lifestyle guy vibes here. A couple of years ago, Adams is seen eating fish in public. And this caused a bit of a stir. Of course, he's been holding himself out as a vegan.

Adams makes a statement that he's an imperfect vegan which fair enough right yeah although He also told Ian Parker for the New Yorker that he never actually claimed to be vegan And then he added if I see a piece of chicken. I'm going to nibble on it How does he keep doing it?

Oh, God. Fuck. His guru personality goes beyond just the vegan shit and the medicines. He was...

very supportive of the COVID vaccine and was like actually fairly aggressive about vaccine mandates early in his tenure. But a few years ago, before all that, he was dabbling in like anti-vax sentiment. He publicly stated that he didn't need the flu shot one year because of his lifestyle. He said, quote, the jury is still out on whether vaccines cause autism. He seems to believe that certain crystals have healing properties and

and other powers, and he wears bracelets with different types of crystals. He has said before that New York is built atop land with a lot of mineral deposits and that the city is therefore imbued with a, quote, special energy. People go to New York and talk about the energy. Maybe they're correct. There's just like an energy here. Now we are entering the Eric Adams as mayor part of this episode. In 2021, he runs for mayor and he wins.

Part of the reason he's able to win is because he really successfully presents himself as a middle ground between reformers and police. He goes into the race with all of these reformer civil rights advocate allies he's made throughout the years and all of these figures in black political circles and the black church. But then he tacks right.

So this is when violent crime has been spiking. Right. And so he adopts a law and order platform. He was previously a vocal opponent of stop and frisk, but he comes out for it. He's a vocal opponent of the movement to defund the police. Right.

And he sort of just presents himself as like the common sense voice of black and brown working class communities in the city, sensitive to and concerned about police violence, but not anti-police. He would consistently say, like, if you go to these neighborhoods where black people live, they don't want you to take away police. They want police because they're worried about the violence. He's the kind of guy who very consistently says,

if black lives matter, then we need to focus on black on black violence too. Right. Which is like the white population was also very ready for at that particular time. Right. Because there was the huge anti-defund the police backlash. During the primary, we get little glimpses into how weird...

his tenure is going to be. One of the first big weird stories is that right before the primary, like two weeks before, Politico did some reporting that revealed that there was some evidence that Adams did not spend much time in the Brooklyn apartment he listed as his residency. Oh, yeah. And there is, in fact, a possibility, and it seems like maybe the evidence points toward him living in the co-op he owns with his girlfriend in New Jersey. Or I don't know anybody who lives in New Jersey. It sounds terrible.

So you do need to be a resident of New York to be the mayor of New York. So this is not the least important thing in the world. This results in Adams trying to end the media cycle by giving an extremely awkward tour of his apartment. He starts this off by like crying outside of his apartment, talking about his strained relationship with his son over the years. Very weird. Then he gives a tour. And it's hard to describe how many things about the apartment either seem staged or just

Too bizarre to understand like it's hard to describe But there's like a single piece of a sectional directly in front of a fireplace not like spaced back I mean like right flush against it There are curtains that are like clearly just out of the box like they have they have the folds in them someone was like We need curtains in this room. Oh my god. There's a bed in

That's just directly in front of French doors with like no way to open them. OK, there's a lineup of shoes that Internet sleuths quickly realized belonged to his son. Nice. There's fish in the fridge. And so people are like, aren't you a vegan? Because this is before it's found out that he's not. Yeah. And it's just weird. It's plausible that they staged this fake ass apartment. It's also plausible that he's just a weird fucking dude who would have a weird house. Like the fact that there's shit in his house that doesn't make sense.

