The Gotham Conservative

Fresh off the dissolution of his criminal corruption case , New York City Mayor Eric Adams says he's pulling out of the Democratic primary and running instead as an independent, citing his court case as a distraction. The embattled Democrat announced Thursday that he will run for mayor as an independent, leaving Andrew Cuomo, who resigned as governor of New York amid a sexual harassment controversy, the primary contender at the top of the blue ticket. Adams remains a registered Democrat, however. In a  video , Adams, said he will not run in the Democratic primary in June because the case "dragged on too long" while the "false accusations were held over me." "I firmly believe that this city is better served by truly independent leadership, not leaders pulled at by the extremists at the far left or the far right, but instead those rooted in the common middle, the place where the vast majority of New Yorkers are firmly planted," Adams said. ...

The Republican-controlled U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security is investigating the Chinese-American Planning Council, a New York City nonprofit, alleging in a letter that the taxpayer-funded group's know-your-rights training sessions may help undocumented people evade immigrant enforcement officers. In a letter published on the committee's website, Committee Chair Rep. Mark E. Green of Tennessee and Rep. Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma alerted CPC President and CEO Wayne Ho about the probe into the "potential use of federal funds by non-government organizations (NGOs) to facilitate illegal immigration." The two Republicans requested that Ho turn over a bevy of documents, including federal grant applications and notes relating to an "undercover video" of a March 8 training purportedly recorded by Muckraker.com, a conservative watchdog group. The footage, as characterized in the House committee letter, shows a CPC official "explaining strategies...

In 1805, New York made a deal. State officials granted taxpayer funds and a corporate charter to a private organization known as the Free School Society, which agreed in return to provide a free education to poor children in New York City. The society became a precursor to modern-day charter school networks. Other 19th century school organizations took notice, including religious ones. From 1825 until 1841, New York officials received similar requests for funding from Baptist, Jewish, Lutheran, Catholic, Presbyterian and Quaker schools. All were denied. What happened next is remarkable. Not only did none of the religious schools win a lawsuit arguing that the denial of funding violated their constitutional right to free exercise of religion, but none even brought suit. And similar episodes unfolded around the country. To many people, this two-centuries-old snapshot may seem quaint or even irrelevant. But to the Supreme Court of the United States, it is everything. It'...

New polling suggests Congresswoman Elise Stefanik is best poised to challenge Governor Hochul in next year's gubernatorial election. Despite Ms. Stefanik's conservative record and her close relationship with President Trump, she is within striking distance of defeating Ms. Hochul to become the first Republican governor of New York in more than two decades.  According to the poll from the firm GrayHouse, Ms. Hochul leads Ms. Stefanik by a mere six points — 46 percent to 40 percent — with 14 percent of voters undecided.  Of the Republican candidates tested by GrayHouse, Ms. Stefanik fares the best against the incumbent governor. Congressman Mike Lawler trails Ms. Hochul by seven points, while Nassau County executive Bruce Blakeman trails by eight points.  In the Republican primary, Ms. Stefanik would have a commanding lead over her two major competitors. Mr. Lawler, a Rockland County-area congressman, has been telling allies that he will likely run for governor next ye...

Gov. Kathy Hochul and her deputy, Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado, haven't been playing off the same sheet music for a while now. It took a failed presidential run and an embattled mayor to make the off-key production coming out of the executive chamber painfully obvious to the rest of New York, but that doesn't mean that political machinations in Washington, D.C., or New York City are to blame for the dissonance. Instead, a slowly building realization that the two upstate Democrats weren't on the same team killed any hope for his future in the administration and any optimism she held toward gaining a new ally. Delgado announced he wouldn't seek reelection as lieutenant governor in February after his and Hochul's latest public disagreement. Hochul pointed out the obvious during the fallout of his announcement: He clearly didn't want the job of being her lieutenant governor anymore. What's less clear is if he knew what he was getting into and, more importan...

