I was getting together with some New York City friends. We were at a local Chinese restaurant that we have been known to frequent. Full disclosure, I had the chicken chop suey because the kung pao chicken is too spicy so soon after my Christmas gorge fest.
We eventually got around to talking about Daniel Penny and his surprise acquittal by a New York City jury. And then we talked about mayor Eric Adams and his trouble with the FBI. It was agreed that he was being targeted not because he was guilty of the crimes he probably did commit but because he had complained about the outrageous scourge of illegal aliens that the city was being forced to house and feed.
I said I thought that maybe after Trump takes office, he might cut a deal with Adams to have pressure put on the judges and prosecutors persecuting Trump in exchange for a pardon on the charges the FBI has brought against Adams. Of course, I said this tongue in cheek. New York Democrats will never stop attacking Trump until he cuts off federal funds to New York. So, if he helps Adams, it will only be because he wants to make a deal with Adams to deport the New York illegals.
And then we talked about New York City’s future. Basically, the crime and dysfunction has gotten so bad that even “safe” neighborhoods like Shore Road in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn were experiencing levels of violent crime never seen before, even in the 1990s. And outrages like the illegal alien who set a female subway rider on fire and watched impassively as she burned to death.
I asked whether it seemed likely that the disastrous conditions would elicit a powerful reaction to restore law and order and save the city. The answer I got was no. They felt there wasn’t the will to fix things. The elites who sponsored Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams as mayors wouldn’t change course no matter the consequences. The were intent on enforcing progressive policies regardless of the consequences. Of course, my friends freely admit that these elites will eventually abandon New York City for safer suburbs once their families are at risk in the city. And once the people with the money abandon New York City it will begin to look like Philadelphia and Newark and eventually Detroit. So that was their take. New York City is in its death spiral. The crime that the Democrats unleashed after the summer of George Floyd will be the cancer that kills Gotham by the sea.
It’s a funny thing. Several years ago, I returned home to my old neighborhood. And it was basically unrecognizable. The new immigrants there had taken over and made the place their own. Well, even if it made me a little sad to see my childhood memories thoroughly erased, I could understand that it was the nature of cities like New York. But knowing that the city would be utterly destroyed is different. It’s completely unnecessary. A city full of immigrants from all corners of the earth needs law and order even more than some homogeneous ethnic enclave. Everyone needs to feel like the law is there to protect them from chaos. The fact that the progressives have declared law and order racist is proof that they don’t deserve to govern. But it may take the destruction of every blue city to prove to everyone in this country that fact. Oh well.
Speaking of homogeneous ethnic enclaves, I grew up in Sandy Springs in the 50’s and 60’s, a North Atlanta suburb populated almost exclusively by what were known as WASPS. As far as we were aware, there was no crime at all until drugs started to come into the scene, which would have been the latter half of the 60’s. But, even then, there was no evident violent crime. I assume that this idyllic period during my formative years is behind my conviction that the present world should somehow achieve that status. But even Sandy Springs doesn’t exist any more except… Read more »