Charles Fain Lehman, Heather Mac Donald, Judge Glock, and Rafael Mangual discuss the Trump-Harvard fight, the New York City Council’s lawsuit against Mayor Eric Adams, and transit crime.
Audio Transcript
Charles Fain Lehman: Welcome back to the City Journal podcast. I’m your host, Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor of City Journal. Today on our panel, I am joined by Judge Glock, economics policy guy at the Manhattan Institute, and Rafael Mangual, our crime policy expert. And today with special guest, Heather Mac Donald, Thomas Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and of course, a contributing editor of City Journal, and long time champion of City Journal. Heather, thank you so much for joining us.
I want to get us right into the news of the day. We’ve been following very closely this Harvard case, the conflict between the Trump administration and Harvard University. On Monday, Harvard brought suit against the administration, alleging a variety of both procedural and substantive violations. The administration, meanwhile, has sort of tried to backtrack on its particularly aggressive ask of Harvard, saying basically, “we didn’t really mean to send you that memo.” Heather, you wrote in CJ, I think last week about the administration’s movement on Harvard, and you sort of said that it’s going in the right direction, but they’re going about it in a somewhat a blundering way. Can you elaborate a little bit on how you’re thinking about that and how you thought about their initial actions?
Heather Mac Donald: Well, it’s very frustrating for me, Charles, because I will secede to no one in my hatred for universities. I think they are the driving force for the anti-Western hatred that is pulling down our civilization, that is destroying meritocracy, that is breeding division, that is breeding falsehood. They are currently constantly talking about themselves as so fanatically dedicated to the unfettered pursuit of truth. Well, that’s completely wrong as far as the unfettered pursuit goes because they are absolutely involved in shutting down contrary, unorthodox viewpoints and they are taking us in the opposite direction of truth. So I’m all for uprooting them. I’m just very uncertain that the government, the federal government, is the right entity to do so.
And this puts me in a difficult position, but I do think that conservatives above all have to believe and maintain the idea that the federal government is limited in its powers. It can act only on the basis of constitutional grants. And when it does act, it needs to follow certain types of procedures. And in this case, when the… And also what haunts me throughout this entire, extremely exciting period of what Trump is doing, in many instances, on matters that I completely agree with him on a substantive basis, I think all the time what happens when the tables flip and the precedents that he created will be used by a left-wing government in favor of its, in the pursuit of its favorite causes, so that’s how I approach this matter. And when Trump sent that, the administration, task force on anti-Semitism sent a demand letter to Harvard, asking, demanding that it monitor itself for viewpoint diversity, that it hire a critical mass of intellectually diverse faculty, that it conform itself, that it promote the faculty that are most in sync with the Trump administration.
It does not necessarily have the constitutional power to make those demands. And as far as withholding funding, which is what prompted the Harvard suit on Monday, it is the case that federal statutes set out a procedure by which the government can withhold funding for violations of the civil rights statutes. It needs to have a hearing. It needs to give notice to the government. It needs to try to negotiate an alternative resolution. It needs to send a report to Congress, give Congress 30 days to think over the matter and see whether it agrees with the administration before it can withhold funds. The Trump administration has done none of that. So it’s…
On the other hand, Harvard obviously demands no sympathy. It’s going around like every university today with these nauseating protestations about its commitment to truth. Harvard, let’s not forget, was the one that got rid of Ronald Sullivan from being a master of a dorm. And I shouldn’t even use “master” because that’s another thing that Harvard did was get rid of the term master because it apparently made black students feel so unsafe based on a totally phony etymology that claimed that it was based on a master-slave relationship, whereas in fact it was based on a medieval honorific towards teachers. But Harvard got rid of Ronald Sullivan, a Harvard law professor, from working as a master in an undergraduate dorm because he was representing Harvey Weinstein and that made the students feel unsafe. Harvard basically drummed out a biology researcher, Carole Hooven, because she maintained that there are two biological sexes, no in-betweens, no alternatives and it’s not something you decide upon by choice, it’s in your chromosomes. Harvard had the place mat, the place mats for racial justice, where it wanted to send its students home for Thanksgiving vacation with ways to indoctrinate their parents about the Black Lives Matter movement.
