I think the correct response is to respectfully ask Governor Walz to go pound sand where the sun don’t shine. The first thing that should be done is to cut off all federal police funding to Minneapolis and institute a DOJ investigation into the civil rights violations inherent in a city knowingly allowing a mob to terrorize American citizens based on their racial identity.
Tag: Black Lives Matter
Anti-White Lives Do Not Matter to Me
For the first half of my life I had hoped that eventually black Americans would become reconciled with their country and we would reach a point where we wouldn’t have the periodic race riots and looting/arson sprees that seem to be occurring more and more frequently.
I no longer believe that to be true. There will never be a time when a black underclass will not be ready, willing and able to erupt in a spasm of destructive rage that destroys everything in their reach and allows the race hustlers to extort more loot from the frightened people of this country. It’s as simple as that.
How we eventually end this stalemate where we have to interact in this horrific dysfunctional relationship is currently unknown to me. Maybe we split the country or maybe we figure out a way to end the black privilege that allows them to commit mayhem through some strict enforcement of the laws. That is a mystery to me.
So, if this insanity will continue into the foreseeable future, then the most important thing for me to figure out is how to avoid being where the rioters are going to be. By extension I want to make sure none of the people I care about are anywhere near the rioters either.
So, what should I do? Here’s my checklist:
- Live far away from large cities. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s a city in Oklahoma or in New York. Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, St. Louis, Kansas City? Of course. But even Salt Lake City or Boise probably have their slums where the denizens are smoldering over some perceived slight that they imagine white people have inflicted on them. Give all these cities a wide berth.
- Don’t live in blue or purple states. Because in these states, even if you’re far from the slums, the government will allow the rioters to come to your town to destroy your way of life. Look at Minnesota. The governor there wouldn’t even stop the rioters from hopping into cars and going out to the suburbs to terrorize the people out there. The government in these states seem to take pride in punishing the non-black citizens by allowing them to be harassed.
- Don’t send your kids to the public schools. Don’t let the state propagandize them and torture them into thinking they’re the problem. Allowing this to happen is like crippling them.
- Tell your children the real truth about how the system is rigged in this country and how they can avoid being victimized by the next round of rampages. Explain to them that the Democrat party gins up this outrage every election cycle to ensure a good crop of black votes. Let them know that there are many people who buy into this white self-hatred but they themselves don’t have to.
- Find like minded people to associate with and avoid as much as possible the company of the anti-white individuals. Make a point of doing business with folks that you know are like-minded. And in addition to patronizing tradesmen like plumbers and electricians, which is a no-brainer, look at retailers. I’d pay a hefty premium to give my business to someone I like rather than give Jeff Bezos the money.
- If you’re religious find a church where the pastor doesn’t spend his time preaching the gospel of social justice according to Saint Al Sharpton. You’re better off starting your own church rather than let your children be indoctrinated in self-hatred by some atheist clergyman who wants to atone for some ancestor who owned a slave or something.
Our elites have adopted the Black Lives Matter agenda. More precisely they’ve decided to impose it on their serfs, namely us. They themselves will just continue living in their gated communities with their private security out of reach of the arson, looting and mayhem that they’ve reserved for us. They have adopted the Black Lives Matter mantra. And that mantra says, “Only Black Lives Matter.” If you say blue lives matter or white lives matter or even all lives matter, you will be denounced as a racist. So, don’t be foolish enough to think that any of this has anything at all to do with equal treatment. That is the last thing they want. What they want is immunity from the law. In fact, they want their own law. And rest assured under that law everything you have won’t be enough to provide reparations for whatever alleged sins your ancestors committed against their ancestors. And that is assuming that your ancestors were even in the country before 1865 which mine were not.
The lives that matter to me are those of me and mine and my friends. They can be white, orange or purple but to me they are the ones that matter. The lives that don’t matter to me are Anti-White lives. Let the antifa and BLM thugs burning down the country worry about their own lives. White or black, I no longer consider them countrymen. They are my enemy. Their lives matter to me not at all. As far as I’m concerned, they can go to hell.
