Eric Adams Thinks New York City Is Great Because 9/11 Can Happen at Any Moment

New York City Mayor Eric Adams has an interesting opinion on what makes the Big Apple so great: It could be subject to a terrorist attack at any moment.

In a Monday interview, Adams was asked to sum up 2023 in one word.

“New York,” Adams replied, which is technically two words.

“This is a place where everyday you wake up, you could experience everything from a plane crashing into our Trade Center to a person who’s celebrating a new business that’s open. This is a very, very complicated city, and that’s why it’s the greatest city on the globe.”

The utter lack of imagination in Adams’s “one word” answer aside, this is an extremely bad take. A city isn’t great because one of the most traumatic experiences in recent American memory happened there. And you certainly aren’t going to curry favor with your constituents by warning them it could easily happen again.

Adams has been in office for about two years, and he recently recorded the lowest-ever approval rating for a New York mayor. A poll released in early December by Quinnipiac University found just 28 percent of respondents said they approved of Adams’s performance.

His popularity certainly isn’t helped by his penchant for very strange behavior. In August, Adams chose to mark the anniversary of Indian independence by comparing himself to Gandhi.

Adams has also repeatedly said he has carried a photo of a fallen police officer in his wallet for decades. Instead, Adams allegedly instructed his staff in 2022 to print out the photo and then age it with coffee stains.

Meanwhile, the mayor is facing a federal investigation into his campaign, as well as an accusation of sexual assault from 30 years ago.

Elon Musk may be held accountable for X (formerly Twitter) devolving into a hellscape. The European Commission on Monday opened multiple investigations into the platform under the bloc’s new social media law.

The Digital Services Act went into effect in Europe in late August. The sweeping new rulebook aims to create safer online environments: Digital platforms are required to prevent and remove posts that contain illegal goods, services, or content. Targeted ads based on sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, or political beliefs are prohibited, and ads targeting children are heavily restricted.

“We now have clear rules, ex-ante obligations, strong oversight, speedy enforcement and deterrent sanctions and we will make full use of our toolbox to protect our citizens and democracies,” EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton told Politico.

The infringement proceedings into X are the commission’s first ever under the DSA. The four probes will look at whether the platform violated rules on combating illegal content and disinformation, as well as rules on transparency regarding advertising and data sharing. Investigators will also seek to determine if X misled its users when it changed its blue-check system. The check marks used to indicate that a user’s identity had been verified, but they now show that the user is paying a subscription fee in exchange for increased visibility.

The investigations do not immediately indicate wrongdoing. But if X is found culpable, the company could face fines of up to 6 percent of its global revenue.

The commission has also taken preliminary steps to investigate other major social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat. Investigators have requested information to see how the platforms combat illegal content and disinformation, and how they protect minors.

This isn’t the first time the European Commission has taken aim at X owner Musk. In November, the bloc froze ads on the platform, following a Media Matters report that found X has been placing ads for brands including Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity next to posts that promote Hitler and Nazi beliefs.

Hate speech has flourished on X in the little more than a year since Musk bought the platform. The social media research group National Contagion Research Institute found that in the 12 hours after Musk bought X, use of the n-word increased almost 500 percent.

And Musk is often a major source of that hate speech and disinformation. In addition to aggressively antisemitic posts, Musk also regularly lets Nazis back on X, shares transphobic content, and spreads conspiracy theories.

The American people will never be rid of George Santos—at least not according to him.

In a one-on-one interview with comedian Ziwe on Monday, the indicted former Long Island representative said that he would one day return to Congress after outliving the members who voted to expel him, claiming he’ll have plenty of time since he’s only 35 years old.

It’s not the first time that Santos has threatened his return to the House’s lower chamber.

“I’m not done with public service. I want to go back to Congress,” Santos told radio host Frank Morano on Wednesday, just two weeks after he stormed out of Congress claiming he was done with politics. “I’m not saying today. I’m not saying tomorrow.”

“I have a lot of things I need to take care of first,” he said on the program. “I think we all know, but I do have hopes of trying to regain the trust of the American people and going there, because I will continue to expose and root out the rot in our federal government.”

Whether or not Santos returns to Congress, it’s unlikely we’ll get him entirely out of our system. The Republican is reportedly making more than $80,000 per day for bespoke videos on the mid-tier celebrity messaging platform Cameo—significantly more than his $174,000 congressional salary during his nine-month term.

According to Santos, the only way we’ll stop seeing him is if comedians, producers, and interviewers “stop inviting [him] to your gigs.”

“But you can’t because you want the content,” he quipped.

In another dystopian twist in the interview, Santos rapped Nicki Minaj’s verse from Kanye West’s “Monster” after failing to identify Marsha P. Johnson, James Baldwin, and Harvey Milk.

The confrontational comedian also got down to brass tacks with Santos over the baby debacle, in which the politician emerged holding a mysterious baby mid-meltdown while feuding with a Palestinian activist just weeks before his expulsion.

Clarence Thomas was in so much debt two decades ago that he tried to get Supreme Court justice salaries raised across the board. Within months, Republican billionaires began giving him extravagant gifts.

Thomas spoke at a conservative conference in January 2000, according to a new ProPublica report. In what we now know to be classic Thomas style, he did not report that trip on his financial disclosure forms.

On the way home, he sat next to Republican Representative Cliff Stearns. During the flight, Thomas complained bitterly that his salary—then $173,600—was insufficient. He even hinted that multiple justices could resign in the next year if they weren’t given a pay raise.

Thomas’s words sparked a rush of attempts on Capitol Hill to significantly raise the justices’ salaries or at least ensure their pay kept pace with inflation. Specifically, Republicans wanted to make sure that Thomas and his fellow staunch conservative Antonin Scalia did not leave the bench.

Thomas also petitioned then–Chief Justice William Rehnquist to lift a ban on justices giving paid speeches. Ultimately, the attempts to give justices more money all failed. But soon after, a group of Republican billionaire megadonors began lavishing Thomas and his family with a steady stream of gifts.

It is still unclear what exactly prompted the gift-giving, or if it was directly tied to Thomas’s money complaints. But certainly, many of those gifts have alleviated the justice’s financial concerns.

One of those generous souls is billionaire Harlan Crow, who has been friends with Thomas for more than two decades. In that time, Crow—a Nazi memorabilia collector—has repeatedly lavished Thomas with expensive gifts. These include island-hopping yacht vacations, private school tuition for Thomas’s nephew, and buying and renovating a Thomas family property, where Thomas’s mother still lives.

Crow has also regularly brought Thomas as his guest to the Bohemian Grove, which ProPublica has previously described as a “secretive all-men’s retreat in Northern California” that attracts major corporate and political players.

By 2003, Thomas’s wife, Ginni, had begun working at the Heritage Foundation and was making a salary in the low six figures. The Heritage Foundation is part of the Koch brothers’ network. By at least 2010, Clarence Thomas began secretly participating in Koch donor network events, which put him in touch with wealthy and influential conservatives.

Looking at Thomas’s finances, though, it would seem that keeping pace with inflation wasn’t the main issue. When he was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1991, he still had student loans from law school. But during the early 1990s, he made at least two big purchases: a Corvette and a house in Virginia with five acres of land. Thomas and his wife bought the house for $522,000 in 1992. They were able to pay $8,000 out of pocket and had to borrow the rest, according to property records.

The couple borrowed huge sums of money throughout the next decade, including a consumer loan of $50,000 and a $100,000 line of credit on their house. In 1998, Thomas became his grandnephew’s legal guardian and began sending him to pricey private schools.

The month before Thomas complained about his salary to Stearns, he had borrowed $267,000 from a friend to buy a luxury R.V. That purchase partially paid off, though: In 2001, Thomas took his R.V. to get serviced outside Tampa. While there, he met Earl Dixon, the owner of a Florida pest control company, who ended up giving Thomas $5,000 for his grandnephew’s tuition.

By 2019, Thomas began singing a decidedly different tune. Justices’ pay was by then keeping up with inflation, but it hadn’t increased significantly. But in June, when asked about the court’s salaries, Thomas said, “Oh goodness, I think it’s plenty.”

“My wife and I are doing fine. We don’t live extravagantly, but we are fine.”

A few weeks later, Crow took the Thomases on a yacht vacation.

GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump continued to escalate immigration rhetoric on Sunday, promising to divert federal law enforcement funds to battle what he called a “military invasion” at the border.

“This is an invasion. This is like a military invasion,” Trump said. “Drugs, criminals, gang members, and terrorists are pouring into our country at record levels. We’ve never seen anything like it. They’re taking over our cities.”

To a crowd of cheers, Trump swore to “shift massive portions of federal law enforcement to immigration enforcement, including parts of the DEA, ATF, FBI, and DHS.”

“And I will make clear that we must use any and all resources needed to stop the invasion of our country, including moving thousands of troops currently stationed overseas in countries that don’t like us,” he added.

That wasn’t all the indicted former president had to say on the matter. In a speech a day earlier, Trump continued to channel the language of Adolf Hitler, warning that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” while lionizing some of his icons, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un.

“Not just in South America, not just the three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world they are coming into our country, from Africa, from Asia, all over the world. They’re pouring into our country, nobody’s even looking at them,” he said.

It’s the latest bout of dehumanizing vitriol out of Trump’s mouth. On Veteran’s Day, Trump made some eyebrow-raising public remarks that took his often callous approach to politics to an ugly new level: “We pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Trump said at the time. “They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article suggested that Trump’s comments about an “invasion” and his statement about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country” occurred during the same speeches. Trump made these statements in two separate speeches over the weekend.