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Megyn Kelly, long time conservative commentator and 2025 TIME100 honoree , admitted she doesn't have "a lot of hope" for journalistic freedom. "My core belief is that corporate media is dead, whether it knows it or not," Kelly told TIME. "They really need to wake up not just during the Trump Administration, but during the Democratic administrations too." Kelly, who recently announced her new podcast network "MK Media," was one of several honorees who offered insights into the state of journalism in the current political climate. Her comments came amid broader conversations about media independence, following the recent resignation of 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens, who cited a loss of journalistic freedom. Kelly argued that Owens should "take a hard look" at what he did during his tenure of the show. "It was under his watch that it went so far left and lost all credibility," Kelly said. "He let ...

NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK: Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds 's appearance at the 2025 TIME100 Gala suggested cracks as the couple's public outing comes at an extraordinarily tense time. Lively, 37, isn't just navigating a feud with conservative journalist Megyn Kelly; she's locked in a messy and high-stakes legal war with her 'It Ends With Us' co-star and director, Justin Baldoni, as the Daily Mail reported. Body Language expert says Blake Lively 'choreographed' a reluctant Ryan Reynolds In December 2024, Blake Lively sued Justin Baldoni for harassment and fostering a toxic work environment on the set of 'It Ends with Us', claims he fiercely denied before countersuing the actress, her publicist, and even Ryan Reynolds for defamation, to the staggering tune of $400 million. Now, it seems the pressure from these courtroom clashes is spilling into their public appearances. Body language expert Judi James , speaking exclusively to The...

A lively Mass with mariachi music in San Antonio. A monthly potluck for Filipino Catholics in New York City. Parishes in Las Vegas so crowded that some attendees must stand. These are some of the faces of the Catholic Church in the United States this Easter weekend — a moment marked by both celebration and mourning after the death of Pope Francis on Monday. For decades, the share of American Catholics declined in the face of broader trends in secularization. But those numbers have stabilized in recent years, according to the latest survey data from the Pew Research Center , buoyed by growing immigrant communities across the West and the South and by broader societal changes that are transforming Catholic identity. About 78 percent of Asian Catholics in the United States were born outside the country, and another 14 percent are the children of immigrants — the highest proportion of any ethnic group for which Pew has sufficient data. While Asian Catholics now make up only about 4 pe...

The death of the first bishop of Rome to rise from Latin America, Pope Francis, brings into sharp relief the possibility that the next pontiff selected at the imminent conclave could hail from the continent essential to the church's future — Africa.  There has not been a pope from Africa in some 1,500 years. The first of three African popes, Victor I, ordained that Easter always falls on a Sunday. The holiday had previously been celebrated on the 14th of Nissan, the date the Jewish calendar assigns to the night before Passover.   The hopes of Catholic traditionalists who felt betrayed by Francis's rhetoric of reform appear to be migrating to the person of Robert Cardinal Sarah, a Guinean prelate and unabashed conservative. At a prayer breakfast at Washington, D.C., in 2016, he decried "the legalization of same-sex marriage" and the "obligation to accept contraception within health care programs." Cardinal Sarah, who has also called fundamentalist ...

NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK: Joy Behar , co-host of 'The View', voiced her apprehension on the Tuesday, April 22, episode following the death of Pope Francis , worrying that the Vatican may shift back toward conservatism. Pope Francis, aged 88, died on the morning of Monday in Vatican City. His funeral service is set to take place on April 27, at 10 am local time in St Peter's Square, the New York Post reported.  Joy Behar fears conservative backlash following Pope Francis' death Pope Francis was widely regarded as a reform-minded pope who attempted to modernize aspects of the Catholic Church while emphasizing mercy and compassion. "I wonder because there might be a backlash against how good he was and how much humility he had compared to some of the leaders in this world right now, so there might be a backlash to it," Behar said. "And they'll get some conservative guy in there who, you know, is anti-gay and everything else," she add...