A White Cop in a Black City
That Atlanta cop who shot the black guy who shot at him with a taser is being charged with murder. Think about what that job must be like nowadays. The criminals and the low lives won’t allow themselves to be arrested anymore. They’ll fight you, try to get your gun and if you do your job or defend yourself, you’ll be charged with murder if the perp dies. You have to wear a camera all the time and any altercation that gets ugly leaves you liable to police brutality charges and disciplinary actions. The brazenness of the criminals means you stand a good chance of being shot or stabbed or assaulted in some fashion and the black population hates and insults you at every turn. Your food will be poisoned in fast food joints by the minimum wage employees from the neighborhood and your chain of command and the mayor will turn on you at the drop of a hat and feed you to the sharks.
So, you might ask yourself why would anyone want to be a white cop in a black city. The short answer is it used not to be this bad. And that has been true forever. The cities have been getting progressively worse over the course of the last century but we have now reached the breaking point. Places like Baltimore, St. Louis, Kansas City and Atlanta have finally reached the point where the cop’s job is untenable.
Why don’t they quit? Well the pay is good; the benefits are very good and the retirement is excellent. Some cops can retire at twenty years in. That means you could be thirty-eight and retiring on full pay. Plus, if you quit now what would you do? Your family is local. Your kids are in school in a suburb and you have roots in the community. What job would pay anything close to what you currently make? You want to stay. But how to avoid ending up in jail?
What I expect to see from now on is cops ignoring all black crime. I’m not even sure they’ll intervene in a gang shootout. They’ll just wait for the two sides to run out of bullets and call the ambulances to collect the ones who didn’t avoid the flying lead. And this probably will hold for black criminals in white neighborhoods. And that will hasten the white flight that is already gripping the cities that recently went through the riots. I’ve spoken to Manhattanites who tell me that the middle-class people are looking to get out. The way it was explained to me the rich don’t care because they are completely insulated from the impact. They have their own schools and security arrangements and if things get really bad, they’ll just stay out at their homes in the Hamptons until the violence blows over. But the middle class have none of these buffers. So, they’re leaving. And when they do the city starts sinking. The tax base will disappear and city services will suffer drastic cuts and then even the rich will leave. And once that happens you get Detroit.
I only hope no more white guys become cops in black cities. Let the guys in there get out as soon as they can and then let the jobs be filled by black city dwellers. That will be the perfect solution. I guarantee that the denizens won’t like it much. The criminals won’t be able to yell racism and the black cops won’t worry about police brutality. But the honest citizens will be the ones to pity. The levels of corruption and incompetency in black run cities are usually impressive. Baltimore is on their second mayor convicted of financial crimes associated with the office and I believe the next mayor will be one of those two coming back for another try. Detroit politics are so laughably corrupt that Michigan had to step in and oversee much of their finances. And the school systems are truly frightening in their dysfunction.
But the best outcome in Atlanta would be for the whole police force to resign en masse. Within a month there wouldn’t be a single business unlooted in the whole city. The murder rate would be so high that the people tallying it would give it up as unmanageable. And Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms would beg the police on bended knee to come back. She would somehow have the officer who was arrested for murder cleared of the charge and reinstated.
That would be the best outcome for Atlanta. But it would not be the best outcome for those policemen. Their jobs will never be anything but hellish. They should get out and stay out. These cities are unmanageable and will only get worse. Let the people there manage themselves. Let the Democrats rule all the Detroits they are making. After all, White Lives Matter too. At least to us they do.
What Are the Priorities for Us in the New America of Neil Gorsuch, BLM and Antifa?
So here we are, the newly minted super-conservative Justice Gorsuch finds transgender rights in the Constitution of the United States. And under the reliably spineless leadership of John Roberts every major case from illegal immigrants to Second Amendment rights were dynamited against us. And there was absolutely no fig leaf for any of these decisions. The Supreme Court is a disaster. I no longer expect any relief from that Court.