Harvard is absolutely fantastically overfunding diversity, bureaucracies, none of which it has touched. So it does not deserve our sympathy. Nevertheless, the federal government is being too heavy handed. It should be following the law assiduously rather than giving meat to the ridiculous idea that we’re heading towards authoritarianism that the left and the New York Times is embracing. And frankly, you know, sometimes from one perspective, it looks like it.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I want to bring Judge in, because I’m curious, as I think the other person most, really everyone on this call is pretty sympathetic to the sort federalist, minimally invasive federal powers argument. But Judge, I’m curious if you think, if there’s a way for the administration to backtrack and sort of do this in the right fashion, have they gotten out over their skis? I think Heather’s right, and by the way, she has a great piece in the most recent, the newly out issue of City Journal that I could check out about the sort of misconduct of these universities. But so I’m curious if there’s a way for the Trump administration to reclaim this like, you know, the mantle of justice here.
Judge Glock: Well, kind of like Heather said, the best way to do that would be to focus as narrowly as possible on the civil rights claims, the claims about inappropriate hiring and inappropriate applications that have already been adjudicated by the Supreme court, using race, especially, to decide who gets hired and who gets into the administration. That’s clearly illegal, and they, the federal government, does have laws in place to stop that. And they should, as others said, go about, stopping that in a typical lawful way.
I get particularly uptight or concerned when a lot on the right, though, say, well, listen, the Harvard Corporation, you, Columbia University, you take federal money and therefore you’re required to adhere to not just basic civil rights law, but this whole panoply of federal demands that we are putting on you, whether those be actually imposed somewhat through Congress or directly through the Trump administration, precisely because we live in a world where the federal government has its tentacles on absolutely everything. The tax code is subsidizing us in some way through our child tax credit, just at the same time as it’s taking money from us. The tax exemptions for, for nonprofits, obviously, now encompass a massive part of our entire economy. I think it’s almost 10 % of our whole economy goes through a nonprofit in one shape or form. All of these companies get Medicare grants, Medicaid grants, research grants. We all are participating in this and we certainly don’t want to go down the path of, well, if you take the money, then of course you have to adhere to federal dictates.
That’s not a path we want to go down and that’s the path they think conservatives have rightly been warning about for the past hundred years. This is a different variation of the you didn’t build that phenomenon. The idea that hey, the government paid for the roads you used to drive to work and therefore you’re actually a product in some way shape or form of the federal government and you have to listen to do what we tell you to do. No, no, no, absolutely. If anything, we should obviously try to disentangle ourselves from all these federal funding streams which are largely destructive and we shouldn’t use them to impose more burdens or use them in a selective manner to just attack the people who’s ever in power at a moment want to attack.
Heather Mac Donald: Can I, and I absolutely agree with that, that’s a brilliant analysis. I would also say two things.
I think the use of anti-Semitism is purely opportunistic at this point. I fear that I’m going to alienate people. There is no question that there is hatred for Israel. But the Trump administration is using this charge of anti-Semitism as an excuse to do whatever it wants. I mean, the list of demands that it sent on April 11, maybe two of the 30 or something had something remotely to do with anti-Semitism. But I would also say that it’s too narrow and too broad.
What’s really the problem here is anti-Westernism and Israel is hated because it’s seen as the Western power par excellence, it’s now seen as white and the actual, clear actions of anti-Semitism are quite small on any campus. And frankly, Jews are not targeted by traditional anti-Semitic hate. They are allowed to succeed. The problem is that they are not black or Hispanic. So they come under the same prejudice as an Asian person would or a white male would on Harvard campus, but not because they’re Jewish per se. And there’s a real risk of violating, hate, you know, possibly repugnant, but protected speech about Zionism on campuses.
