Leftists are still talking about the drubbing they took in the 2022 midterms in New York, even though they won the governor's chair with an absolutely repulsive hag who dismissed violent crime as the problem of those who complain about it.

I still don't think that election was clean. However, it is what it is.

No wonder the left is just a little queasy about it all, just a little spooked about that result. The locals, who are normally inclined to vote 'Democrat' don't seem to love them anymore, and sure enough the reason is violent crime.

So here's the headline and subhed from The Nation, written by one Jumaane P. Williams, which was featured on today's RealClearPolitics:

When It Comes to Crime, the Left Has a Messaging Problem

Progressives must do a better job speaking to people’s fears and presenting an affirmative case for our workable, effective policies on public safety.

Apparently, that's all it is. Messaging. Not results, of course, just bad spin doctoring.

Leftists lost seat after seat in ultra-blue New York (the GOP took four congressional seats on Lee Zeldin's coattails), all because leftists aren't "messaging" well enough. Pay no attention to the results of their sorry policies which created the massive wave of crime hitting New York, featuring old people being pushed down subway steps; Chinese young women being stealthily following into their apartments by killers who push their way in and slaughter them; nurses, ordinary people, moms, and dads with kids being pushing into oncoming subways, boutiques being trashed by organized looting rings who put out the notice to loot onto Twitter, and more.

Anecdotal, schmanecdotal, and never mind that these things make the news because they are so horrid and new, and never used to happen in New York within recent memory. And they happen over and over and over again, not just once in awhile.

CNN is putting out stories like this:

Major crimes in New York City spiked nearly 60% in February compared to the same month in 2021 – a large majority occurring in a small swath of the metropolis – as Mayor Eric Adams rolled out his plan to combat gun violence and crime in the city.

The New York Police Department tracked increases across every major crime category. The city recorded a 41% increase in overall major crime through the first months of 2022 compared to the same period last year, including a nearly 54% increase in robberies, a 56% increase in grand larceny incidents and a 22% increase in rape reports, the data shows.

“We’ve got to get it right,” Adams said Friday. “Two months in, we’re executing our plan and we’re going to defeat crime. I’m clear on that.”

Murders increased by 10%, while citywide shooting incidents decreased by 1.3%, with 77 incidents in February 2021 and 76 incidents last month, NYPD data shows.

And in response, record numbers of New Yorkers are running for their lives. According to RebelNews:

Thousands of New Yorkers have fled the Democrat-run state in hopes of greener pastures, with many of them settling in conservative Florida. 

According to a New York Post analysis of data from the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, a startling 5,833 New Yorkers changed their driver's licenses to Florida last month, bringing the total of New Yorkers moving to the sunshine state over 41,000. 

Speaking to the New York Post, Alvin Valley, a fashion designer who moved to Florida, said that “First it was the billionaires. Then it was the rich following behind them. Now you have the middle class.”

“A lot of families just began to feel like New York was becoming unliveable,” he added, “Especially for younger couples with kids in their thirties and forties. They don’t want to get on the subway. It’s a safety issue, it’s a school issue.”

That's obviously a sign of a problem. There has been some speculation that the only reason Kathy Hochul was able to beat Lee Zeldin in the midterm race despite Zeldin's coattail victories with downballot races, was that so many potential GOP voters have fled their state.

So who is Jumaane G. Williams and what solution is he offering to the left?

I'll get into who he is in a minute, let's look at what he is telling the lefties their problem is:

There are several reasons for those [electoral] losses, including complacency at the top of the ticket and ineptitude by the state party. Many races in the New York City area, though, were defined by public safety and perceptions of it, with conservative outlets molding those perceptions by pushing hysterical narratives on crime. Elected officials of both parties were all too eager to accept and advance those narratives.

To be clear: While crime has increased in New York since the start of the pandemic, that is part of a national rise in violence over that period. New York City is still statistically much safer now than it was even 10 years ago, and progressive justice reforms have been shown again and again to not be a cause of this increase in crime, regardless of what tabloids and elected officials have counterfactually insisted. Hyperbolic coverage of crime have spurred voters to align with the party that has long been—erroneously—perceived as better on these issues.

So it's all the New York Post's coverage and were it not for that, everyone would feel 'safe' in New York.

Williams tries to get his hands on the problem, but the whole thing slips between his fingers:

At the same time, it’s not enough for progressives to reject these narratives or refute these falsehoods. Under the overblown rhetoric is a real increase in crime. Under the disingenuous fearmongering is real fear. Under the statements and statistics are real individuals and families facing pain and loss as a result of violence in their neighborhoods.