Add onto this problem that Antifa and BLM are now the official enforcement wing of the Democrat party. In any jurisdiction federal, state or local where they have cover from Democrat elected officials, they are shown to be ready, willing and able to wage literal war up to and including murder and arson against their enemies. Living in a blue state or even a blue city is tantamount to living in Mao’s Cultural Revolution. At any time, you can be sucked into a purge or pogrom that really has no limits on what can happen. Your rights in these jurisdictions do not exist as such. They can be overridden with no notice and are subject to amendment whenever circumstances make the ruling coalition think they would benefit from it.
Those are the conditions on the ground. Where does that leave us?
From my point of view that precludes certain strategies. With the clarification of the role of the Supreme Court I would say any idea that unconstitutional actions will be struck down nationally and thereby benefit people living in blue states is sheer fantasy. Nothing will be done to restrain places like California, New England, or New York. They will just make things continually worse until you knuckle under and learn to love Big Brother or leave.
I suppose there are strategies to hide in plain sight in places like these. I know people who say they can avoid the consequences of living under these regimes and still enjoy life. I confess I do not possess the coping skills that must be needed to hide your feelings when living in the belly of the beast. My daily interactions here in New England with the true believers involve mind boggling levels of cognitive dissonance. It takes every ounce of self-control not to laugh in their faces or explain why the things being claimed are patently absurd.
The alternative then is to revolt against these laws. Ignoring them or avoiding them by stealth is becoming harder and harder in these places. Ultimately control over all aspects of life is becoming more stringent everywhere but especially in these blue states. To the extent that it can be done I suppose that will be the strategy for conservatives living in these areas. You will have to go underground. And this means as far as raising children you’ll have to figure out how to work around the indoctrination of the schools and other social settings that the Left has taken over. This is the Benedict Option that Rod Dreher has talked about. Ultimately, it’s a temporary measure because eventually they will eliminate freedom of religion entirely.
But from my point of view, the best idea is to live in a deep red state where the political leaders have the means to craft laws that protect their citizens from the unconstitutional consequences of the Supreme Court. They can make a law upholding the freedom of religion in the Bill of Rights and when the Supreme Court strikes it down the Governor can defy the Supreme Court and say he will protect any of his citizens from federal prosecution. I could see blanket pardons being handed out on a rolling basis and the bureaucrats in Washington spinning out of control as the President refuses to step in.
A number of states following a plan like this would eventually produce a situation on the ground where essentially you would have two legal entities hidden within one name. This is sort of like the situation we currently have with marijuana use. At the federal level and in half of the states it is illegal but in states like California and Colorado it is big business. The same thing should be pushed as hard as possible for as many different parts of the law as possible. Just as things like sanctuary cities and legalization of drugs have been dispiriting for our side, freedom of religion would be very dispiriting for them. It would even have an impact on migration of leftists into red states. If there weren’t the lifestyle protections available to them, they would be much less likely to inhabit these areas.
So essentially what I am saying is that the deep red states are the only remaining points of resistance to the encroachment of Leftist control. Everything else has already been conquered. They will need to be the catalyst for change and that can only happen in conjunction with the four-year protection provided by the beginning of a conservative President’s term.
Hopefully a revolt at the state level will begin and President Trump’s second term will provide that needed protection.
Minneapolis City Council Says They Will Dismantle the Police
Nine members of the Minneapolis City Council, a veto-proof majority, have announced that they intend to eliminate the Minneapolis Police Department. The idea is to replace the police department with a “community-based public safety model,” whatever that is.
Realistically I don’t think they’ll do much of anything beyond handing over a ton of cash to “community organizers” and tying the police force’s hands on lethal force and hiring more minority and female cops. But let’s just imagine what may happen if the police become so angry about all this vilification and decide to stop interfering with the underclass not only in the ‘hood but also everywhere else.
I can just see an enterprising young businessman from the mean streets who notices that Mayor Frey has a pretty nice wardrobe of Armani suits and decides to pay a visit to the mayor’s house to “borrow” them for a while. I imagine that previously the mayor would have had a detail of police whose only job was to provide 24/7 security to hizzoner. I’m guessing that security may become just a wee bit more relaxed after this. And what might be the situation for the nine City Council members who have announced their intention to eliminate the police. Well, I’ve got to tell you, I wouldn’t want to be them after today. The police really are the ones who make life in a big city possible. If you turn them against you, I foresee many, many bad things happening to the people threatening their livelihood. Remember for a minute that there are always a certain number of bad actors on the police force and they’ve just lost their steady gig and they are pretty handy with a gun. Now add in that there isn’t any police force to stop them and they know you were the one who got them fired. It doesn’t sound good.
