The Twenty-Second Episode of the Get Stuff Done Cast Cast

This is the Get Stuff Done Cast Cast, my name is Dave.

The mayor of New York City, uh, Broadway is there, Eric Adams, had a podcast. The only person who listened to it was a dog walker in Queens named Dave.

Hi, if you’re new, welcome. If you’ve been listening for a bit, welcome back. Either way, the deal with this project is: I became aware that Eric Adams, the insane person who is the mayor of New York City, has a podcast, called The Get Stuff Done Cast, and also that developing an audience for that podcast was not among the stuff that was getting done. Quite literally, no one was listening to it, partially due to: why would anyone spend their time on that, but at least partially due to no one knowing he had a podcast. So, I started listening to it, and, beyond being a bad podcast, it’s a revealing look at Eric Adams, and his personal failings, which are currently mapping pretty well onto his mayoral failings.

The mayor, however, stopped recording new episodes of his podcast a few months ago, roughly around the time the FBI took his phones and tablet from him. There’s an ongoing investigation into his very normal campaign and the very normal amount of money that came to the campaign in very normal ways that seems to have very normally financed that campaign. I don’t know why he stopped recording that podcast, or if it’ll come back at some point. There seems to be something screwy going on with his mailing list, which I’m on, but I haven’t been getting updates. I’d be unsurprised to learn that he’s been recording new episodes this whole time, but that no one has noticed there’s a glitch uploading them, or something, because, again, no one ever listens to them.

But, for whatever reason, we’ve been without new episodes of his podcast to unpack, which makes this a good time, if you’re new, to go back and listen to some of the episodes I recorded in a fever haze last November when I thought the mayor’s arrest was imminent. I was clearly wrong about that, but I think I’m correct that 1) there’s a lot about why Eric Adams is a really bad mayor that’s revealed by his podcast, and 2) that you really shouldn’t have to listen to his terrible podcast to learn that stuff, so if you’d still like to learn about him 3) listen to some of the episodes that I recorded about his terrible podcast, if you haven’t yet. If that’s you, just hit pause, go back and listen to Past Dave, and Present Dave will be waiting here patiently when you get caught up.

Speaking of catching up, it’s also a good time to catch up on some of the news that the weird bad mayor has made as we’ve moved from 2023 to 24. A great deal of noise was made towards the end of the year about the budget, as Adams used his discretionary powers as mayor to slash funding to just about every sector of city government. Like, these were historic cuts, and they were sudden. One week things were normal and the next, agencies were preparing for Armageddon and issuing press releases about possibly being unable to meet their mandates while the mayor was saying this was absolutely a necessary step to save the city from a sudden fiscal implosion. And then, as the year began, he more or less claimed he’d found a bunch more money, so a lot of it wouldn’t happen. And then he stopped talking about it at all and went back to screaming about immigrants. From where I sit (dog walker) it’s a confusing mess, and it’s not clear to what extent that’s by design. No one that I’ve read has done an analysis of what has actually been cut, what cuts were then actually restored, and what cuts were made but then only relaxed, without full restoration. For example, Adams is claiming that he saved Saturday library service, which somewhat ignores the fact that he cut Sunday service, and that he threatened to cut Saturday service, but never actually did. Will Sunday service come back, or will Saturday service once again be on the block when the next round of budget negotiations come? It’s beyond my ability to really parse, and unfortunately, it also seems to be beyond the resources of local reporting to figure out, at least based on what I’ve seen. Not to say that this is the fault of the reporters who are trying their best, more that it seems impossible to know what will happen until it does happen and also these days most reporters are unfortunate to work for outlets that hate news. What is clear is that the mayor seems to have set fire to a bunch of political goodwill to wind up, at best, back where he started, and where he started was polling numbers in the toilet and maybe about to be arrested?

Speaking of, reporters working the “boy howdy does the mayor sure seem to like getting money from people who aren’t supposed to give it to him” beat at The City, Documented and The Guardian teamed up to ask a bunch more of his donors if they’d been reimbursed for donations they’d made to the mayor by people who seemed to be connected to the mayor, and all of them replied, “yes, these people asked me to make a donation that I wasn’t planning on making and then paid me back for it and wasn’t aware that was wrong, because these people we’re talking about seem to know the mayor personally, and I guess I thought they’d only advise doing legal things what with the mayor being a cop and constantly yelling about law and order all the time.” I’m obviously doing a certain amount of editorializing there, but only a certain amount. Campaign finance law is complicated, and people operating straw donor schemes often don’t tell the people they’re using as the straw donors that what’s going on is called a straw donor scheme. It’s also important to note that many of the people used as straw donors in these schemes seem to have been employees of the people coordinating the schemes, and that adds a level of coercion, and a major incentive not to push back and say they wouldn’t make the donation. As we’ve discussed in the past, the use of straw donors can allow foreign nationals to donate to campaigns illegally, but also, in NYC, donations by city residents of up to around 2,000 dollars are multiplied to up to 8 times by the city. So, if Person X wanted to, they could gather a bunch of people, say 10 of them, get all 10 to donate 2k to Person X’s preferred candidate, and Person X could then reimburse those small donors out of pocket. That 20k would be multiplied by 8, becoming 160k, whereas if Person X just donated on their own, the max matched would be their individual 2k, which would only enrich Person X’s preferred campaign by 16k. The people these reporters found sure sound like they were part of a pretty obvious effort to spread large donations from individuals connected to the mayor out to many small donors, and thereby multiply the value of those donations many times over, which is not, strictly speaking, legal, and if it was this obvious, it’s a little hard to believe the mayor or people close to him - some of whom sure look like donation bundlers in this story - were unaware of it, if for no other reason than there’s no reason to do a powerful person this illegal favor unless they know you did it, that’s how you turn your money into a powerful person taking actions on your behalf.