The other thing I would say that I neglected to before the Harvard defense, the universities are all defending on academic freedom that the federal government is treading on this sacred space where we should be allowed to do whatever the hell we want. You fund us and then shut up and get out of the way. And I hate that concept. I would go back, I’m very traditional on this, I would actually support Jane Stanford in her original fight with the economist Ross that led to the whole concept of academic freedom where Jane Stanford at the turn of the 20th century said, “Hey man, Stanford is my university. I’m funding it. I don’t want any of these commie economics professors and sociologists here.” She rightly saw what was coming. And that was viewed as just completely inappropriate. You as funder, as creator, you give us the money and then we want you to disappear. I would push back on that a little bit, but now under existing concepts of academic freedom, it would seem again that Trump is moving too far in requiring certain types of viewpoint adherence to the Trump administration.
Again, I’m not in favor of our current concept of academic freedom. I think it’s too broad, but it exists. And so I think for sure Harvard is going to win in court, especially because the judge is Allison Burroughs, who was the judge that allowed Harvard’s racial preferences to proceed in the first iteration of the SFFA versus Harvard suit that was, ultimately her opinion was reversed at the Supreme Court, but she could not be more left-wing. She could not be more pro-Harvard. She actually disagreed with what she called the wise and esteemed Toni Morrison because Morrison, believe it or not, had once said that race is the least reliable information you have about someone and Burroughs said, Toni Morrison is wrong because white Americans are so racist that we need to have racial preference so they can learn to have tolerance, acceptance, and understanding of blacks. So Burroughs is a shoe in to rule for Harvard in this case. The Supreme Court, I would not be surprised if they also support Harvard on the academic freedom grounds and maybe the procedural grounds as well.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised either. I think it’s absolutely the case that the Trump administration’s gotten out over its skis. But I do think that there are a couple of interesting things going on here. One is that the public has had its eyes opened to just how hypocritical these universities are, in Harvard in particular, right? I mean, here they are advancing an academic freedom argument when we’ve been seeing example after example of them trampling academic freedom in their own university for the last, you know, 20 years.
Just look at the ideological distribution of their faculty and tell me that academic freedom actually exists on the Harvard campus. Look at what happened to Roland Fryer and tell me that academic freedom exists on the Harvard campus, right? So I think the public is starting to understand that even if Trump loses in court, he is, I think, winning in the court of public opinion, which is to say that the public is becoming increasingly more disgusted with the hypocrisy that these universities have been allowed to get away with.
And I want to say too that even if the Trump administration loses in this particular dispute, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t opportunities for future regulation of these kinds of arrangements, right? We all have constitutional rights, but we are also all free to negotiate those rights away. And we see that done in various contexts across our society, right? And people will enter into plea bargains and corporations will enter into non-prosecution agreements in which they agree to essentially forfeit Fourth Amendment rights by employing a federal agent to supervise their operations and report on any criminal activity, which is essentially a perpetual search.
The federal government can absolutely be more explicit in terms of the strings that it wants to attach to future funding commitments. It can choose not to engage in future funding commitments. But that’s all going to depend on what the disposition of the next administration is going to be. If Congress really wanted to improve its approval rating in the public eye, what it should do is it should come out and consider legislation that basically, you can do a couple things. One thing that I would consider is putting a cap on federal funding for universities with these large endowments. I think it’s a hard sell for the American public to see a university with a $53 billion endowment getting $2 billion of taxpayer money, especially when Americans are struggling as the economy seems to be doing cartwheels at the moment. So I think, as always, Trump’s kind of reading of public sentiment is exactly right, but his execution is off here.
