cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6117166
Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who won the mayoral primary, said the department was racist and homophobic in a social media post.
its true tho
Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, said on Thursday that he intended to apologize for comments he made in 2020 calling the New York Police Department “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.”
He said that the remarks, which he wrote in June 2020 in a social media post in support of the defund the police movement, were made after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis a month earlier.
The comments were made “at the height of frustration,” he said in an interview with The New York Times, and were not reflective of his current campaign or “my view of public safety and the fact that police will be critical partners in delivering public safety.”
Mr. Mamdani’s post from 2020 has been recirculated by his political opponents, who have used his previous criticism of the police to portray him as weak on issues of public safety. Mr. Mamdani, a New York State assemblyman, is far ahead of his three rivals, who include Mayor Eric Adams, a former police captain who has consistently placed fourth in recent polling.
When he was asked if he should apologize to the city’s police officers, he paused noticeably before answering. He then went on to explain how his views had changed. After he was asked again if he owed officers an apology, he said, “Yes.”
Mr. Mamdani’s statements on Thursday came amid recent attempts to reach out to the police rank-and-file, an effort to address one of his biggest political vulnerabilities. His past criticism of the police has fed the skepticism and even hostility expressed by many police officers, who are wary of the changes he plans to make to the department.
dude you have like a 20 points lead, stop capitulating
Fun Historical Fact
Louis Blanc was a popular French Socialist who advocated for the creation of State-run Stores & Businesses to benefit the Working ClassHe would go on to condemn the Paris Commune for being too Radical, just before the Army violently purged the City's Working Class
Especially since there are whole gangs of people who make a whole cottage industry out of throwing "officially not left enough!" bombs at whoever is the most left, and encouraging people not to vote for them.
It doesn't actually matter whether it's true or not, although you can usually find some kind of misdemeanor if you go back enough years and dig deep enough. Bernie Sanders, apparently, is a Zionist, for example.
The astroturfers making left unity this difficult has always been extremely frustrating to me. It would be a pleasure to deny the right a measure of unity from time to time, in turn.
Well, they are shooting each other. They're sort of always lacking unity just because they tend to be individually pretty dangerous and dishonest in a way that makes it hard to have lasting unity on that side either, with recent events as a new example. They have their own brand of disunity dysfunction, as the left has its own.
That said, I actually kind of suspect that at least a little bit of their new disunity now isn't accidental. Trump's been pissing off Russia, and I sort of suspect that all the sudden panic about Trump being friends with Epstein is because they're trying to poke back at him. None of the information about that is at all new. You would think that the big freakout would be when someone testified under oath that he raped her as a child, something like that, and not because a big picture-book came out that had his signature on it. But I notice it's all of a sudden an "official thing the news can freak out about" now in a way that for some fuckin' reason it wasn't before.
You don't comfort me, but you're right that it feels very manufactured in a lot of ways.