City Hall’s 2015 effort to get singer Jennifer Hudson to cancel out on performing at a pro-charter-school rally provides some telling insight into how Mayor de Blasio’s team thinks.

De Blasio, still in his second year in office, was bent on crushing the city’s charter movement, especially Eva Moskowitz and her Success Academy schools. Moskowitz and other charter leaders answered with a full-court bid to rally public opinion, including the Cadman Plaza rally.

Hudson, as it happened, was already a fan of charters: “I’m standing for education equality because every child deserves access to a great school,” she explained.
But Team de Blasio assumed she just needed “educating.” Internal e-mails show it first tapped then-Deputy Mayor Richard Buery “to talk about finding her rep and having us inform them” why Hudson should bow out.

“Inform”: As if the “Dreamgirls” star couldn’t possibly have her own opinion.

Then Christine Marinoni from the Department of Education jumped in to volunteer her wife, actress Cynthia Nixon, to intervene: “Cynthia and her publicist are going to communicate with Jennifer’s publicist, with the message being, ‘If you know exactly what you’ve signed up for great, but if you’re not totally aware of who Eva M is and Success Academies, I would love to brief you,’ ” Marinoni wrote, asking for help in digging up a New York Times story that smeared Success.

If Nixon did reach out, she failed: Hudson appeared and sang several songs to the 20,000 or so who showed — and Gov. Cuomo and the Legislature went on to slap down de Blasio’s drive to impose huge new costs on the charter sector.

Which shows the limits of Team de Blasio’s approach: They don’t know what to do about people who think for themselves.