But maybe it’s nothing. I mean, it’s not like a personal friend of the Mayor’s, who first met him when they were both cops, pled guilty just last week to arranging straw donors for his campaign.

Here’s where I note that the Mayor himself has not been formally accused of a crime and that it’s possible that the Mayor’s old friend really wanted him to become the mayor so he just did this out of the goodness of his heart and didn’t tell the mayor about any of it, maybe didn’t even know it wasn’t legal at the time, and if you believe that, for your own safety please don’t try to operate anything more complicated than a screen door.

In other news, Adams showed himself to be a master of the type of behind the scenes politicking that mayors may find distasteful but that generates results when the City Council overrode two of his vetoes. Uh, wait, the other thing. He’s a master of the thing where you don’t do any of that behind the scenes stuff, you instead do a bunch of fear mongering about what a veto override would do to the city, call the council a bunch of names in public to the media, literally have your deputy chief of staff steal the chairs from reporters during a press conference with the council, say the Public Advocate doesn’t understand what New Yorkers go through because he lives on a military installation (one that’s in NYC proper, which Eric Adams’ home in Fort Lee New Jersey is not) and rather than getting some private facetime with potentially wavering members of the council, you spend your nights partying at Zero Bond, or an illegally built party shed at a buddy’s restaurant, who just happens to be like the brother of the police commissioner, or for some reason screaming about it at a Bar Mitzvah in Queens which he was probably invited to, but I like to imagine he just barged in. It sounded like this

https://twitter.com/teamsweeting/status/1748007923526038006

You can’t see the video, but after he says, “Not in our city, not in our New York, congratulations…” he turns to the bar mitzvah boy and half mumbles his name, because, obviously he’s forgotten it, if he ever knew it, and then sees the video screen behind the kid says “David” and manages to save himself a certain amount of embarrassment, but only a certain amount. I cannot tell you how weird it would have been if the mayor of Boston had shown up at any of the bar mitzvahs I attended as a kid. We were all so high on sugar and wearing itchy suits, I don’t know that he would have been safe.

It’s worth noting what the two bills that the mayor vetoed were (and also worth noting that the council then overrode his vetoes with more votes than the bills initially garnered). The first was a police transparency bill, which would require cops to make a reasonably quick note of any level one stops they make. Level one stops are investigative stops where they question someone who isn’t a suspect. Seems like someone should in fact be writing down the type of stuff that people say when you ask them things like “what color shirt was the guy wearing when he ran by naked,” so that there’s evidence later. Of course, that implies that level one stops are there for the purposes of solving crimes and not harassing people, particularly people of color. At any rate, the thought of asking cops - who are given a weapon and a car and the authority to kill citizens of the state with either, or just their bare hands or tasers or whatever else they can turn into a thing to kill citizens with - to write down a few sentences every so often? This was a bridge too far for the mayor. The other bill he vetoed was a ban of solitary confinement in most cases in city run jails, since, you know, solitary confinement is torture, and I guess it’s not surprising that he likes torture - he certainly likes torturing the listeners of his podcast am I right??? - but again the council told him to pound sand and cry about it and overrode his veto. I will note that these sorts of incremental wins are seen as progress, but it’s not like cops and jails, particularly Rikers, aren’t constantly in violation of the spirit and letter of laws they don’t feel like following, and they’ll violate these, too. Since there’s almost never any consequence, it’s hard to see wins like this as worth much more than the paper they’re printed on. It is nice to see the mayor lose, though. We have to take our pleasure where we can find it.

Going back in time a bit, in September Eric Adams held two different media events during which he presented the Knightscope K5 security robot to the city, which he promised would become a vital part of policing. The robot is about 5 feet tall, records video on 4 cameras, and can move at a top speed of 3 miles per hour. It was pressed into service in the Times Square subway station and immediately stopped all crime there forever. Adams noted that the K5 would practically pay for itself since it required neither meal nor bathroom breaks, but that was somewhat complicated by the 3-5 cops that had to stand next to it at all times because, evidently, constantly screaming about made up crimes stymies the imagination from envisioning the incredibly obvious things that will happen when people just trying to get through their day have to go through a loud, dehumanizing, somewhat confusing transit hub, and find their paths impeded by something that looks like a gigantic half melted dildo. The robot, which could not navigate stairs, spent most of its time completely still and/or plugged into its charger. It has been decommissioned, there were no flashy press conferences to that effect.

