One of the leaders of Black Lives Matter’s Greater
New York chapter slammed Mayor Bill de Blasio for the city’s vaccine
mandate, explaining the “mandate is racist and specifically targets
black New Yorkers,” in a statement to Fox News.
Chivona Newsome cofounded the Greater New York Chapter of Black Lives
Matter and ran as a congressional candidate for New York’s 15th
district in the 2020 election. The former Congressional candidate
blasted de Blasio’s vaccine mandate in a statement to Fox News.
“Although Mayor Bill De Blasio ran on progressives values, nothing in his tenure will attest to his campaign promises,” Newsome explained
to Fox. “The September 13th vaccine mandate is racist and specifically
targets Black New Yorkers. The vaccination passports are modern-day
Freedom Papers, which limit the free will of Black people.”
“The vaccination mandates infringe upon the civil liberties of the Black community,” she told Fox. “It’s
more than where we can dine or enjoy entertainment, it will result in
loss of income. As of Monday, September 27, Black health care workers
and educators will lose their jobs.”............To Read More.....
For two decades, many New Yorkers had
assured themselves that a return to the crime and squalor of the early
1990s was unlikely. Former mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who presided over a
62 percent drop in major felonies from 1994 through 2001, proved that
violence was not an urban inevitability. His successor, Michael
Bloomberg, drove crime down further, through the 2008 recession and
beyond. Both mayors set a benchmark for what was possible, preemptively
discrediting any future mayor’s excuse that crime was beyond his
capacity to overcome.
That assumption about the permanence of the crime drop was wrong. New
York City in 2020 experienced an unprecedented one-year increase in
homicides and shootings. Through December 27, 2020, the number of
murders was up 41 percent from 2019 and 53 percent from 2018. Shooting
victims were up 103 percent from 2019 and 109 percent from 2018;
shooting incidents rose 97 percent and 104 percent. In gang-ridden
precincts, the spike was even more startling. In Brooklyn’s Brownsville
and Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhoods, there were 170 percent more
shooting victims in 2020 than in 2019 and 151 percent more shooting
incidents. Murder was up 94 percent in these parts of Brooklyn.
It wasn’t just gang areas that were afflicted. On December 29, a
roving pack of young bicyclists in midtown Manhattan attacked a BMW,
smashing a bike on top of the car and jumping on its windshield. The
same group went after a cab minutes later. Office workers in the area
have been chased by similar flash mobs.
The 2020 increase is actually worse than the annual numbers suggest.
Street crime dropped from March 2020 to late May 2020, due to the
coronavirus lockdown. The 2020 increase incorporates that early crime
drop. Measured from June to the end of 2020, the rise in violence would
be even more extreme. And it has continued into 2021. Shootings citywide
were up 20 percent through February 14, 2021, compared with the first
six weeks of 2020.
De Blasio’s early mayoralty suggested that
the Giuliani-Bloomberg benchmark was in fact checking the default
leftism of New York’s leadership class. De Blasio chose as his police
commissioner William Bratton. Bratton had engineered the crime
turnaround of the 1990s as Giuliani’s first police commissioner.
Selecting Bratton angered de Blasio’s left-wing base, which demanded a
black or female commissioner (or, ideally, both). But de Blasio wanted
maximal insurance against a crime increase, so he went with the sure
bet. His next two commissioners were also white males, chosen for their
likely ability to keep crime down, rather than for their race and sex.
The Left was even angrier, but it could not overcome the power of the
benchmark.
Over the last year, though, something even more powerful than a
concern for one’s political legacy has arisen: the need to signal a
commitment to fighting white supremacy. Following the death of George
Floyd in May 2020, racial inequalities have become the obsession of the
nation’s elites. Almost any public matter may be turned into a “race”
issue, including Donald Trump’s battle in late 2020 and early 2021 to
overturn the presidential election results.
The core concern of the antiracism crusade, however, is policing and
incarceration. This is not a new focus, but in 2020, it became ever more
destructive of law and order. For years, antipolice activists,
academics, and liberal politicians have decried the over representation
of blacks in the criminal-justice system. Blacks make up about 12
percent of the nation’s population, but they account for one-third of
the combined federal and state prison rolls; their per-capita rate of
imprisonment is more than four times higher than the per-capita
imprisonment rate of whites. Racism on the part of cops and prosecutors
is the only permissible explanation for that disparity; acknowledging
the vastly higher black crime rate is taboo. (The black incarceration
rate is driven by convictions for violent crime—not, as popular lore has
it, by convictions for drug offenses; 62 percent of black prisoners in
state facilities, which house the vast majority of the nation’s
prisoners, were serving time for a violent offense in 2018, compared
with 48 percent of white state prisoners.) If, as antiracism orthodoxy
dictates, the root causes of higher black crime—above all, family
breakdown—may not be discussed, then the only way to reduce racial
disparities in the criminal-justice system is to stop penalizing
criminal behavior.
Such decriminalization efforts were ongoing in New York before 2020.
The New York City Council and the New York State Legislature had
lightened traditional penalties for a host of public-order offenses,
such as public urination and public drinking. Bail was eliminated for
misdemeanors and many felonies. The Manhattan and Brooklyn district
attorneys competed for the most sweeping de-prosecution initiatives.
Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance announced that he would not
prosecute turnstile jumping, calling it a crime of poverty. (Actually,
it’s a crime of arrogance, as a retired NYPD chief notes.) Not to be
outdone, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez stopped sending most
youthful gunslingers into detention, diverting them instead into poorly
managed social-services programs. Meanwhile, officers who put pressure
on a resisting suspect’s back or chest to subdue his violence could now
be criminally charged.
Alberto Mena
These antiracism initiatives were just
warm-ups. The more frenzied dismantling of law enforcement began in
mid-2020, triggered by the national riots over the death of George
Floyd. Floyd died on May 25, 2020, after resisting arrest for allegedly
trying to pass a counterfeit bill in Minneapolis; video captured an
officer pinning Floyd facedown on the ground with a knee to the nape of
his neck for nearly nine minutes. Though subsequent evidence arguably
undercuts the claim that Floyd died from that police hold, the incident
was universally treated as a manifestation of the lethal police
brutality that blacks endure on a daily basis.
Minneapolis was the first
city to burn, and riots soon spread across the country. In New York
City, caravans of looters smashed storefronts and made off with millions
of dollars in luxury merchandise and dollar-store inventory alike;
rioters burned police cars and attacked officers with bottles, bricks,
cement blocks, and jagged metal pipes. Officers worked back-to-back
shifts with no time to sleep; nearly 400 officers were injured. More
than 200 police cars were vandalized. As darkness fell each night, the
city cowered behind plywood barriers hastily erected over apartment
building entrances and commercial storefronts.
De Blasio called the unrest “very justified” and asked the police to
use a “light touch” because people are “undeniably angry for a reason.”
Not surprisingly, the violence continued unabated, finally pushing the
mayor to impose an 8 PM curfew. Manhattan D.A. Vance was not
cooperating. Vance would not be prosecuting curfew violations and other
riot-related offenses like disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, his
office announced.
The capitulation continued. On June 15, Police Commissioner Dermot
Shea announced that he was dismantling the undercover units tasked with
getting armed felons off the streets. This abdication was being done in
the name of serving the “community”—code for avoiding disparate impact.
The so-called anticrime units were among the last NYPD entities that
forthrightly used their constitutional power to stop, question, and
sometimes frisk individuals engaged in criminally suspicious behavior—a
legal tactic, contrary to what New York’s political class believes. Shea
labeled it “brute force.”
It is true, as was widely reported after Shea’s announcement, that
anticrime officers were involved in a disproportionate number of police
shootings. What was not reported was how low that number of shootings
was. In 2019, there were 25 incidents in which NYPD officers
intentionally shot criminal suspects, the second-lowest number of
officer-involved shootings since records were first kept nearly 50 years
ago. Fifty-four members of the NYPD were involved in those 25 shooting
incidents, of which 19, or 35 percent, were from anticrime units. By
comparison, the roughly 600 anticrime officers were 1.6 percent of the
total NYPD sworn force. Those 25 shooting incidents resulted in 11
civilian fatalities—also a historically low number. All the civilians
killed by NYPD officers in 2019 appeared to be threatening officers with
potentially lethal force; seven had loaded guns.
To put those 25 citywide shooting incidents in perspective: in 2019,
the 36,397 members of the NYPD responded to more than 6.4 million calls
for service. More than 64,000 of those calls involved weapons.
Twenty-five shootings and 11 fatalities are remarkably few, given the
size of New York and of the NYPD. The NYPD’s per-capita use of force is
significantly below that of many other departments facing comparable
population demographics.
For example, from 2015 to 2020, the Houston police, a department of
5,400 officers, killed an average of eight people a year. The NYPD,
nearly seven times the size of Houston’s force, killed an average of
nine people a year from 2010 to 2019. In 2018, the NYPD killed five
people. The Houston rate, if translated to the NYPD, would mean an
average of close to 56 civilian fatalities a year.
That anticrime officers were over represented among officers involved
in shootings says nothing about whether they were trigger-happy or prone
to excessive force. Confronting armed, violent, and resisting suspects
was virtually their job description. The likelihood of an officer’s use
of force is a function of how often he interacts with violent suspects.
Three percent of anticrime officers discharged their weapons at suspects
in 2019; that number, too, suggests restraint rather than brutality.
Shea should have lauded the anticrime officers for their professional
contributions to “community” safety, rather than decommissioning them.
Disbanding the units signaled that the department was “no longer in the
arrest business,” says former police commissioner Ray Kelly. That
message was heard. Shootings jumped 205 percent in the two weeks after
Shea’s announcements, from 38 incidents over those two weeks in 2019 to
116 incidents in 2020. Gunshot injuries rose 238 percent. June 2020
became the most violent month, in terms of gunfire, in 24 years.
Suspects knew that their chances of getting stopped with a gun had
dropped enormously.
NYPD officers also got the message. In the month following the
disbanding of the anticrime units, narcotics arrests fell 85 percent,
gang detectives made 90 percent fewer arrests, subway and housing
arrests fell by comparable amounts, and gun arrests dropped 67 percent.
Through early December, arrests citywide were down 36 percent, though
gun arrests had started rebounding. Too late: the increased gun arrests
couldn’t keep up with the increase in guns on the street, and the year
ended with a 100 percent surge in gun violence.
When proactive policing and public-order
enforcement are universally denounced as racist, officers do less of
those activities. When crime rises as a result, officers are charged
with racism as well. Now, as shootings surged, the NYPD was accused of
indifference to the “community.” Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, a
former NYPD sergeant and a fierce critic of the department’s stop,
question, and frisk tactics, complained that his constituents were not
getting the police response that they deserved. The police had allegedly
not cracked down on illegal dice games and loud music at night,
following resident complaints. But had officers tried to end those
illegal dice games and loud music, they would have subjected themselves
to complaints about their oppression of minority communities. Moreover,
Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez would have thrown out any
summonses or arrests for such low-level quality-of-life problems anyway,
so why should officers bother in the first place?
The most shameless hypocrisy came from Donovan Richards, formerly
chair of the city council’s public-safety committee and now Queens
borough president. Richards embraces Black Lives Matter ideology. He has
called for the evisceration of Broken Windows enforcement, labeling it a
“systemic wrong” that has “stymied progress” for black and Latino
communities. Yet here he was, a month after the disbanding of the
anticrime units, complaining that “communities are being held hostage by
the cops and the robbers at the same time.” The cops allegedly engaged
in such extortion by not delivering precisely the proactive enforcement
that Richards calls a “systemic wrong.” When crime goes up, it is easier
to lash out at the cops than to acknowledge the social ecology of
crime—it thrives in an environment with neither informal social controls
such as strong families nor formal controls such as police presence.
“A good economy is not the precondition for lowered crime; lowered crime is the precondition for economic vitality.
New York’s slide into lawlessness is
mirrored nationwide. The year 2020 likely saw the largest percentage
increase in homicides in U.S. history. The local and the national crime
increases have the same cause: making the avoidance of disparate impact
the guiding principle of law enforcement. Given the vast disparities in
crime commission, however, law enforcement will inevitably fall heaviest
on blacks. But crime, too, falls heaviest on blacks. In order to
protect law-abiding minority residents, officers have to operate more
intensively in minority areas. There is no middle ground. In New York
City, blacks made up over 74 percent of all known shooting suspects in
2019, though they are only about 23 percent of the city’s population.
Non-Hispanic whites were a little over 2 percent of all known shooting
suspects, though they are about 34 percent of the city’s population.
Those suspect identifications come from the victims of, and witnesses
to, shootings—overwhelmingly minority themselves. Shooting victims were
over 71 percent black in 2019 and 2.5 percent white. Police do not wish
these facts into existence; they are the reality of urban crime. The
data mean, however, that the police cannot respond to shootings without
being called into minority neighborhoods and being given the description
of a minority suspect, if anyone is cooperating with the police.