Heather Mac Donald: And it’s just amazing to see these universities. If you’d listen to the discourse over the last month or two, you’d think that what we’re talking about is science research labs, maybe with a football team attached, but that’s about it. They’re exclusively presenting themselves as the sources for possible cures for Alzheimer’s and cancer. You’d never know that they have undergraduate bodies attached and that they’re engaged, you certainly wouldn’t know that they’re engaged in this ideological indoctrination of students on the most grotesque race divisive grounds. It’s amazing that they’ve managed to reconstitute themselves successfully. And I completely agree, Ralf, the problem here is the reliance interest. Trump is trying to call things back after the fact. It should work in the future, but ideally, and you mentioned the incredible ideological monopoly and monolithic quality of the faculty and the students here, absolutely right.
How do we get at that? And those of us who are worried about federal government giving it too much power because just flip the tables and imagine this all coming out of a Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez administration, who want more trans stuff, know, more white bashing. They could use this power.
Rafael Mangual: God help us.
Heather Mac Donald: Ideally, the donors and the alumni, the private entities would be pressuring these institutions. But that’s an almost hopeless cause. You you had the donor revolt that happened right after October 7th when Bill Ackman, Ross Stevens, other people at Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania donors tried to have a new constitution for Pennsylvania, tried to organize donors for a donor boycott, and they got some traction, but it kind of petered out, and elsewhere it hasn’t really gotten much traction at all.
I was recently at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And there was a dinner for conservatives afterwards, people that believed in the traditional academic mission. There was an older alumnus there who was as informed as one could hope for about Madison’s left-wingery, about its pro-Hamas hysteria. Nevertheless, this gentleman was giving Madison a new humanities building and a new engineering building. And I said to him, “how can you do this? This money is fungible. You know how bad Madison is. Why? It’s… They’re just going to use that money that you’re saving them and go more into the anti-israel hatred.” And he just shrugged his shoulders and said “They gave me a free education” I said “It’s not the same institution. The “they” that gave you education is not the Institute today” It doesn’t matter. These guys, they want their names on their buildings. I concluded sort of ungraciously, but if he’s that dumb…
Rafael Mangual: It’s dead now, yeah.
Heather Mac Donald: It is about ego, it’s going to be very hard to turn it around.
Rafael Mangual: I agree.
Charles Fain Lehman: I want to, one, hopefully one way that that could cash out, it could all cash out, you think about the sort of back and forth is there’s a possibility where universities over the long run start to look a little less like Harvard and a little more like Hillsdale in terms of their level of dependence on the federal government, which in my mind would be not such a bad thing, at least in some ways. I want to take us out, because I want us to talk about other topics, but before we do that, I want to ask very briefly, this is a very practical question, short answers.
Is the Trump administration going to blink here? I think Harvard is sort of coming at them with this full court press. Are they going to back down on their demands or are they going to double down? Ralf, what’s your what’s your brief take?
Rafael Mangual: I think they’ll have no choice but to settle this in some way. Whether they can do so and save face is another question, but yeah.
Charles Fain Lehman: Judge.
Judge Glock: Agree with Ralf, they’re going to back down and they’re going to have to make it look as palatable as possible, but it’s not going to be great.
Charles Fain Lehman: Heather.
Heather Mac Donald: I don’t think they will. I think they’ll fight it to the core. I don’t think Trump admits fault ever.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yes, I think that’s correct. I they don’t like to back down in the administration. All right, I want to make sure that one more time remind folks to check out Heather’s long form piece on “everything in the university’s racist but underfunded” in City Journal’s print magazine and also online.
But let’s move on to talk briefly about some New York City news. Also earlier this week, a judge in Manhattan barred the Adams administration from allowing ICE agents to operate out of Rikers Island, which is New York City’s jail that is slated for closure by 2027. This is after the New York City Council sued to stop Adams from bringing immigration agents back to the city. New York is a sanctuary city and a sanctuary state. On the other hand, Adams has sort of pushed back against this saying that immigrant crime in particular is a major problem for the city right now.
