Eric Adams Is the Lying Face of the Campus Crackdown

Journalism, a trade where the need to maintain access often requires euphemism, is rich in evasive language to describe people like Eric Adams: dissimulator, equivocator, teller of tall tales, prevaricator, fabulist, among many others. But to be perfectly frank—something that Adams is incapable of—the New York mayor is a bald-faced liar. He is willing to say anything to advance his immediate interest, with little or no regard for the truth. Adams doesn’t just tell the occasional fib. He lies on a legendary scale, comparable to Baron Munchausen, the Wizard of Oz, or Pinocchio. Adams is second only to Donald Trump in his wanton mendacity. In a very entertaining 2023 profile of Adams for The New Yorker, Ian Parker made clear just how essential lying is to Adams’s persona, to the point that Adams will tell lies denying the lies he had previously told.

Adams regularly called himself a vegan. When Politico reported in 2022 that he ate fish, Adams, according to Parker, “initially denied this” and then “he denied to me, untruthfully, that he’d ever claimed to be a vegan.” Later, Adams said, “If I see a piece of chicken, I’m going to nibble on it.”

In 2021, Adams said he had never boxed before. Two years later, he boasted that he often boxed when younger, doing well in the gym but quickly getting knocked out in the ring. Adams has claimed he was born in Alabama (which is where his mom was born, he himself entering the world in a Park Slope hospital). He claimed his father sometimes took him to see Malcolm X speak—virtually impossible, since the civil rights leader was assassinated when Adams was 4. Adams has boasted, “When I played football for Bayside High School, we used to win championships all the time.” He also denied to Parker ever playing football for Bayside.

Adams’s deceptions have even required the fabrication of evidence—as Parker relates:

Last year, after the murder of two police officers in Harlem, Adams made a speech in which he described having long carried, in his wallet, a small photograph of a police-officer friend who was murdered in 1987. A week later, Adams showed this crumpled keepsake to journalists. The Times recently reported that, in the days following the speech, City Hall aides had manufactured the wallet photograph by downloading an image from the Internet, then staining a print with coffee, to make it look old.

One thing that Adams does not lie about, it seems, is his love of Israel. Of course, it’s not unknown for New York politicians to work up an expedient enthusiasm for the Jewish state. But Adams seemed genuine when he said he planned to retire in Israel. Asked where, he said “the Golan Heights” (which, to be sure, is actually Syrian territory occupied by Israel).

All the various strands of Adams’s political personality—his Zionism, his pro-cop stance, and his habit of lying—came together this week when he became the public face of the nationwide campus crackdown on pro-Palestinian activism. To be sure, this crackdown is supported by a dismayingly wide bipartisan consensus, headed by President Joe Biden. But Biden reserved his major pro-crackdown sentiment for a speech of less than four minutes, shameful but mercifully brief. By contrast, Adams has been rushing into the limelight to make arguments on behalf of a large sweep of Columbia University on Tuesday that led to more than 300 arrests.

The campus crackdown, at both Columbia and schools across the nation, is indefensible. But when you are defending the indefensible, you need a spokesman like Adams, as prolific an inventor of fables as Scheherazade.

At a press conference on Wednesday, Adams offered this strange rationale for the crackdown: “There is a movement to radicalize young people, and I’m not going to wait until it’s done and all of a sudden acknowledge the existence of it. This is a global problem that young people are being influenced by those who are professionals at radicalizing our children, and I’m not going to allow that to happen as the mayor of the City of New York.”

This is a bizarre justification for a police action in a nation where free expression is constitutionally protected. After all, there is nothing illegal about “radicalizing” students, who are not, in any case, children. Adams is openly confessing to violating the First Amendment. The phrase “professionals” was much used by Adams and his administration, as was the even more nakedly authoritarian “outside agitators.” Even as he talked of “outside agitators” on Tuesday, Adams acknowledged that the concept had a disreputable past. The “outside agitator” trope was much used by racists in the Jim Crow South as a way to demonize the civil rights movement. It is, as Columbia historian Mae Ngai noted, a “bogeyman narrative.” But the toxic history of the phrase didn’t stop Adams from using it.

When Adams tried to specify who the outside agitators were, he repeatedly botched the facts. As Nia Prater of New York notes: