70-year-old Janet Parvizyar should consider herself lucky— she only got a few bruises and a busted lip when a man with 20 prior arrests attacked her on the New York City subway last month.
Less fortunate victims of subway violence— up 66% since 2019— include innocent passengers who were thrown onto the tracks and lit on fire in December last year…
… or the woman who was sexually assaulted last week by a serial sex offender that authorities had recently released onto the streets without bail.
Naturally the city doesn’t have the resources to focus on these crimes; they are too busy taking care of illegal migrants, including the 173,000 who enjoyed taxpayers’ hospitality at the posh Roosevelt Hotel in midtown.
In fact New Yorkers spend more money ($7.7 billion) on migrants than the annual budget of the NYPD (~$6 billion).
The upside, of course, is that the city’s residents get to pay $11 for a dozen eggs… and $3,500 per month for a tiny 200 square foot apartment.
Yesterday, we talked about one of the key reasons why America can’t solve its gargantuan challenges: blind optimism.
Arnold Schwarzenegger captured this mindset perfectly on Jimmy Kimmel Live, when he reassured the audience that America has been through worse and will “get out of this mess” too.
It was classic feel-good rhetoric—the belief that things will just magically work themselves out because, well, they always have.
Easy to say. But someone actually has to do something; Congress needs to pass sensible, meaningful entitlement reform. Immigration reform. Budget reform. Regulatory reform. Etc. But it just never happens.
So repeating this white lie— “Don’t worry, America will figure it out”— lulls people into a false sense of confidence that there’s not a serious crisis looming. In reality, it’s only about 8 years away. Time is running out.
But aside from blind optimism, another major force preventing America from solving its challenges is embodied in New York City’s astonishing decline: aggressive ignorance.
New Yorkers are clearly sick and tired of crime, outrageous cost of living, and mostly peaceful looting in solidarity with Gaza.
But most voters have no idea why any of it is happening. And they don’t seem to care enough to find out.
They just tune into MSNBC, nod along to the usual talking points, and blame Donald Trump.
This is ironic because the same entrenched leftist political class has been in power for decades. The Left created New York’s problems. And the Left keeps making it worse, with polices like:
- Union handouts which drove up the cost of transportation.
- Sanctuary city status, welcoming illegal immigrants and paying for their hotel rooms.
- Rent control forcing landlords to remove units from the market— reducing supply and creating a housing shortage
- Ever-rising business and millionaire taxes, pushing the city’s tax base to leave forever
- Zero-bail policies to put hard criminals back onto the streets
Yet now, to solve the problems created by the Left’s crazy policies, New Yorkers just anointed an even harder leftist to take over.
Avowed socialist Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary for New York City mayor earlier this week… which makes him the clear front-runner in the city’s November general election.
Mamdani campaigned on promises to fix the housing shortage (brought on by the Left’s rent control policies) with MORE RENT CONTROL!
He wants to fix the high cost of food at grocery stores by… having the city own and operate grocery stores. Full blown COMMUNISM! It’s genius!
(Just imagine— a deli counter as clean as the New York City subway, fruit and vegetables as fresh as a school lunch, and service as friendly as the DMV. Sign me up.)
He’s going to fix the crime problem by defunding the police. He’s going to fix the anti-semitism by arresting the Israeli Prime Minister (despite defunding the police…). And he’s going to pay for everything with— drum roll please— higher taxes on the wealthy!
Well there’s a fresh idea.
Voters aren’t asking how this time will be any different than the last several times they tried solving New York City’s problems by taxing the rich (and the rich then picked up and left for Miami).
It really boggles the mind— it should be obvious that doubling down on their failed policies will be double the failure.
Yet, again, voters are simply too ignorant. They know there are serious problems. They just don’t know why. They haven’t bothered to understand why decades of Leftist rule have resulted in higher costs, higher crime, and more chaos.
Their knee-jerk reaction is to go even farther to the Left without ever once questioning why their city is failing.
If you haven’t seen this guy, Mamdani is scary. His politics are even farther to the Left than Bernie Sanders. Yet he has the media savvy of AOC, speaks as slickly as Gavin Newsom, and has the charisma of Barack Obama.
No wonder he called himself a “new model” for his party.
Sure, a candidate like Mamdani wouldn’t win a national election—yet. I just hope we don’t have to see how desperate the voters are in 2028 or 2032 after several more years of economic warfare and multi-trillion dollar deficits.
Either way, New York is still the wealthiest city in the country. It’s supposed to be the capital of global finance. What happens there matters. Whoever runs it wields real influence.
And right now, the city is sending a signal to the rest of the world: America isn’t serious about solving its problems.