The council, by contrast, is doubling down on its commitment to immigration at all costs. Ralf, I wonder what you make of this latest ruling. Do you think this is, you know, is this sensible policy? Is Adam moving in the right direction or is the council right to pick a fight with him?
Rafael Mangual: Well, Adams is moving absolutely in the right direction, but the council does have a legal leg to stand on here. I mean, you know, there is legislation prohibiting that kind of cooperation. Now, I think that’s misguided from a policy perspective, but I don’t think that this lawsuit is completely empty here either.
But it’s another example of the left’s of commitment to the most radical approach to, whether it’s immigration enforcement or law enforcement, possible. And New York City’s been ground zero for that for a long time, so it’s not at all surprising to me.
But the nice thing is that this might actually help Mayor Adams in the mayoral election because here he is again standing on the right side of what is in reality an 80-20 issue against an institution that seems more and more like it’s running around with its hair on fire and that’s the New York City Council.
Heather Mac Donald: It’s amazing. mean, if you wanted proof of the great replacement ideology, and it’s not a conspiracy, it’s just a reality, you have elites that are saying, we don’t have enough illegal aliens. We need to hold on to the illegal alien criminals as well. You know, most people in Rikers are guilty. There are mistakes that are made, but they have to work pretty hard to get picked up by the police and put in Rikers. And all that’s being asked here is for ICE agents to be stationed in Rikers to check out whether the people there are in fact documented or undocumented. But the view on the part of sanctuary advocates in New York City and elsewhere is that we have to hold on to our illegal alien criminals and put them back on the streets. If you were a… And I find it completely amazing when you have police chiefs probably maybe under pressure, they’ll give them the benefit of the doubt or by sincere conviction also opposing cooperating with ICE on things like detainers where a prison or a jail will notify ICE when it’s about to release an illegal alien criminal so that the department, ICE, can pick him up right as he leaves rather than having him disperse back into the community and makes it much harder to find him, much more dangerous for all parties involved. But you have police chiefs objecting to notifying ICE when an illegal alien criminal is being released. You would think any police chief would say, get the guy off my hands. That’s one less criminal I have to worry about. And yet they will still say he’s our illegal alien criminal. Keep him here. It is truly perverse.
Rafael Mangual: Well, thank God it’s not happening everywhere. I mean, I’m here in Nassau County out in Long Island and the Nassau County executive, Mr. Blakeman, actually allowed the Nassau County Police Department to deputize 10 detectives as ICE agents so that they can help facilitate enforcement out here on the island, which has been, you know, great and it’s very welcome among the residents. But it just creates an even starker contrast between sanity and New York City, which is becoming increasingly insane.
Judge Glock: Can I just ask as someone who hasn’t followed this as much obviously as I think the rest of the people on this podcast, the core, do you think most Americans understand that the core of the sanctuary city policy is do not let the federal government take criminals out of jail to deport them? I mean, because I am worried. I think when I read these things, you hear the “sanctuary city” and these seem to pass in these blue cities all the time. And people seem to think like, Hey, we’re protecting you know, the Joe on the street who’s going to, who’s building the building, from being packed off by ICE agents, but Sanctuary City is almost exclusively about people in jail or prison and preventing them from being packed off by ICE. I mean, right into, and that’s correct, right? And do most Americans understand that?
Rafael Mangual: Yeah. That’s exactly right. I’m not sure that most Americans understand that. But the ones that do, also think, have bought this line that the Democrats have been selling for the last year, which is that they’re not really criminals until they’ve been convicted. That these are just people who have been arrested and charged and are facing charges, and we have to let this play out and spend our taxpayer money on this process before… Even though we know that they’re here illegally, we know that multiple actors, the police officers that made the arrest, the judges at arraignment have made a determination about probable cause in the case. So we know they’re more likely to be guilty than not. And yet, you know, there’s still no appetite on the left for allowance.
Judge Glock: Is there anybody on the left who says like, okay, like we’ll give this largely bogus argument about non-convicted people, but okay, we’ll admit that after they’re convicted, we’ll allow ICE to pack them off to Mexico. No.
