Cards on the table: I’m glad to see Mayor Adams make clear, in deeds and words, that there are limits to the disruptions — to transit hubs, major roadways and college campuses — that he’s willing to tolerate.
He seems confident that most New Yorkers are on his side, and I expect polling will bear that out.
Unlike his Democratic predecessor, Adams, a former cop not to mention a former Republican, is functioning as the city’s executive leader, not merely its prime minister, and communicating and sometimes governing, for better and worse, in line with the will of the city rather than the will of the party as the space between those keeps widening.
And the NYPD is singing to this mayor’s tune, not working to undermine him like it did Bill de Blasio.
As to the protest organizers aiming to generate dramatic confrontations with the cops and the imagery that’s supposed to come with those escalations, they’re using classic techniques and new twists on them that emerged in the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street to try and bend if not popular opinion then at least cravenly college administrators to advance an ugly, decades-long ideological effort to........