“Progressive Paradise”

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.

A California appeals court ruled that San Francisco could not block four suspected drug dealers from the inner-city Tenderloin district, a 50-square-block neighborhood rife with crime and drug use.

The ruling, which came on Friday, stemmed from San Francisco’s attempted to ban 28 alleged drug dealers in 2020 who frequented the downtown area, which has seen the city’s largest number of overdose deaths.

An enforcement of the ban what shot down in court last May, with the city appealing the decision as officials specifically named alleged drug dealers Christian Noel Padilla-Martel, Victor Zelaya, 27, Jarold Sanchez, 23, and Guadaloupe Aguilar-Benegas, 28, as individuals who needed to be kept out of the district.

A group of at least 17 gangs targeting Los Angeles’ wealthiest are responsible for the city’s recent string of ‘follow-home’ robberies, cops said Tuesday.

‘In my 34 years in the LAPD, I have never seen this type of criminal behavior in such large groups coordinating to conduct attacks on unsuspecting citizens to take their property and/or vehicles,’ said Capt. Jonathan Tippet of the attacks, which started in September.

In November, Tippet was tabbed to head a division designed to combat the robberies – Follow Home Robbery Task Force – which has seen armed suspects stalk victims leaving ritzy boutiques, hotels, and restaurants before striking.

Few are listening any more to the clueless Justin Trudeaus and bumbling Joe Bidens and all the toxic hypocrisies they embody.

Canada is now governed by absurdism, and it is symptomatic of an ailing Western elite.

Liberal Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week invoked martial law to arrest and financially destroy truckers on the charge that their largely peaceful protests are “dismantling the Canadian economy” that had already been dismantled for two years under some of the most draconian lockdowns in the world. The trucker “sect,” Trudeau added, is guilty of felonious “unacceptable views.” But his rhetoric still cannot square the circle of demonizing vital workers while conceding he cannot run his country without them.

The city is carrying out a bizarre medical experiment in which they are helping homeless drug addicts use drugs. ‘It’s handing a loaded gun to a suicidal person.’

At this point all I can say is: go and see it.

Over the past two years, more than 1,360 people have died from drug overdoses in San Francisco. That is more than double the number who have died from Covid.

But you don’t need more stats. You don’t need more numbers about how the tent encampments are exploding. Or about the amount of money that the city is paying for each person doing drugs on the sidewalks. You need to see it.