Democrat policies are destroying American cities

 Ross Barkan:

Just over a month after Brandon Johnson was elected mayor of Chicago, another Democrat endorsed by Bernie Sanders has a chance to govern a major American city. Philadelphia’s Helen Gym, a former city councilwoman who has also secured the support of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman, is a top contender in Tuesday’s Democratic primary. If Gym prevails — and this is no guarantee, given the number of viable contenders — progressives will have capped a remarkable run of victories in mayoral races that were once the domain of machine-backed moderates. Eric Adams, who once declared himself the “face” of the Democratic Party, would find himself strangely alone in New York, sandwiched between progressives in Philadelphia and Boston, where Michelle Wu, a 38-year-old Elizabeth Warren protégé, has been mayor since 2021.

A year ago, big city progressives appeared to be struggling mightily. Chesa Boudin, a proud proponent of criminal justice reform, was driven out of the San Francisco District Attorney’s office in a brutal recall election. Los Angeles was gearing up for a recall of their own left-leaning district attorney, George Gascón, and the next mayor there appeared to be Rick Caruso, a billionaire real estate developer and former Republican. Adams, in New York, was still riding relatively high. Surges in crime and homelessness, coming on the heels of a pandemic that ravaged many downtowns, were supposed to bolster the prospects of Democrats explicitly opposed to the progressives and leftists who rose to prominence in the late 2010s. Many of these progressives were derided as pollyannaish and unserious about public disorder.
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There is much more.

Many of the cities where so-called "progressives" have been elected now lie in ruin.  San Francisco, Portland, and LA along with St. Louis and Chicago are losing population and suffering from increased crime.  They have a problem with crime and drug-addled homeless people.  Their high taxes are also causing people who can to leave.  This is especially so for the rich who are moving to low-tax states like Texas and Florida.

Progressive policing has been a disaster wherever it is tried.  It has led to taking police off the streets and leaving criminals on the streets.  

See, also:

Deliver Us from Reality

The only silver lining in this minatory storm cloud is the fact that such movements, though unconscionably cruel, arbitrary, and destructive, are also astonishingly fragile.

“Because he can.”

That’s the answer one has to give to those who ask how Alvin Bragg, a local district attorney in office by the slimmest of margins—and then only because of a huge subsidy from the anti-American billionaire George Soros—can get away with antics like indicting Donald Trump, a former (and, possibly, future) president of the United States, and, now, with charging former Marine Daniel Penny with manslaughter because he (along with at least two others) intervened to stop Jordan Neely from attacking fellow passengers on a New York subway.

Because he can. As a friend remarked when digesting the spectacle of Penny being led away in handcuffs, totalitarian movements often start slowly, almost timidly, but as they gain power, they become more brazen. After a certain point, they do outrageous things just to intimidate the public and demonstrate their power.

We now know that the FBI, the CIA, and other elements of America’s security apparatus intervened directly in the decision making of Twitter and other social media companies to influence the course of the 2020 election. One part of that intervention had to do with organizing 51 senior former intelligence figures to sign a letter declaring that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.” That was a lie. They knew it was a lie. It didn’t matter. They did it because they knew they could get away with it.

The United States is on the verge of being inundated with thousands upon thousands of illegal aliens. Many are from South or Central America. Hundreds are from China, even though they are crossing that notional line we used to be able to call, without irony, our southern border. Why did the Biden Administration decide to enact a real-life Camp of the Saints invasion of the United States? Because it could. There was no immediate price to pay.
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