Doesn't actually make me all that suspicious necessarily because this is like the...

popular knapsack with many different locations guy. Like he might, he might just have a couch in front of the fucking fireplace. I mean, he doesn't look like the kind of guy who would know how to decorate an apartment. So, you know, there's that. But the real indicator is like, you don't own a place with your girlfriend and then just live somewhere else. You know what I mean? Like that's just very unlikely. Yeah. People didn't really care. I'm not sure that I cared. I think what was funny about it was his attempt to,

dispel the controversy and

with this like weird almost like like vaguely humiliating apartment tour where you're like what do you do like it would have been better to just to just not say anything at all this is like when speedrunners get caught cheating and they're like i'm gonna release a video of me playing the game but like there's no audio and it's like desynced and they're playing with some like fake controller and it's like this is just making it worse like your attempts to prove that it's not true are kind of proving that it's true what the fuck are you talking about oh

What the fuck? You don't watch those on YouTube? I know I don't watch speed runners on YouTube, dude. Speed running cheating investigations, Peter. Oh my God. All I'm saying is that this is a familiar pattern to me. I now understand it. Give it to me in speed running. The ways in which our nerdiness both overlaps and then doesn't at all. When you say speed running, I am like picturing...

A 17 year old who's been homeschooled and one day was like, I'm going to get fast at Mario. You have been watching the videos. That's accurate. But then why are you watching? All right. You know what? No, I can't. Because they're really fast, Peter. No one who watches sports can give me shit about watching people play video games very quickly. It's a physical feat, though. It's like something's happening. Fingers are physical. People press fingers fast. That's physical. That's a physical feat.

I can't do this. Ha ha ha!

There's no argument that speed running is dumb and sports are fine. It's all dumb. There are so many arguments, okay? There are so many arguments. Let's spend the rest of the episode on this. Look, I have said publicly, sports for straight men are bravo for gays, right? That's the same basic concept. It's all entertainment. Well, this is entertainment. Fingers. I would never say sports for straight men are like speed running for gay nerds or whatever is going on here. It's not even gay.

I don't know. I'm just describing you. It actually sounds very, my guess is it actually sounds very straight. And if this is like there's overlap with like Magic the Gathering and Smash Brothers and shit. It's basically awesome. I'll send you links. I will accept your apology on our next bonus episode. Yeah, when I'm really into speed running, no fucking way. You have my promise. It

If books can kill a universe, I will never get into speed running. I'm too straight. I'm too normal. You have been watching the Eric Adams clips. I like that he's rubbing up on you. Oh, God. All right. Obviously, we've gotten sidetracked and at a weird time in the episode because now I'm about to talk about policy. Okay. We're doing the boring stuff now. Hold on. No, I've got this transition. Okay. Speaking of things that are for nerds, policy. Okay.

Nailed it. Professional podcaster. So Eric Adams, not like a policy driven mayor. Right. This is this is a guy who, again, he likes the idea of being mayor more than he likes the day to day of being mayor. And to be fair, being the mayor of New York City would suck shit. I can't be fair enough. So, again, he runs on this like tough on crime platform. Right. And so his big thing off the bat is combating bail reform, which we already did an episode on. So we don't have to elaborate too much.

The other tough on crime stuff, he takes a hard line stance on Rikers Island. Conditions at Rikers are so awful that there is a serious legal question right now of whether the federal government is going to seize operations. The previous administration under Bill de Blasio committed to closing Rikers by 2027. But Adams has sort of started like walking that back, talking about a plan B and

It's not clear if he actually could stop this, even if he wanted to. But he's also demonstrated that he just doesn't care about prison conditions. Last year, he announced that they would stop reporting inmate deaths at Rikers. Oh, my God. When the city put limitations on solitary confinement, Adams vetoed it. And then when they overrode his veto, he issued an executive order trying to nullify it anyway. Jesus. And despite promising during his campaign to discipline officers who engage in misconduct, right, like police.

That was sort of part of his platform that remained reform oriented. He was like, we're going to get black and brown people into the force, which will change the culture over time. And we're going to be serious about discipline. However, he cut the budget for the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which does police oversight. He vetoed a law that would have created...

an accounting of NYPD stops of civilians, complaints of abuse by NYPD are at a 15-year high. Jesus. He's also proposed all sorts of like surveillance state shit, like body scanners in subways and random bag searches and all this stuff that seems vaguely unconstitutional and also just like a waste of fucking money. Because they're not doing them at every single station. So you can just go to the stations that don't have the fucking scanners if you're like a terrorist or whatever. So like,