Too often, progressives are characterized as not caring about that pain, because, too often, progressives are quick to minimize the realities of crime and violence because of the compassion inherent in progressive ideology and policy. Statistics mean nothing to victims of a crime, and unfortunately mean little to people hearing the visceral, emotional stories of those victims.

Apparently he doesn't notice that when enough people become victims of violent crime, then EVERYONE comes to the conclusion that violent crime is a problem.

His solution? It doesn't get more detailed than this:

But I know from experience that there are ways to talk about these issues that convince people of the benefits of progressive public safety policies, ways that recognize and respond to fears rather than dismiss or aggravate them. I’ve seen strategies find success that I believe the movement must adopt.

We can and must do a better job not only speaking to that pain and those fears but presenting an affirmative case for our workable, effective policies on public safety. On mental health, on gun violence, on law enforcement, on housing, and on economic issues, all of which play a role in public safety, our policies are better, but our messaging is worse. Most of my individual conversations on public safety end in agreement, but on a mass scale, our message is being distorted or drowned out in favor of louder, more emotional voices. An overreliance on our long-term ideals is not landing with people who also demand short-term solutions.

So, like Chesa Boudin, the former wokester San Francisco district attorney who was thrown out of office for telling that city's citizens, including its beleaguered crime victims victimized over and over and over, that the high crime engulfing that city was ... all in their heads. Their problems were their feelings, and "not feeling safe" as he put it, not his statistics, which were all rigged anyway, based on cops retiring at their desks and victims no longer reporting crimes.

That approach went over like a lead balloon in that even bluer city and sure enough, Boudin got the boot he so badly deserved.

Williams claims he won the last election on this "messaging" which is weird stuff, his Wikipedia page says the last election he won was in 2019, during the Trump era, in the little-noticed position for public advocate. He lost two other races at the primary stage to other Democrats, including Hochul. Maybe all that "messaging" didn't do the trick.

Where he really goes off the rails, though, is on policy, insisting that ruling leftists must double down on their own monstrously failed justice reforms which have made New York a criminal's paradise.

This is not a call to step back from our solutions or beliefs on public safety—on the contrary, we have to lean forward. Progressives have a messaging problem; conservatives have a moral and factual problem; but so-called moderates may have the worst electoral problem of all.

Getting voters to support the strategies that we know work—the public safety policies that helped make my city the safest it had been in half a century prior to the pandemic—is a challenge even when crime is down. When crime is rising, it’s even more important to stand by those values, but harder to do so—and so many people prefer to run away from their convictions and toward conservatism.

If a policy fails, you try something else, at least that's how normal people do it. This guy advocates doubling down on the wokesterism, because Republicans are morally wrong.

Such an idiot. 

And who is Williams? Why, one of the architects of New York's crime-ridden state of misery. Surprise, surprise.

Wikipedia says he was a big supporter of Occupy! Wall Street, and since then has served in city council positions as a progressive representing the "dead" district of Flatbush, an urban wasteland, winning the advocacy of the Working Families Party and serving as a "democratic socialist" with Democratic Socialists of America affiliation, same as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He's one of those.

Meanwhile, as city councilman, amNY outlines his record on that front:

Williams was first elected in 2009 in District 45, which represents Flatbush, East Flatbush, Flatlands, Midwood and Canarsie. He was re-elected in 2013 and 2017. 

One of the first issues he addressed as a councilman was the NYPD’s “stop-and-frisk” policy. He co-sponsored the Community Safety Act, which created the Office of Inspector General in the NYPD.

Among other legislation he has sponsored is the “Ban the Box” bill, which prohibits employers from asking about an applicant’s criminal history before making an offer.

End stop and frisk. Hire dishonest criminals for city government jobs to rule over the law-abiding. Harass the cops and ensure they retire at their desks or leave the force.

Maybe the fact that he was arrested in 2009 after a disgusting altercation with his girlfriend of five years, throwing a snow globe, dumping the contents of her purse on the floor, damaging a wall and breaking a chair, might have something to do with this, who knows?

He's quite a guy. 

Making life easy for criminals and not putting them away after they commit crimes is pretty much the root of what's wrong with New York and why citizens are voting with their feet. These are the policies he created and he now demands doubling down on, while telling the locals the crime they are experiencing is all in their heads. He proposes pretend-compassion for them at public meetings to make the aggrieved citizens go away, and then forging full speed ahead at ending any semblance of rule of law at all in New York City. Pat them on the head and get woker.

Now he's preaching this approach to the lefties, and you can bet that with them desperate at losing so many seats in Congress, they will take him up on it. You know he will get good press as a result. Chesa Boudin tried this once already. Let's see him try this once again on savvy New Yorkers and see how he does.

Image: Michael Fleshman, via Wikipedia // CC BY-SA 2.0