We seem to live in a time when prominent people who lead august institutions and great cities are being exposed as liars and frauds. There’s the recent example of Claudine Gay, a woman of comparatively little academic achievement who, nonetheless, was made president of Harvard, an institution of higher learning that, at least until recently, has been considered one of the most august universities in the world.
In addition to a disturbingly high tolerance for anti-semitic threats and calls for genocide on the Cambridge campus, it turns out she’s also a serial plagiarist.
Now comes the man who is mayor of one the world’s truly great cities, New York. He’s had his own trouble with the truth in the past. Back when the ex-cop was running for mayor, he pledged to continue to carry a gun if elected. It turns out that, like so many campaign promises, that was just another a load of bovine excrement.
Blown campaign promises are a dime a dozen, though. If every politician who lied on the stump were removed from office, we wouldn’t have any elected officials. Wait…maybe that’s not such a bad idea after all. Anyway . . .
Aside from fibbing about packing heat in city hall, it Hizzoner has a more extensive history of fabulism. Back in 2009, Adams wrote a book called Don’t Let It Happen. This is own Amazon describes the book . . .
Don’t Let It Happen is a life saving resource, designed to assist parents in detecting when their children are involved in an activity that can be harmful to themselves and/or other family members. Far too often, we take note when a young adult engages in harmful behavior, but we may not realize the broader impact their actions can have.
As I will point out throughout this book, a young adult’s actions can mean the difference between life and death for an entire family. This book is primarily for law-abiding citizens trying to raise their children and support their families. I hope it acts as a life raft in a sea of confusion.
In the book, Adams relates a harrowing story of what happened to him when he was a child and another student brought a gun to school. As first reported by Byline, Adams writes . . .
“When I was a child, a friend of mine brought a gun to school… to show off to the rest of the students. This was my first time seeing a real gun. After years of playing ‘Cowboys and Indians’ with toy guns, I did not believe the gun he was showing us was real. I laughed at his stupid trick and grabbed the gun from him. ‘If this gun is real,’ I said, ‘then it should go off.’ I pointed what I thought was a toy gun at my group of friends and pulled the trigger. A round discharged, and only by the grace of God and my poor aim did the bullet miss my friends. The incident scared me so much that I dropped the gun and ran.”
Lucky him. Thank goodness he missed his friends. Sounds like a close call.
But far more interesting than that instructive anecdote from so many years ago is the fact that Mayor Adams now admits that it’s all a steaming pile of bullsh!t. It literally never happened.
As the AP reports today, the mayor was asked about his gun-in-school story at a press conference yesterday . . .
“I never fired a gun in school,” he said. “The co-author of the book may have misunderstood” an incident “where someone pointed what they thought was a toy gun,” he added.
Adams then said the book “never got into print because it never went through the proof-reading aspect of it.”
Except those are all lies, too.
First, there’s no co-author. Only Adams’ name appears as the author of the book. And Don’t Let It Happen is very much in print. You can buy a copy at Amazon right now for $18.59.
More from the AP . . .
A City Hall spokesperson said after the press conference that the mayor had never reviewed the final version of the book and only just learned it was publicly available.
“The mayor has already contacted the publisher, who is working to take the book out of circulation,” the spokesperson, Charles Lutvak, said in an email. He said the mayor had worked on the book with a ghostwriter, who he declined to name.
Uh huh.
This isn’t the first time Adams has told tall tales. Back in July, the New York Times called into question a story he liked to tell about a fallen fellow NYPD officer. And as the AP report goes on to detail . . .
But some of the personal stories, which are often difficult to verify, have drawn scrutiny. He has admitted to The New York Times that a confrontation he claimed to have had with a neighbor, which he recounted in a 2019 commencement address, actually happened to someone else. And he has faced questions about minor changes he has made to an oft-repeated story about being beaten up by police as a child.
In other words, Mayor Adams is just another run-of-the-mill, lying politician. And just as with so many others, it’s easy to tell when he’s lying…his lips are moving. Act accordingly.