Racist Mayor: Bill de Blasio

Editor’s note: This is the 14th part in Frontpage Mag’s series on Racist Mayors. (See previous parts below this article). Stay tuned for more installments.

Bill de Blasio has been the mayor of New York City for nearly eight years. He has a habit of frequently and proudly proclaiming his unwavering commitment to protecting the civil and human rights of New York’s black community. No doubt he is sincere in his belief that he is a white champion for the African American cause. But the unspoken, uncomfortable truth that de Blasio will never acknowledge is that he in fact sees black men and women not as fully developed human beings entirely capable of having agency over their own lives, but rather, as profoundly handicapped beings who are to be forever pitied. He sees them not as dignified adults, but as pathetic, incompetent, childlike victims of a society so cruel, that only the paternalistic helping hand of sanctimonious white leftists like Bill de Blasio can save them.

Among the handmaidens of paternalistic, sanctimonious white leftists are black revolutionaries for whom the doctrine of eternal black victimhood is forever the coin of the realm. As such, de Blasio encourages black Americans to hitch their hopes and dreams to the angry rantings of people like Al Sharpton. In one of his first speeches as mayor-elect, for instance, de Blasio visited Sharpton’s National Action Network and stated: “Every year Reverend Sharpton is becoming stronger as a leader, is reaching farther as a leader…. And he’ll be the first one up to stand up for justice. I gotta tell you guys, he’s a blessing for all of us.” A few weeks into his first term as mayor, de Blasio said at the National Action Network’s annual conference in New York: “I just want everyone to know I am proud to stand with Rev. Sharpton. Because to borrow a phrase from our youth, Reverend, ‘you’re the real thing.’” And at Sharpton’s 60th birthday celebration on October 1, 2014, de Blasio characterized him as “a blessing for this city,” adding: “The more people criticize him, the more I want to hang out with him.”

On none of those occasions did de Blasio make even a passing mention of Sharpton’s long history as an outspoken racist and Jew-hater. That’s because in de Blasio’s mind, black contempt for whites and Jews is nothing more than karma.

At de Blasio’s first swearing-in ceremony as mayor on January 1, 2014, a prayer was delivered by prison chaplain Askia Muhammad, a former Nation of Islam member and an avid supporter of none other than Louis Farrakhan. Farrakhan, you may recall, has distinguished himself by describing Adolf Hitler as “a very great man,” and has spent many decades denouncing “white devils” and the “satanic” Jewish “bloodsuckers” who practice a “gutter religion.”

De Blasio was outraged after a Staten Island grand jury decided, in December 2014, not to indict a white New York City police officer whose recent effort to arrest an uncooperative black criminal named Eric Garner had tragically resulted in Garner’s death – largely because of the latter’s pre-existing, underlying medical morbidities. “There are so many families in this city who [wonder] each and every night, is my child safe?” the mayor lamented in response to the grand jury’s decision. “And not just from … crime and violence … but are they safe from the very people they want to have faith in as their protectors?” “[O]ur history, sadly, requires us to say that black lives matter,” de Blasio added. “Because as I said the other day, we’re not just dealing with a problem in 2014. We’re not dealing with years of racism leading up to it, or decades of racism. We are dealing with centuries of racism that have brought us to this day. That is how profound the crisis is..”

In a July 2016 interview with CNN, de Blasio praised the Black Lives Matter movement, saying: “I think that movement, just the very phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ has changed the national discussion … for the better.” On another occasion, he described Black Lives Matter as a “positive movement” that had “hit the right note” on the subject of racism and police violence in America. In short, the mayor was proud to voice his high esteem for an avowedly Marxist, anti-Semitic, racial supremacist movement whose most revered icon is Assata Shakur, a lifelong Marxist revolutionary whose greatest claim to fame was her cold-blooded, execution-style murder of a white state trooper.

During a June 30, 2020 appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program, de Blasio proudly emphasized the “profound change” that would be taking place in New York – in the form of defunding the city’s police department — so as to promote the creation of a “safer city in the future.” He also announced that some of the money that was being taken from the NYPD would be used to fund the painting of the words “Black Lives Matter,” in massive yellow letters, onto the pavement of Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower. “We’re going to take this moment in history and amplify it by taking the ‘Black Lives Matter’ symbolism and putting it all over this city, including right in front of Trump Tower,” said the mayor. In a photo op, de Blasio himself actually helped paint the words on the street, as did his wife, Chirlane McCray, and his beloved ally, Al Sharpton.

During a July 9, 2020 interview with CNN, de Blasio stated that while all large scheduled events in the city, such as parades and festivals, were being cancelled for the foreseeable future because of concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic, he would nonetheless permit hundreds and thousands of Black Lives Matter protesters to continue marching through the streets whenever they wished. Why? Because the post-George Floyd era was “a historic moment of change,” the mayor explained.

And what was the fruit of Mayor de Blasio’s love affair with Black Lives Matter and its war on the police? For one thing, as the NYPD’s Chief of Department, Terence Monahan, put it last summer: “The animosity towards police has been absolutely unbelievable.” And because so many cops understood that de Blasio and his administration could not in any way be trusted to support them, more than 5,300 NYPD uniformed officers either retired or put in their papers to leave the department in 2020 — a 75 percent increase over the year before.

Those factors — anti-police hatred coupled with widespread officer resignations — were, in turn, intimately linked to a spike in crime rates like the city had not seen in decades. From 2019 to 2020 in NYC, shootings increased by 97%, murders by 44%, burglaries by 42%, and car thefts by 62%. Moreover, most of the perpetrators of those crimes — as well as most of the victims — were black residents of New York. A once-safe and well-ordered city suddenly turned into a war zone where the black lives that supposedly “mattered” so much to Mayor de Blasio were suddenly under continuous, violent assault.

All because of a racist mayor who cloaks his exceedingly low regard for black people in the flowery, hollow rhetoric of “racial justice.” If New York were to have elected, as its mayor, a Klansman who openly wished to create an atmosphere that would inevitably lead to a massive increase in black death and suffering across the city, he could not have done any more to achieve such an objective than Mayor Bill de Blasio has done.

Previous Parts of the Series:

Part I: Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot.
Part 2: LA’s Eric Garcetti.
Part 3: DC’s Muriel Bowser.
Part 4: KC’s Quinton Lucas.
Part 5: SF’s London Breed.
Part 6: Philly’s Jim Kenney.
Part 7: St. Louis’ Tishaura Jones.
Part 8: Jackson’s Chokwe Antar Lumumba.
Part 9: Seattle’s Jenny Durkan.
Part 10: Minneapolis’s Jacob Frey.
Part 11: Charlottesville’s Nikuyah Walker.
Part 12: Portland’s Ted Wheeler.
Part 13: Keisha Lance Bottoms.