The city has come back from the brink before. The crime turnaround
that began under Giuliani and Bratton can happen again if the NYPD
reinvigorates proactive enforcement—above all, Broken Windows
enforcement. The anticrime units should be reconstituted and given
political support. The city’s prosecutors must cooperate in imposing
serious consequences for antisocial behavior. A jail or prison sentence
is not always required.
Being processed for an arrest may be enough to
disrupt criminal behavior and discourage its continuation. But every
city official must be unequivocal that lowering crime is the most urgent
task facing the city as it tries to rebound from the economically
disastrous lockdowns. As long as crime and disorder continue increasing,
residents and would-be residents will stay away and businesses will
have even less reason to bring their employees back to the city’s
commercial core. A good economy is not the precondition for lowered
crime; lowered crime is the precondition for economic vitality.
Unfortunately, all the candidates for mayor and Manhattan district
attorney are committed to the systemic police racism conceit, seemingly
oblivious to the fact that the NYPD is a civil rights organization—one
dedicated to equalizing the benefits of safe streets across the city.
With few exceptions, the would-be mayors and prosecutors are calling for
more decriminalization and decarceration, not less. (Eric Adams has
called for restoring the anticrime units in select precincts, on the
ground that the “bad guys are saying if you don’t see a blue and white
you can do whatever you want.”) Absent a change in New York’s reigning
ideology, choosing a police commissioner for his crime-fighting prowess
alone is over; diversity will be paramount. There is still time,
however, for a mayoral candidate to emerge who can articulate the core
function of urban government: providing the civil order that allows
human creativity and entrepreneurship to flourish. If that doesn’t
happen, New York may be heading back not just to the early 1990s but to
the even grimmer 1970s.
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leading free-market think tank. Are you interested in supporting the
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Mayor Bill de Blasio has cancelled
a graffiti-eradication program targeted at cleaning private buildings.
He is thus deliberately sending New York City back to its worst days of
crime and squalor.
The symbolic significance of this cancellation is as large as its
practical effect. Nothing sent a stronger signal in the late 1980s that
New York was determined to fight back from anarchy than the transit
system’s campaign against subway graffiti. That campaign was based on Broken Windows
theory, the most transformative idea in urban policy over the last 40
years. Broken Windows recognizes that physical disorder and low-level
lawlessness—graffiti, turnstile-jumping, and litter—telegraph that
social control in a disordered environment has broken down. That
low-level lawlessness invites more contempt for public norms of behavior, including felony crime...............
But an appreciation of public order does not come naturally to a
self-described progressive........... Vagrancy was up in the subways,
litter was metastasizing. And now, with the cancellation of the
graffiti-removal program, de Blasio has reverted to type...........And when two women poured black paint
on those BLM logos to protest anti-cop hatred, de Blasio found the
resources to arrest and charge them with criminal mischief—for graffiti
vandalism!—as well as to repaint the slogans.........
To Read More....
Controversial conservative blogger Pamela Geller says in a new lawsuit that Mayor Bill de Blasio’s ban on public demonstrations violates her First Amendment right to protest the shut-down. “There is no justification, pandemic or otherwise, for a government
official to revoke this fundamental right of the people,” wrote lawyer
David Yerushalmi in the civil rights filing that asks a judge to rescind
the directive.
The suit, which also names Police
Commissioner Dermot Shea, says that if not for the “draconian
restrictions on liberty” banning demonstrations, Geller would have
organized and participated in a rally against the shut-down. These demonstrations, she argued, can be held while “maintaining proper social distancing.”...........To Read More....
One of the constants of communism is anti-Semitism. It's baked into the Marxist pie, starting with Karl Marx himself, whose anti-Semitic writings are indistinguishable from Hitler's. Given New York Mayor Bill de Blasio's communist credentials, his escalating hostility to the politically conservative, religiously orthodox Jews in his city should not come as a surprise.
As background, Karl Marx came from a Jewish family. Shortly before he was born, though, his father converted to the state Evangelical Church of Prussia for purely pragmatic reasons. A child of the Enlightenment with little patience for religion, Herr Marx Sr. could not advance in Prussia as a Jew.
Young Karl Marx came to loathe his Jewish heritage. It was he who converted traditional European anti-Semitism, which was centered entirely on the Jewish rejection of Christ, into socialist anti-Semitism, which ties Jews to financial capital. (Marx did this even though the vast majority of Europe's Jews lived in abysmal poverty, with only a small number, many of whom had been able to take advantage of Prussia's brief window of Enlightenment, achieving any wealth.)
It's one thing for thousands of people to support black trans lives; it's
another thing altogether for Jewish children to play in city parks.
If you're interested in Marx's "unambiguous" anti-Semitism, the best article is Michael Ezra's "Karl Marx's Radical Antisemitism." It discusses Marx's
essay "On the Jewish Question," which sounds remarkably close to
something Hitler or Stalin (or Al Sharpton or Louis Farrakhan) could
have written:........... To Read More
Early on Easter morning on Clifford Ave, 3 people were shot. 2 of them recovered, but 1 did not.
The triple shooting in Rochester was one of a series of brutal gangland assaults in the upstate New York metropolitan area. Justin ‘Tookie’ McMillan's shooting by Dvontea Alexander marked the eighth murder in Rochester. Tookie’s social media photos showed him flashing stacks of hundred-dollar bills and gang signals. Dvontea Alexander, his alleged shooter, appeared to have a previous criminal record.
Dvontea was quickly arrested and charged. As with the aftermath of any gang-related shooting, social media quickly filled up with local comments alternately mourning or celebrating Tookie’s death.
After Tookie’s murder, a large crowd gathered on Clifford Ave to pay tribute to the dead man. Candles were lit, balloons were inflated, and empty bottles of Remy Martin cognac lined the sidewalk outside the corner convenience store.
Vigils after shootings in Rochester aren’t unusual. And even in the age of the Wuhan Virus, the vigils were going on. But the Tookie vigil drew over 200 people and attracted the attention of the authorities.
Mayor Lovely Warren said that she drove by the vigil and decided to allow it to continue.
“Knowing our community and knowing the passion and the need to mourn we decided that we were going to allow the community to come together yesterday to mourn the life that was lost,” she opined. “Yesterday that’s what this community needed and that is what we allowed to happen because it was done in a peaceful way and it was safe and we were able to keep eyes on it."
Police Chief La'Ron Singletary argued that, "Force could've been used to remove the crowd. Officers would've certainly liked to use force and increase the likelihood of an officer contracting COVID, if someone was a carrier of COVID in that crowd.”
Both Lovely and La’Ron were essentially arguing that people needed an outlet for their grief, and that trying to break up the vigil would have led to violence. Meanwhile, Lovely’s administration had been closing down playgrounds and removing basketball rims to keep people from gathering outside.
