You know the Left has gone off the rails when premier race hustler Al Sharpton emerges as a relative voice of reason. While Bill de Blasio et al defund the police, driving the crime rate into the stratosphere, Sharpton demurs:

“To take all policing off is something that I think a latte liberal may go for as they sit around the Hamptons discussing this as some academic problem,” Sharpton said.

“But people living on the ground need proper policing,” he said.

Specifically regarding New York City,

Sharpton noted how certain neighborhoods are indeed suffering from gun violence when asked about the safety of the city.

That would mainly be black neighborhoods. Blacks are the first victims of the antipolice Black Lives Matter ideology that has been embraced by the liberal establishment.

On a tip from Rapinhoe.

Restaurants in New York State are allowed to open now, but they have to limit dining rooms to 50% capacity and follow distancing mandates. In New York City, indoor dining is completely forbidden, despite the virus having mostly moved on. Governor Cuomo says that the police would need to devote 4,000 officers to enforcing social distancing compliance in restaurants before indoor dining will be allowed, which won’t be easy, considering that de Blasio has defunded the NYPD by $1 billion in honor of Black Lives Matter. At least it isn’t too cold for indoor dining yet. But that has drawbacks in the age of BLM, as diners in upstate Rochester can tell you:

Dangerous protesters converged on Rochester, New York, for the third night in a row following the release of the footage showing local authorities arresting Daniel Prude.

Daniel Prude is a maniac who was running around naked, evidently out of his mind on drugs. He died after having been detained by the police, who had to put a spit hood on him.

An autopsy report from the Monroe County Medical Examiner’s Office determined that Prude died as a result of “complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint due to excited delirium due to acute phencyclidine intoxication,” which is “an indication that Prude might have been high on PCP.”

Since he happened to be black, this is grounds for still more riots. The following video demonstrates what this means for normal people trying to eat out. This is not a trailer for a zombie apocalypse movie, but actual footage of BLM militants terrorizing diners in Rochester:

Police were unable to control the riot, which then spread:

Rioters later also reportedly began taking to residential areas, and could be seen climbing on roofs. Demonstrators reportedly set fire to at least one city bus stop during the overnight melee.

The race hate driving the Black Lives Matter movement was on open display:

Another video sees at least one demonstrator insisting that any protest efforts be aimed “toward the white folks.”

Democrats are counting on people thinking that they can appease this mob by voting for the party that has made a pageant of endorsing it. But anyone who remembers grade school knows that trying to appease bullies only results in more bullying.

On tips from Rapinhoe, Steve T, KirklesWorth, and R F.

Remember Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman, the New York City lawyers who were arrested for throwing a Molotov cocktail into an NYPD vehicle? Turns out there were mitigating circumstances. They were “young and idealistic”:

If your ideals motivate you to firebomb police cars, being idealistic is not a good thing. All terrorists are idealistic.

The link in the tweet is to a New York Magazine piece glorifying the not so peaceful protesters as champions of the marginalized. It asserts that prosecuting them “is far more extreme than the crime itself; that it amounts to a criminalization of dissent and reflects a broader right-wing crusade against people of color and the progressive left — and, as such, demonstrates precisely the horror of the system they were out in the streets that night to protest.” That they were prosecuted for firebombing the police vehicle proves that they were right to do it. The two sociopaths are lauded as “civil-rights heroes.”

The crime is characterized as a momentary “lapse in judgment.” This is untrue. Rahman is an avowed terrorist. She gave an interview prior to the firebombing in which she barked, “This s–t won’t ever stop unless we f–kin’ take it all down” and “the only way they hear us is through violence.”

Also prior to the attack, Mattis and Rahman were seen passing out extra Molotov cocktails to other rioters. The New York Magazine piece didn’t get around to mentioning this.

The never-ending riots are not happening in a vacuum. They were initially triggered when a COVID-infected career criminal who had overindulged in fentanyl and methamphetamine died in police custody. But that’s not what has caused them to spread and continue.

A society that tolerates rioting will have rioting. It will continue to escalate until society stops tolerating it. By glorifying the rioters and their cause, the liberal media has done far more to cause the mayhem than Derek Chauvin. George Floyd was never more than a pretext.

On a tip from Blackjack. Hat tip: Hot Air.