It's completely pointless. In general, the sort of like practical guy who is open to reform has never really showed up, right? He's just been unabashedly pro-police, anti-reform during his tenure. And-

completely abandoned the progressive side of his base. I mean, it's pretty clear that he was just lying to get votes, right? And that he had no intention of actually doing this stuff. I mean, who knows? The reality is that before his mayoral run, he was a reform guy. NYPD fucking hated him. He had enemies in NYPD. He wanted to win some of those enemies back. And he also...

is an old guy who didn't like defund the police shit, right? Right. And so he just takes this reactionary turn and he's sort of won over NYPD to some degree. Yeah. They seem to be aligned with him, although he's never stood in their way on fucking anything. So, you know. Yeah. One of the recent Eric Adams initiatives that has been the talk of the town is his effort to reduce the number of rats in this city. We have texted about this. Yeah.

All right, I'm now going to send you a series of clips, each of which you're going to watch for about five seconds. Okay. And then we'll be done. I want to watch the one that we watched the other day. Many of us live in communities where rats think they run the city. And we are serious about this. Everyday employees, I hear it all the time. I'm on the trains. I'm walking the streets.

Oh, I love them. I like that you sent the clip rather than the text because no one can capture it. The idea is that the rats have gotten too cocky. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not like this public health sanitation problem that we're addressing. It's like it's us versus the rats and we're going to win. All right. The next one. All right. Count's down. Listen, it's many rivers that feed to see a rat. That's one of them. There's no instinct. Okay, okay, okay.

Oh, God. Okay, and then I'm going to send you the last one. Okay. This one doesn't really translate well to podcast, but we're going to describe it for our listeners after. But first, let me count us down. Ooh!

Welcome to our trash revolution. And no one does it better than our amazing commissioner. Commissioner Tish, you have really taken on this job. All right. Welcome to our trash revolution. Our trash revolution. I love a diegetic press conference. I am now going to describe this clip for our listeners in case you haven't seen it.

Eric Adams, wearing aviators, is walking down a little driveway. In the background, Empire State of Mind is playing. Beginning, though, with a voiceover from Eric Adams himself saying there are two types of people in this world, people who live in New York and people who want to live in New York. Okay. He then arrives at a podium next to which is a trash bin and a bag of trash. He places the bag of trash into the trash bin. Woo!

Who daps up the whitest lady I've ever seen in my life and then says, welcome to our trash revolution. The thing is, I feel like the dap is important. It's this like celebratory way. He's like, look, we just put a bag of trash in a fucking trash can. And then he's like, hell yeah. Like the way that volleyball teams do after they score. It's so fucking funny. This is this is his announcement of a big anti-rat initiative. Trash bins.

This is the funniest New York thing to me. They're just bags of fucking garbage everywhere. And they're talking about it as if this isn't a solved problem in every other city in the country. No, I like I when I'm walking down the sidewalk, I like to step in a sludge comprised of every liquid that just seeped out of a trash bag. Yeah, I want like the brown puddle underneath like this.

fucking pile of bags. This is why I don't go to New York between like fucking May and like October. It's awful. It smells like Venice. What's remarkable about this clip, this is a verbal sort of tick that Eric Adams has that I picked up on after watching many hours of him. Eric Adams loves a rhetorical flourish and he loves drama. Yeah, yeah. He wants to create the vibe of a big historic moment. But his downfall is

is that he doesn't seem to understand that you can't just do that with any moment and have it feel big and important and cool. It's not like, hey, we're going back to bins. It's like, well, this is a trash revolution. Walking down a driveway to place a bag of trash into a bin as if he needs to show us what it looks like. Yeah, like, oh, what is this new plan? How does it work? The one funny thing about this is that I kind of think that...

That this initiative is going to fail. Why? Everyone's reaction was you dipshits don't use trash bins. Yes. The whole internet finally got to dunk on New York for once. It was great. Here's the thing. New York used to use trash cans. Yeah. And until like the 70s.

But they get filthy. So a lot of the problems with trash, which is gross, smelly, et cetera, are still there. They take up a ton of space. New York City is, A, very dense from a population perspective, of course, but also there's no alleys. Right. It's just not really conducive to any form of trash disposal. I don't know.

