BUCK: We could sit here all day, Clay, and just have longtime senior and respected law enforcement experts, people that have spent their careers doing this telling us all the same basic story. Which is that there is a nationwide deterioration and safety on city streets, and we’re talking the top 50, the top 100 cities by population.
This is what’s going on across America. Why? We’re gonna get into the why, but there’s one place where this is playing out right now in real-time in a political sense, and it’s my hometown of New York City. You have right now, essentially, Clay, a battle between… There’s a bunch of different candidates, and it’s a ranked voting system, which is a little strange.
New York just instituted this I think in 2019. You put 1 through 5 and then if no one gets 50% on the first round, they get rid of the bottom-tier candidate, and then they retabulate. And then they get rid of the candidate that’s bottom tier, and then they retabulate.
So it could a matter of weeks before find out the answer. But here’s why this is so interesting. I’m wanting your take on this. Again, I grew up in New York City, Clay. I could sit here and tell stories about what that city was like when there were over 2,000 murders a year in the early 1990s.
CLAY: I think a lot of people listening to us remember, even if they didn’t grow up there, just walking through Times Square, and how much difference before Rudy Giuliani and after.
BUCK: A hellscape.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: And I live there, and I love it. I love New York. I’ve always been a big New York proponent, although the political leadership is just getting dumber and worse all the time, it seems. But it was so dangerous, you had by the Bloomberg era — from, let’s say, 2,300 homicides a year, give or take, in the early 1990s, Mayor Dinkins — down all the way to about 300 murders. So over 2,300 to 300.
CLAY: One of the most successful eradications of crime in the history not only of the United States, but of the world.
BUCK: And people look at this and they see that what happened in New York was also a harbinger of what was to come in a lot of other cities because we just had the former Boston police chief. Guess what? The NYPD model — and I was an intelligence division specialist at the NYPD for a while, so I know those folks very well. The NYPD model was applied in all these other cities, the Giuliani crime method, and it worked.
CLAY: The broken windows. People know the phrase.
BUCK: And it’s not just enforcing minor laws because it creates a greater sense of law and order, but it does. It’s also creating more of basis for police contact with those who break the law. Because it turns out — and we ran the experiment, we saw the data in New York and a lot of other cities — the guy who is jumping the turnstile is much more likely to also be the guy (and it’s guys we’re talking about here) who has a warrant out for an attempted murder, or has a warrant out for a serious crime.
CLAY: Same thing with the guy who doesn’t have his tags updated. People who don’t have their driver’s permits and everything else set up, are also more likely when they get pulled over to have outstanding warrants that are significant of a violent nature.
BUCK: And this is why the two real polls, if you will, or the separation, the major separation in this mayoral race… You have Andrew Yang, who we all know. he’s a popular guy. People like him. I’ve interviewed him. I don’t know if you’ve interviewed him, but he’s a likable guy. He’s smart. He’s very pro-business, and he had a pretty interesting run — short-lived but interesting run — for the Democrat primary as president. And now he’s getting a pretty decent bit of support. But it’s really between based on this narrative of pro-police or defund police.
CLAY: It’s going to decide the election.
BUCK: That is the primary issue, and Adams right now, Eric Adams, who’s a former police captain of the NYPD —
BUCK: This guy is law enforcement through and through. He’s now borough the president of Brooklyn. He is pro-police to the point where he wants to bring back the plane clothes unit that was disbanded, as essentially a gift to the BLM movement. As we all know, this didn’t work out well for anybody.
He also might even bring back some of the elements of — it has been talked about, at least — stop-and-frisk, which became very controversial and Mayor Bill De Blasio got rid of. But thinking about this, Clay, in a sense this is like the crucible for law enforcement action that is on the largest scale. It’s the biggest police department in the country, the biggest city in the country.
And we see the numbers going in the wrong direction. Not only could you have Eric Adams end up winning basically on the crime issue, being pro-police and anti-crime, but then the rest of the country is gonna have to see what ends up happening with those policies playing out, because people will know that the defund movement is clearly failing, so we gotta find something else to do.