You know, come to think of it, I really think they should vote on this thing right away. I’d be interested in seeing what happens when the police department has a ninety percent sick week in Minneapolis. It might actually outdo the recent riots for destructive result. And the timing is perfect. The long hot summer and the COVID-19 depression are both right there to make a bad situation into a living hell. When the first wave of teenagers robs its first department store and realize that no one is going to stop them they’re going to get a rush of excitement that may not let up until they’ve looted every store for a mile around. And that’s not even considering how exciting it’s going to get when the young thugs who currently practice the knockout game in their inner-city neighborhoods export it to the better neighborhoods like Fulton. Once the self-righteous citizens of Minneapolis get a real good look at what happens when you tell the underclass that there is no one there to make them stop they’re gonna beg the cops to come back and they’ll pay them double without a thought. Unless you live in a gated community with round the clock armed guards you really don’t want to let the mob have its way.
But let’s see whether it’s all talk or not. It would make for an interesting experiment but not a pretty picture. Let’s call it a teachable moment.
It’s the End of the World as We Know It and I Feel Fine?
Well not exactly. This morning I woke up feeling pretty bleak. Antifa and BLM have flushed untold billions of dollars and thousands of American businesses down the drain with their orgy of theft and destruction. Multiple lives have been lost in rioting to somehow make up for the single life that this was all supposed to be about. Governors and Mayors in the blue states are passing this whole thing off as a justifiable reaction. The usual suspects in the media are cheerleading the mayhem and somehow blaming everything on the President. It sounds like I might have a reason to be down.
But I thought about it a little. There is precious little other than blogging about it that I can do. Nobody I know has been burned out of his home or business, so far, and the fallout from all this madness should result in the Democrats losing a bunch of elections in a bunch of places. Possibly this will help to clarify in a lot of people’s minds what it means to put the far left in charge of your lives. If it does maybe it will be a net positive for the country. After all Donald Trump was elected partly as a reaction to the BLM atrocities under Obama. So that gives me a reason to be patient while the madness plays out. I can look forward to a change for the better.
And let’s play devil’s advocate and suppose that instead the country decides to knuckle under to Antifa and BLM and elects the whole leftist crew who then initiate the entire “destroy America agenda.” Well as bad as that would be, and it indeed would be the end of the world as we know it, it would also clarify my place in the world completely. It would essentially end the need for me to wait for things to improve. After all, if you take freedom out of America, you remove the original advantage that everyone came here for in the first place. Then my mission becomes relatively simple, find the place where I have the best chance of enjoying life. Maybe it’ll be Oklahoma or Mississippi, Idaho or Wyoming. I’ll be depending on local conditions to make life tolerable. I can try to remove myself from as many of the systems that the government has built up to control us and try to find a community that thinks like I do. At least in a place like that you might have some like-minded people around you. Who knows, you might be able to join a rebellion of our own.
So yeah, there are a lot of scary things going on and faith in my fellow Americans is at an all time low. But they have until November to restore my faith in them. If they do the right thing and re-elect the President and toss out a bunch of commies who backed Antifa and BLM then we have a chance to straighten things out here. It will still take decades to repair the damage that has already been done. The American people have been sorely harmed by the policies that the Democrats and Republicans inflicted on us over the last fifty years. But if the people choose wisely then we can get started. If not, then I’ll take care me and mine and anyone else I find who feels he’s in the same boat. I’ll look around and see where the deck isn’t stacked against me and I’ll shake off the dust of my feet and leave a place that doesn’t have a place for me.
So, I may not feel fine but I have plans for all eventualities.
Does Raising a Family in a Large American City Make Any Possible Sense?