And there’s a thing that happens with stuff like this, where people take an arch, but also semi-condescending tone towards men (it’s almost always men) in power when their futuristic tech doesn’t work out. Boys with their toys, and all that. As if the boys (or, more properly, the extremely powerful men) don’t know that this stuff won’t work, or that they want it to work at all. They don’t care, and they know. Adams knew the K5 robot wouldn’t work, come the fuck on, look up a picture of the damn thing. He’s stupid, but no one is that stupid. Adams has been promoting, for years, a piece of tech called the BolaWrap, a handheld device that fires a snare at a fleeing suspect, like they’re members of the Foot Clan, and cops are Ninja Turtles. The NYPD, which piloted both the K5 and a stupid gun that fires a magnetic tracking device at cars, as if that’s in any way necessary or could ever work, rejected the BolaWrap. It’s completely useless. Nevertheless, Adams has been holding press conferences promoting the device since 2018, and it’s very tempting to say that he must just like Batman type stuff like this, it’s charming, and adds a cute bit of flavor to his character to think of that. Of course, it ignores that, as the New York Times reported, Adams’ current chief of staff, who is named - and I don’t like to do this but I sorta like to do this - his name is Frank Carrone, and I’m sorry, that name would be too on the nose if you wrote it for a movie about the most corrupt guy in the world, Frank has invested about a million dollars in the company that makes the BolaWrap, and doubled his investment after Adams promoted the device in 2018 in Brooklyn Borough hall. The Times reports that Carrone has made about half a million dollars this way.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/18/nyregion/eric-adams-frank-carone-bolawrap.html

It’s also worth noting, for all the good it’ll do, that a lot of legal stuff gets pretty illegal when you do it for the purposes of pumping a publicly traded stock’s price. Both of the products I’ve been talking about here are publicly traded, though come on, no one’s ever gonna do anything about this or really anything else. Robbing banks is legal if you own the bank.

I keep trying to get to the point that I can actually talk about the book this episode is meant to talk about, but as soon as I start, there’s more news, so forgive me, but there’s still more! About 10 days ago, as I’m writing this, a group of men assaulted a couple cops in Times Square. Injuries to the cops were minor. The NYPD released a video of the assault itself, but not the moments that preceded it, and the NYPD’s version of events was that 15 migrants, loitering in Times Square were told to clear the sidewalk, and they reacted by ganging up on the cops and pummeling them.

Following this, the mayor put on a bulletproof vest and went out on a ridealong with the NYPD to catch some alleged migrant shoplifters. So, just really leaning into a narrative here.

Shortly after that, a violent street gang that’s never referred to as a violent street gang because they’re a bunch of conservative guys who they typically beat up poor people, and also their leader was the Republican candidate for mayor, I’m talking about Curtis Sliwa and the Guardian Angels, in case it’s not clear - that bunch of goons did a live shot for Hannity on Fox from Times Square to talk about how he and his goons are going to clear the streets of all the migrants that do all the crime in NYC and then they literally beat the shit out of a guy on air, the crime was filmed, and, while they claimed they were brutalizing a shoplifter who was also a non citizen, as if either of those categories are reason to be assaulted by vigilantes, it now appears that the reason they beat the guy, an American citizen, was that he was loudly calling them what they are (fascist brownshirts) while they were trying to lie about the state of the world for political clout on a TV show hosted by a fascist brownshirt. Might want to also note that Curtis Sliwa has a long history of making up things that happened to him for press coverage, like that time he faked his own kidnapping, and he was once shot by a mobster, and the reason for that has long been the subject of speculation, and I don’t know why any of these weirdos does what they do, but mostly you get intentionally shot by a mobster if you are, yourself, a mobster. Also he was fired from his recurring bit on the local news for being incredibly racist.

But the initial incident was still troubling, right? Well, maybe, but maybe some additional context has come out to narrow the direction of that trouble. The NYPD has lowered the number of people involved from 15 to 11 and released the body cam footage from one of the cops, which I watched. It shows that the cops approached a group of people, most of whom appear to be young, several in their teens. Those people weren’t blocking the sidewalk, and that they more or less started to disperse when told to, despite the sidewalk not belonging to the police and it being legal to stand on it. The cops approached them aggressively and with a lot of hostility, and at least one of the people being forced to move was holding an infant. When the cops stepped in front of one of the individuals, he was forced to stop suddenly, causing some of his possessions to fall to the ground. When he went to pick them up, and I’m sure the cop didn’t intend to make this guy drop his stuff, the other cop started to jaw at him. The individual finished picking up his stuff, kept moving, and loudly said that one of the cops looked like Ugly Betty, which is a devastating burn, but it’s illegal to make a cop feel, so that Ugly Betty ass cop slammed him against the side of a building. And that’s when the rest of the people the cops had been harassing defended that person. They also stopped defending that person long before actual harm was done to the cops, who as soon as the incident is over, the video shows, get right back up. Also, I can now report that the YouTube recommendation engine thinks that if you watch NYPD bodycam footage you probably want a bunch of Tucker Carlson content, and that’s one for the algorithm right there. 