Charles Fain Lehman: There was this very brief political moment where that was viable, right? So like you think about something like the Laken Riley Act, passed, which is the first law that President Trump signed into law, which got a handful of Democrats supported in Congress in this bill said, you know, we’ve got to way to extra make sure that we’re deporting serious violent criminal aliens.
And now, you know, there’s this brief moment where sort of Democrats lost the election. They said, okay, we need to like back off a little bit on sort of the most insane version of our views. And now you have Democrats in Congress saying, actually, we regret the Laken Riley Act. Like we think we should not have voted in the way that we did. There’s no room for consensus on, for example, a border bill or an asylum bill.
And then at the local level, you know, we’re talking about the city council. Adrienne Adams, who is the speaker of the city council, is a run, no relation to Eric Adams, different Adams, but Adrienne Adams is running for mayor while she is backing this stuff. And so in her mind, this is like what she needs to do in order to earn the endorsement of New Yorkers. So I think it is, there was a brief period of time where sort of like conceding to the general public’s view on this topic made sense to Democrats. But I think that window has already rapidly closed as the salience of immigration and of Trump’s views on immigration has risen, they sort of feel the need to push back against that.
Rafael Mangual: I think that’s right. I mean, the real test of this would be to actually, for the Trump administration to say, okay, fine, well, we won’t reopen the office on Rikers, which by the way, existed in the past and the sky didn’t fall as far as I’m aware. But we’re going to reopen those offices now in New York state prison campuses. So we’re going to work with the officials at Sing Sing and Attica and all these places where the only people there are those who have been convicted. And then we’ll see what the Democrats think. But my guess is that somebody somewhere will soon stop that too.
Judge Glock: I mean, that’s just a straight savings for the state and local then, for the, after the post-convictions like, hey, just deport the guy that saves us all time and money. Especially like not to bring up the other elephant in the room. New York City is spending almost $5 billion a year on illegal immigrant sheltering and services and so forth.
Rafael Mangual: Well, that’s going down now. mean, you we’ve seen the population plummet. Yeah.
Judge Glock: But it’s going way down now, but this is like, you know, historically in the past few years, this has been almost a thousand dollars for every man, woman, and child in the city spent on this nonsense. And you’d think that anybody with a little modicum of common sense would be like, we might want to reduce that number somewhat by cooperating somewhat with the people who have a power to control immigration. Like this is not benefiting obviously the vast majority of New Yorkers who are spending these billions a year on it, but you guys know all this.
Heather Mac Donald: But I think that, I’ve always understood that was always the ISE there for always post-sentence or post-conviction, not just somebody’s come into a jail and he’s illegal, we’re going to take him now. I think it’s always been that. That just, again, underlines the fact that for the left, deportation per se is illegitimate. They want to hold on. They want to maximize the number of mass migration illegal aliens here.
And there’s the view that, one of the arguments they have against immigration enforcement on the inside. And when Trump began his efforts to do interior enforcement, we had headline after headline just the way back in 2016: “Immigrants fearful of deportation” and I’m afraid those articles did not elicit one iota of sympathy from me because as far as I’m concerned if you come here illegally you’re assuming the risk at the very least of having some trepidation about deportation but for the perspective of the left once you’re here illegally you’re inside you should be completely as sanguine as carefree as anybody here who came here legally and it’s unfair to make you fear deportation.
So the usual argument against any kind of sanctuary cooperation is that, it’s going to de-incentivize people from cooperating with the police to turn in a criminal because they’re worried that the police officer will turn around and arrest them for being illegal. But if somebody’s already in a jail, and you arrest them there, you’re not disincentivizing any crime witnesses from cooperating. So again, this just is another way of understanding how perverse the left’s outlook is when it comes to mass migration and how determined they are to maximize the number of illegal aliens in this country because they are willing to tell police chiefs, know, state prison, you can’t get these guys off your hands for free. The federal government’s willing to take them off your hands and they’ll still say, no, we want them. Don’t take them away from us. It is truly amazing.