How could progressives keep progressing after the ultraleftist Bill de Blasio appeared to take moonbattery to the last possible extreme? By plunging headlong into self-parody, as personified by current New York City Mayor Eric Adams. He has issued new proposals to confront the rampant crime liberal policy has predictably produced:

The Democrat mayor’s plan, laid out in bullet point format during a local Fox 5 broadcast, included providing “De-escalation training for retail employees,” and putting kiosks in stores that connect “would-be thieves” to social service.

The Babylon Bee wishes it had come up with this story.

Any sane people who have not yet evacuated the rotting Big Apple are encouraged to escape before it collapses even further into dysfunctional farce.

Note that Democrats respond to the shoplifting epidemic by reducing punishment. For whatever malevolent reasons, they want more crime.

On tips from Wiggins and Varla.

Our moonbat rulers have decreed that, to signal compliance with their ideology, all vehicles must be electric — even heavy trucks, even school buses, even military vehicles. However, electric garbage trucks are not working out in New York:

The [Department of Sanitation] aims to switch all 6,000 vehicles in its fleet from gas to electric as part of the state’s goal to reduce emissions by 2040. But city officials say they haven’t found electric garbage trucks that are powerful enough to plow snow.

The department has ordered seven electric rear loader garbage trucks, custom-made by Mack and costing more than $523,000 each, with delivery slated for the spring. Used for curbside trash collection, the department’s current rear loader truck fleet runs on diesel and is outfitted with plows to clear streets during snow season.

But officials say previous electric trucks tested by sanitation have not lasted longer than four hours plowing snow before running out of power…

Fortunately, the same ideology that makes overpriced, unreliable electric trucks necessary also provides a solution. Just wait for global warming to melt the snow.

The founder of the Cult of Global Warming has been bellowing since at least 2007 that immediate radical action is required because the planet has a fever. Surely the snow must have melted already.

New York City’s commitment to plowing each street puts the sanitation department’s 2,100 collection trucks to work each winter, clearing the equivalent of 19,000 miles of street lanes. The service is one of the mayor’s most important duties. Mayors Bill de Blasio and Michael Bloomberg both faced withering criticism while in office for slow snow removal.

No worries. Government’s only commitment now is to uphold leftist ideology. All Eric Adams needs to do is denounce anyone who doesn’t like streets waist-deep in snow as a climate denier who hates The Science.

On a tip from Franco.

When moonbats screech about “white supremacists,” they are often referring to blacks. John Sexton wrote about the Black Hebrew Israelites…

…in 2019 when the Covington Catholic fiasco turned out to have been largely instigated by a group of BHI preachers who were originally there to start a fight with a group of Native Americans but wound up starting one with the Catholic high school kids because they were there.

The media jumped in and conducted a massive demonization campaign against the white teenagers, who handled the situation remarkably well, although Nick Sandmann allegedly committed what George Orwell called “facecrime.”

Later that year…

…there had been a spate of anti-Semitic incidents in New York and New Jersey. Mayor de Blasio’s claim that these incidents were connected to “an atmosphere of hate” emanating from Washington, a not-so-veiled reference to Trump. Rep. Rashida Tlaib tweeted about an attack in Jersey City that killed six, “White supremacy kills.” Only it turned out one of the shooters had ties to the Black Hebrew Israelites.

Shamelessly dishonest by nature, moonbats continue to blame whites for black racism:

Michael Eric Dyson tries a similar rhetorical trick, proclaiming the anti-Semitic statements by Kanye West and the video promoted by Kyrie Irving part of a “toxic species of the white supremacy.”

Supposedly oppressed black liberal elitist Dyson takes to the New York Times to explain why white racists are responsible for the antics of the Black Hebrew Israelites:

Until we see antisemitism as a toxic species of the white supremacy that threatens Black security and democracy’s future, none of us are truly safe.

Capitalization as in original. According to the flagship publication of liberal establishment, you are supposed to capitalize “Black” out of deference, but not “white,” because whites do not deserve respect. The antiwhite racism of the leftist ruling class can be as juvenile as it is ubiquitous.

