Ashley Elizabeth Miller

After a wet walk down the block to my corner coffee spot, the Sensuous Bean of Columbus Avenue, I strode home, eager to read the Saturday morning news. The caffeine may have encouraged my purchase of (yet another) subscription. I bowed to the monthly rate of The Economist premium publication.

I am listening to a podcast on the troubling governing of New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who ran on a law-and-order campaign and promised to expand available housing. He was never popular in Manhattan. But he did garner a working-class population in the outer boroughs. All our pro-police mayor has done is impose more surveillance systems across the city.

“When the burdens of the Presidency seem unusually heavy, I always remind myself that it could be worse — I could be a mayor of a city instead,” said former U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson.

The critics calling out Adams, whose campaign financing is under federal investigation, reminds me about our privilege as a free democracy to publicly question our leaders, unlike those in Russia living under the villainous vermin, Mr. Vladimir Putin. Following Alexei Navalny’s “death” in an Arctic prison, a loss globally attributed to Putin’s murderous policing team, U.S. President Joe Biden placed more sanctions on Russia, but Masha Gessen says these are not impactful.

Yesterday, on Friday, March 1st, thousands of courageous Russians gathered outside the Church of the Icon of Our Lady Soother My Sorrows, where Alexei Navalny’s funeral was held, and the Borisovskoye Cemetery, where the iconic Putin-dissident was buried. Before the expected demonstration, which is illegal due to Russia’s Stalin-like KGB regime, the police barracked the memorial areas with sprawling metal barricades, as reported by Meduza, an independent news website operating out of Latvia, which combats Russian propaganda.

As a political reporter in New York City, working as a City Hall watchdog, I cannot help but notice the similarities between our ex-cop mayor’s alarming agenda and his blatant suppression of free speech as a troubling mirror to the totalitarian regime under Putin.

The Thursday before Moscow was overrun with Navalny’s mourners, Putin made his annual State of the Nation address to Russia’s Federal Assembly, a feed fed to his people covering the largest country in the world (1.7 times bigger than the United States). He asked Russians to stop drinking and start exercising, alluding to the nation’s dwindling life expectancy rate, exacerbated by the ongoing war in Ukraine.

“Stop drinking and start getting on your skis,” the Kremlin told the camera.

His unnerving glee and casual confidence behind the podium for a nearly two-hour-long speech reminds me of a similar show by Mayor Adams during his annual State of the City Speech at Hostos Community College in the Bronx performed in January 2024. He similarly laid out a false narrative of prosperity and only asked for one thing: “Stay focused, no distractions, and grind.” While not the most eloquent, certainly something Putin would scoff at, Adams nonetheless spewed a valiant attempt at propagandist mimicry.