CLAY: Defund the police is popular with super rich white people, primarily — who live in neighborhoods that typically aren’t very dangerous in the first place — and also with super-rich activists who oftentimes have their own private security details. The number one to me litmus test should be, if you have ever had private security or paid for it, you can’t argue that police need to be defunded.
Because you are actually taking the next step beyond! You’re like, “No, the police around enough to make sure that I’m safe. I’m going to spend my money to make sure that I have my own security on top of the security provided by police.” So for some people out there, I understand they’re gonna say, “I don’t live in New York. I don’t care about this story. I don’t care about this overall election.”
What I believe you are missing is that this is a larger metaphor for the nation as a whole and the debate we’re having over whether or not policing is in crisis and whether we should be defunding it — and also, as a part of that larger conversation, it’s an internal civil war with the Democratic Party right now.
There’s a lot of talk in the mainstream media about the internal civil war that exists in the Republican Party and they always want to trot out Elizabeth Cheney and say, “Oh, look, are they allied with Trump or are they not allied with Trump? They don’t even allow freedom of speech in their own party!” Well, this is a real civil war, because Elizabeth Cheney is a small segment of the Republican Party, right? This is the essence of Democratic Party right now.
BUCK: And who supports defund police and who do you hear from on this issue? It’s activists, MSNBC hosts, and the far left of the elected Democrats.
CLAY: AOC.
BUCK: They’re the only ones. Now, it’s so interesting. I don’t even know, Clay, if you were alluding to this or not, because your comment about people who pay for their own security while they want to defund? That’s actually true of Maya Wiley. She lives in an almost $3 million mansion —
BUCK: Her husband’s a private equity guy.
CLAY: Good for him.
BUCK: Remember “Vulture Capital” with Mitt Romney and Bane and all that, right?
CLAY: Right.
BUCK: Her husband’s a private equity guy, and she, it came out, has a neighborhood association where they all pay dues for a private security force.
CLAY: On top of the police.
BUCK: On top of, of course, having police protection. But she wants to defund — and she’s even been pushed on the issue of disarming — cops.
CLAY: Which would be crazy.
BUCK: Yeah.
CLAY: She basically said that she wanted them to not have guns and then she tried to walk it back.
BUCK: So you have on the one hand that in a sense, the quintessential defund liberal, somebody who lives in a multimillion-dollar house, has private security.
CLAY: Of course.
BUCK: Oh, and guess what? She also has her kids in private schools.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: While she’s a huge proponent of making sure that all the rest of New York City has no school choice, her kids go to a fancy private school. And this is, in many ways I feel, the distillation of the modern Democrat elite.
They don’t even try to hide this stuff anymore. So it’s gonna be either Eric Adams as … Remember, Eric Adams, African-American police captain of over 20 years. By the way, the guy’s still a Democrat. We’re really picking among the best socialists here in a sense. But at least he wants you to be safe walking home with groceries in your hands instead of what you’re getting with Maya Wiley.
BUCK: Yes.
CLAY: So you have on the left, the far left-wing, Maya Wiley who wants police officers to have no guns, except for the private security guards who protect her and her family and her multimillion-dollar mansion. And then you have Eric Adams, who is on the positive side a 22-year veteran of the New York Police Department, but might not actually live in the city in which he’s running to be mayor of.
BUCK: I mean, he’s got a —
CLAY: This is a perfect contrast, and these are the two prongs that are most likely to win, right?
BUCK: He’s got a place that doesn’t look so much like it’s that lived in, but it is technically.
CLAY: I watched the video.
BUCK: You saw the video? (laughing)
CLAY: I care… And for someone who lives in Nashville, Tennessee, and has lived in Nashville his entire life, I am an example of someone who is following this election closely, one, because I love elections, but two because I think it puts defund the police on the ballot. Right?
This is ultimately rubber meeting road in a highly liberal city to see whether or not the data, which I’ve looked at. You talked about I like to look at the data. The data I’ve looked at and everybody has shared, no one of any kind of serious intellect supports defunding the police. There are no arguments that support it in any way.
BUCK: In fact, the African-American community specifically —
CLAY: Huge, huge majority wants more police.
BUCK: — wants more police, because as you’ve pointed out when you look at disproportionate effects of crime in low-income neighborhoods —
CLAY: The people getting killed by crime rates rising overwhelmingly are black.