Monroe County Executive Adam Bello, a Democrat, condemned "incendiary" rhetoric about the vigil. Meanwhile he had been telling local residents to wear masks, threatening to close public parks, and complaining that too many people were going shopping. “We need to think about why we’re going to those stores, and how many people from each household is going to those stores," he scolded.
At the end of that same month, Rabbi Chaim Mertz passed away in Brooklyn from the Wuhan Virus at the age of 73. Rabbi Mertz was the leader of the Tola’as Yaakov Chassidic movement which took its name, "Worm of Jacob", from Isaiah 41:14, which reads, 'Fear not, O worm of Jacob, the numberer of Israel; "I have helped you," says the Lord, and your redeemer, the Holy One of Israel.'"
Rabbi Mertz's father had survived the Holocaust, losing a wife and 5 children. After remarrying, he fled Communist tyranny in Hungary in the fifties, and came to this country where he founded a small obscure synagogue in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn. True to the name of their movement, both father and son were known as pious and humble religious leaders who would try to blend into crowds.
While the Tola’as Yaakov movement was tiny and Rabbi Mertz's synagogue rarely had more than two dozen congregants, the Mertz family was loved by its fellow Hungarian Chassidic Satmar dynasty which is also based out of Williamsburg. While the Mertz family had been humbly expecting a small turnout and had arranged with the NYPD to allow well-wishers to pay their respects, a large number of Satmar Chassidim also arrived to pay tribute to a man whom their religious leader had greatly respected.
The Mertz family had planned for a socially distanced procession with people wearing masks and walking down a closed street at the proper lengths from each other. Community groups tried to maintain order, handing out masks to new arrivals, and urging them to keep their distance. The larger than expected crowd led the NYPD to order everyone to disperse, but without a proper sense of direction, people didn’t know where to go and began to mill around up against the police barricades.
That was when Mayor Bill de Blasio arrived on the scene, later claiming that he needed to be there personally to break up the event. “I went there myself to ensure the crowd was dispersed,” he tweeted.
De Blasio’s claim was false. The NYPD and the funeral organizers had already made the decision to shut down the event. If the funeral was a potential infection site that was risking lives, as Bill de Blasio claimed, why did he need to go there in person and expose his police security detail to the virus?
What Mayor Bill de Blasio actually wanted was to show up for a photo op. Some have theorized that the entire arrangement had been a bait and switch in which the Mayor’s Office had approved a funeral only as a platform for the politician to arrive in a huff and declare that it was shut down.
Even otherwise friendly media outlets had been critical of Bill de Blasio's failures to prepare, warn, and take action against the virus.
The De Blasio administration had dismissed the idea that the virus was contagious on public transportation and had urged New Yorkers to go and participate in a parade in Chinatown. It had made no preparations to deal with the pandemic until it was too late. Bill de Blasio had made a point of casually violating safety guidelines while endangering the health of his own police detail.
And, like many traditional bigots, he had now found Orthodox Jews to be a convenient minority to scapegoat for his own failures while butching up and playing the tough guy.
It was classic anti-Semitism.
What happened next only reinforced that theory as the Democrat, who had badly failed at fighting the virus, took to social media to threaten the “Jewish community” that the “the time for warnings has passed”. “I have instructed the NYPD to proceed immediately to summons or even arrest those who gather in large groups,” he claimed. And the summons blitz he threatened did indeed follow.
There had been only a minimal police presence in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn when a rash of anti-Semitic hate crimes was taking place, but now an army of cops descended on Williamsburg, broke into a synagogue where religious scholars were studying their sacred texts, more than 6 feet apart, and began issuing summonses to anyone who was walking down the street while Chassidic.
Even though New York City's mask rule only requires wearing one when you're unable to be more than 6 feet from another person, summonses were being handed out to people just walking down the street at a reasonable distance. The only obvious distinguishing mark of those being ticketed was their religious identity.
The crackdown was underway.
It might have once been unthinkable that the mayor of a major American city could publicly threaten a religious minority and then lead an obvious discriminatory campaign targeting that group, while using them as scapegoats for his own incompetence, but the past few months have ushered in formerly unthinkable violations of the Bill of Rights as a new norm.
In a political environment where people can be arrested for leaving the house, for playing catch, or pushing their kids on a swing, where governors and law enforcement officers can casually dismiss the Bill of Rights as irrelevant to their jobs, a radical politico with a history in an anti-Semitic Marxist movement can act out his worst ideological impulses to boost his future political prospects.
Crack down on enough Jews and maybe Bill de Blasio will do better in the Dem primaries in 2024.
Anti-Semitism, like so many other social ills, is a byproduct of a totalitarian society whose fears and hatreds are stronger than its principles and convictions. It is no accident that those who want us to be most afraid are targeting churches and synagogues to take away that which gives us hope and faith.
Fear gives politicians power; faith takes it away.
The tale of two funerals reveals the fallacies of lockdown culture. We are not all in this together. That was always a lie. The governors whose families are in their vacation homes in different states are not in this with us. Different communities are treated differently in the lockdown as in daily life.
The differences between Mayor Lovely Warren's tolerant response to the vigil in Rochester and Mayor Bill de Blasio's crackdown on a Chassidic funeral in Brooklyn is unfair and it's also human nature.
The alternative to everyone possessing the same set of objective rights is to be ruled by the subjective biases of everyone more powerful than us. But that is exactly what happens when an emergency is used to override our rights and that covers a multitude of abuses from corruption to religious persecution.
People of all races and religions should be able to mourn their dead. There is no culture so savage that it has uprooted this fundamental human norm. Even elephants bury their dead. How can humans do less? Is it possible for people to pray, to mourn their dead, and earn a living in a sensible manner?
It is. And we ourselves can best decide what that is right for our communities and ourselves.
A handful of politicians have chosen to treat their entire states as untrustworthy non-essential people who ought to be locked up in their homes and scolded daily for not cowering far enough under their tables and beds. That's as un-American as Bill de Blasio's misconduct.
They've gotten away with it because they taught us to be afraid of each other, of our loved ones, and, most of all, of ourselves. If we are going to change that, we have to stop being afraid of each other, and start being afraid of the politicians.
If we don't, the final funeral will be for our freedoms.
In 2016, Bernie Sanders was considered very extreme for wanting to transform America into a very expensive European-style welfare state.
If the Democratic Party’s presidential debates this summer are any guide, that radical approach is now mainstream. Almost all the candidates have been competing over who could most quickly turn American into Greece.
The Mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, was especially determined to show that he was even more radical than Bernie Sanders. At one point, while watching de Blasio bellow about class-warfare taxes, I thought about a satirical version of the Pizza Hut commercial, with the Vermont Senator exclaiming “No one out-crazies the Bern.”
But give de Blasio credit for tryring. His only signature moment in an otherwise lackluster campaign occurred when he said he wanted to “tax the hell out of the wealthy.”
He even has a www.taxthehell.com website where he outlines his various proposals to cripple investment and entrepreneurship by imposing confiscatory taxes.
In other words, he is like Crazy Bernie in that he seems to really believe in ever-larger government. Consider these excerpts from a Q&A session he did with New York Magazine.
…our legal system is structured to favor private property. I think people all over this city, of every background, would like to have the city government be able to determine which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent will be. I think there’s a socialistic impulse, which I hear every day, in every kind of community, that they would like things to be planned in accordance to their needs. And I would, too. Unfortunately, what stands in the way of that is hundreds of years of history that have elevated property rights… Look, if I had my druthers, the city government would determine every single plot of land, how development would proceed. And there would be very stringent requirements around income levels and rents. That’s a world I’d love to see, and I think what we have, in this city at least, are people who would love to have the New Deal back, on one level. They’d love to have a very, very powerful government, including a federal government… I’m calling for a millionaires tax… need to see the wealthy paying their fair share. It frustrates me greatly that we don’t have the power here to tax the wealthy in this city.
Not only does he talk the talk, he also walks the walk.
Albeit in a bad way.
Here are some excerpts from a news report about one of his attacks on property rights.
Liberal New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is rolling out a new plan that would potentially allow the city government to seize buildings of landlords who force tenants out — a plan his opponents say amounts to “straight communism.” De Blasio…wants to take action against landlords who try to force tenants out by making the property unliveable — and pulled out an executive order to create a Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. He said that in the event the government intervenes, the buildings would then be controlled by a “community nonprofit.” …“My first reaction was: Is this communist Cuba?” state Assemblymember Nicole Malliotakis, who ran against De Blasio in the 2017 mayoral race, told Fox News. “ I can say that as a daughter of Cuban refugees who fled Castro’s Cuba in 1959, this is what happened to her family, she had her home taken, my grandfather had his gas station taken.” “This is extreme even for Mayor de Blasio, because we know that he has socialist leanings, but this is straight communism and I think it’s very scary to America-loving, democracy-loving people.”
By the way, I’m guessing that landlords are in a tough position because of NYC’s rent control laws.
To be fair, many of the problems in New York City didn’t start with de Blasio.
To be more specific, unfunded pensions are the biggest reason NYC is in deep trouble.
…the city is staring bankruptcy in the face. …but there’s been little talk about one of the main causes of the city’s growing debt: public employee pensions. As of today, nearly 75 percent of the city’s $197.8 billion deficit is due to pension and other retirement liabilities. …Sick of high taxes, residents and businesses are already leaving in droves… NYC offers five different pension plans to its municipal employees, from teachers to members of the school board. These pensions serve as a source of retirement income to former city employees and are defined benefit plans, meaning that benefits are guaranteed by the employer. …it’s no surprise that the pension plans’ funded ratio, which shows the ratio of the plans’ assets to liabilities, has dropped to 71.4 percent for NYCERS and 58.6 percent for TRS—thanks to accumulated debt. …for every dollar spent on NYCERS payroll, 34 cents goes toward pensions, and that number is 10 cents higher for TRS. …Pension contributions make up 11 percent of the city’s total budget and consume 17 percent of the city’s tax revenues. And it’s worth remembering that in the city ranked number one in local tax burden in the United States.
As you might suspect, Mayor de Blasio certainly isn’t doing anything to address this problem.
I’m simply noting that the problem existed before he took office and presumably would still exist with any other mayor.
And there are other officials in New York City who deserve scorn.
Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance is a traveling man with some high-end tastes. The prosecutor spent $249,716 on meals and work trips to everywhere from the City of Angels to the City of Lights over the past five years, according to records obtained via a Freedom of Information Law request. Vance paid for it all – including a $4,780 roundtrip flight to London and a $2,800 stay at a five-star Paris hotel – with money his office obtained from state-asset forfeiture funds largely tied to big-sum legal settlements with banks, records show. He controls more than $600 million stemming from forfeitures. …the other city district attorneys say they did not use asset forfeiture money to cover their work travel expenses. …Vance also does not skimp when it comes to eating out… He spent $645 at Patroon on East 46th Street to cover dinner… Vance also has expensed five meals at Tribeca’s Odeon for a total of $897… During his Paris visit, he spent $94 at Le Nemrod, $124 at Marco Polo, $72 at Le Saint Regis and $169 at Le Christine, according to the expense reports. …DAs have wide-ranging flexibility on how asset forfeiture money is used. Expenditures must cover “law enforcement” issues — but few other rules exist.
Here’s a map showing Vance’s travel.
By the way, the most outrageous part of this story isn’t the luxury travel or the expensive meals.
What really irks me is that his high-flying lifestyle is made possible by asset forfeiture, which is what happens when the government steals someone’s property – oftentimes without any finding of guilt!
The bottom line is that New York City has a terrible mayor, but the problem goes way beyond one person.
Which is why this final story, from Bloomberg, should be the canary in the coal mine when contemplating the future of the city.
New York leads all U.S. metro areas as the largest net loser with 277 people moving every day — more than double the exodus of 132 just one year ago. Los Angeles and Chicago were next with triple digit daily losses of 201 and 161 residents, respectively. This is according to 2018 Census data on migration flows to the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas compiled by Bloomberg News. …While New York is experiencing the biggest net exodus, the blow is being softened by international migrant inflows. From July 2017 to July 2018, a net of close to 200,000 New Yorkers sought a new life outside the Big Apple while the area welcomed almost 100,000 net international migrants. …Some areas are affected by high home prices and local taxes, which are pushing residents out and deterring potential movers from other parts of the country. About 200,000 residents left New York last year. Los Angeles had a decline of nearly 120,000 and Chicago fell by 84,000.
Here’s the map showing the cities losing the most people and gaining the most people.
By the way, it’s no coincidence that most of the fast-growth cities are in states with no income taxes.
P.S. Mayor de Blasio wants to “tax the hell out of the wealthy” in New York City, but fortunately he’s been somewhat frustrated in that goal because of limits on his power.
P.P.S. Because taxpayers in NYC no longer have unlimited ability to deduct their state and local taxes on their federal returns, the 2017 tax law almost certainly is contributing to the exodus from New York City. And every time one of those taxpayers escape, NYC gets closer to fiscal crisis.