Although Irving didn’t directly utter antisemitic sentiments, he endorsed a film that did. The player shared without comment a link to “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America,” a film rife with antisemitic conspiracy theories…

These Afrocentric theories appear to have been developed by blacks. The movie in question was directed by the swarthy Ronald Dalton Jr. Any white person who made a film with the word “Negroes” in the title would be crucified. However,

The relation of African Americans to Jews cannot be divorced from the pervasive glow and allure and privilege of whiteness. The fact that most Jews are white-eligible and African Americans are white-excluded creates tensions between African Americans and many Jews that have less to do with the cultural conflicts between the groups than with the meaning of Blackness and whiteness in America.

No matter what anyone does or says, if it’s bad, whites did it, so they must do penance by voting Democrat.

Jews are sacred victims in confrontations with whites, but when blacks spew hatred at them, Jews become “white-eligible.” They must learn their place in the Cultural Marxist pecking order.

Look out, there go some of the white supremacists the liberal media keeps shrieking about, marching in support of the infamous KKK leader Kyrie Irving:

On a tip from TCS III.

Under Democrat rule, civilization is collapsing. This can be seen everywhere: in the quality of our political leadership, in the filth children are exposed to, in the unwatchability of entertainment, in the subversion of formerly trusted institutions like the military and medicine, and most conspicuously of all, in the crime crisis that predictably followed in the wake of Black Lives Matter.

A typical story from New York:

Dramatic surveillance video shows the moment a trio of robbers — one swinging a sledgehammer — smashed their way into a high-end Park Avenue jewelry store over the weekend.

The video:

Not even the nicest parts of town are safe from the collapse of law & order that began under Bill de Blasio and continues uninterrupted under Eric Adams.

At last word there were no arrests in the looting of Cellini Jewelers, which lost over $500,000 in merchandise.

According to NYPD’s latest crime statistics, burglaries and grand larcenies were up more than 31% and 41% respectively, while robberies have seen an increase of 35.5%, compared to the same time last year.

Last year crime rates were already stratospheric in New York and nationwide.

Republican campaign ads have enraged liberals by calling them on it. Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer says drawing attention to crime is “vile” and “racist.” Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot got this ad pulled for showing what has been going on in Chicago:

But Pritzker and Lightfoot have not been able to suppress public awareness of how fellow thugs have exploited the carte blanche offered them by liberal rule. Crime has emerged as a major issue in the midterms — and people know who to blame for it.

In contrast, Republicans offer solutions. They are outnumbered more than two to one in New York, yet Lee Zeldin is running neck and neck with incumbent Governor Kathy Hochul. Zeldin says he will immediately declare a state of emergency to combat crime:

“I’m going to suspend New York’s cashless bail laws and some other pro-criminal laws that have been passed, force the legislature to come to the table to negotiate an improvement because we have to take back our streets.”

He plans to remove Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for refusal to enforce the law. Like George Gascon (Los Angeles), Kim Foxx (Chicago), Larry Krasner (Philadelphia), Chesa Boudin (San Francisco), and Kim Gardner (St Louis), and Marilyn Mosby (Baltimore), Bragg was placed in office by sinister leftist financier George Soros.

Weather Underground scion Chesa Boudin has been recalled. The rest need to follow. But to properly clean house, Democrats must be pried from power.

On tips from Wiggins, ABC of the ANC, and MrRightWingDave.

Due to moonbat rule, crime is effectively legal in New York City, which is no longer part of the civilized world.

City Journal has the stats to document a great city’s decline:

The city is currently seeing a 42 percent rise in petit larceny, 40 percent rise in robbery, and a nearly 50 percent rise in grand larceny since this time last year. …

Nearly a decade ago, 63 percent of cases disposed by the Manhattan DA’s office resulted in convictions, and only 12 percent ended in dismissals. Those proportions are now flipped: so far this year, only a third of disposed cases ended in convictions, and nearly half were dismissed. …

In 2013 (the earliest data readily available), convictions were secured for 61,762 Manhattan cases. More than halfway through 2022, the county has managed only 6,902 convictions. These decreases are even more astounding for lower-level crimes. In 2013—when the city had about 25 percent fewer violation offenses than today—Manhattan secured 7,528 convictions for disposed infraction/violation cases. This year, it has gotten 16.