Now, look, do I love violence? Sure, I’m an American. I adore violence. But, go ahead and, as a civilian, act like the cops did. Tell someone to move, even away from somewhere that you own, get mad when they do while making it clear they don’t like you, react by slamming them against a wall, and cry to the press when their friends come to their aid. Shit, tell the cops that story and see if anyone at all gets arrested. If you pop back up as fast as those cops did, those same cops will look at you with the same degree of concern they show when you ask them if they’re gonna try to find your stolen bike. But if it happens to cops? The Post will scream for migrant blood for days, Curtis Sliwa will take the opportunity to get an erection the only way he can, immediate arrests will be made, and the theoretically unbiased press will publish the police narrative without pushback. And also, it does not matter what accident of birth led these people to have or not have a piece of paper indicating that they are citizens of this country or not, but it’s not clear that they were all migrants. I kinda think that they might have been because they seem to be advocating for their god given rights to not have state agents mess with them or their property - you may recall there was a bit of a war over this issue about 250 years ago - in a way that most citizens of this country seem to have forgotten how to do. Bless.

All else aside, imagine coming into the precinct the day after a bunch of teenagers fed you pavement. Imagine how badly those two cops are getting hazed for being manhandled by children. Prayers up.

That’s some, though by no means all, of the news since last we chatted. If you have already listened to every episode, or you just got caught up, you know that, since he’s not recording his podcast, in my last episode, I discussed a book Eric Adams wrote back in 2020. His extremely specific, scientific, not at all confusing and obviously successful plan for health and wellness “Healthy At Last”.

It’s not the only book Adams has written. In the last couple months there’s been a little bit of interest in a book from 2009, called Don’t Let It Happen, because, like a lot of Eric Adams content, it seems like no one read it, and probably someone should have when he was running for mayor. Now that he is mayor, finally, someone did read it, a guy named Eamon Levesque and he put a review of it up on Byline which went somewhat viral. Now, in the wake of that interest, which arose, to be clear, because a reporter finally got around to actually reading a book the mayor wrote and then simply reporting on what was in that book, Adams said several things about this book, including that it might have been ghostwritten and even seemed to imply that he never wanted it to be published at all, and would therefore have been unaware that it had been. A city hall spokesperson claimed that Adams didn’t review the final draft of the book and was unaware that it was being sold.

That strains credulity for a number of reasons. Eric Adams’ name is on the copy of the book I have. The book was written 15 years ago, and Adams was not a particularly well known person at that point. He’d been elected to the state senate, but was politically unknown to the point that he’s credited on the book’s cover as being a former police officer, which is to say a ghostwriter will ghostwrite for anyone who’s paying but he doesn’t seem like he would have merited a ghostwriter at that point. It also doesn’t really… feel like a ghostwritten book, for reasons we can get into later. And the publishing house is a self-publisher; you have to tell self-publishers that you want them to print the book, or they don’t do it. The book was quoted by reporters who reported on his campaign for Mayor, clearly Eric Adams should have been aware of this. Additionally, because those reporters didn’t make their articles about how nuts the book is, it seems like maybe someone fed them pull quotes from it, which seems like only something the campaign itself would do, though obviously I can’t say that with any certainty. What I can say is that I’m pretty sure he wrote the damn thing, but I obviously didn’t witness him write it.

Oh, I just thought of something and stopped recording in order to poke around a little bit. Took some doing, but I’m a dog walker on a snow day, though reporters theoretically could do this as part of just having a job that allows them to do research for a living. Anyway, the printer that Adams self-published with is called Xulon, because why would anything be normal here, but whatever. Xulon recently pulled the page with Adams’ book from their website, presumably because Adams told them to stop selling this book that made him look like a weird and unpleasant person. This might lead one to wonder if Xulon, in fact, did publish the book without his permission. Maybe, in that thinking, he submitted this manuscript years ago, but never pulled the trigger on it, never authorized them to publish, and then, when he finally became a famous enough person, Xulon saw dollar signs when they realized they were sitting on this thing and decided to cash in. Or maybe he never wrote a book for them at all and they just put something together to generate, well, viral blog posts and podcast episodes that might drive eyeballs to their publishing house.