Rafael Mangual: It is. It is. And I also, I just think that the argument that they make about cooperating with law enforcement with respect to other crimes is rich because in theory, these are going to be criminals that the left has supported in every other way by making sure that they’re less likely to be held in pre-trial detention, prosecuted at all. And if they are prosecuted and convicted by some stroke of luck, they’re going to make sure that they serve the lightest possible prison sentence, if any.
It’s hard to even take that seriously, you so you’re exactly right. I mean, at bottom, this is really just a commitment to immigration for its own sake, both legal and legal. I don’t understand it. I think the vast majority of Americans don’t understand it. But what I don’t think we’ve yet figured out is why these cities continue to get away with it, even though I think if you were to poll residents, the vast majority of them think that this is unreasonable.
Charles Fain Lehman: So I want to, want to, I want to take us out and I want to ask, it seems like the consensus here, and I agree is that, you know, justice and the public are on Eric Adams’ side, but is that going to be enough? Do we think that Adams is going to win this one? Is he going to get his way or is the city council going to finagle its way to ensuring that violent illegal immigrants are deported without I don’t even know what? Ralf, what’s your prediction?
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I think the city council has a good chance of winning this fighting court, but I think that continues to erode public trust on this issue and it might ultimately help Adams in the mayoral contest, although I still think Cuomo is going to be the front runner far and away.
But then again, I also think it’s very possible that this turns out to be a three-way race between Cuomo, Adams, and Mamdani with Curtis Sliwa taking off another small slice of the vote, actually. So, who knows how this plays out.
Charles Fain Lehman: Judge, what’s take?
Judge Glock: Yeah, I think the council’s got this, the power here. It’s almost like they’re going to win. But from what I saw, it sounded like the judge ruling on this and the first kind of injunction was pretty wild. They can’t even, Adams can’t even talk to ICE or something like that. This is the sort of thing where the people are overreacting to anything the federal government does, and then just enjoining the entire like activity of the government without thought. So I think some of the more extreme pushback by the city council is going to lose, but on the whole, they’ll probably get what they want, unfortunately.
Charles Fain Lehman: Where do you think it’s going?
Heather Mac Donald: Well, I’m not as familiar with the lawsuit. think that the NGOs in this country, rather in this city, have enormous power. Whether or not the mass of the public would be in favor of immigration enforcement matters less than the fact that the left in the New York City government has created a huge infrastructure of support in organized groups. And so I think as a political matter, I think the city council view is going to remain the dominant one in New York government for a while unless we have a truly transformative mayor the way we had in Rudolph Giuliani again.
Charles Fain Lehman: We can only hope, yeah, I mean, think that’s right. I buy the argument that the city council has the better of it. It’s still a sanctuary city. And then on the other hand, like, is this, it seems like this can only really help Adams, right? Like saying New Yorkers are going to go, well, I don’t like Donald Trump, but also I really, I don’t like having to pay for illegal immigrants who commit crimes to continue to be housed in the city.
I want to make sure, by the way, you know, this is the City Journal Podcast, we love to talk about crime, all things crime related. I want to encourage listeners before we go out to check out Ralf. At the time of this recording he has an ambiguously forthcoming piece on crime in New York in the New York Times. It may or not be out by the time this drafts, so we’ll see. They’re always…
Rafael Mangual: Yeah. Fingers crossed. Fingers crossed.
Charles Fain Lehman: Fingers crossed. But on that note, I want to draw our attention for our brief closing discussion to a headline from our friends at the New York Post. And the headline is, “Homeless parolee with 13 prior arrests charged in random metal knuckle knife attack on NY subway.” And first of all, that’s it’s really a work of art from the New York Post headline writers as always. We got to love them. But I want to ask our panelists impression very briefly, are the subways getting safer in New York and elsewhere? Is transit crime, is people’s perception of transit crime changing? Does it feel like the subways are getting safer given this high-salience attack? Ralf, what’s your take?
