If she were a Republican or it were 2020, Democrat New York Gov. Kathy Hochul would be accused of putting black lives in danger. On Wednesday, the Democrat governor mobilized 750 National Guard troops to patrol the New York City subway with 250 state and local police officers conducting random bag checks. Spikes in violent crime prompted the mobilization.
“These brazen heinous attacks on our subway system will not be tolerated,” Hochul said. “No one heading to their job or to visit family or go to a doctor appointment should worry that the person sitting next to them possesses a deadly weapon.”
Sending in the troops is effectively stop-and-frisk on steroids, a successful policy that haunted former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s 2020 presidential campaign. Bloomberg dropped out of the race months before the death of drug addict George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody jacked up far-left animosity against law enforcement. The first two weeks of Floyd riots alone cost an estimated 66 times the damage inflicted at the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
As riots devastated Main Streets across America, Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton wrote an op-ed for The New York Times calling on then-President Donald Trump to “Send in the Troops.” Cotton urged the White House to mobilize the military with the Insurrection Act to restore peace.
“The American people aren’t blind to injustices in our society, but they know that the most basic responsibility of government is to maintain public order and safety,” Cotton wrote. “In normal times, local law enforcement can uphold public order. But in rare moments, like ours today, more is needed, even if many politicians prefer to wring their hands while the country burns.”
New York Times activist staffers responded with outrage, posting on social media, “Running this puts Black [New York Times] staffers in danger.” The paper’s union issued a statement calling the article “a clear threat to the health and safety of the journalists we represent,” and the editor who published the senator’s article, James Bennet, was promptly ousted.
Cotton took an online victory lap Wednesday following the news of Hochul’s efforts to restore law and order to the nation’s largest subway system.
The New York Times coverage of Hochul’s initiative was generic, in contrast to its hysteria over Cotton’s op-ed.
“Subway safety is a constant concern in New York City, where the system’s recovery is critical to the city’s rebound from the pandemic, and public officials can be as sensitive to the perception that mass transit is dangerous as they are to an actual rise in crime,” the Times reported. “The additional law enforcement officers would add to an already large police presence in the subways, where Mayor Eric Adams ordered an additional 1,000 officers in February following a 45 percent spike in major crimes in January compared with the same time last year.”