Ah, but the internet never forgets. The wayback machine at archive dot org archived Xulon Press’s website on August 29th, 2011, when Eric Adams was a New York state senator, and state senators (as opposed to federal senators from states) are nobody famous. Adams had held the position since 2007, and it’s one for which he had so little renown that when he wrote this book two years later, in 2009, he credited himself as “Eric Adams, Retired NYPD Captain.” So there’d be no reason for Xulon to be publishing it in 2011 without his authorization. No reason for Xulon to be making it up in 2011. And in 2011, the page for Eric Adams’ book, Don’t Let It Happen, is on Xulon’s website archive, complete with his author credit. Not to belabor the point, but Adams and his spokesperson are liars.

At about 150 pages, Don’t Let It Happen is a thin book, unlike Healthy At Last which is over 250 pages long. Unlike Healthy At Last, Don’t Let It Happen is an incredibly packed book. It’s not really surprising that a wellness grift is heavily padded and light on information or science or statistics or facts or even anecdotes that make sense or support whatever the thesis is supposed to be. I am truly surprised to report, though, that every page of Don’t Let It Happen has so much information on it. Note that “information” and “truth” are not always ride or dies but the point is, I’m gonna take some time with this one. Levesque’s article was great, but it was an overview of the book, and could only narrow to focus on one or two of the more lunatic bits. I’m looking to do a deeper dive here, and there’s something truly worth our time on every page of this thing. I’m not really sure how many episodes I’m going to wring from this slim volume, but, just for the sake of not putting out a 7 hour long episode, I’m going to break this up a bit.

Also, blanket warning going forward: Adams regularly starts what appears to be a normal story, and then just suddenly throws the most horrifying details of terrible things happening to a child. The “It” that Adams wants to prevent from Happening covers a wide variety of things happening to children, and he’s going to talk about a lot of really bad things that happen to children here, including sexual violence, gang violence, suicidality and more. I really cannot express how jarring and in your face out of nowhere some of this is and you should be aware of that going in.

Shall we commence?

Let’s start with the cover, which I encourage you to do an image search of. If you’re a careful listener of this podcast, or other works I’ve done, you know that I really enjoy creating audio descriptions of insane images, and rest assured, this will really scratch that itch. 

The book is roughly square, so we’re looking at a square. It was 2009, so all the fonts on the cover are non-serifed. At the top is the title. In relatively small, red letters are the words “Don’t Let It.” Under that, larger, bold weight, black and in all caps is the word “HAPPEN”. The kerning, or space between letters on both lines is unsettlingly off.

It’s not clear why but the cover is bisected horizontally. The top half is colored slightly off white, the bottom half is colored more or less perfectly white.

Below the title is a red plastic box. It’s slightly see-through and it has a red plastic clasp that stands proudly under the two Ps in HAPPEN. It’s the type of cheap clasp that typically fails if the box is turned over or jostled with anything heavy inside. It’s interesting what the mind manages to infer. This is clearly meant to be a child’s lunchbox, and I immediately clocked it as one, despite the fact that on closer inspection I have never seen a child’s lunchbox that looked anything like this. I’m not sure this box exists in the real world, or if it’s just a photoshopped together Frankenbox (I’m obligated to make the joke that the Frankenbox is the doctor). 

The box is wider than it is deep or high. Based on the typical size of its contents I’d guess it’s meant to be about 10 inches by six inches, and when closed about three inches high. It is, however, open, and the box is canted forward at an angle, so we can see into it, see its contents, and also we can see that the things inside of it would never actually fit if it was closed.

What are those things?

Moving from right to left, there is a banana, which sweeps from the lower right corner, arcing upwards in the image towards the back of the box, until it disappears behind another object. In the top middle of the box, also partially obscured by another object is a small bag of mini pretzels. Under that, in the lower middle of the box is a wrapped white blob. One part of the mind immediately says “deli sandwich” and another immediately says “brick of cocaine” but it’s not clear which we’re going for here.

There’s one other object in the box. Resting on top of the pretzels and mirroring the banana’s sweep so that it moves from the lower left of the image to the middle right, passing over the banana and preventing us from seeing that the top of the banana must be breaking through the back of the box because the box is much too small to hold a banana, is a snub nosed revolver. It looks like whoever created this image knew enough to remove the branding but the gun looks like a Smith & Wesson, except the graphic designer either flipped the image or used a left handed gun, the lever that opens the revolver is on the wrong side. The gun has a shadow around it, none of the other objects in the box do. The box sits in null bisected space as if it is atop something, but it’s just floating there, save that it, too, has a shadow which somehow rests on the nothing the box sits atop.

Under this, in relatively small black type are the words “Eric Adams, Retired NYPD Captain.”

And below that are the words “Foreword by Tracey Collins, Former Principal.”

So that’s the cover. We are led to believe that this still life is a thing that happens and we must not let it. Apparently the text of the book will provide the means to divert It from Happen.

Let’s dive in.