It has gotten this bad with pro-criminal Soros-appointed Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg on the job only since January. Bragg’s mission is to splash gasoline on the flames:

Last January he announced, as his first order of business, that robbing a store with a dangerous weapon would no longer be charged as a felony, only as a misdemeanor—a category of cases for which convictions over the past 11 years fell by over 90 percent.

Rudy Giuliani worked wonders to clean up the mess liberals had made of New York when he took over as mayor in 1994. But the decay is so deep at this point that someone like Giuliani would stand no chance of getting elected. Those who have not had the good sense to escape New York choose tasteless jokes like Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams instead.

At least we can learn from this tragedy. Ever wonder how certain segments of society would behave if not compelled by law to act with civility? Now we know.

Once it’s clear that there are no criminal justice guardrails in effect, those restrained by neither family nor community norms feel emboldened to commit the worst kinds of violent acts for even trivial causes.

If we were all civilized, we would hardly need the police. But we live among savages. When liberals screech about defunding and abolishing police, they are demanding that civilized people to be marginalized in favor of people like these, whose pretext for violence was a $1.75 charge for dipping sauce:

On a tip from seaoh.

Rallying behind their martyred demigod, the career criminal George Floyd, liberal Democrats called for local police to be hamstrung if not completely abolished, because Racism and Oppression. In New York City under the misrule of the left-wing lunatic Bill de Blasio and now the useless kook Eric Adams, they have gotten their way.

This is what a society where the police have been marginalized looks like:

On a tip from Wiggins.

If you aren’t convinced yet to steer clear of New York City until it has been pried loose from liberal rule, maybe this will help:

A man smeared human feces on a woman’s face in an unprovoked rush-hour attack inside a Bronx subway station, sickening new video shows.

The attack occurred as the 43-year-old woman sat on a bench on the platform at Wakefield–241st Street station. The attacker did not say a word.

At least he didn’t use a hammer, as in another recent NYC subway attack.

Whether this was an instance of “racial justice” is unclear.

Mayor Eric Adams responded by honking about mental health issues. Yes, there are a lot of crazy people out there. Some of them are running both the city and state of New York, so psychopaths feel uninhibited, knowing that the police have their hands tied and anything goes.

Fortunately, this happened outside of Manhattan, so fanatically pro-criminal DA Alvin Bragg will not be in a position to let the perp free on the off chance he is ever apprehended. Conceivably, he could serve whole months in prison.

What Giuliani did to make NYC livable, Bill de Blasio completely reversed and then some. Given the local politics, no one is likely to reverse the reversal any time soon.

On a tip from Wiggins.

Eric Adams has two big advantages that helped him become mayor of the nation’s largest city: (1) he is black and (2) he has no shame about playing the race card. Watch how it is done to deflect even the slightest criticism from an obsequious media establishment that worships his skin color:

Meanwhile, Adams refers to people not blessed with his politically advantageous pigmentation as “crackers.” We all know what racists crackers can be.

In other Eric Adams news, he just fired over 1,400 city workers for not submitting to an increasingly superfluous Covid vaccine, even as the pandemic peters out.

It is doubtful that New York City will ever have a worse mayor than Bill de Blasio. But then, who would have thought that New York State would have a worse governor than Andrew Cuomo — until Kathy Hochul came along?

On tips from THOUGHTCRIMINAL2084 and Wiggins.

In the context of New York City politics, Eric Adams was elected mayor as the lonely voice of relative sanity among those with any chance of winning. But don’t get your hopes up that the city will pull out of the tailspin Bill de Blasio set it into. The swearing in of Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell does not offer hope. It took place in front of a mural depicting radical racists of the type who have inspired Black Lives Matter rioters, including Malcolm “By Any Means Necessary” X, cop-killer Assata Shakur, and communist revolutionary Angela Davis.

Via Fox News:

Shakur, a prominent figure in the Black Lives Matter riots last summer, was convicted of being an accomplice in the 1973 slaying of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster, who left behind a wife and 3-year-old son. Shakur later escaped prison and fled to Cuba, where former Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro granted her asylum.

She was a member of the Black Liberation Army, which the FBI describes as one of “the most violent militant organizations of the 1970s.”

Angela Davis was affiliated with the Communist Party USA, the Black Panther Party, and the Feminist Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz.

Davis was charged with murder, kidnapping, and criminal conspiracy charges after authorities linked her to the purchase of weapons that were later used by three inmates who took a judge and juror hostage during their trial in 1970 for killing a prison guard.