About 33 years ago I moved out of New York City. Now I was born and bred there. My family had lived there for four generations. I liked the amenities that the City possessed. I could take the kids to Central Park and to the American Museum of Natural History or the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We could go to a Yankee or Met game, go to the beach, go fishing out of Sheepshead Bay. It was my home. I liked my neighbors. But this was in the mid-eighties and things had gotten steadily more dangerous even in a relatively “safe” neighborhood like the one I lived in. Muggers had taken to getting off the expressways in “safe” neighborhoods early in the morning and mugging old ladies as they walked to Early Mass at church. And they didn’t just get robbed they were often brutalized pretty badly. Apparently, a baseball bat to the shoulder from behind is an excellent way to make an old lady drop her pocketbook. And thinking about what it would cost to put my young children in good schools in New York just wasn’t in the cards for me at that time. So, we moved out into the “country.” Or so we called it. Really it was outer suburbia in New England but there were farms and cows and so we told our kids they lived in the country. Fast forward twenty-five years and we moved again out of the “country” because it became too crowded.
And that’s just what growth looks like. Instead of 275 million people now there are 330 million people. But moving from outer suburbia to a more rural area is a matter of choice and temperament, not a life or death decision. I like more trees and fewer stop lights. I want a quiet environment rather than a busy commercial strip. But the next guy might like to live in a small town so he can walk to get his cup of coffee and doughnut. He likes to have a French restaurant and a yoga studio a few blocks away. Vive la différence.
But instead, let’s say you live in Minneapolis or Philadelphia or Baltimore or even my old home town of New York City. For the sake of argument let’s say you live right outside of New York City in a very expensive suburb. You pay an enormous amount of money to buy a house there and you pay taxes that are almost obscene. Let’s say the schools are good and the amenities in your town are excellent. Great restaurants and stores. Good health clubs and a very nice golf course that you enjoy. And crime is reasonable. Sure, there are property crimes that happen, burglaries and car theft but violent crime while not unknown is infrequent because you have a good police force that prevents that sort of thing. Your very nice gated community is a haven from the urban existence that you can see on the horizon.
But then something happens. A cop in a city with a Democratic mayor kills a black man during an arrest. And he does it in front of a video camera and it looks terrible. People in this liberal city in this liberal state feel outraged. The very liberal mayor fires the cops involved and says an investigation will judge whether the law was broken. Nothing unusual there. This has happened before. But this mayor is extremely weak. When the protests begin, he warns the police to back off. They do. And the protestors are heavily infiltrated by Antifa and anarchists and probably BLM. They don’t just protest. They riot, loot and burn down a sizable area of the downtown. Does the mayor decide to put a stop to the violence after that? Far from it. He orders the police to abandon their precinct to the mob. Now the devastation becomes extensive and drunk with the victory of the city’s capitulation they decide to extend their reign of terror and head out into the suburbs of the next city over. And when the Democratic governor realizes that the Mayor is useless, he proves that he is equally useless and only sends a few hundred National Guardsmen in and mostly just to guard the electric power station and Federal Reserve Bank building. So now the rioters are free to continue their arson and looting.
After this has gone on for a day or two the inner-city denizens and the local Antifa cohorts in every major city decide it’s time to set up a local chapter of burn everything down and steal whatever comes to hand. So now it gets real for you. You’re watching on tv as the metropolis that’s fifteen minutes away begins to go up in flames and the cops stand down at the behest of Bill de Blasio in order not to annoy his constituency while they enjoy their first amendment right to loot and burn other people’s life’s savings. And in a video on social media you hear the rioters tell you, seemingly you in particular, that they’re headed out to your suburb to bring the same treatment to you and yours.
