Back in September 2022 when he was touting his state’s supposedly world-class reputation, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, took a cheap shot at Kansas.
“We have a brand, and when people see it, it means something,” Adams stated at the time.
“You know when we go there, Kansas doesn’t have a brand. When you go there, OK, you’re from Kansas. But New York has a brand and that brand is diversity,” Adams also claimed.
A few months later, Adams again took aim at Kansas while bragging about being elected mayor to the “most powerful city on the globe.”
“I strongly believe in all my heart, God said, ‘I’m going to take the most broken person and I’m going to elevate him to the place of being the mayor of the most powerful city on the globe,’” Adams told attendees during an interfaith breakfast in February 2023.
“He could have made me the mayor of Topeka, Kansas. He could have made me the mayor of some small town or village somewhere.”
Blue-state Democrats and red-state Republicans have, for decades now, always openly talked about the benefits of living in their cities or states in contrast with those that are run by their political opposition.
But Adams’ comments weren’t just a swipe at red-state leaders but also the people who call Kansas home.
Despite promoting themselves as the champions of diversity and differing points of view over the years, New York Democrats, those at both city and state levels, have been notoriously hostile toward and unwelcoming of conservatives.
For instance, in 2014, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo point-blank told conservatives they weren’t welcome in the Empire State if they held, to his way of thinking, the wrong point of view.
Conservatives who were pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, and pro-traditional marriage “have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are,” Cuomo, who went on to resign in disgrace seven years later amid a sexual harassment scandal, said at the time.
In August 2022, when faced with a formidable general election opponent in Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul urged Republicans she didn’t like including Zeldin to leave the state.
“…just jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong. OK? Get out of town. Because you don’t represent our values,” Hochul said during a campaign rally.
In an apparent effort to demonstrate how New York was once again on the cutting edge of things, last week the Big Apple made a big production of rolling out automated side-loading garbage trucks, which we also learned were built after consultation with “experts” in Turin, Italy.
“The truck you see next to me,” Adams told reporters who were busy snapping pictures and taking video, “represents the future of New York City garbage collection.”
The truck was… very similar, almost identical, to the ones Podunksville and Hicktown USA have been seeing pull into their neighborhoods on the designated day of the week going back decades. But for the Adams administration, it was — to borrow a term then-Vice President Joe Biden once used — “a big f***in’ deal” because it was new to them.
It always amazed me when I visited NYC to see the bags of trash piled up on city streets, which I later found out was that way thanks to the unions who opposed the automated trucks because they would mean fewer workers needed for trash pickup.
Back to Adams and the fanfare-filled truck debut, the consensus from red staters on social media was to welcome New York City to “the 20th century” when it came to garbage collection, a well-deserved ding considering Adams’ – and other New York Democrats’ – obvious disdain for people who don’t think like them.
North Carolina native Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym Sister Toldjah and is a media analyst and regular contributor to RedState and Legal Insurrection.
