Remember last summer and fall, when leftists began to lose their minds every time they heard then-President Donald Trump use the term “law and order”?

The rhetoric of the day was embodied in an op-ed that appeared in The Hill — an op-ed that conjured up images of bogeymen past: “With President Trump’s increasing reliance on the racial grievance to be reelected,” wrote authors Dan Carter and Paul Stekler, “the comparisons to the 1968 campaign of Alabama Gov. George Wallace, the Democrat turned third-party presidential candidate who fanned flames of racial division, seem obvious.”

There’s indeed an obviousness here, but it’s not the one the authors are promoting. Instead, it’s the Left’s incessant invocation of Southern segregationists and cries of Racism! whenever those on the Right deign to point out their opponents’ anti-cop, pro-crime bona fides.

Increasingly, though, as violent crime surges in big cities across the country, Democrats are finding their knee-jerk, Trump-deranged demonization of that simple three-word string, law and order, to be untenable. The New York City’s mayoral race is proof positive.

There, in the fast-rotting, crime-ridden Big Apple of anti-cop leftist Mayor Bill de Blasio, a black man is handily beating the field in the city’s Democrat primary. But Eric Adams isn’t just any black man. He’s a former NYPD captain and the current Brooklyn borough president. And he’s staunchly pro-Second Amendment.

When asked during the NYC FAQ podcast whether he’d carry a gun if elected, Adams didn’t hesitate: “Yes I will, number one. And number two, I won’t have a security detail. If the city is safe, the mayor shouldn’t have a security detail with him. He should be walking the street by himself.” Wow.

As National Review’s Zachary Evans writes:

As of early Wednesday morning, New York City mayoral candidate Eric Adams leads the Democratic primary contest by a comfortable ten-point margin, but remains short of outright victory thanks to the delays in ballot-counting caused by the city’s adoption of ranked-choice voting. … The winner of the Democratic primary is generally expected to win New York’s mayoral race given the strong Democratic majority. New York City is home to 3.7 million registered Democrats, 1.08 million Independents, and about 566,000 Republicans as of February 2021.

New York City is for the first time using a ranked-choice voting system, so the final tally might not be known for another 10 days, but this much is already clear: When a strong Second Amendment advocate leads a Democrat field by 10 points in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by six to one, something’s going on. And that “something” is a repudiation of the Democrats’ soft-on-crime policies.

Our Thomas Gallatin picked up on the Adams phenomenon last month. As he wrote then: “No matter Adams’s other policy positions, which are decidedly on the left, it’s a rare breath of fresh air to hear a Democrat actually embrace and defend the Second Amendment. Sadly, it appears that it takes a massive spike in crime to convince New Yorkers that maybe — just maybe — the right to bear arms to defend one’s life and property is fundamental to countering lawlessness.”

To be clear, Adams is no Rudy Giuliani in terms of his governing philosophy. He’s not even a Mike Bloomberg. He is, after all, a Democrat. But Adams is right-of-center on the single issue that seems to matter most to New Yorkers: law and order.