Is that really you, Bill?
Former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio finally admitted that liberal calls to “defund the police” and lax border policies were wrong for America.
De Blasio – who was recently mistaken in a news article for another man with the same name – made the “un-Bill-ievable” admission as the progressive darling got chummy with Fox News’ Sean Hannity on his new podcast “Hang Out with Sean Hannity.”
“In retrospect, the whole concept of ‘defund the police’ made no sense,” de Blasio said as the Democrat sat with a margarita.
“It made sense to say, `how can we do better?’ It made sense to say, hey—and by the way, a lot of cops told me this. A lot of police leaders told me this—we’ve got to do a lot more for young people to give them positive alternatives, because that’s good for the police too. That’s good safety too.”
Hannity responded, “We’re not disagreeing, right? This is amazing.”
De Blasio responded, “So far we’re doing good. We’re doing—so defund was a mistake. And I understand where it came from, but it was a mistake.”
De Blasio belatedly admitted that Biden’s lax border policy had failed in another segment in the sitdown.
“We’re going to have some common ground. Are you ready?” de Blasio teased Hannity.
“I’m shocked,” Hannity said.
“OK – I don’t like what Biden did with the border,” said de Blasio, who served as mayor from 2014 to 2021.
Hannity asked him, “Why didn’t you say it then?”
“Because honestly,” de Blasio said, “I didn’t think it was as bad as it was. And then, when I saw it during Biden’s time, that he was able to reverse course in that final year and tighten up the border—no, I mean, that’s the irony.”
Hannity fired back that Biden moved too late to tighten the border and didn’t deserve credit for a turnaround. His lax enforcement triggered a migrant crisis that flooded the Big Apple and other municipalities with hundreds of thousands of desperate asylum seekers, Hannity said.
“Something changed. Obviously, something changed,” de Blasio said.
“So we better drink more of your margarita,” Hannity joked. “This is going to get tougher.”
De Blasio then confesses, “We, as Democrats, rightfully deserve that critique.”
Right-of-center New Yorkers got a kick out of de Blasio’s about-face.
“Even a stopped clock is right twice a day,” quipped state Conservative Party chairman Gerard Kassar.
“Unfortunately, de Blasio didn’t say this when he had the power to make a difference. But I’m glad he’s admitting he’s wrong.”
Kassar said de Blasio just could have worked by the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, which was temporarily used as a migrant shelter, to understand how bad the border crisis had gotten.
During his time as mayor, de Blasio never outright called to “defund the police” but he supported trimming $1 billion from the police budget in 2020 as protests flared in the wake of the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.
The City Council approved an $88.1 billion budget overnight that included shifting roughly $1 billion away from the NYPD.
At the time the then-mayor defended the cuts and said he was “very comfortable we struck the right balance.”
“We are reducing the size of our police force by not having the next recruit class,” he said at the time. “We are reducing our overtime levels. We’re shifting functions away from police to civilian agencies.”
But by April 2021, he had reversed course and decided to spend $105 million to build a new NYPD precinct in Southeast Queens — a top priority of black constituents, reversing a decision to eliminate the project the prior year when he was under pressure to cut the police budget.