Fifth Ave BLM Mural: An Icon of Blas’ Folly
IT happened again this weekend: A pro-Trump protester vandalized the Black Lives Matter mural painted on Fifth Avenue below Trump Tower. The mural has become a dangerously divisive symbol. It needs to go. Last month, Mayor de Blasio and several other political and civic leaders helped paint the bright yellow letters on the pavement in front of the president’s iconic HQ. Ever since, critics have repeatedly doused it with black or red paint.
Police have arrested the vandals, and enlightened opinion has denounced them as crackpot Trump supporters. The mayor’s childish provocation is now an icon of the anti-Trump #Resistance. To the woke, the mural must be preserved as a reaffirmation of City Hall’s commitment to all that is good and just — including, no doubt, a Democratic victory in November.
Self-awareness and thinking outside of his own personal ideological box isn’t one of Hizzoner’s strengths. But after several weeks of this nonsense, it’s time for the mayor to rethink the decision to turn the Fifth Avenue site into a magnet for protests that are almost certainly going to get nastier and messier as we draw closer to the election.
This mayor has overseen a mental-health crisis long predating the recent pandemic troubles, an explosion in homelessness, a massive spike in violent crime and the general collapse of the rule of law. So his decision to paint the slogan in front of President Trump’s former home isn’t the worst thing de Blasio has done. But the mural does symbolize the way he has demonized the police and prioritized the politics of the ideological left over the safety and well-being of ordinary New Yorkers.
The president has largely avoided the place in the last 3 ¹/2 years for security reasons. But the building is still the most prominent reminder that Trump is a lifelong New Yorker, whose fingerprints as a real-estate developer are all over the city.
As such, it was understandable that liberals would fixate on the tower to vent their spleen at the president. But for the city to make such sentiments official government policy was an absurd abuse of power to advance a partisan cause. Was it legal, strictly speaking? Probably.
Was it wise? Absolutely not. New York has had its share of great and good mayors. In the last century, men such as Fiorello La Guardia, Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani left Gotham better than they found it. There is an even longer list of terrible and corrupt mayors dating back to the 19th century. But it isn’t likely that even one of the on-the-take stooges and knaves put forth by Tammany
Hall in its heyday would have thought insulting a sitting president from Manhattan was a good idea. Trump, after all, might get re-elected, and the Big Apple badly needs a federal bailout.
The mural was also a terrible idea from the point of view of social cohesion. De Blasio has now enshrined a visible marker of support for the official BLM movement, which smears America as irredeemably racist and promotes terrible ideas like defunding the police. Hizzoner has also created a rallying point for Trump supporters.
Now overburdened cops have to
‘
The mural does symbolize the way he has demonized the police and prioritized left.’ the politics of the ideological
arrest anyone who dares to deface the mural — even as few have been arrested for graffiti and far worse forms of disorderly conduct committed in the name of black lives. Taxpayers, moreover, have to foot the bill for the mural at a time when funding for graffiti cleanup elsewhere — so necessary to maintaining the impression that the law is being enforced — has been cut.
But the deepest problem is that de Blasio has created what lawyers might call an “attractive nuisance” that is a standing invitation to mayhem. Last month, a policeman was injured during one such melee. As the election campaign heats up, this finger in the eye of Trump will continue to be a point of contention; more casualties are likely.
Only someone as blind to reality as de Blasio can fail to see that turning Fifth Avenue into a battle zone merely to troll the president isn’t worth it. Removing the BLM mural won’t help Trump win. But it will be a much-needed return to sanity that all New Yorkers should approve.