Last week, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul ordered the National Guard to start patrolling the subways of New York City to deal with the city’s crime problem, which has been metastasizing for years now.
There was a lot of guffawing from the online peanut gallery, and understandably so. In the summer of 2020, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., had written a New York Times op-ed suggesting the deployment of the military to quell the rioting that destroyed dozens of cities and did billions of dollars in damage. Though polls showed Cotton’s suggestion had popular support, the Times’ own staff revolted against their employer, with several employees publicly reciting some version of the mantra that publishing Cotton’s op-ed put “black people in danger.”
But now? Mara Gay, a member of the Times’ editorial board who had been quite vocal in her opposition to publishing the Cotton op-ed, has now authored a column headlined, “The National Guard Might Help Subway Riders Feel Safer.” (For what it’s worth, Mara Gay is not related to disgraced former Harvard president Claudine Gay, though Times columnist Roxane Gay, who also opposed the Cotton op-ed, is.) In four years, we went from Democrats essentially saying we had to tolerate the lawless devastation of dozens of American city centers to fully endorsing armed 20-year-olds rifling through your bag before you use public transportation to deal with the ordinary criminality they allowed to fester.