The foreword is a page long and is by Tracey Collins, again identified as a former principal. A bit about Tracey Collins. Eric Adams has never married, likes to party, and has hinted at being somewhat non-monogomously inclined, and good for him, as long as - I was going to say “as long as everyone’s happy” but that holds non-traditional relationships to a standard we don’t really hold what are considered standard marriages to. Unhappy marriages are more or less seen as normal, something to be worked on and fixed, and sometimes they can be, but it’s sorta strange to say “well, good for them if they want to get married, as long as everyone’s happy with that arrangement,” so it should be sorta strange to say it about other relationships, right? Whatever, Tracey Collins is considered his longtime partner, they got together sometime in the early 2000s. Adams and Collings own a condo together in Fort Lee, New Jersey, which Adams claimed wasn’t his primary residence, if it was he would have been ineligible to run for Mayor. The extent to which they see each other is unclear; close friends of Adams’ have said they’ve never met her. She may just be a quiet, private person who is balancing being in a relationship with one of the loudest attention seekers on the planet. Interestingly, she is also an author. Collings wrote a book called Sweet Promptings for the same self-publishing imprint as Adams, and Adams wrote the foreword for that book. Collins has run a minor non-profit and seems to agree with Adams that sagging pants is a major problem behavior in the youth of today. Hell Gate reports that her relationship to Adams has, at least, been enriching financially: “In July 2022, Collins even got a promotion and a more than 20 percent pay raise at the DOE, going from the “senior youth development director” to the “senior adviser to the deputy chancellor of school leadership,” a role that did not exist before David Banks, himself Adams’s good friend, was appointed DOE chancellor by the mayor.”

So what does she have to say about the book we’re going to be looking at here? A couple quotes:

“In this book, Eric uses a common sense approach to address the seriousness of topics such as child sexual safety, abduction, crime victimization, drugs and gangs, in order to help parents, children and youth make smart choices about their own safety and well-being.

It is written in a straightforward manner and contains a unique blend of anecdotes, practical tips, resources and case studies.”

…

“Now more than ever, keeping our children safe dominates the global landscape.”

Well, that’s extremely poorly written - is he addressing the topics or the seriousness of the topics? Is it straightforward or does it contain a unique blend? - but this woman is already unfortunate enough to be in a relationship with Eric Adams, so I don’t want to go too hard on her.

Moving on to what Eric Adams himself has to say, we have the next… Well, it’s called both Chapter One and Introduction. I don’t know which it is!

Adams begins by telling us the story of why he wrote this book, about a new principal in a failing school who called a schoolwide assembly. In Adams’ telling, the school hadn’t had an assembly for 3 years because the staff was too scared of the students. If the staff was scared of the students, though, they’d have assemblies all the time, that’s when you can get a lot of staff together and stand in the back and watch the students. I used to take music and theater shows to schools in NYC and the one time we went to a truly bad school, the teachers there used the opportunity presented by what was supposed to be a solo musician performing for a single class to dump the entire school into the auditorium so that they could get a break from their unmanageable classes.

The principal holds the assembly. Quote: 

“When all the students were seated, she revealed that she intended to give them a new designation. She further informed them that they should ask their parents to use the revised title. The staff members had a puzzled look on their face as they realized the entire auditorium was hushed.

The quiet was broken by further words from the principal. She explained to the students that their new label was Scholars. She described what it meant to be a Scholar and how she would spend her time as their principal helping them to become “Smarter, Wiser and Kinder.””

Ok. I went to a suburban high school that’s considered very good, though that didn’t stop multiple kids from, you know, trying to kill me. Anyway, if you had done anything like this to us we’d have torn you apart. But also, the idea that this was ghostwritten is pretty rich. If I make a habit of pausing for every instance of terrible grammar and word choice in this book, I’ll need to do an episode for every page, but for some reason the words “Smarter, Wiser and Kinder” are capitalized, he uses the word “further” twice in three sentences, and one of those sentences, “The quiet was broken by further words from the principal” is one of the worst I’ve ever read.

Well, who cares, some time was wasted and some kids were bored, sounds like school. Strap in, because we’re gonna turn the page and I cannot express how insane (and trigger warning for child sexual abuse) what happens next is going to be. Armed with the fact that they are now Smarter, Wiser and Kinder, multiple kids come forward to accuse one of the teachers in the school of sexually assaulting them. Why now? Well, said THE PARENTS OF THESE STUDENTS the principal seemed like she was the first person who’d take this seriously. The teacher is eventually found guilty and jailed. 

Adams writes that after he heard this story, he decided to write a book to empower parents and create the same environment that the principal did. Quote:

“This book will teach you how to notice the early signs that may indicate that your child is being sexually abused, associating with street gangs, doing drugs or alcohol, or carrying a firearm. Near the conclusion of this book, I examine the painful topic of teenage suicide and the signs that your child may be having suicidal thoughts.”