Compost drop-off bin is seen near Madison Square Park in Manhattan, in January, 2024. Credit: Sipa USA via AP/Cristina Matuozzi In an abrupt backtrack, Mayor Eric Adams' administration in recent days has exempted most of New York City's residential buildings from being fined for violating the composting law, which mandates that food scraps and yard waste be separated from the rest of the trash. That new exemption covers buildings with fewer than 30 units, as well as a carve-out for bigger buildings, which now won't face fines until the fifth time being caught violating the law and will instead receive warnings for the first four violations, according to Joshua Goodman, a spokesman for the city's Sanitation Department. The exemptions last until year's end, he said. Although composting has been mandatory for New York City residential buildings since October, it wasn't until April 1 that violators could face fines. For buildings with eight or fewer ...

Convicted cop killers should never walk free. But New York's soft-on-crime parole board is poised to release its 44th cop killer since 2017. For this injustice, you can blame mayoral wannabee Andrew Cuomo and his criminal-coddling successor, Gov. Kathy Hochul. Also to blame is a network of George Soros-funded pro-crime advocacy groups -- call it the decarceration-industrial complex -- pressuring Albany lawmakers. The executive director of one of these groups, Release Aging People from Prison, is himself out on parole after being convicted of attempted murder of an NYPD sergeant. You can't make this up. The parole "reform" agenda in Albany is being driven largely by ex-cons and bankrolled by extreme leftists. Later this month, cop killer David McClary will go before the state parole board. In 1988, McClary snuck up behind 22-year-old rookie cop Edward Byrne in his patrol car guarding a building and fired five bullets into the back of his head. It was...

For everyday New Yorkers struggling with high costs of living, Zohran Mamdani's commitment to progressive and democratic values make him the right choice for mayor. As the 2025 New York City's 2025 mayoral elections come closer, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo is the leading Democratic candidate, with 34% of voters saying he was their top choice. But Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani from Queens is quickly becoming a formidable contender as the race continues. Mamdani's hyper-progressive policies — that calls for a whole-of-government approach to community issues  — will attempt to relieve New York City's working class of the city's growing unaffordability. Although many of his opponents have adopted more centrist positions for the sake of popularity, Mamdani has remained unwavering in his left-leaning beliefs, appealing to the New Yorkers who feel abandoned by their leaders with a campaign that speaks to their real, daily s truggles. New York City made the list of...

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While New York City has been a focal point for debate over the deportation of undocumented immigrants, many of its major industries and institutions are immersed in a budding policy fight over which and how many skilled foreign workers to allow into the country. New York City led all U.S. urban areas in 2024 with more than 21,000 approvals for coveted H-1B work visas for specialty and skilled workers, according to new data by O2I, a New Jersey-based outsourcing firm. New York and New Jersey are among the top-five states for H-1B recipients, with nearly 56,000 H-1B visa holders in 2024, the company said. The authorizations allow employers to temporarily hire foreign workers in areas where there are gaps in the domestic supply, including in mathematics, engineering and medical sciences. But the H-1B program has been the subject of sharp debate in President Trump's inner circle, where critics contend the program, long dominated by Indian nationals, denies jobs to U.S.-born ...

In the Lower Manhattan neighborhood of TriBeCa, known for its liberal politics and sky-high rents, a new retailer, known for its conservative Christian convictions, rock-bottom prices and steadfast customers in rural America, is moving in. Now the question is, can this retailer, Hobby Lobby, make it in Manhattan? The retailer, which is expected to open this spring and is taking over 75,000 square feet that used to be a Bed Bath & Beyond and Barnes & Noble for its first Manhattan store, should have prompted an enthusiastic response given the surge of Americans who picked up crafts hobbies during the pandemic. Instead, the reaction has been mixed, with some residents feeling affronted that Hobby Lobby is opening in their neighborhood. Local groups and forums that are protesting the company's arrival in TriBeCa point to Hobby Lobby's work with organizations that oppose gay and transgender rights . They haven't forgotten the private company's lawsuit in 2014 to ...