Cities
March 14, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Has there ever been a faster cycle of liberal non-sense to the “never mind” stage than the case of “Defund the Police”? Of course, simply refunding the police is not sufficient when there is an all-out attack on the police for their practices, or DAs who have decided to play catch-and-release. Should we be surprised that more and more police officers conclude it isn’t worth the trouble to arrest someone
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March 7, 2022 — Steven Hayward
No city matches Seattle for electing lunatic socialists to the city council as well as Congress (i.e., Rep. Pramila Jayapal). So having demonized police and letting the city descend into anarchic chaos, Seattle is now surprised and “rattled” by a sharp rise in crime, according to the Wall Street Journal this morning: Long one of America’s safest cities, Seattle had 612 shootings and shots-fired incidents last year, nearly double its
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February 20, 2022 — Steven Hayward
With the San Francisco school board recall landslide still disturbing the sleep of progressives, and a recall election of San Francisco’s pro-crime DA Chesa Boudin coming in the spring, eyes are now looking south to Los Angeles, where a new recall drive against their pro-crime DA George Gascon is picking up steam. But Los Angeles magazine has the scoop: the campaign, nearing $2 million in money raised, is being bankrolled
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January 25, 2022 — Steven Hayward
The old cliche about the news media is that “if it bleeds, it ledes,” but during the AGF (After George Floyd) madness that gripped the nation in the summer of 2020, the media was happy to run with the narrative of police brutality, and gave lavish favorable coverage to “defund the police” advocates. But there are signs that even the mainstream media is starting to have second thoughts, though I
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December 29, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Like so many interesting writers, former Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass has set up shop on Substack. Professor Glenn Loury has also set up shop on Substack. Kass connected with Loury via Twitter and wrote about it here in a December 18 post. Lightfoot, Foxx, Preckwinkle, Pritzker, Judge Evans. Look at what your liberal policies have done to Chicago, city of anarchy. You’ve killed the city. You make speeches about
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May 8, 2021 — Steven Hayward
After the left’s anti-police agitation went into hyperdrive following the death of George Floyd, the easiest prediction in the world to make was that the chief victims of this ideologically-driven rage would be the very people liberals claim to champion—low income minorities. Heather Mac Donald called it “the Ferguson effect,” after the anti-police riots in Ferguson, Missouri in 2015. Told that they are the enemy, the police are curtailing their
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August 30, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Let’s catch up on some updates to the regular themes and stores we’re covering right now. • Here’s our feel good story of the day: Mayor Bill De Blasio Plans 22,000 Layoffs, As People Flee New York City In Droves New York City may lay off tens of thousands of municipal workers. Even with this massive downsizing, it won’t be enough to stem the financial hemorrhaging plaguing the city. The Wall
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August 17, 2020 — Steven Hayward
We’re familiar with the designation of places like Somalia as “failed states,” but can’t we equally recognize failed cities when we see them? New York City in the 1970s, when it needed a federal bailout, was one example from our past, and New York’s fiscal woes were closely connected with its larger social problems of crime, welfare dependency, and all the other factors that diminished the shine of the Big
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August 15, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Let us take as our text for the day a passage from Sir Roger Scruton’s book How To Be a Conservative: Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets: peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property
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August 4, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Not long ago UC Hastings School of Law, as well-regarded law school in downtown San Francisco, sued the city because local neighborhood conditions had deteriorated to the point that the law school was losing prospective students who took one look at the place and said, “No, thanks!” Hastings is a very liberal law school—I don’t think they have a single conservative on their faculty—but as Robert Conquest reminded us, everyone
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June 24, 2020 — Steven Hayward
It’s barely noon here out here on the Left Coast, and already my Krazy Kup overfloweth. A (very) few highlights: • What is it with liberals and Hollywood types and blackface? Now the NBC hit “30 Rock” is memory-holing four episodes that featured white characters in blackface: Four episodes of 30 Rock, including two featuring Jane Krakowski’s Jenna character in blackface, are being removed from subscription streaming services Hulu and
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June 22, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Lately I’ve been saying “I’m so old I can remember when Democrats wanted 100,000 more police on the street—and proposed federal funds to make it happen!” That was in the long-ago days of the Clinton Administration, when even Hillary Herself was speaking about “super-predators” who needed to be taken off the street. (This was one reason why leftist law professor Michelle Alexander argued in 2016 that, as Slate reported, “Clinton’s past
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June 13, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Joel Kotkin is one of America’s premier analysts of city life, urban economics, demographic change, and social trends. His brand new book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class, turns upside down the conventional liberal narrative about why the middle and working classes are under pressure. It’s not capitalism and markets, but their perversions, especially in the hands of the tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley and
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June 10, 2020 — Steven Hayward
When our cities start to come apart and people say it seems like 1968 all over again, that can only mean one thing: time to get in touch with Fred Siegel. Among Fred’s many fine books is The Future Once Happened Here: New York, LA, DC, and the Fate of America’s Big Cities, which explained the high cost of incompetent liberal rule of our major cities in the 1960s and 1970s
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June 4, 2020 — Steven Hayward
One of the most-read unsigned editorials ever to appear in the Wall Street Journal editorial page was way back in 1993, entitled “No Guardrails.” It is rare that an unsigned editorial at a daily paper has much of a half-life, but “No Guardrails” was one those that you clipped out and kept handy, and which people talked about for years after. Dan Henninger, nowadays the Journal‘s regular Thursday columnist, was
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June 4, 2020 — Steven Hayward
It is a long running theme that the United States and Europe have been dissipating their inherited moral capital, and with the asset side of our civilizational balance sheet running dangerously low, we can see the consequences in front of us over the last seven days. Take New York City Mayor Warren Wilhelm Bill de Blasio, who is, let’s face it, a literal Communist. You could tolerate him so long as
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July 29, 2019 — Steven Hayward
The controversy about rat-infested cities provokes a strong sense of deja vu, as a proposed federal rat eradication program was perhaps the turning point against LBJ’s “Great Society” back in 1967. A little background and the climax to this story from the first volume of my Age of Reagan: Many poor urban neighborhoods have yet to recover [from the rise in crime], for it was precisely the poor, and largely
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