Massive Scandal Alert

In this edition: Eric Adams is up to some very shady stuff.

(Photo by Arturo Holmes/Getty Images for National Urban League)

Welcome to “Massive Scandal Alert,” an occasional series in which we point out that something in the news sure seems like a massive scandal.

Today’s Massive Scandal Alert (or MSA for short) comes to us courtesy of the “Big Apple” itself, New York City. New Yorkers (including, full disclosure, myself) are currently ruled over by Mayor Eric Adams, who is bad in roughly 153 million ways.

One of the things that Adams has been bad about is the influx of migrants that other states have been sending to New York City in a nasty combination of political trolling and sheer human cruelty. This is a big humanitarian and logistical challenge that would pose issues for even a good mayor. But Adams is not a good mayor. For months, he has chosen to talk about the new arrivals as though they are locusts descending from the sky. He has said that the city is being “destroyed” by the migrants (longtime resident here, the city has not been destroyed), has overhauled regulations so that they can be kicked out of city shelters more quickly, is printing fliers telling migrants not to come to New York, and declared that there is “no more room” left for any newcomers. (For evidence that New York is actually quite capable of absorbing newcomers, please examine the entire history of the city.)

This is all quite scandalous and disgusting, but the specific MSA we’re bringing you today comes from a piece by Jay Root in Sunday’s New York Times about one of the ways that the Adams administration has chosen to handle the migrant influx—namely, by being extremely shady and corrupt.

Lemme give you the gist.