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About a month ago, I was in Portland, Oregon, ostensibly to cover the riots outside of the ICE facility there. But what struck me even more was the utter lack of order in the harrowing streets of its downtownDon’t look now, but that same brand of disorder may be coming to New York City.
Four years ago, as Democrat Socialist Bill de Blasio was ending his disastrous eight years of disgraceful mismanagement of Gotham, the New York Post tasked me with doing a walkabout around midtown Manhattan to to chronicle the destruction he wrought.
To be clear, New York City in 2021 was not as bad as Portland or San Francisco are now, but it was very, very bad.
Here is how I described it back then:
“Some lie half-naked, sprawled on sidewalk concrete, some appear in small gaggles, pooling meager funds for illicit purchases. Others prowl the streets yelling incoherently like Times Square preachers. One man in a long flowing dress danced seductively across the traffic of taxicab- strewn Eighth Avenue, landing at a light pole on which to perform a kind of striptease.
“These days, the city’s response to all of this seems to be to do nothing.”
To his credit, Mayor Eric Adams, upon taking office in 2022, worked quickly with the NYPD to ameliorate much of this. Just a few months into his term, you could still catch the wafting aroma of marijuana amid the glass and steel towers, but at least the guys selling it on cardboard boxes with scales were gone.
As a former cop, Adams understood that quality of life crime is a huge threat to a city, and though he shied away from the controversial term, “broken windows policing,” he did institute quality of life teams, or “Q Teams,” in the police department to tackle low-level street crime.
These are exactly the kinds of efforts that Zany Zohran Mamdani promises to eliminate as he plans to replace police responses with that of social workers and the homeless industrial complex, exactly the same plan that has destroyed Portland.
This week, there was a very telling X post from a writer for Esquire, New York magazine and Jezebel, named Sophie Vershbow, who said, “None of Zohran’s big proposals (free buses, free childcare, rent freeze) would impact my life directly because I’m privileged AF and don’t want kids. I can’t wait to vote for him because every NYer deserves to have their basic needs met and live with dignity. It’s that simple.”
This is precisely the attitude that created Portland’s decrepitude. And Vershbow is right, she will barely be impacted. There will still be brunch and cocktails, there will still be Ubers to keep her “privileged AF” self safe from the subway.
And, given that Vershbow has no interest in children, who cares if she has to walk past a few drug addicts or sprawled out bodies? Those are difficult things to explain to our children, but easy enough for us adults to simply ignore.
De Blasio had been well on his way to bringing New York to that breaking point by 2021. Times Square was not a place you wanted to bring your kids, but then, thankfully, voters rejected his socialist policies in favor of Adams.
It seems unfathomable that the Big Apple is ready to return to the disastrous wages of socialism that it so recently experienced and voted out, though in fairness, Mamdani, should he win, is likely to do so with less than 50% of the vote.
If that occurs, look to Portland to find out what will happen with quality of life issues. It took de Blasio eight long years to undo the generational progress of mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, but Zohran will hit the ground running.
Like Portland, the wealthy in New York, those who choose not to flee skyrocketing taxes, will be fin. Just like communist leaders themselves, they never suffer any privation from Marxism. To them it’s just a grand and loving experiment, not a death sentence for a once great city.
It was the people of Portland who wrecked their hometown by refusing to police the streets, deal with the homeless and addicted, while driving small businesses into the ground through unpunished theft.
Sadly, it seems New Yorkers are about to follow suit, and things may be on the verge of getting uglier than they have ever been in Gotham.
The post DAVID MARCUS: How Zohran Mamdani will turn New York City into Portland appeared first on Fox News.