The judge was killed. Davis got off compliments of a politicized trial.

Malcolm X rejected the racial conciliation and color-blind society advocated by Martin Luther King, using the militant Nation of Islam as a platform to sow racial strife.

Also featured in the mural is Nat Turner, who led a slave rebellion in 1831, to put homicidal communist maniacs into the phony context of slavery. Fifty whites and 120 slaves died in the rebellion.

The mural also features Huey Newton, the drug dealer, rapist, and murderer who founded the violent Black Panther Party.

If these are to be the guiding lights of New York’s new police commissioner, she will be on the same page as Manhattan’s new district attorney, the pro-criminal radical Alvin Bragg.

Adams confirmed that Sewell was appointed on the basis of identity politics by quacking about glass ceilings.

If you live in New York, get out now. Detroit, once the wealthiest city in the country, never came back from Coleman Young. Likewise, NYC will never recover from the comparably catastrophic de Blasio.

On a tip from THOUGHTCRIMINAL2084.

American citizenship means nothing to Democrats. They have no loyalty to the USA, regarding themselves as globalist citizens of the world. Unless they are removed from power, the country will be run like New York, where the City Council just passed a measure allowing noncitizens to vote.

Marxist Mayor Bill de Blasio has said he will sign it. His incoming replacement Eric Adams supports it too. The measure applies not only to green-card–holding foreigners but also to “Dreamers” — i.e., illegal aliens.

The anti-American leftists at CNBC rejoice:

Councilman Francisco Moya, whose family hails from Ecuador, choked up as he spoke in support of the bill.

“This is for my beautiful mother who will be able to vote for her son,” said Moya, while joining the session by video with his immigrant mother at his side.

Doesn’t that make you feel all warm and mushy inside?

Democrats would not dilute the vote of Americans with those of foreigners if they did not stand to benefit. Non-American translates to un-American when it comes to elections.

The city’s move could enflame the national debate over voting rights, particularly among some who wrongly assert that rampant fraud by noncitizens has taken place in federal elections.

Thank you, CNBC, for further clarifying whose side you are on by lying clumsily on behalf of the Democratic Party. As Tom Fitton explains, it is naive to think illegal aliens are not voting by the millions. This is a major reason the southern border is still wide open, with needy, unskilled voters pouring across at a rate of millions per year to displace us.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, the Democratic Party is at war with the United States.

On a tip from Ed McAninch.

Sometimes a single song captures the spirit of an era. If the worm turns on the authoritarians who have been exploiting Covid, that song for our era will be “Stick Your Vaccine Mandate Up Your A**”:

Meanwhile, in New York City,

[Mayor Bill] de Blasio has already required vaccines for city government workers, teachers and anyone who wants to eat at a restaurant, use a gym or see a show in the city. This has harmed small businesses and tourism. Yet apparently these mandates aren’t coercive enough for Hizzoner. So now he’s giving the unvaccinated an ultimatum: Get one shot by Dec. 27, leave the city or stay unemployed.

That’s the date by which all private workers are required to be vaxxed.

While vaccines are protective against severe illness, they don’t prevent infection or transmission. Unvaccinated workers are mainly a threat to themselves. Mr. de Blasio’s mandate threatens small businesses struggling under the city’s tax burden and expensive labor regulations.

Kathryn Wylde, CEO of the Partnership for New York City, said businesses “were blindsided” by the mayor’s announcement, adding “there’s no forewarning, no discussion, no idea about whether it’s legal or who he expects to enforce it.”

The mandate—the first nationwide, as far as we know—is a nasty and needless infringement on liberty.

Also from NYC:

Children as young as 5 will be required to get vaccines in New York City to enter restaurants and other indoor venues, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Monday morning. …

Children between 5 and 11 will also be required to get vaccinated to participate in high-risk extracurricular activities. These activities include sports, band, orchestra, and dance.

The virus is no more of a threat to small children than the flu, and the long-term effects of the vaccines are unknowable. Advancing public health is clearly not the motive for the mandates.

Tyrannical moonbats and those who want to live free are speeding trains heading in opposite directions on the same rails. We are in for a hell of a crash.

On tips from 100Bravo and Varla.