Jonathan Martin has written a column over at Politico asking the same question I’ve been hammering on relentlessly since at least April of last year: “Between Protests and a Rookie Mayor, Is Chicago Ready for the DNC?” If you’re familiar with Betteridge’s Law of Headlines or my written corpus to date, you already know the answer is “No.” And it’s primarily because of the unique combination of malevolence and incompetence embodied by Mayor Brandon Johnson …
Chicago, like so many of our major cities, is out of control. Homelessness, smash-and-grab robberies, carjackings, gangs effectively taking over parts of the city – Chicago is in free fall. On Sunday, another incident in Chicago’s meltdown was revealed when the Chicago Police Department canceled the city’s Cinco de Mayo parade “out of an abundance of caution,” due to gang violence and large-scale fighting in the area of the parade.
Would have loved to have seen @ChicagosMayor's exalted "violence interrupters" quell this feud between gang members.
Gangs don't negotiate. Gangs fight.
Gangs require a police response.
Video: @KyleMazzaWUNF. pic.twitter.com/ixnewmN7xf
— Chicago Contrarian (@ChicagoContrar1) May 5, 2024
Chicago man (driver of the black sedan) gets shot and killed during a "street takeover" this weekend…#urban #Chicago #CityLife #StreetTakeover #crime #democrats pic.twitter.com/alVxTcG1ra
— Mrgunsngear (@Mrgunsngear) May 5, 2024
h/t XC
On May 3, 2013, violence erupted in the hallways of Woodlawn High School.
As many as six separate fights between unruly students broke out that day – part of an annus horribilis that saw 61 arrests made at the racially diverse school in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Looking on in despair was Norman Browning, who had recently spent 15 years volunteering as a sports coach at Woodlawn.
A suburb of Atlanta sought to secede as well.
Covid is long since over, but the protesters still wear face masks: the ignorant, entitled little delinquents running riot in so many of the world’s greatest universities are truly an embarrassment. The product of a catastrophic social experiment, of years of brainwashing and coddling, they embody all of the Western world’s most debilitating pathologies.
Communist cosplay is the worst side effect of this generations indoctrination. They been spoon fed the good side of communism (free this, free that, go frolic in the park, protest) instead of what it actually is. Oh well. Most cone from affluent families so I hardly feel bad. https://t.co/5NMXEACdZh
— Lobbyist_pundit 💸 (@Lobbyist_pundit) April 29, 2024
Caesar Duarte didn’t flinch as an Amazon truck barreled down the busy 110 Freeway in Los Angeles, missing his makeshift home by just a few feet.
The only thing that stood between Duarte’s outdoor kitchen and speeding vehicles was a three-foot retaining wall and metal fencing.
The 44-year-old mechanic and house painter said he has learned to deal with the danger and noise since he erected his homestead by the freeway about four years ago.
San Francisco residents are balking at the sky-high cost of the city’s new homeless cabins.
A complex of 60 ‘tiny homes’ for unhoused Californians each cost taxpayers an eye-popping $113,000.
That’s several times higher than the price of similar cabins in nearby Oakland and San Jose.
The city of Oakland has experienced a dramatic crime surge since 2020 as arrests plunge and the police department struggles to fill vacancies.
From 2020 to 2023 burglaries increased by 99 percent, motor-vehicle theft surged by 72 percent, robberies jumped by 53 percent and homicides went up 16 percent, according to a supplemental police report on the Oakland public safety committee’s April 9 agenda. Arrests plummeted by 50 percent over the same period.
Retailers can’t get enough of leaving their hearts in San Francisco, or at least just leaving. Everybody from higher-end retailers like Nordstrom and Saks Off 5th, to global brands Uniqlo, Gap, and H&M, to corner Walgreens and CVS outlets have called it quits on The City That Knows How to Make Everything Worse.
Amid more deadly disorder in New York City, young women are being randomly punched in the face.
In recent days—deadly ones in New York—another alarming trend has apparently emerged in the city: sudden, violent attacks on young women. The flustered victims, all relatively young and white, report that they were walking down the street in lower Manhattan when a passerby punched them in the face. Videos on TikTok are made on the fly, immediately after the attack, and show women in a state of shock, some with bruises, some crying, some just flabbergasted.
The women getting punched in New York? We think it’s coming from those nasty right-wingers. pic.twitter.com/gIPKJQpdBC
— Dr. Jebra Faushay (@JebraFaushay) March 27, 2024
For decades, Democrats have controlled the nation’s largest cities. The results have been catastrophic, including high crime rates, blight, failing public educational systems, rampant poverty, and an expanding homeless population.
These horrific outcomes are due to Democrats supporting failed policies, such as raising taxes, increasing regulations, growing the government, and refusing to prosecute violent criminals. Consequently, citizens voted with their feet and left in droves, a trend which has started to accelerate.
There’s a significant reason why DC workers don’t want to go downtown: crime
Muriel Bowser is a woman with a plan. In late February the mayor of the District of Columbia unveiled a $400 million, five-year economic development strategy to revitalize the capital’s downtown. It involves converting empty office space into residential units and rebranding parts of the neighborhood. Soon, visitors to Washington will be able to watch homeless addicts shoot up in “Historic Green Triangle” and get their phones stolen by moped-riding teenagers in the “Penn West Equity, Innovation & University District.”
Cherelle Parker has vowed to shut down the city’s open-air drug markets, but the task may be beyond any one mayor’s reach.
Prior to being elected Philadelphia’s 100th mayor—the first woman in the post—Cherelle Parker pledged to make Philadelphia the “safest, cleanest, greenest city in America.” Her election was a rebuke to the city’s left-wing Democrats, who had hoped to capture City Hall and remake it in the image of Seattle, San Francisco, or Portland. The Left’s favored mayoral candidate, Helen Gym, had the support of woke millennial elites and the Working Families Party, as well as endorsements from national left-wing figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Gym’s well-funded campaign overshadowed Parker’s, but in the end Parker, a native Philadelphian, triumphed over Gym, a Columbus, Ohio, native who had moved to the city to attend the University of Pennsylvania.
There are now 700 million CCTV cameras in Communist China. Those electronic eyes are attached to the most complete state apparatus of surveillance yet imagined. It has the ability not only to recognise faces at a distance, but gait itself when facial features are hidden or obscured.
Such capability can, and soon will, be augmented to the point where the movements of eyes themselves, monitored by intelligent cameras, will be sufficient to identify any active party.
Oregon’s drug-legalization law didn’t make things better. Now what?
After a three-year trial period, Oregon’s great experiment with drug decriminalization looks to be wrapping up. A bill to restore misdemeanor penalties for drug possession has now passed both houses of the state legislature with bipartisan support, and Governor Tina Kotek is expected to sign it.
Does every city in Canada have an activist bicycle community and city hall defending scoff law cyclists while advocating for unneeded, traffic slowing infrastructure?
That is how it is in Toronto.