There's a lot of other big, dense cities. What they need to do is just take parking spaces from fucking cars and like put dumpsters in them or something else. Yes. They need to use public space more efficiently. Yes. There are all sorts of solutions that other cities have implemented to similar problems. But we as New Yorkers are fated to just switch back and forth between bins and bags for the next two centuries. Right.

With every single switch being touted as like a transformative moment in New York history. Yeah. Anyway, that's my analysis, my policy wonk analysis of the trash situation. Also, I need to know who brought the Bluetooth speaker. Yeah.

Who was like, okay, we're going to do this like a WWE entrance. Like you need to have a theme song and like a swagger. If you are the audio producer who did the voiceover of Eric Adams onto Empire State of Mind, I want to hear from you. Reach out. So...

A couple more policy items. One of the big political dramas recently is the migrant crisis. New York City currently housing a very large number of migrants, some of which have just been, you know, bust here by Greg Abbott and other lunatics. Initially, Adams was very open and positive about it, but eventually started saying the crisis would, quote, destroy New York City.

And started calling on like national Democrats to step in, not to mention cutting services provided to migrants. But yeah, he's sort of taken the conservative position on another big ticket issue here. Right. And also coming from New York.

Where it's like, man, all these people moving here. We can't have all these newcomers. It's like New York is the place where people fucking go from other places. I think part of this is that maybe this is the first time he's actually had like a real discreet logistical problem on his hands. Yeah. And so he was like,

freaking out about that. Yeah. I sort of feel like as like someone who believes that being mayor is showing up to photo ops. Yeah. Maybe this was weighing on him a bit, you know? Right. He has an actual problem to solve. And, you know, I mean, his administration has been characterized by like

Budget cuts for 3K libraries, trash pickups, which like, you know, may be relevant to the rats. Now we're sort of exiting the policy realm. But then you get to the Turkish corruption. Thank you. I was just going to ask about this. What what is this even? So in mid 2023, the Manhattan D.A. charged a bunch of Adams's donors with campaign finance violations, basically

Basically, a straw donor operation. The city matches campaign donations at a very high rate, like eight to one. And these guys made a bunch of falsified donations to Adams in order to take advantage of that system. Oh, so if I give a hundred bucks to Adams, the city gives 800 bucks, but I can just lie and not actually give a hundred bucks and then just funnel 800 bucks to Adams's campaign. Or you can give a hundred bucks on behalf of a bunch of other people. So-

In November 2023, Adams is visiting D.C. to talk about migrant issues. And the feds raid the home of his chief fundraiser with similar allegations, except this time there are allegations that foreign donations from Turkey were being illegally funneled to the mayor's campaign. So we go from a Manhattan D.A. investigation to the feds.

Adams has visited Turkey a couple of times when he was the borough president, including times when he had funding from the Turkish government. A couple of days later, the Fed sees Eric Adams' phone. It's classic Eric Adams. It's corrupt.

It's very weird. Yeah. It's a little bit stupid, a little bit goofy and bizarre in ways that are sort of hard to put your finger on. The idea of like a New York City mayor having international corruption stuff with Turkey. Yeah, it's just really weird. Like why? Why does Turkey care who the mayor of New York is? New York is the Istanbul of America.

We're going to end up speculating a bunch, but like it's possible that what's happening here is almost like low level corruption, that this is about like who gets to build what and where in New York City and shit like that. There are there is like a construction company involved that has ties to Turkey. So it might not be Turkey's interest. It might be like just some corrupt dude.

I mean, there's a lot of corruption within Turkey sort of made obvious by the fact that like they've got their hands in quite a few large political corruption scandals in the United States these days. It sort of makes sense that he'd be an easy mark for someone who wanted to just like run some money into New York politics for whatever reason. It's sort of like Trump, too. Whenever he gets busted doing corrupt shit, he seems to just not understand the concept.