At Wednesday’s Democratic debate, Mayor Bill de Blasio promised that when he is president — ha! — “we will tax the hell out of the wealthy.” It’s New York, though, that is the tax hellscape. Not so much for the super-rich, who can make a rational decision whether to pay high taxes or leave, but for middle-class and working-class folks who are stuck here.
Hizzoner ran for his first term promising a tax hike on the 1 percent, yes, but Gov. Andrew Cuomo wouldn’t let him, hardly a great sign that a President de Blasio could get Congress to agree. Nope, New York’s income taxes were high, and progressive, before de Blasio. The top city rate — nearly 3.9 percent of income, plus state and federal taxes of between 44 and 46 percent — applies to people making more than half a million dollars a year.
People paying this top rate — about 61,500 households — paid just more than half of the Big Apple’s income taxes in 2015, or close to $5.6 billion, according to city data. Households making more than $10 million — “only” 1,400 — paid 17 percent of the city’s income taxes in 2016.........To Read More....
Although I have witnessed firsthand the precipitous decline in the quality of life in the Big Apple (please see here, and trust me: it has only gotten worse), even I was shocked to see footage of uniformed New York City policemen being drenched with water and attacked with flying objects by laughing and jeering residents of Harlem.
Although many have attempted to explain the causes of this utterly outrageous and disgraceful scenario, noting the atmosphere of disrespect for police and the damaged police morale, courtesy of New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, one glaring factor has been absent from the conversation. In fact, the concluding section of the Harlem video footage demands further explanation, as we view policemen actively ignoring the repeated dousing of water all over them, as they slowly walk soaking wet to their patrol car, heads down, as if they are not allowed to react to the grave offenses committed against them.
Remove "as if" in the above sentence, and you have the answer.
To Read More...
The New York Police Department turned its back on Mayor Bill de Blasio at a press conference in 2014 following the murder of a few of their officers. That's because just a few days before, the mayor accused the police of being responsible for the "distrust" in their community. He has also told the press that he has raised his black son to be aware of the "dangers" posed by police.
To the NYPD, the mayor had spurred the community's animosity against them and may have put a target on their backs. Pat Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, even accused the mayor of "throwing them under the bus."
So, when De Blasio, now a presidential contender, said at Wednesday night's Democratic primary that he hopes to bridge the divide between cops and community members, the NYPD scoffed.............To Read More....
One can never start too early to plan for retirement, and a sound strategy for longevity begins by convincing your parents not to conceive you in the Big Apple, where 35 percent of all pregnancies end in a Big Abortion. New York City sees about four times more late-term abortions (after 21 weeks) than homicides.
Although the odds of an unborn baby making it through the birth canal alive in New York City fall shy of the chances of a Warriors gang member completing the perilous trek from Van Cortlandt Park to Coney Island, Mayor Bill de Blasio — steadfast in the conviction that equality is always greater than inequality — grasps that the city could do more to achieve parity between live births and abortions.
So, New York City, long a draw for immigrants, now calls for, in addition to the tempest-tossed, huddled masses, and wretched refuse, pregnant women in search of medical miscarriages.
New York became the first city in the United States to directly fund abortions this week. The city had already indirectly funded abortion through allocations to city hospitals and Planned Parenthood, and New York state subsidizes it through Medicaid. But here the mayor and city council agreed to a budget that includes a $250,000 allocation to the New York Abortion Access Fund (NYAAF), a nonprofit whose charitable works focus on terminating children in the womb, to pay specifically for abortions..........To Read More....
As education-reform activists prepare to demonstrate at New York’s City Hall on Wednesday, a massive grade-fraud scandal has been exposed in America’s largest public-school system. SOS NYC, an organization that fights the under-education of Gotham’s children, released middle-school ratings using its nascent School Grade Fraud Index (SGFI). The Index divides the percentage of a school’s students who pass their math classes by the percentage of students who pass their New York State math tests. The higher the Index, the greater the fraud. If 100 percent of a middle school’s students pass their math classes and 100 percent of students also pass the state math test, the school would have an SGFI of 1.0. Conversely, if 100 percent of students passed their math classes, but only 1 percent of students passed the state exam, the school’s Index would be 100...............De Blasio also is embroiled in scandal over his mismanagement of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). ............To Read More....
New York City politicians intend to “lead the way” to combat “climate change.” Last week, the City Council voted almost unanimously for a package of six bills that comprise the “Climate Mobilization Act” for the nation’s largest city. Of the 44 council members voting, only two opposed this legislation.
What will happen that is predictable is the immediate cost. The centerpiece of this legislation is the $4 billion energy efficiency mandate on the City’s largest buildings, on top of the already substantial property taxes and construction costs. But that is just the beginning of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s estimated $14 billion strategic plan—his own “Green New Deal”—unveiled on Earth Day to reduce the City’s “carbon footprint…before it’s too late.”
Most of the bills set forth energy and emission goals for the future, such as becoming “carbon neutral” as a city by 2050. The more immediate impact would be to require “mandatory organics recycling,” that is, food waste, on a citywide basis. The bills also hit the City’s large commercial real estate industry by requiring all buildings of more than 25,000 square feet to retrofit themselves in five years to lower energy usage and curb carbon emissions 40 percent by 2030; this, despite the fact the newer buildings, such as the Hudson Yards development, already have LEED certification, the Green Building Council’s highest designation.
Mayor de Blasio said building owners need to “clean up their act” (who knew they were such polluters?) and that “if we don’t get results, there will be real fines.” In addition to the City Council’s handiwork, the mayor’s plan would go further by effectively banning glass-walled and steel buildings. I suppose what would remain is concrete and stone. Appropriately, today’s front page of the New York Post ridiculed the mayor.
Another aspect of the City’s Green future is to phase out reliance of processed meat and reduce the City’s purchase of beef by 50 percent, which really has Brooklyn Borough President, Eric Adams, excited: “I am particularly thrilled that this city has taken up our mantle to reduce our overconsumption of meat…make no mistake, addressing the carbon-intensive activity of meat production is a sustainable solution for the health of our bodies and our planet alike.”
Mr. Adams clearly has a chip on his shoulder about cows and their supposed detriment to the planet, which would be comic book laughable, except he believes it. More worrisome is that he and so many of his colleagues in elective office feel they can dictate the balance of our diets and lifestyles since, after all, they are about saving the planet.
Then there is Queens Councilman Costa Constantinides, the chairman of the environmental committee, who takes a long-term view: “There are talks about the Rockaways, Coney Island and neighborhoods in Staten Island literally being wiped off the map by the end of this century if we do not act.” So, passing these bills will keep parts of New York City from disappearing underwater in eighty years. Seriously.