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I think that you asked the question exactly the right way. The subways on paper are getting safer, right? The part one crimes are going down. We haven’t had a murder through the first quarter of the year for the first time in a while, right? All of that stuff is good. The perception, however, as I think that the subways are unsafe is more durable in part because there’s a lot of, not just these high-salience attacks like the one that made the cover of the New York Post, which, you know, of course is terrifying and all too common in this city, but, you know, it’s more so the disorder that people are being confronted with on a daily basis. I mean, I entered the subway recently, not that long ago, and someone decided to urinate right in between cars while, you know, in a subway full of people. I mean, just pulled her pants down, opened the door and squatted between the, you know. So that’s the kind, I had another friend tell me that some guy had exposed himself. You know, so these are the interactions that probably never get reported to the police. You people just kind of take them in stride now, but nevertheless inform a sense that, you know, the subways are lawless and that that part is not entirely inaccurate. So, you know, yes, we’re making progress. Yes, that’s good. But also there’s still a lot of work to be done. The subways are still an unpleasant place to be. The smells, the smoke, the anti-social, boorish behavior, lots of people I think are still fed up with it and rightly so.
Charles Fain Lehman: Heather, I don’t know how often you, do you ride the subway? What’s your impression of where the subway’s at? How do you feel about it right now?
Heather Mac Donald: I don’t know know how one cannot ride the subway thanks to the stupid bike lanes we’ve got everywhere that make surface traffic absolutely impossible. In the city, I do not have the patience to sit in traffic for two hours. So yes, I do. But it’s… and I would say that’s like the one in in theory, the one thing I still like about New York is not having to have a car. But I’m very aware that every time you step on the subway, you are assuming, I mean, I know that in sheer numbers, it’s a small number of us, but one subway assault like we just saw that’s happening on a weekly basis, that’s one too many. There should be none, zero. It is outrageous that the city council, any part of New York government is worrying about illegal alien criminals getting deported. Every waking moment should be spent on trying to get the subways and the streets safer, of cleaning up this squalor.
These people that are committing these repeated attacks are completely knowable in advance. We know what they look like. They’re the psychotic drug users, the MICA population, mentally ill chemical abusers. They are walking time bombs and yet government has so lost faith in its right and legitimacy to enforce bourgeois norms of order and behavior that it has allowed public spaces, cities, to degenerate into insane asylums, putting the law-abiding and the hard-working at risk. It’s the great inversion. Government now takes as its primary clients the dysfunctional, the antisocial, the dependent and regards hard-working taxpayers as ATMs to fund the government’s foolish, impossible, utopian social projects of social uplift.
It is absolutely horrendous what New Yorkers have allowed themselves to put up with in the quality of this urban streetscape, the degradation of human behavior, and the risk that nobody in a civil society should have to undertake of being attacked out of nowhere by a mentally ill person who should be put in prison or put in a mental institution for life because he should not have the freedom to put at risk people who are trying to go about their lives, contribute to society, participate in the economy, and pass something on to their children.
Rafael Mangual: Say it again.
Judge Glock: Yeah, what Heather said, that’s my response.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I think that’s right. I’ve got nothing to add. That sounds completely correct to me. Alright.
I want to take us out, because I think that’s about all the time that we have. Thank you, as always, to our panelists. Please check out Heather in the new issue and also Ralf in the New York Times at some point. Thank you to our producer, Isabella. Isabella Redjai, as always. Listeners, if you’ve enjoyed this episode, or even if you haven’t, please like, subscribe, leave comments, ratings, if you ask us questions. At some time, we may eventually answer one of them.
You can check us out on YouTube or anywhere else you get your favorite podcasts. Until next time, you’ve been listening to the City Journal Podcast. I hope you’ll join us again soon.
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