This is a weird pull, but follow me. I’ve watched a lot of Walker: Texas Ranger, because, you may have realized, I hate enjoying my free time. Walker: Texas Ranger is a show that posits that there is no social problem that cannot be solved by liberally applying Walker: Texas Ranger. Walker, a Texas Ranger, played by Chuck Norris, exists in a world that actually does run on these rules, and so, in the episode A Silent Cry, which is somewhat infamous amongst Walkerheads, Walker comes to the aid of a woman who was slipped roofies at a bar and assaulted. The way he does this is to barge into a group councilling session of rape survivors, yell at this woman that she needs to tell him what happened, and enlist her as a cooperative witness, at which point her rapists try to murder her and burn her house to the ground. Walker then arrives just in the nick of time to save her, if not her house, and basically beats these guys to death, and because this is the Walker: Texas Ranger universe, those are the correct outcomes. A woman who, in our world, would have been repeatedly retraumatized by Walker shrieking at her in a therapy setting, and then causing her to be nearly killed and lose all of her worldly possessions is, instead, healed by these events. Because that’s the Walkerverse, and obviously we don’t live there.

The interesting thing for me is that the Walkerverse correctly identifies the problem, and follows the logical next steps of the real world solution. A cop applies violence to the problem of a woman’s assault, and that leads to this poor woman being further immiserated. Typically, in the real world, for victims of sexual violence the options are about as bad. In the Walkerverse, the major departures from reality are that Walker actually tries to solve the crime, Walker actually catches the bad guys, and that despite all the misery, much caused by Walker himself, the woman who was assaulted feels that justice was done. I hope I don’t need to tell you that I hate all of this and wish it was different.

What I’m trying to point out is that the identification of a problem doesn’t mean that the solution presented will be a good one. Adams notes that the principal in question went to the cops after the first report and they laughed her off. The other teachers ignored the issue and were then hostile to her, closing ranks around the accused. The lack of robust reporting mechanisms and delegitimization of victim reports are bigger problems than one principal, and if that’s your single point of success or failure, it will fail again. What happens when she retires or moves schools? What happens when the other teachers who prey on students recognize that this school is protected and request transfers? Why is the focus on this principal (who is never identified, but the foreword is by a former principal who is Eric’s girlfriend, so I have a guess here) and not on the bravery of the kids coming forward? Why is the focus on the principal and not the fact that the system repeatedly failed these kids, and if this story is true, all they needed was one pro forma assembly and one authority figure willing to listen? Why isn’t this seen as a terrible systemic failure to protect children, and what is anyone going to do about it at that level?

Well, Adams, to his credit, wrote a book to try and get his version of what you need to know to be safe out there. But the thing is, like your body, like your health, like the last book of his we discussed, he seems, once again, to be focusing on what you need to change, and not what society needs to change. Even if it works, unless a lot of people buy this self-published book out of Xulon Press, there’s going to be a lot of people who don’t get the message.

And again, there’s only so much an individual can do to protect themselves, but as a whole, there is a great deal society could do to benefit everyone’s safety.

Quote:

“When I began writing this book, my focus was on the complicated and controversial issue of racial profiling. Because it is still my goal to explain this often misunderstood issue and to arm you with the information about how to prevent yourself from being profiled, you will find a section on racial profiling in this book.”

The way you prevent yourself from being racially profiled is that we all stop cops from racially profiling people. Or find another way to achieve society’s needs altogether, since it seems like the current one doesn't work that great.

Chapter 2 is called Child Sexual Safety. It’s an enormous bummer and goes into an almost are-you-alright-Eric level of detail about the ways in which a child can be harmed by an adult which I’m going to spare you from. As for what you can do to prevent it, Adams gives a bunch of tips and I’m also not going to talk about them because you’ve heard them all, they’re the ones everyone is told, in fact Adams, in his book of information you need to know about how to keep it from happening says this about his tips to keep it from happening: “These suggestions come from many excellent law enforcement sources and the American Academy of Pediatrics.” Real hard to find, cutting edge stuff. It’s also all stuff that falls into two categories 1) “stranger danger stuff”, for the very rare cases that a child is threatened with assault or abduction from someone unknown to them or 2) “you can tell me about bad things that happened to you stuff” for things that were already done to a child by someone they know. Since that’s the vast majority of this type of assault, it would be helpful to get some tips on preventing it from happening, since this book is called Don’t Let It Happen, but those sorts of solutions tend to be along the lines of “completely reorient society to allow much more robust reporting of predators and to give parents a lot more time to be with their kids and keep them safe.” It’d be nice if Adams advocated for that sort of thing, but of course he won’t.

Maybe nothing I’ve ever seen more succinctly captures this dynamic than this quote:

“Below is a list of steps that you can take to keep your children safe:” And then the first in the list is:

• “Have your dentist prepare dental charts for your children and request that they are redone at each routine dental checkup. Keep a copy of these charts.”