For all the self-congratulations from politicians over the new mandates and climate goals, not a single one I noticed bothered to explain, nor was asked to explain by a credulous media, how any of these measures will impact the earth’s climate, or the City’s. Somehow, in the space of a few square miles, requiring buildings to be more energy efficient, eating less meat, and recycling more food waste (“organics”), will accomplish …what? Lowering the earth’s temperature sometime in the future?
Mayor de Blasio is so ambitiously Green, that his goal for the City government is to run on renewable energy in just five years. When he made this statement on MSNBC on Monday, host Joe Scarborough made no follow-up, as in, “how?” The Mayor also said he would continue to use his city-supplied SUV to take him back and forth from Manhattan to Brooklyn, not for official business, but to his gymnasium. Tall buildings need to “clean up their act” at enormous expense but Mayor Green Progressive, Bill de Blasio, has no plans to alter his own lifestyle; he’s too important – reduce carbon footprint for thee, not for me.
Most prominently absent in the pursuit of New York City’s green agenda is the science of the issue. For example, nothing the City mandates on buildings or food waste is going to stop Coney Island from submerging under water eight decades from now, which itself is an absurd prediction based on conjecture from a crackpot computer “model”. Dire climate predictions are old hat in this cottage industry, e.g. 11 years ago, the former Vice President of the United States, Al Gore, predicted the north polar ice caps would disappear by 2014. By 2015 there was more measureable ice, not less.
New York politicians will press on, regardless. The state just finished imposing stiff new congestion tolls on Manhattan, and now commercial buildings, a bedrock industry and job provider, face costly retrofitting mandates. Politicians just love boasting of “leading the way” on fighting climate change, which is the big reason for these actions – being first, and feeling virtuous thinking you’re helping the planet.
Not coincidentally perhaps, New York City for the last two years has lost population for the first time in decades. More people are starting to leave, as the cumulative costly effects of its policies take hold. The City’s politicians may want to be the “leader” in environmental mandates to somehow combat the climate, but if population trends continue, there will be fewer people participating and paying the price.
New York City is broke, its murder rate increasing, its productive citizens fleeing — but never fear, New Yorkers: your mayor and possible presidential wannabe, Bill de Blasio (D), is on the job for the city's really important problems. Using the toilet properly is so necessary for the safety of New York's innards, according to His Mayoralty..............Read more
The comprehensive health care plan ceremoniously unveiled by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio this week drew lots of applause from the Democrat’s supporters but also skepticism from those in the city who question the value and cost of the effort.
De Blasio said NYC Care, starting in the Bronx and phased in across the city’s five boroughs, will provide primary and specialty care from pediatric to geriatric to 600,000 uninsured New Yorkers. De Blasio estimated the annual cost at $100 million.
“This is the city paying for direct comprehensive care (not just ERs) for people who can’t afford it, or can’t get comprehensive Medicaid — including 300,000 undocumented New Yorkers,” Eric Phillips, spokesman for Mayor Bill de Blasio, boasted on Twitter.
State Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican representing parts of Brooklyn and Staten Island, criticized the proposal as an example of de Blasio using city coffers “like his personal ATM.”
“How about instead of giving free health care to 300,000 citizens of other countries, you lower property taxes for our senior citizens who are being forced to sell the homes they’ve lived in for decades because they can’t afford to pay your 44 percent increase in property taxes?” she said...........To Read More.......
New York is facing an educational disaster. Mayor Bill De Blasio's socialist plan to end meritocratic entry to New York's famed specialty schools - in performing arts, hard sciences, engineering, academic achievement - in the name of racial equality, is about to trigger a huge white flight. And not just white flight, Asian flight. Here's an excellent report from New York Post columnist Karol Markowitz:
In a push to improve diversity at District 15 middle schools in Brooklyn, Mayor de Blasio last week approved a plan to remove admission standards at all of them.
and
The announcement of the changes featured some blatant doublespeak. “The District 15 middle-school diversity plan will remove screens from all middle schools and will prioritize 52 percent of sixth-grade seats for students from low-income families, English-language learners and students in temporary housing.” Got that? They will remove screens and replace them with other screens.
The removal of standards won’t just be academic. Schools that previously focused on music or the arts will no longer be able to audition students. Students who have dedicated their lives to learning to play the cello will be in classes alongside kids who have no interest in the arts at all.
Does that sound revolting or what?................To Read More.......... My Take -De Blasio, whose real name is Warren Wilhelm Jr., later changed to Warren de Blasio-Wilhelm, and changed again to Bill De Blasio. Does anyone besides me think that's just a little bit strange? Would it be unfair to think he may be suffering from an Identity Crisis? That's considered a mental disorder by the way. At any rate, none of that changes his long term membership in the Club For the Galacticly Stupid.
What is it about socialists that enables them to ignore the overwhelming evidence that short-circuiting market forces with government controls produces disaster every time it is seriously tried?
Maybe it is confidence in the effectiveness of the brainwashing efforts of the education establishment? Or reliance on the media ignoring the actual causes of the starvation, poverty, and economic failure that followed Venezuela's adoption of the socialist model?
Whatever the reason, New Yorkers with brains should be very afraid of the desires expressed by their mayor, Bill de Blasio, when it comes to housing in their city, in a long interview in New York Magazine, as highlighted by Fox News:.........Read more
You’ve got to admire the full frontal audacity of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and their union and pressure group comrades in arms. Their hypocrisy, fraud and tyranny seem to have no boundaries, especially on fiscal responsibility, energy and climate change.
Amid the seventh year of a “New York is open for business” advertising campaign that has spent $354 million thus far, they are presiding over tax and regulatory regimes, mountains of debt, intransigent public sector unions, anti-nuclear, anti-fossil fuel energy policies that are anything but business friendly – and press conferences that promise more of the same for their businesses, taxpayers and pensioners.
As Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn notes, Cuomo and his fellow warriors against Trump and Republicans will do almost anything – “except address the root problem by lowering their taxes and spending. Because to do so would require taking on the public unions that drive much of state spending and debt, and are the key constituency of the 21st-century Democratic Party.”
Across the river in New Jersey, unions resist any reforms to their payrolls or pensions just as fiercely. The NJ pension system is already $90-billion short of what it needs to pay future benefits, says the Manhattan Institute. The state will collect some $35 billion in 2018 taxes, but any new revenue will go to pension payouts and spending on new government programs. Connecticut is in the same boat.
