On Sunday morning, April 6, NYC police responded to a 911 call in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, where a 49 year old man named Longqian Chen, armed with cooking knives, had allegedly attacked a group of young girls ranging from 8 to 16, at least one of them, reportedly, his own niece.
The girls were seriously injured from the multiple stabbings, and were all taken immediately to the hospital; all are currently expected to recover.
The suspect, Longqian Chen, age 49, was shot multiple times by police in their attempt to stop his attacks, and is now in custody.
Bensonhurst, once a major Italian-American neighborhood, is now known as the most ethnically Chinese in the area; approximately 11% of New York’s hundreds of thousands of Chinese-born residents are located there.
It is unknown how long it will be before Longqian Chen files his candidacy for NYC Mayor; he just missed the filing deadline for the primary ballot, but he has until May 27 to file if he decides to run as an independent candidate, as the incumbent Mayor, Eric Adams intends.
The above may sound like a typo, or a sick joke; surely the attempted murderer of four innocent girls would never run for any elected office in America, much less an office as prominent as the Mayor of New York City. Such speculation is outlandish on its face – isn’t it?
Well, now, as long as you ask, No. It’s not so outlandish, at all.
New York City has a population of 8.5 million people, of whom about 40% are immigrants. And of those, half a million are Chinese. A candidate who could claim that he represents such a slice of the electorate should have a leg up, especially in an era in which adoration of the concept of immigration – legal and illegal alike – is considered a holy sacrament to the Democrat voter.
Still not convinced?
Well, then, consider who’s in the lead in current polling.
Incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, a rock-rib, solid modern liberal in almost every way, had the nerve to break the orthodoxy of pro-immigrant rhetoric when the Biden-Harris regime’s flood of illegal aliens began to drown his city, and Adams came out in favor of border enforcement. Such a violation of the DNC’s “intersectionality” principle caused Adams’ star to drop as quickly as it had once risen, and his poll numbers fell along with it.
With Mayor Adams in trouble, an opening was noticed, and the disgraced former governor of New York state, Andrew Cuomo, threw his hat in the ring. The former governor now stands at 38% in the polls, his juggernaut indicating that the former governor is the odds-on favorite for victory in both the summer primary and the autumn general.
And who is Andrew Cuomo? A former governor, who in 2021 was tossed out of office in disgrace in the midst of the #MeToo movement, buried under an avalanche of allegations of sexual harassment and offensive passes at eleven then-current and former colleagues, ranging from high level aides to low-level staffers.
There do seem to be politicians who can get away with such behavior; Andrew Cuomo didn’t seem to be one of them.
But that’s not the only storm that drummed him out of office. Andrew Cuomo wrote a book – or should we say, edited a book largely ghost-written for him by state employees on state time – about his successful management of the Covid-19 crisis. News that this effort was done on the clock, in violation of both legal and ethical employer-employee rules, was as shocking to some New York voters as the groping charges.
And that book served to remind the voters of Cuomo’s behavior during the pandemic. As we have found in the years since, Americans have a deep psychological need to forget about the pandemic, to put its pain behind them, because so many lost so much – from the lives of friends and relatives to jobs and fortunes alike – as a result of that horrendously mismanaged occurrence.
His candidacy for mayor in 2025 therefore disturbs memories long since buried; memories of how Cuomo directed his offices to crack down on many of the most ludicrous and irresponsible protocols of that demented, statist era.
Cuomo ordered closures of the Broadway theatre district, the schools and college systems, and he ordered that schools must plan for ways to feed their students without educating them. Cuomo ordered that nursing homes and hospitals cease accepting visitors for the duration.
The list of illegal “emergency” orders in New York bearing Governor Cuomo’s fingerprints reads much like the list in other blue states like Michigan and California, which is bad enough, but there’s a special issue worth calling out: Governor Cuomo ordered hospitals to send all their Covid-19 patients – already known (or at least strongly suspected) to be highly contagious – to nursing homes.
What sane person would intentionally put very sick sufferers of a highly contagious disease next to elderly, vulnerable patients of the group most likely to be susceptible to the worst effects of such a virus?
Of all the many Covid-related missteps of the Cuomo administration in Albany, this is the one he will be remembered by. It is believed that somewhere between nine and eleven thousand of New York’s certain casualties from the pandemic were nursing home patients who caught their fatal illness directly from the patients whom Andrew Cuomo situated in their midst.
Obviously at this point, more than six months ahead of the November election, it is impossible to say for sure whether current polling will hold or not. But it is fascinating that someone rightly turned out of a governor’s mansion under such circumstances could possibly mount a political comeback like this.
For four years now, Andrew Cuomo has been considered the executioner of thousands and thousands of innocent senior citizens, the man who gave the order as surely as Jim Jones did in Guyana forty years earlier, replacing the cups of poison with an airborne virus.
By comparison to such a villain, Longqian Chen is hardly comparable. To the best of our knowledge, he has only tried to kill four innocent girls, and they are all expected to survive.
Which of the two would New York voters prefer?
Politics in New York have always been peculiar, but this year may set new records.
Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris regime (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
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