Ultra-progressive city Comptroller Brad Lander, who once fought to defund the police, claims to have seen the light now that he’s running for mayor; he’s also offering a great price on a bridge down by Front Street.
Now that fighting crime and disorder is a top issue for voters, Lander rolled out a public safety plan that includes bumping police hiring to 35,000 and vowing to keep NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, if he wins election.
Tisch implicitly answered that vow Wednesday morning with a barn-burner of an address making it plain that progressives like Lander are a huge part of the problem on crime.
Brad can talk about waking up to the “challenges” now obvious “in gun violence and mental health and homelessness, in retail theft and hate violence,” but he as a City Council member still voted to decriminalize public urination and drinking booze in public, supported not prosecuting fare beaters or shoplifters and backed sanctuary-city insanity including kicking ICE off of Rikers Island.
And it’s not just his long record on crime and public safety that Lander needs to live down.
He’s also been soft on Hamas, jumping in early in the war to demand a ceasefire that would’ve left the terrorists unharmed after their Oct. 7, 2023 atrocities. Nor has he spoken out against the left’s growing public antisemitism in the months since.
The Park Slope Democrat insists on lumping the rise in antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence together with the suffering of Palestinians and nonexistent Islamophobia.
Of course, Lander’s Democratic Socialist pals are all-in against Israel; he’s also big buddies with noxious Palestinian activist Linda Sarsour.
Heck, soon after winning the comptroller post in 2021, he expressed approval of Ben and Jerry’s decision to stop selling its ice cream in the West Bank.
He’s also pro-toll, taking legal action when the gov (all too briefly) paused the “congestion pricing” plan last summer and is vowing to reverse the Trump nixing of it.
Lander can campaign all he likes as an anti-crime champion of poor and working-class New Yorkers, but all he’ll actually prove is that he’s every bit as insincere as he is odious.