Meanwhile, electricity prices continue to climb: In New York 18.8 cents per kilowatt-hour for families, 15.0 cents for the businesses the state is so eager to attract, and 6.2 cents for its few industries. In Jersey, 14.7, 11.4 and 9.6 cents, respectively. In Connecticut, a whopping 21.3, 16.8 and 13.5 cents per kWh!
On the Left Coast, similarly exorbitant electricity rates pummel California businesses, families, factories, farms, hospitals and schools – while neighborhoods confront monstrous mudslides, resulting from winter rains in the wake of fiery hillside-denuding conflagrations that combined have destroyed nearly 9,000 homes, killed over 60 people, and devastated entire forests and neighborhoods.
Golden State forests have 129 million dead trees, and enough dry brush to fill LA Memorial Coliseum several times. But state regulators, environmentalists and judges make it impossible to remove any. It’s more “natural,” “sustainable” and “climate friendly” to have it erupt in 1,400 to 2,200 degree F infernos.
Compare those fiscal and environmental train wrecks to results thus far of the deregulation, tax reduction, pro-fossil fuel policies of President Trump and congressional Republicans: new jobs, higher wages, bonuses, a coming repatriation of trillions of now overseas dollars to fuel new investment and innovation, the lowest black unemployment since recordkeeping began, and the stock market (DJIA) reaching a record high of 25,575 January 11, following a record 92 closing highs since President Trump was elected.
Compare that to Nobel Prize winning Blue economist Paul Krugman’s dire prediction after the election: the markets will crash and “never” recover, amid a long “global recession.” Meanwhile, multi-multi-millionaire Nancy Pelosi belittled the $1,000 bonuses as “crumbs.” Tell that to families bringing in $25,000 to $50,000 a year. The House Minority Leader is completely out of touch with average families.
The Democrats need bogeymen, scapegoats, distractions – to deflect attention away from this lunacy. That’s the best way to explain the Cuomo and de Blasio press stunts this past week.
Rather than confronting public sector unions and rabid greens – or supporting onshore and offshore drilling and fracking that would create jobs and improve economies in poor counties far from Albany and Manhattan, generate tax revenues, and reduce electricity prices – the gov railed against the new $10,000 cap on how much of their state and local taxes rich NY residents can deduct on their federal forms.
Mr. Cuomo proposes to transform personal income taxes into corporate payroll taxes, or even charitable deductions! These gambits would bring friendly IRS auditors to the Empire State, but he should worry?
Meanwhile, Mayor de Blasio went on a rant against fossil fuels – announcing that the city is suing five major oil companies for billions of dollars in climate damages, and insisting that the Big Apple must divest its police, teacher and other public pensions from any and all fossil fuel stocks.
Energy stocks are leading the latest US stock market rally, fossil fuels will continue providing 75-80% of US and global energy for decades to come, resurgent economies overseas are booming thanks to coal, oil and natural gas, and forecasters are predicting $80-per-barrel oil in 2018, as demand surges. So Liberal Logic says it’s time to divest from fossil fuels – and maybe switch to ideologically sympatico holdings, like subsidized wind turbines or booming economies like Argentina, Venezuela or North Korea.
Greenhouse gas emissions produced disasters like Superstorm Sandy, de Blasio railed. “I remember those days. I remember how desperate it was, how much fear and confusion there was. This tragedy was wrought by the actions of fossil fuel companies.” Now New York needs $20 billion “to build resilience against rising seas, more powerful storms and hotter temperatures.”
Nice try, Mr. Mayor. But blaming sub-hurricane-strength Sandy for the actions and incompetence of city and state officials won’t cut it. As environmental consultant Pat Moffitt and I explained in great detail in a three-part series several months after the storm pounded the NYC area (here, here and here), fossil fuels and GHGs had zero to do with the damages – any more than they did for Harvey, Irma or other storms
.
And any more than fossil fuels are responsible for the California’s wildfires and mudslides, despite Governor Jerry Brown’s scapegoating insistence that GHG emissions are responsible for that too. It’s all self-serving fraud. But changing the minds of fanatics is a tough task.
Fuel oil and natural gas got millions of New Yorkers and New Englanders through the recent record cold snap, while wind turbines froze up, solar panels went AWOL, and Al Gore blamed the cold on global warming! But who are we to argue with Hizzoner da Mare about fossil fuels, dangerous manmade climate change, Sandy or divestment? He might sic his RICO attack dogs on us again.
Indeed, such prosecutions are part and parcel of the new leftist-fascist world order, under which partisans, politicians and professors shut down debate, impose uniform thinking, set corporate policy, and may even punish contrarian views with physical violence when those views threaten their safe spaces.
It’s not yet as dicey as getting into a Moscow elevator. But one climate doomsayer wants to ship climate chaos skeptics to a Kerguelen Island gulag off Antarctica, where he probably assumes they could watch the entire continent melt – from GHG emissions, if not from volcanoes and magma beneath the ice.
Antifa leftist-fascist have learned well from their predecessors and contemporaries, but are now employing their technological prowess as well. Google and Facebook use clever algorithms to steer searches to help liberal news and views reach audiences, while conservative perspectives get shunted to the “back pages.” Google now displays “fact checks” next to Daily Caller and other conservative views, though not with liberal leaning stories; Snopes says its fake news, but others say the charge has merit.
Twitter allegedly uses “shadow banning” algorithms to make users think their tweets have been posted, when in fact they’ve been sent to cyber oblivion. And talk show host Dennis Prager is suing YouTube for using “restricted mode filtering” to keep PragerU educational videos from reaching audiences.
Former Colorado Democratic Governor Richard Lamm would instantly recognize these tyrannical tactics. In 2005, Mr. Lamm said they were integral parts of an eight-step program to “destroy America.” Here’s an audio of the talk (on YouTube!), and we know Lamm really said it, because even Snopes says so!
The future of our free speech and other democratic safeguards and institutions is at stake. So is the future of sound, evidence-based science, on climate and other topics – and of reliable, affordable energy. Blue State officials, unions and activists may be delighted with how their agenda is “progressing.” The rest of the United States … and world … may not be so happy.
New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio is dangerous
because he’s as close as you can get to being a Marxist without actually
standing on a street corner handing out little red books.Political pendulums swing. After a certain
number of years where there is political dominance by one party or another, it
is not unusual in our system for voters to grow restless and want change. Our
nation’s largest and most influential city is in the midst of one of these
shifts. It’s been 20 years since a Democrat was elected Mayor of Gotham, and
today the left is salivating at the possibility of regaining its seat of power
in lower Manhattan.
Here’s the problem: New York’s notoriously late primary
has led to the selection — as primaries often do — of an extremist; a man David
Webb and I recently dubbed “the most dangerous man in New York,” Bill de
Blasio.
