If you’re wondering what the hot new trend among Brooklyn progressives is—apparently, it’s stealing from Whole Foods. That’s according to a recent episode of The Opinions, a New York Times podcast, in which host Nadja Spiegelman and guests Hasan Piker and Jia Tolentino discuss what Spiegelman calls “microlooting”—“taking small things from big corporations and . . . feeling justified.”
Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we had what the great Tom Wolfe indelibly dubbed “radical chic”: the tendency of rich leftists to support causes that, if they triumphed, would destroy their comfortable benefactors utterly. We’re way beyond that now. Today, rich leftists don’t just support the Marxist revolutionaries who would destroy the comforts of society that those leftists take for granted; they’re actually joining them in small criminal and anarchic acts, all while the intelligentsia cheers them on from the pages of the New York Times.
There was a time when Detroit was a great American city. The heart of the U.S. auto industry, Detroit peaked with almost 2 million residents. Today, it’s population is less than 700,000 and crime is higher. Crime is so bad, in fact, that city officials are now asking criminals not to steal the city’s fire hydrants for the brass components.
It is a short walk from my door to one of London’s busiest arteries. The first two minutes of the walk are usually pleasant, especially in summer, when a luscious thatch of untrimmed leaves bow down from the road’s many trees. There is the occasional roar of an accelerating driver drunk on testosterone and the odd shouting voice, but mostly it’s people padding along with their dogs and neighbours chatting.
But then the idyll ends. The road that leads up to the Tube station and the artery has a major bus stop, a rubbish collection point, a taxi rank, and a Deliveroo rider rank. This culminates in one of London’s most persistent homeless encampments, with tents, begging, traipsing, drug-taking, drinking and Tube loitering. The permanent residence for two cackling women is a stinking underpass. There are more stragglers and smells in the unavoidable (above ground) cement passage required to rejoin the pavement going north.
First and foremost, I avoid all confrontation,” Robert Freeman, a 47-year-old bus driver in Queens, remarked to the New York Times. “Me, I just concentrate on driving, and I don’t say nothing.” It was an apt summary of the city’s attitude towards petty criminals, who have been all too happy to take advantage of New York’s deteriorating public order — including in Freeman’s line of work.
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.
Pimps and criminals thrive amid political decay
Every online review for one of Blackpool’s brothels tells a sordid story. “I plan to visit nightly,” writes a punter whose wife has just died. “A depressing hovel,” claims another who took a teddy bear with him. A third admits he was too drunk “to make full use”, but plans to return.
The first time I visit Cookson Street, it is Saturday morning and, despite its reputation, there are no red lights: just a string of boarded-up shops and a building site at the end of the road. A new “Civil Service Hub” for 3,000 relocated government workers is nearing completion. Around the corner, a Royal British Legion club stands opposite a gay sauna. Which, I wonder, will the civil servants prefer?
Nearly a third of all downtown Minneapolis office space is currently vacant, according to a recent Cushman & Wakefield report. Hybrid work models and other post-COVID phenomena have resulted in many companies downsizing their offices, with some pulling out altogether.
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.
Lessons from a previous American tumble
American cities are littered with street camps, drugs, and a motley crew of addicts, alcoholics, dropouts, vagrants, criminals, and the mentally ill. From Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood to San Francisco’s Tenderloin, from Portland to New York, from downtown Los Angeles to Seattle’s Highland Park, thousands of American urban districts are sites of danger and disorder.
The tragedy unfolding on our streets may seem unprecedented. But drug-fueled urban squalor is nothing new in the United States, and we could learn something from how our forebears handled it.
The Thursday before Christmas, I woke up in downtown Sofia, leisurely drank a coffee, and jumped on a metro that took me directly to the airport. In less than an hour, I was at the gate for my flight to New York’s JFK. My plan was to get the last bus upstate that evening, so I could be in my own bed a little after midnight. But it would only work if the flight landed on time — and if passport control took under an hour and a half.
The first happened, but the second didn’t even come close. To describe Terminal One that Thursday night as a shitshow is unfair to shitshows, which are at least darkly entertaining. This was bureaucratic hell: lines of exhausted travellers snaking out into dreary linoleum hallways festooned with disconcertingly cheery posters welcoming us to NYC. It took close to an hour to even reach the main hall, and then we endured another hour of slow shuffling up to the 10 or so border security agents.
Stores fleeing from rising theft will leave residents in cities like New York with fewer places to shop, less merchandise to buy, and higher prices to pay.
The rising social disorder and crime of the 1970s and 1980s drove out not only hundreds of thousands of residents from New York City, but also many businesses. Within a few years, entire communities lacked basic amenities like supermarkets and drugstores; empty storefronts littered shopping districts. That started to change only when crime began falling in the 1990s and neighborhoods rebounded—first in New York and then in other big cities—prompting national retailers to begin setting up shop in places that they had once avoided. Thousands of stores and tens of thousands of jobs blossomed in New York alone thanks to this retail revival. But those gains are vanishing before our eyes as rising retail theft is driving a new era of closings.
Toronto with Chow’s sales tax.
Viciously maligned as racists since WWII, nobody bothered to ask working-class whites why they left the cities.
Against any reasonable expectation, America’s once-proud post–World War II suburbanization and middle-class expansion has become a critical flashpoint in our national politics. A generation of left-leaning scholars, major media (think the New York Times’s 1619 project), and antiracist activists have succeeded in establishing that era as one of profound black disfranchisement: As blacks began their second “Great Migration” out of the rural South around 1940, the federal government embarked on a massive suburbanization effort to benefit white people and isolate blacks, an effort that included highway construction, home mortgage insurance, and “redlining,” which effectively excluded blacks from homeownership and left them to pick through the rubble of rapidly deindustrializing urban places.
In Indianapolis, the technology giant Salesforce is paring back a quarter of its office space in the tallest building in Indiana, where it has been a key tenant for the past six years. In Atlanta, the private investment giant Starwood Capital defaulted on a $212 million mortgage on a 29-story office tower. And in Baltimore, a landmark building sold for $24 million last month, roughly $42 million less than it fetched in 2015.
Alpha News’ Liz Collins calls this a “shocking” video, and it would be — from anywhere else other than Minneapolis or perhaps San Francisco. South Minneapolis had been known as a relatively serene urban area, at least until a few years ago. When the extreme-progressive leadership began capitulating on homelessness, things began to change for residents like Dave Marquardt.
A good video at the link above.
Wall Street denizens fleeing NYC
This news probably wouldn’t be particularly newsworthy were it not for the fact that few in the media have been talking about it. For the past several years, there has been what the New York Post describes as a “giant, sucking sound” coming from the financial sector in New York City. That “whooshing” sound you hear has been caused by more than 150 major financial firms on Wall Street calling it quits and moving to more friendly climes around the country, particularly in the South.
Toronto is among the hardest hit “downtowns” in North Amercia. We too are heading for Hell hole status.
