Broad daylight.
Why aren’t we talking about a collapse of law and order so severe that a lone gunman felt comfortable enough to stroll the streets of Midtown Manhattan, late on a sunny afternoon, carrying an assault rifle?
Just look at his posture, his stride, his demeanor. That confidence should chill to the bone.
But we’re not talking about that.
No. We’re talking about who the gunman was, what his motive could possibly be, and the shock of a mass shooting in a posh Park Avenue office building that left four innocent people, including an off-duty police officer – a father of two with a baby due next month – dead.
If this doesn’t wake up New York City and soft-on-crime liberalism at large, nothing will.
The same well-heeled, virtue-signaling Manhattan Democrats who just voted socialist Zohran Mamdani as their nominee for mayor – a guy who, in my opinion, isn’t being honest about his anti-cop, anti-Semitic stances – consider mass shootings a problem for other parts of America.
The parts where the poor and uneducated live. Massacres such as this are the province of rural red states, they think, a kind of like-attracts-like.
Not anymore.
Why aren’t we talking about a collapse of law and order so severe that a lone gunman felt comfortable enough to stroll the streets of Midtown Manhattan, late on a sunny afternoon, carrying an assault rifle?
If this doesn’t wake up New York City and soft-on-crime liberalism at large, nothing will.
The same well-heeled, virtue-signaling Manhattan Democrats who just voted socialist Zohran Mamdani as their nominee for mayor consider mass shootings a problem for other parts of America.
Yet this savage attack, in an office tower that houses the gunman’s intended target – the NFL headquarters, in a building so large it has its own zip code – was made possible by a deep blue city that, like so many others, has been standing down since George Floyd.
This rot goes back to the BLM riots of 2020, which elected officials and the liberal mainstream media told us was peaceful protest.
Riots and looting? Look the other way. Small price to pay for America’s virulent strain of white supremacy.
And the swallowing of this malignant lie led to race hustlers like ‘White Fragility’ author Robin DiAngelo – herself a white woman! – pocketing millions from CEOs to tell their white workers how intractably racist they are; to DEI policies that encourage discrimination and unfair hiring practices; and pro-crime, anti-public safety policies that see career criminals turfed through the system and back onto streets.
In New York, retail security guards are often told by management to let shoplifters abscond with whatever they like and are explicitly instructed not to interfere.
You know: Not do the very job they were hired to do – the job that’s in the job title.
But lawmakers would rather lock up toothpaste at CVS than criminals at Rikers.
This laxity was completely responsible for alleged killer Luigi Mangione feeling emboldened to shoot a healthcare exec, a husband and father – in broad daylight, on the streets of Midtown Manhattan.
And instead of valorizing the victim, Mangione is the hero, lionized in San Francisco’s ‘Luigi: The Musical’ – such a smash that it may be heading to Broadway.
Yes, a musical about an accused stone-cold killer may be mounted just blocks away from the actual murder.
And why not? New York is on the verge of electing Mamdani, a vocal proponent of ‘defund the police’.
Mamdani says his position has changed. I don’t buy it. I think he’s saying the politically expedient things needed to win.
Most of Mamdani’s rivals – Mayor Eric Adams, former governor Andrew Cuomo, and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa – have called for thousands more cops to be hired.
Not Mamdani. He’d like more social workers.
As he celebrated his wedding at his family’s lavish compound in Uganda night – a wedding that took place back in February, by the way – Mamdani issued a generic tweet about being ‘heartbroken’.
Not furious, or incentivized, or ready on Day One to harden up New York’s soft targets. Just ‘heartbroken’.
It didn’t take long for some of Mamdani’s old tweets to surface. Such as: ‘We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.’
And this guy has the gall, in his initial tweet this week, to mention last – not first – the off-duty police officer who was shot.
As to that old tweet, Mamdani went on to make his position crystal clear: ‘What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD.’
It didn’t take long for some of Mamdani’s old tweets to surface. Such as: ‘We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.’
This unblinking embrace of America as a wholly white supremacist county, culture and criminal justice system has surely led directly to CNN anchor Erin Burnett looking at a surveillance image of the shooter and telling her rapidly dwindling viewership that he was ‘possibly white’.
Paging Jussie Smollett!
White people propagating the myth of pervasive white supremacy led to the Jussie swindle too, and now we’re at a point where Sydney Sweeney’s ad for American Eagle denim has been tarred as the same.
As national discourse goes, this is a new low.
It’s a humiliation and it’s beneath us and it’s brought us, as with so much of wokeness, to an Orwellian state in which we are told not to trust our own eyes, ears and experiences.
Come November election day in New York, this fresh horror will be but a distant memory, and a wealthy anti-cop socialist hypocrite will most likely be celebrated as the city’s mayor and future.
One day after the shooting, while ending a work call, a colleague said two words I haven’t heard since the aftermath of 9/11: ‘Stay safe.’
We are at war. And the bad guys are winning.