He's like, well, of course people from like the Saudi government are staying at my hotels at these jacked up rates. Like, yeah, they're willing to pay it. Why would I not do it? It just like doesn't compute as like a scandal. Again, I just really, I wanted to avoid being like, he's just like Trump, but unfortunately he is. He kind of is. He has this weird amorality to him. To someone like Trump, there is no fairness, right? That sort of thing is a pipe dream. The only, like, you know, it's like the law of the jungle and whoever wins, wins. And so-

The idea of being like anti-corruption doesn't compute. The point is that you do the corruption for you and your allies. Yeah. Why else would you have power? Right. It's pure gangster capitalism or whatever. It's not like –

This has always been sort of like a vein of like reactionary thought. It's that it's not the sort of like market capitalism philosophy. It's like the mafioso capitalism philosophy. Right. Like we are here to grab whatever we can. And that's our right. Right. That's that's the point of acquiring power and money. And to their credit, they've been fairly transparent about this during the campaigns. They're like, yeah, I would like more power so that I can like give things to my cronies.

And then he does that and you're like, that's corrupt. And he's like, what do you mean? I've been very clear about the reason this is why I'm in politics. The last thing I want to talk about in terms of his mayoral tenure is that briefly there was like some hype.

About his ascendancy and what it meant for Democrats. Are we going to read the Nate Silver tweet? I got I got something even better for you. He built a fairly broad working class coalition. He's a black former cop coming out against police reform and pulling in black votes. Right. So a lot of puns.

pundits thought that there were lessons to be learned for the Democrats here coming out of the Black Lives Matter era. I'm going to send you my favorite headline. Oh, no. I know from the font that this is the Atlantic. Correct. Headline, Eric Adams is making white liberals squirm.

Sub-headline, he battled police brutality. Now this ex-cop is fighting efforts to defund the force. Many New Yorkers seem ready to give his middle-of-the-road ideas a try. Yeah, I am a little tiny baby. The wallet inspector is here to inspect my wallet. Yeah, I think that there was a brief moment here where...

Where are these people? There's a school of thought that Democrats have been like too quick to elevate progressives and radicals and academics in their ranks. And they, in the process, have lost touch with working people who don't want to defund police and shit like that, but in fact want a police presence everywhere.

Yeah.

Now, the main problem with this is that like something like defund the police never took hold within the Democratic Party. And the idea that you needed like a counterbalance within the party itself didn't quite make much sense. Right. Yeah. Was it like a popular slogan with activists? Yeah. Did people associate it with the Democratic Party? Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Biden had already won the election when Eric Adams is running. Right. How did he win the election? By presenting himself as a moderate alternative to Trump. Right. And then the Democratic Party won the midterms by presenting themselves as a moderate alternative to the Republicans who had just overturned Roe v. Wade. Right. Biden famously said in his State of the Union, fund the police. I shouldn't have called that my favorite headline. OK. Here's the Wall Street Journal just a couple of days after Adams took office.

office. Oh, it says Mansion Adams in 2024. No,

New York's mayor says he's the party's future. If he succeeds, he might just be that. So I'm going to send you, I'm going to send you an excerpt from this. It says, that is the central challenge to any moderate Democrat today. The left, prosecutors, teachers, unions, bureaucrats, house speakers, hold many levers of power now, and they won't budge. Reforming New York or Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, LA, Seattle, and Portland is a hard uphill climb. But if the Adams approach makes progress, the country will notice.

Then add grateful and admiring suburbanites to his coalition. Despite Mr. Biden's mysterious out-migration to the Sanders-Warren left, what, what?

We now have two prominent nationally visible Democrats, Joe Manchin and New York City's mayor, who argue the Democratic Party's future lies elsewhere. If the progressive policy disintegration continues in Washington and in the streets, someone in that party will have to pick up the pieces. How does Manchin Adams sound? These people are completely disconnected from reality. They want to cast the median Democrats as like far left people.

Because then it allows them to pretend that like Joe Manchin is a reasonable compromise for Democrats. Right. As opposed to just like the right most member of the Democratic caucus. Yeah. Because he doesn't represent a huge political constituency even. I mean, the stuff that he wanted, like cutting the child poverty tax credit is like not popular and it's not effective. Like on the merits, nothing he wants to do. He just wants to do nothing.

This is a guy who exists in exactly one political context, which is a Democrat in a very conservative state that's been there for so long that the people are willing to still vote for a Democrat. Yeah. Someone who like votes for Joe Biden's judicial appointees, but then opposes all of his policies. Yeah. What's the constituency for that? It's exactly one Senate seat. It is in keeping. I mean, at least they understand. Yeah.