Well, that’s got to be an eye opener. And the more you think about it the more you realize that there’s not a damn thing anyone is going to do to end this cycle. This happens periodically. First it happened in 1965, then in 1977. In the late seventies through the early nineties it never really stopped. The violence and crime were continuous. Giuliani was a change in New York. He was the last gasp of a majority that would allow the police to keep the criminal elements under strict control. The nineties were peaceful and prosperous for New York. But Giuliani was term limited out in 2001. Bloomberg left the police in place but constantly railed against them in the press. By the time Obama and de Blasio were in the White House and Gracie Mansion respectively, it was open season on the police and law and order too. Eric Holder demonized the police and spawned Black Lives Matter. Now you could say that President Trump is a reaction to Obama and the Ferguson scam that keeps being perpetrated on the people. And he can do a lot to prevent this stuff spreading to red states. But if you live in a blue state and especially if you live close to one of the big cities in them you are at ground zero for every wave of the roller coaster.
And that brings me to my point.
Move.
There’s no good reason to live there. The bad reasons are that it’s your home. And it’s where your family lives. I don’t live near one of the big cities but I wish I were a thousand miles away in a red state. But I have kids and grandkids that have roots here. And every day I try to figure out how to get us all out. But if you’re starting out now or are going to start a family, get out now. Head south and west and look for a state that is run by normal people and isn’t filled with people who don’t have any stuff but want your stuff instead. I assure you from sad experience, it’s no way to live.
The Long Hot Summer Begins
The riots, looting and arson in Minneapolis have spread to other Democrat cities. It’s a tricky proposition for the mayors and governors in those jurisdictions in terms of how far they let it go. The Mayor of Minneapolis was willing to let the closest police precinct burn to the ground along with all the stores and even banks in the area. Now that the anarchy has spread to nearby St. Paul it’s probable that state officials are in a panic to put a stop to the chaos. I don’t know enough about Minneapolis politics to know if the Mayor there is immune from voter outrage. But even a city like New York back in the late eighties with a very large minority population finally reached a point where law and order problems created a backlash that brought in Rudy Giuliani. Whether Minneapolis is simply too liberal to ever retreat from the appeasement of crime approach is about to be seen.
And all the usual suspects are on tv stirring the pot. The Mayor of Chicago somehow blames the President. It should be interesting to see whether Lori Lightfoot’s city ends up burning down too. To her credit the Mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Bottoms, addressed the senselessness and stupidity of the rioters destroying their own city. In a small ironic twist, the rioters have smashed some parts of the CNN headquarters in Atlanta.
The manufactured nature of the riots is so blatant that even the left-wing press has acknowledged it. The inner-city population is looting the stores but wherever the damage is worst you can see some blond-headed twenty something at the center smashing a store window or lighting a Molotov cocktail. This is Antifa’s show. They ignited it and they’re keeping it going.
The bigger picture is what will be the political fallout from a spasm of violence and lawlessness running through the cities of the United States during an election year. President Trump has to very carefully choreograph his response to the events on the ground. He’ll profess anger for the death of George Floyd but he’ll have to condemn in the strongest terms the evil madness of the rioters. And if finally, the governor in Minnesota fails to take control of the chaos the President will have to step in. Taken all together I think this chaos will hurt the Democrats. It’s reminiscent of the street violence in 1968 that helped elect Richard Nixon president. Even voters in Democrat controlled states fear the violence and destruction that a mob unleashes when it riots. It wouldn’t surprise me if this increases President Trump’s margin when he flips Minnesota in November. And looking down the road it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that both Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey get the boot in a few years when they’re up for re-election.
And one last consequence of this madness is what it will do to the COVID-19 situation. I predict that we’re going to hear a lot less about the “pandemic.” I noticed that a lot of the rioters weren’t social distancing as they looted the various stores and offices and I assume that when you’re running from a mob or a National Guard riot squad that a face mask will be too hard to breathe through. A lot of citizens may figure if it’s good enough for the mob it’s good enough for them.
When the Narrative Starts to Break Down
New York City is an enormous place. Something like eight million people live within the confines of the five boroughs and twelve million more live in the adjacent areas of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and even Pennsylvania that act as bedroom communities for the people who make a living off of that gigantic place.
And along with that enormity is an enormously difficult and dangerous job of keeping such a place safe. Along with the NYPD there are the police departments of all the adjacent communities and the state troopers of New York and the adjacent states. All told, there are tens of thousands of police officers in the New York City area but compare that to twenty million people and you realize the necessity for maintaining the respect and legitimacy of police officers in the New York City area.
