In 2014 I took a business trip to San Francisco, and was excited because it had been a long time since I’d been there. I also had wonderful memories of visiting the city when I was a child on family vacations, and it’s one of the great cities of the world. Thus I had no idea my reaction this time would be disgust. I couldn’t walk outside the hotel without being accosted by what we now call a homeless person. In the olden days when we didn’t give people excuses for aberrant behavior, we called them bums, and the bums were everywhere. On the way to the airport for the trip home I asked the driver why, and he said the city council pays them, that’s why. Guess what happens when you subsidize perverse behavior? You guessed it, you get more of it! Go figure.
As I often say, everything the left (progressives, Democrats, socialists, all Marxists) touches turns to excrement (it’s a family blog). Progressives over one hundred years ago began with the best of intentions. Science and human knowledge had advanced to such a degree by the early 20th century that many thought no problem was beyond the ability of “experts” to solve. Something new called “scientific management” was all the rage, and if any body of knowledge had science attached to it, every obstacle to human betterment could be overcome. Only it didn’t quite work out that way.
The progressive era began with Teddy Roosevelt, but it didn’t start to become the monster it is today until the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, and even then it didn’t make real headway until Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal. Contrary to the accepted progressive version of history, the New Deal did not get America out of the Great Depression. In fact, and you won’t learn this in our government schools, unemployment in 1939—after eight years of New Deal “solutions”— was worse than it was in 1931 before Roosevelt became president. And the national debt grew more in those eight years than in the previous 150 years of America’s existence. Government, bureaucratic “experts’” response to the Depression was an abysmal failure, just like every other bureaucratic “experts’” response progressives have foisted on us ever since. If it wasn’t for World War II we might still be in the Great Depression!
The next great progressive experiment came when Lyndon Johnson declared “War on Poverty” in 1964. Only government bureaucratic “experts,” and the academics who feed their delusions, could believe it’s possible to rid America of poverty with government programs, but that was what they declared. What have their good intentions and over $30 trillion bought us? No more poverty? Human flourishing? Hardly. In fact, exactly the opposite. Broken families and dysfunctional cities are everywhere government largess has gone. Prior to Johnson’s “Great Society” upwards of 80% of black children were born to a married mother and father. Today, over 70% are born out of wedlock. Talk about a recipe for disaster. Kids who grow up in households headed without a father are far more likely to be poor, quit school, get pregnant as teens and end up in jail.
And if this didn’t create enough death and misery, the liberal lefties decided to turn themselves into cultural Marxists, and embraced the woke insanity that has enveloped American culture. We are now seeing the results in America’s once great cities when progressivism is taken to the next level of Marxist revolution. While some leftist progressives really do think it is compassionate to go easy on minority criminals, and that they are doing a virtuous thing, others are true believing Marxists who hate America and want to bring it down to create their progressive, Marxists, socialist Utopia. Nobody knows what that looks like because going back to Marx himself, no Marxist-communist has ever defined it. What they all know and are convinced must happen is that the current bourgeois capitalist traditionalist (read Christian) society must be torn down. In blue cities everything is going as planned.
Marxism as a cultural woke contagion has to be pure Satanic evil because to normal people it’s incomprehensible. The obsession with racial diversity and gender equality and identity (LGBTQXYZ), and environmental, social, and corporate governance (aka ESG) bring death, destruction, destitution, and misery wherever it goes. One of the great mysteries of this evil is that woke district attorneys in blue cities (many supported with the money of George Soros) change sentencing guidelines for hardened criminals so they get out of jail more easily. And what do these people do when they get out of jail? Commit more crimes! Who could have predicted that! The elegant perversity of this is that these leftists somehow believe that tolerating decadence, destruction, and chaos is compassion, and those who opposes such perverse tolerance are bigots. I mean, there has to be a devil because evil of this depth is beyond mere bumbling human imagination.
I thought San Francisco was bad in 2014, but now it is unimaginable. Elon Musk whose Twitter headquarters is in the city, and whose friend Bob Lee was recently murdered while visiting there, had this to say about the once great city:
Downtown SF looks like a zombie apocalypse. People who’ve not been there have no idea.
This, the poison fruit of progressivism (again, read Marxism).
Baltimore, a once vibrant and beautiful city I too visited several times years ago when it was still vibrant and beautiful now joins the zombie apocalypse:
Downtown Baltimore is plagued with shootings, carjackings, muggings, and out-of-control packs of teenagers wreaking havoc. Baltimore residents can thank five decades of Democrat politicians for mismanaging this once-thriving town.
Think about that, fifty plus years being run by Democrats, and it has been run into the ground. Watch the very short video of hundreds of young people running wild and it’s no surprise the city is dying and decadent.
Then there is this short piece with the apropos title, “The Left Has Killed Our Great Cities.” The author writes about how Chicago kicked out its last mayor only to elect another mayor more radical and leftist than the last one! You might think people would connect the destructive policies of the leftist lunatics they elect to the destructive results they inflict, but alas they seem not to. And it’s not one or two Democrat run cities that have been ruined by leftist Democrat radicals, but all of them. The author points out the same is happening in Portland and Seattle, not mentioning that New York City is right with them. The Guardian, not exactly a right-wing rag, calls the homeless situation in Los Angeles, my once great hometown, a “catastrophe.”
Beyond the mad Satanic ideas of the woke leftists, Jesus tells us why this is all happening:
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.
It is Christ or Chaos. I wrote recently about how the school shootings in Nashville where a transgendered woman murdered six Christians, three children, in cold blood is the triumph of secularism. A God-less society, secularism, is perfectly encapsulated in blue city America where Satan and his minions run rampant like kids in a candy store. Unlike most Christians and conservatives this all gives me hope. God’s judgment against sin is in a way revelatory, and many Americans are waking up. The battle is engaged against leftism and secularism in a way it’s not been since the 1960s spilled into history, and I’ll have some thoughts on this in my next post.
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