The New York City Subway is showing solidarity with Israel: like public transportation in Israel, it does not usefully run on weekends. Today, while going from my hotel to Marron, I waited 16 minutes for the F train, and when I got to the platform, there was already a small crowd there; the headway must have been 20 minutes. Now writing this on the way north to Queens, I’m seeing canceled trains and going through reroutes hoping that it’s possible to get from Marron to the Queens Night Market in under an hour; revising hours later, I now know it would have been but the 7 train is skipping the nearest stop to the Night Market, 111th Street.

This is on my mind as I see that Governor Kathy Hochul, after abruptly canceling congestion pricing in legally murky circumstances, wants to also ban wearing masks on the subway. I write this on a car where I’m the only person wearing a mask as far I can see, but usually I do see a handful of others who wear one like me or Cid. Hochul told the New York Post that Jewish groups asked her to do so citing security concerns, since some anti-Semitic rioters cover their faces. Jewish and pro-Israel groups have said no such thing, and I think it’s useful to bring this up, partly because it does affect the subway, and partly because it speaks to how bad Hochul’s political knowledge is that she would even say this.

Now, I don’t think the mask ban is going very far. For a few days, instead of getting constant constituent calls all the time demanding that congestion pricing be restored, legislators were getting such calls only half the time, and got calls demanding they oppose the mask ban the other half. Congestion pricing is likely not within Hochul’s personal authority to cancel, but evidently the MTA board did not overrule her and did not sign that the state consented to congestion pricing; but a mask ban is definitely not within her authority, certainly not when it would be new policy rather than status quo policy (if not status quo law, since congestion pricing did get signed into law).

That said, the invocation of Jewish or pro-Israel concerns was troubling, for a number of reasons, chief of which is that the groups so named did not in fact demand a subway mask ban. The Anti-Defamation League asked for a mask ban at protests, where the current left-wing American protest culture involves wearing masks but very rarely medical ones. Hochul cited unnamed Jewish advisors, when at no point has any significant element in the American Jewish community called for this. There are a number of possibilities, all of which are derogatory to her judgment, knowledge, or other political skills.

The first possibility is that she’s just lying. Nobody asked for this, not on the subway, and she’s trying to change the topic from her total failure on congestion pricing; a mask ban at protests alone, as proposed by Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (at least before she just got corona), would not change the conversation on issues of public transportation.

The second is that she is using the ADL for cover because the ADL has little patience for anything it perceives as too left-wing, and Hochul wants to position herself as a moderate and her pro-congestion pricing opponents as too liberal. If that was the intent, then it’s dumb – subway advocacy is not at all radical, and the people spearheading both the lawsuit against Hochul and the rallies in favor of congestion pricing are neither anti-Israel nor baitable on this subject.

And the third is that she internalized a kind of conspiratorial anti-Semitism; she doesn’t weaponize it against Jews like properly anti-Semitic politicians, but a politician from Buffalo, thrust into a stage with different demographics from what she’s used to, might still believe, in the back of her mind, that Jews are conspiring and say things they do not mean. It’s complete hogwash – pro-Israel groups are open about who they are and what they want, and have little trouble calling for changes that they think are necessary for the protection of the great majority of American Jews who are at least somewhat pro-Israel. They have no need to whisper in a governor’s ear and every reason to call for such a ban in the open if they believe it is good; that they haven’t should end any suspicion that they want it.

In any of the above cases, the inevitable conclusion is that Hochul knows neither how to govern nor how to do politics effectively. She can’t distract the public from her own inability to run the state, certainly not by piling one failure upon another.