Yeah, keep your kid safe by hanging onto a way that they can be identified if all that’s left of their corpse is their teeth.

Beyond that this chapter sucks and makes me feel bad so I’m not going to spend any more time on it.

Chapter 3 is called Truancy. It’s three pages long and I’m going to spend like 45 minutes on it.

Adams begins by applying his typical rigorous scientific analysis telling us that “A scholar once described truancy as the doorway to criminal behavior”. Adams doesn’t name this scholar, but it’s fine to just believe everything “a scholar” says, particularly since in the Introduction Adams’ principal friend took great pains to expand the definition of scholar to children.

Just off the top of my head, here’s the list of gateways to criminality that I’ve been reliably assured, over my now 46 years on earth, are the reason for the kids doing all the murders that, in fact, are mostly committed by adults:

Video games, violent video games, first person shooter video games, pot, underage drinking, underage sex, crack, heroin, krokodil, drug dealers, meth, pcp, satan, Dungeons and Dragons, the internet, the dark web, online chatrooms, AOL, white vans that drive around the neighborhood, democrats, the loss of ‘western values’, the destruction of the ‘nuclear family’, gay people, trans people, lead paint.

That’s just what I could think of in a minute, and for what it’s worth, I sorta believe that last one. Look it up.

Anyway, I’m sure they finally figured it out and it’s truancy.

Studies, Adams tells us, reveal the following (all data obviously comes from when he wrote this in 2009):

“In New York City, 15% of all students are absent each day.” It’s probably higher now, to be honest, since everyone’s coughing all the time.

“In Los Angeles, 10% of all students are absent each day.” LA’s truancy rate is lower than NYC, but that hasn’t translated into lower crime rates, LA has a considerably worse crime rate than NYC’s. Sorta seems to undercut Adams here.

“In Pittsburgh, 12% of students are absent each day.” This reads like Adams took an intro to improv class and learned that it’s funny if you do something three times, particularly if the first two are NYC and LA and then the button to the joke is Pittsburgh. At any rate, these numbers are broadly in line with the 10-20% of the country that is sick at any given time during the flu season, which has considerable overlap with the school year. Or anyway, this would have been the case when Adams was writing this. Thankfully we’ve significantly improved our public health outcomes in the past four years.

“Daytime crime in Minneapolis dropped 68% after police began cracking down on truant students.”  This is a fascinating figure and immediately stood out to me. 1) What is meant by cracking down? Were children that weren’t in school, like, forced by cops to go to school? Were they fined? Arrested? What was the enforcement mechanism? 2) When was this study done and over how long a period of time? Might the decrease have occurred on the same curve as the decrease of all crime, which occurred approximately when the worst generation to ever exist aged enough to lose their hormonal drives to murder everyone, which happened right around 1995. 3) Why was it the police that were cracking down and not some other agency like, I don’t know, the department of education? 4) Who was responsible for this study? What methods did they use?

Well. To that last point, I did some poking around and found several agencies and websites that said more or less the exact same thing as Adams, but with no sourcing. I finally found a social work candidate’s thesis, which cited the Manual to Combat Truancy as the source for the claim. The Manual to Combat Truancy was a report created at the Federal level as a joint project of the Department of Justice and the Department of Education. It’s 9 pages long, and doesn’t have footnotes or endnotes. On the first page of the report is the sentence, “In Minneapolis, daytime crime dropped 68 percent after police began citing truant students.” That’s it. No link to a study, no further discussion of this statistic, no timeline, explanation, methodology. That is the only time the word Minneapolis appears in the text. The trail dead ends there. Adams repeats this virtually word for word, without citation.

Directly under that, in the report, is the claim that “In San Diego, 44 percent of violent juvenile crime occurs between 8:30 a.m . and 1:30 p.m.” which is also directly under the stat about Minneapolis in Adams’ book, repeated virtually word for word. And no, there are no citations or endnotes in Adams’ book.

Adams then presents a list of vague recommendations in bullet point format that he admits he is just reprinting from the Department of Education (many of which also appear, with slightly different language, in the Manual to Combat Truancy). These are all things like “a message should be sent to all students that truancy won’t be accepted,” and “create incentives for parents and students,” and “involve local law enforcement,” so they’re all very vague, and also not particularly things that parents, the theoretical audience of this book, can do. These are pieces of advice for administrators and government officials, and not to belabor the point, but this is the sort of thing a ghostwriter would catch and fix.

They might not catch plagiarism, though I’m not sure how much of a gray area it is to more or less reprint a federal report like this. You’d probably be expected, at the least, to cite the report, which Adams does not.

So that was chapter 3, and I’m going to wind this episode down here. We’re only about 30 pages through this damn thing, and because the book publisher didn’t understand that you typically start the numbered pages when the author starts writing, which is to say, you don’t include the foreword, or table of contents, or title page, we’ve only gotten through about 18 pages of this monstrosity.

Well, plenty to look forward to, then!