“Progressive Paradise”

The city’s very real progress is being squandered as crime spreads

There are two ways to think about Chicago. The depressing one is to follow the news. These days it’s pretty bad. In mid-May, two people were killed and seven wounded when a gunman fired into a crowd outside a McDonald’s restaurant on the Near North Side.

I know the McDonald’s well. I went to high school nearby, and my three children attended the elementary school across the street. Once scruffy, the area is now affluent. Overlooking the murder site is a seventy-five-story tower where condos sell for up to $6.1 million. The building’s developer described the shootings as “isolated to [that] location.”

America’s cities are rotting. The Democrat-run cities in particular. And all of them are going wrong in the same way, suffused with the same problems of violence, drugs and homelessness.

In the nation’s capital, the homelessness problem is visible from the moment you enter the city. Arriving into DC used to be a great pleasure, with the visitor immediately thrown into the centre of the grand capital. Today the lawns outside Union station that greet the traveller are covered with tents. It is just the first of the homeless encampments which visitors are now confronted with throughout the city. Almost every green space in DC is now covered with tents, a constant reminder that America seems to be rotting from the centre outwards.

Portland’s open-air drug market is laid bare as people smoke heroin on the streets and needles litter the sidewalks as city officials start homeless sweeps while a nearby city’s mayoral candidate ‘wants to round them up and use ‘Japanese-style pods’ to house them.

New photos taken by DailyMail.com show the current situation in Portland, a city that has been plagued with homelessness and addicts openly using drugs in broad daylight. Users were seen injecting themselves, slumping over in a semi-comatose state.

Discarded needles, human waste and the smell of urine adds another layer of tarnish to city’s progressive policies – one of them being the Ballot Measure 110 decision, which has decriminalized hard drugs in the Democrat-run state.

If one is concerned about ideological excesses on the left and right in our mainstream culture and politics, there are nascent signs that something of an ideological correction may be slowly gaining momentum. Developments in recent weeks point to institutional leaders and the general public starting to push back against the radicals and reactionaries that have come to disproportionately influence our popular discourse in Canada, the United States and elsewhere across the West.

The streets of Portland resemble an ‘open air drug market’ after state officials’ scheme to decriminalize hard drugs led to a surge in overdose deaths, critics claim.

Law enforcement agents say that the streets of Portland are full of homeless addicts openly buying and selling drugs and that signs of drug addiction are actually increasing statewide, Fox News reported.

Photos show the desperate situation in the liberal Pacific Northwest city, where people can be seen shooting up drugs or passed out in broad daylight.

Parts of San Francisco have been in a state of emergency this year. The city’s drugs and homelessness crisis has divided Democrats – and this week helped bring about the political demise of one of its most prominent politicians.

Like thousands of people in San Francisco, Jay has been sleeping rough on the streets.

Jay describes his life as nightmarish – as he struggles with a fentanyl addiction he derives no pleasure from. He says he shoots up just to feel normal.

“It’s horrible man. I’m sick all the time,” he says.

The streets where he lives – the city’s notorious Tenderloin district – are dangerous too. He says he’s had fights. Drug dealers have burnt his tent down several times.

… I’d gotten used to the crime, rarely violent but often brazen; to leaving the car empty and the doors unlocked so thieves would at least quit breaking my windows. A lot of people leave notes on the glass stating some variation of Nothing’s in the car. Don’t smash the windows. One time someone smashed our windows just to steal a scarf. Once, when I was walking and a guy tore my jacket off my back and sprinted away with it, I didn’t even shout for help. I was embarrassed—what was I, a tourist? Living in a failing city does weird things to you. The normal thing to do then was to yell, to try to get help—even, dare I say it, from a police officer—but this felt somehow lame and maybe racist.

Only a nuke can save San Francisco… If you’re wondering why there’s a homeless crisis wonder no more.

A couple of years ago, one of my friends saw a man staggering down the street, bleeding. She recognized him as someone who regularly slept outside in the neighborhood, and called 911. Paramedics and police arrived and began treating him, but members of a homeless advocacy group noticed and intervened. They told the man that he didn’t have to get into the ambulance, that he had the right to refuse treatment. So that’s what he did. The paramedics left; the activists left. The man sat on the sidewalk alone, still bleeding. A few months later, he died about a block away.

h/t CK

San Francisco has been waiting to be rocked by another massive earthquake since 1906. On Tuesday night this week, it finally came when the people of America’s most famously Left-wing city voted overwhelmingly to throw out their chief prosecutor — and with him a policy of ultra-woke tolerance of crime that has brought the city to its knees.

Some 60 per cent of San Franciscans voted to ‘recall’ from office Chesa Boudin, a pin-up for the ‘progressive’ Left, midway through his term as the city’s District Attorney.

Portland use to be one of my favorite towns to visit. It had fun bars and groovy thrift stores. Now it looks like Detroit on a bender.

The difference between my hometown, the Motor City, and Portland is that Portland’s death was intentional. Whereas Detroit was murdered by a perfect storm of crotch-kicks from the auto industry and a racist, corrupt mayor, Portland was killed by its own citizens and the Democratic Party.

Last October, Boeing’s headquarters in Chicago was described as looking like a ghost town, with few people showing up to work at the company’s corporate offices. And that was largely after the city began reopening following the pandemic lockdowns. Many employees may still have been working from home out of caution over COVID, but others simply didn’t want to brave the streets of the Windy City for fear of being carjacked or otherwise harmed by the criminals who seemed to be running the streets.

Related: 23 Shot, 5 Fatally, During Weekend in Mayor Lori Lightfoot‘s Chicago 

As more transit riders who can afford to pay fares jump them instead, will U.S. cities step up efforts to increase collections?

Two cities on opposite coasts may be experiencing the gentrification of fare evasion. Janno Lieber, head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, recently complained that security cameras had captured among the 12.5 percent of riders who don’t swipe at subway turnstiles “countless images of people in designer clothes, carrying $7 lattes, waltzing through emergency gates at Wall Street or on the Upper East Side.” Fare evasion could cost the MTA as much as $500 million this year, Lieber noted. The complaint echoed that of Peter Rogoff, the chief of Seattle and Tacoma’s Sound Transit, who recently singled out riders who paid for seats and $13 beers at a Mariners game but didn’t pay their fares afterward. Rogoff recently said Sound Transit was facing insolvency and was on a “financially unsustainable” trajectory.