That Adams is also just like a fucking miserable centrist who doesn't want to actually do anything, just like Joe Manchin. We can sort of pick this analysis apart. But maybe the important thing to note is that Eric Adams is historically unpopular. As of like last year, his approval rating was...

has fallen below 30%, basically the lowest on record for a New York mayor. And it makes sense. He's a weird guy who constantly lies, who did not actually fulfill any of his promises directed at progressives in a progressive city. Like the thesis being put forward here is

Is that like progressives are a very tiny slice of this country such that they don't even have a sizable constituency in New York. And Eric Adams proves that. Right. What Eric Adams tenure actually proved is that no progressives are a sizable constituency, at least in New York, because they fucking hate him. Yeah. And they have tanked.

his approval ratings to the point where he's at 20 something percent approval. That's a lower share than the Republican candidate got in the election against him. Right. It is also worth noting that Joe Manchin is one of the most unpopular politicians in America. That's really it. I fucking hate these people who no matter what, no matter what happens, they're like, hmm,

Should we get more racist? Should we just be a little more racist? Well, what if we gave more money to cops? What if we, you know, what if we listened even less to progressives? Like because the fact that we now have like four people in the House of Representatives has caused them to lose their minds. The thing is, I consider this a problem of political misinformation more than a debate about political ideologies.

Because the core appeal of a candidate like Eric Adams comes from the fact that people think that he represents a break from the norm. When he says like, oh, we're going to stop all this defund the police nonsense. We're finally going to let the police do what they want to do. That's the current policy. And so you have cities basically with these entrenched problems that never get solved because nobody can tell the truth about what we're doing now.

and how they would change it. Like Seattle just elected this mayor that did the same thing. Like, oh, we're finally going to cut it out with this activist nonsense. And then he's now been in office for two years. And like, has homelessness gotten better because he like cut out the nonsense? No, because all he's doing is continuing the policies we've been doing. Right. And so I think what bugs me about these columns is that it feels like they're more interested in like sticking it to the left or like

activists shut up or whatever, then just presenting to people a nuanced and like adult understanding of what the issues actually are and why they haven't been solved. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And I think that's why that's what these like op eds are meant to obscure. Right. You know, where basically they're like here in Seattle, we've tried communism. Now it's time to try like moderate practical solutions, right?

It's just a way of sort of like shifting the Overton window by sort of lying about where it currently sits. Yeah. There is one last thing that I want to mention about Eric Adams before we wrap, and it might be his most outrageous lie to date. I could not squeeze this into any other part of the episode. A couple of years back, right after Adams enters office, two

Two cops are killed in Harlem. Adams gives a big speech about it where he claimed that he has long carried in his wallet a picture of his former police officer friend who was murdered in 1987. A few days later, he poses for pictures with the photograph for The New York Times. He parades it around media and public events for several months after that.

And then the New York Times found out that the picture was fake. Nice. Adams had told the initial story, which was not true. And then his aides had rushed to manufacture an old looking photograph, which they did by printing out an old picture of this guy who was killed and then staining it with coffee. No way. They actually did that?

Like the Schindler's List thing where they're like artificially weathering a document. Yeah. Holy shit. Another example of his willingness to just weave a narrative that pleases the audience in the moment, regardless of whether it's true. Also such a fucking weird, pointless lie. You can just tell the story of a friend who...

Yeah. Who was murdered. If that's, you know, you don't have to say I carry my picture. I carry his picture with me in my wallet. Yeah. The sort of like guy who's just perpetually bullshitting.

Americans kind of like it, you know, I I have to believe that there are countries where this wouldn't work I just have you I want to believe that yeah, but it it sure works here and yeah, I think unfortunately I was hoping to go into this and being and Come out and be like he's different from Trump, but he's similar, but I actually just think he's basically the same guy Yeah, this is like lefty Trump what makes the left better than the right and

is that Eric Adams is very unpopular and will never be mayor again. That's what distinguishes the left from the right when it comes to these types of guys is we don't really like them. Whereas you put these guys on the right and they will subsume the party under the weight of their charisma. And their ability to identify popular knapsacks with many different locations. Something as simple as a crack pipe.