As 2024 draws to a close and liberals mourn what is to come, we’ve come across a very poignant write-up about liberal policy in The Wall Street Journal.

Liberals are saying they want “livable cities”. Allysia Finley of WSJ had a few musings about this over Christmas dinner with her family. The crux of the conversation? Is New York City-a city that never sleeps-a backdrop for Christmas movies that highlight the magic of the season-a livable city?

Sure, NYC might be livable if you are young, oblivious and living off your parents’ money. NYC is perfect for these types, living in their own liberal bubbles, jogging to and from an afternoon of shopping at Hudson Yards. New York City is a great city if you can hire your own driver, Uber, Taxi and Blade to and from your destinations.

But what about the subway where a homeless, illegal, vagrant burned a woman alive just days before Christmas? The world saw this dystopian scene. And no, it wasn’t a third-world country. It was NEW YORK.

The video is a snapshot of the city’s problems: crime, mentally deranged and intoxicated vagrants, undocumented migrants and unsafe subways. It’s also an apt metaphor for the destruction of the Big Apple and other once-great cities by progressive arsonists.”-Allysia Finley, WSJ

There were more subway crimes-elderly men and women getting punched in the head, theft, stabbings. The city is not only failing the innocent, the city and its liberal policies are failing the very people they claim to champion: the homeless, the illegal, the mentally ill, the addicted-the whole lot of them. ABC and NBC news both did write-ups about the life of Jordan Neely who was killed in a chokehold by Daniel Penny (dubbed the Bernhard Hugo Goetz of our time) after erratic behavior on the NYC subway. The write-ups both cemented the racial divide between the two men without highlighting much of the actual issue. Read: Daniel Penny is a white guy who choked and killed a black guy. The black guy, of course, was at a disadvantage with a family life and a past that turned him into a statistic.

Most often, the “system” fails because it isn’t serious enough about delivering critical care to people who are in no mental state to realize how much they need it, and how dangerous it is for them to ignore that fact. And so it is no surprise it produces incidents like the death of Jordan Neely, and that juries find them lawful. We can argue about whether Penny held the chokehold too long, but subduing a man in crisis who declared ‘someone is going to die today’ isn’t vigilante justice; it’s defense of self and others. If the government is truly a capable guardian, people have an obligation to step back and let professionals protect them. If not, they can act. Given the challenges police have meting out force with precision, we shouldn’t be surprised when citizen encounters end badly: Chokeholds are prohibited by the NYPD exactly because they are effective but hard to control. In the midst of a close-in struggle, an adrenalized person has tunnel vision and isn’t thinking of his opponent’s airway, even if they were trained in the Marines.

I doubt Daniel Penny wanted the defining moment of his life to be strangling a mentally ill man to death on the subway. But if Goetz sent a message on the city’s behalf to the muggers of New York forty years ago, Penny sent one to its government. Criminals may be impulsive, but they can respond to incentives and deterrents. People with serious mental illness won’t be chastened by Neely’s death, because that’s not how mental illness works.”–Brandon Del Polo, Vital City

If you look at any liberal city and their policies, you can see the impact of liberal and progressive policies. Turnstile jumping and crazy people on a train is not limited to the confines of the Big Apple. Ridership on San Francisco’s BART is down, too.

Traveling further up the west coast to Portland, we saw law enforcement with their hands tied; unable to do anything while the city burned and morphed into a humongous trash pile. In Seattle, addicts were smoking fentanyl openly on city busses. The city that gave birth to the CHAZ/CHOP-whatever-also gave us SODAs (Stay-out-of-Drug Areas) and SOAPs (Stay-Out-Areas of Prostitution)-basically allowing criminals addicts, pimps and hookers to simply “go somewhere else”. Drug addicts got clean needles and Average Joe who just wants a Coke that is not a Diet or Coke Zero gets charged extra because it is deemed “unhealthy” to drink a sugary beverage. (GASP!) Diabetes or something.

While the rest of the west coast leaned a little further to the right in this past election cycle, Washington State (my state) went further LEFT. Is there a correlation between this and drug overdose deaths increasing in Washington State while other states saw reduced numbers nationwide?

These are the fires brought on by the elites; the individuals who venture into the cities for a night out on the town, shopping, a Christmas (err-Holiday) production-and then go back to their gated communities and their islands or their college apartments that their parents bankroll. They don’t have to ride the bus next to the drug-addled, “home free” who does not want to be in a shelter because he would be forced to get clean. They don’t have to take the subway and watch a human burn to her death. They open windows when fires from the inner cities burn because it is a “touchstone“. They will apologize for “stealing land” but they won’t freaking leave. They will apologize for “being white” and will claim to “stand for justice” as long as it does not enter the sanctity of their oblivious bubbles of like-minded, liberal jackassery.

Don’t those tires smell good, Gwen? There’s nothing like the fragrance of Cannabis and Fent on a subway platform!

The fires brought on by liberals in our cities must be extinguished. But it’s going to take some time. For 2025? I’m hoping a heaping pile of these crap, liberal policies get torched. That’s a fire I will watch until it burns to the ground.

Now THAT would be a touchstone.

Photo Credit: U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Levi Riendeau, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons/Cropped

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