BUCK: And we haven’t even addressed the Republican side of this equation, which is real. Now, New York City, folks, has about an 8-to-1 disparity in party registration. So, you know, Clay gets to live —
CLAY: I live in a red state.
BUCK: — in freedom in a red state here in Tennessee. I’m from New York, which is, you know, very expensive commieville. But I still love it. But here’s the thing. You have Curtis Sliwa, who is the founder of the Guardian Angels —
BUCK: — who is also on the ballot. I know Curtis, interviewed Curtis, he’s a good guy. So in a sense, you have the ultimate pro-police/public safety candidate who’s also there. I’ve talked to people who say that, you know, it’s obviously an uphill climb. But here’s the thing. If you were to see — because of the ranked voting no one really knows how this is gonna work out — if Maya Wiley ended up being the candidate or even some of the others… I didn’t even mention, but you’ve got Kathryn Garcia, the sanitation commissioner —
CLAY: Who’s now allied, I think, with Yang. Like, they’re trying to pair their votes.
BUCK: That’s right.
CLAY: They’re trying to come together.
BUCK: And AOC is the primary backer, publicly, at least, not financially, but in terms of public support for Maya Wiley. But if Wiley’s the candidate, you may have… This is the theoretical and it’s unlikely, I just want to say, but you may have this moment where people say, “Look, Rudy Giuliani was a Republican, folks. Bloomberg, Mayor Bloomberg, was technically a Republican.”
CLAY: Both of those guys did phenomenal jobs protecting the residents of New York City, which to me is the essence of the job of the mayor.
BUCK: I told everybody, ’cause there was… Look, Bloomberg on guns is horrible. Your Mountain Dew, by the way?
CLAY: (laughing) I know.
BUCK: He would have security escort you out to pour it out.
CLAY: I know. I’d get taxed like crazy to sit here and drink a Mountain Dew during the show.
BUCK: Yeah, exactly. You’d be paying through the nose.
CLAY: He’s a businessman who at least understands the importance of business in a city like New York, which I think a lot of these candidates have no clue of.
BUCK: Can I…? I wanted see if we could… You want to…? Let’s bring in some folks to hear what they think about this.
CLAY: Yeah! Let’s do it.
BUCK: It’d be fun if we do that, and then also I’ve got just a quick anecdote for you about Portland, ’cause I don’t want to focus too much on one East Coast city. We could talk Portland, we could talk LA, we can talk a lot of places. But you gotta hear how Portland’s tourism, folks, are trying to sell people on still visiting that anarchic wasteland in downtown Portland right now. So why don’t we come back to that.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
CLAY: New York native Buck Sexton is making his best case — and I think he’s right — for why you and I should care about what’s happening today in the New York City mayoral election even though we’re probably not gonna know for a little while who actually ends up winning that election, and why it is in many ways a referendum on the defund the police movement. You have on the one side of the education — even though it is within a Democratic primary — Eric Adams, who is a 22-year veteran of the New York Police Department. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you have Maya Wiley, who has said maybe they don’t even necessarily need guns.
CLAY: (laughing)
BUCK: Social workers.
CLAY: If somebody has a gun, we should just have a social worker show up and explain to them why they should stop shooting people. That will be a viable response — and of course, as is typically the case, Maya Wiley has her own security detail, Buck, that is actually protecting her in New York City even while she believes the rest of the population should have to be defunding the police.
BUCK: Oh, let’s not forget they also… Not only do they want to defund police, but they also want to make sure that you can’t defend yourself with the right to bear arms in New York, which is a whole other subject.
CLAY: That’s a big mess.
BUCK: I know this one intimately because I’ve had to go through the process of talking to folks about what you can and can’t do and —
CLAY: It’s a sub-plot of Billions —
BUCK: It’s crazy.
CLAY: — what you have to do get a gun license.
BUCK: Getting a concealed carry permit in New York is for ultra-elites.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: When you look at who actually has a concealed carry. You can’t open carry in New York. But even the premise permit. Anyway, people that live in Texas and Tennessee are like, “Your problem.” So anyway… (laughing) True, by the way. Fact-check: True.
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