NYC's Seal on Verge of Being Labeled 'Problematic': Shows Sailor Carrying Rope with Loop on the End

“Raymond, why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?”

That’s how Communists turn the brainwashed war veteran and politician’s son Raymond Shaw into a lethal assassin in the 1962 film version of “The Manchurian Candidate.”

Shaw was conditioned to first comply with the suggestion, only fully activating for his sinister mission once he drew the Queen of Diamonds. 

It seems a similar phenomenon is at play on the left whereby someone suggests something previously innocuous should be “looked at” for possible racism, completely triggering the left’s conditioned rage response once it is officially deemed “problematic.”

This week’s suggestion regarding newly identified racism comes courtesy of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who — when not busy targeting Jewish funerals or defacing public property — secretly contemplates the appropriateness of the city’s official seal (a version of which also happens to be found on the mayor’s flag). 

During the Democratic mayor’s daily news briefing Monday, with de Blasio awash in a sea of the seals emblazoned on the city flags behind him and even his coffee mug, WCBS Newsradio 880 reporter Rich Lamb asked de Blasio about it.

“This is a little bit out of left field here,” Lamb began, apparently unaware that this is exactly the kind of thing the mayor spends his time worrying about rather than the worrying wave of violent crime in his city. 

“So I was taking a look at the seal of the city of New York,” he added. “It’s a man in pantaloons holding a rope with a loop at the end of it, presumably a trap or something, and then on the other side of the windmill and a couple of barrels, you have a Native American who’s holding a bow.

“I’m just wondering whether you or your commission or somebody is taking a look at that seal and wondering how relevant it is these days.”

“From time to time, I’ve looked at it,” de Blasio replied. “It’s a good question. It’s something of an unclear image, what it’s saying to us, but I think that’s exactly right.

“It’s the kind of thing a commission should look at carefully and decide if it still makes sense for the 21st century,” he concluded.

Now that the suggestion has been thrown out there, it may be only a matter of time before the seal joins butter, pancakes and syrup, master bedrooms and a myriad of otherwise harmless things in becoming “problematic” to the left. 

(To an extent, that’s already happened, with one Native American activist describing, in an interview with The New York Times, the depiction of the two men in the seal as “cartoonish.”)

But neither the reporter nor the mayor seemed to have any knowledge of what the symbols comprising the seal actually were.

Had they simply consulted the city’s official description of the seal, they would have learned that the “man in pantaloons” is a sailor named Dexter.

Dexter is not exactly holding a “rope with a loop,” as Lamb described it, but rather a seafarer’s plummet used for checking ocean depth.

Even The Times properly identified the plummet in a piece about the mayor’s response, though the outlet did say that the rope has “what appears to be a loop on its end.” (As the New York Post editorial board pointed out, the “implication” is “that it just might be a noose.”)

Moreover, a Times reporter parroted Lamb’s provocative suggestion when tweeting the story.

“A Native American man in a loincloth is on NYC’s official seal,” wrote Cliff Levy, The Times’ associate managing editor and Metro editor. “So is an early American settler, holding a long rope with a loop on its end.”

The Native American man is identified as Sinister, who the city’s site describes as an “Indian of Manhattan.”

He likely represents the people who sold the island of Manhattan to Dutch settlers for a paltry sum (funny that the people who won’t venerate Christopher Columbus for how he treated indigenous peoples apparently have no problem inhabiting the land that settlers acquired by low-balling the natives).

But the suggestion that this may not be appropriate for today’s zeitgeist without any actual acknowledgment of facts or historical context is on par with the anti-American movement we’ve seen sweep the country, and could set in motion another mission to destroy history.

For now, the outrage mob has its initial cue with the NYC seal now open to examination, and could fully activate later on once the left officially labels the seal “problematic.”