Back when I was a young man living in New York in the nineteen seventies and eighties, crime was a frightening fact of life. Even the “safe” neighborhoods had been invaded by violent criminals who “mugged” the unsuspecting and often weaker members of the community wherever the opportunity offered. The democrat mayors of the city payed lip service to policing the problems but because of their dependence on votes from the African American and Latino communities they were careful never to embrace too openly the law and order aspect of the city’s responsibilities. But when David Dinkins became the first African American mayor in 1990 his first responsibility was to his ethnic constituency and that ensured the effective handcuffing of the NYPD and gave a carte blanche to criminals.
But back then even New York liberals knew that unfettered criminality would destroy their home. So, they did the unthinkable, they elected Rudy Giuliani mayor. Giuliani was a republican and a former US Attorney who had prosecuted mafia bosses and high-profile criminals. He put in place a highly effective neighborhood policing strategy that targeted both low level crime (broken windows offenses) and serious crime (robbery and violent crime) and in the space of a few years made New York City one of the safest big cities in the United States. But being a republican, albeit a relatively liberal one, and having made his reputation by embracing law enforcement, the democratic City Council enacted term limits for the first time in city history to prevent him from governing for more than eight years.
His successor Michael Bloomberg ran as a republican (in name only) and saw the mayoral term limit law removed so that he could serve for twelve years. Being a creature of the liberal establishment Bloomberg would often excoriate any police incident that showed up in the bleeding-heart liberal New York media. But he was at least smart enough to mostly leave in place the police practices that Giuliani had pioneered.
But then two things happened. Barack Obama became President of the Unites States and Bill de Blasio became Mayor of New York. Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder used the Justice Department to criminalize and prosecute police officers whenever an opportunity arose in the media that could be construed as police brutality against African American criminals. It spawned the Black Lives Matters organization which was responsible for the deaths of police officers in several American cities. But de Blasio embraced it and has effectively handcuffed police effectiveness in New York City. As part of his police policy, “stop and frisk” and broken windows policing have been eliminated. Due to this, quality of life crimes have started to proliferate again. And more recently, violent crime, which until recently had been close to non-existent is becoming a day to day reality for the first time since the early nineteen nineties.
And that’s where we are today. The progressives have a firm hold on New York City politics but the demographics of left-wing politics have changed. New York is a minority majority city and the old left-wing ethnicities are no longer in control. It may no longer be possible for a Rudy Giuliani type reformer to be brought in to clean up de Blasio’s crime problem.
When anti-Semitism against the easily recognizable Orthodox Jewish community is being perpetrated by African Americans, both on a day to day low level harassment basis and in deadly attacks as have recently occurred, it becomes difficult for de Blasio and the other New York progressives to get people to believe that white supremacists are responsible for the problem. I mean he’ll still try, but as seen in that link, it’s getting a little thick.
So, where does this leave the New York Jewish community? Their voting record, with exceptions, puts them squarely in line with progressive candidates on the local, state and national level. So, essentially, they have themselves helped to create this monster by electing Barack Obama, Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio to the positions that allowed them to hamstring the only entity that could have protected them, the New York Police Department. And once the police saw that their bosses no longer had their backs, they stopped doing their jobs. Why risk being sent to prison for trying to prevent crime? Now they just clean up the pieces after the damage is done.
Some in the Jewish community are advocating for a return to sane police policy but the more pragmatic voices, knowing the reality of where they are, are calling for their communities to hire private armed security forces for their houses of worship. And that is indeed highly ironic. After eliminating the public security force that made it possible for all of New York City to thrive they now are forced to provide for themselves a private police force to protect them from the criminals they have empowered.
Those in the more upscale New York City communities were in the vanguard of movements such as Black Lives Matter and other initiatives begun during the Obama and de Blasio administrations. Now they are living with the results of those movements. Currently it is still at the periphery of their community, with the non-progressive elements such as the Orthodox community bearing the brunt of the problem. But just as back in the 1980s these problems eventually find their way back to the “safe” neighborhoods. The question for them will be what happens when the Narrative breaks down on their own doorstep?