Hi everyone!
Zohran Mamdani's back from Uganda and he's got an NYPD detail to wander around the city with him to rooftop bars and campaign stops. This is the guy who said definitively and repeatedly that he wants to "defund the police" and that "queer liberation" depends on it. Yet when it comes to his own security, he's all set with a police detail. When he was asked about it, he said it was necessary due to "threats."
This is the same guy who has proposed to replace cops with a mental health squad, who thinks criminal justice reform means not prosecuting criminals and believes that every day New Yorkers don't need the kind of protection he does. Tell that to the woman who was nearly raped on a subway platform, the families of shooting victims, or to the MTA drivers and conductors who are harassed and threatened on a daily basis.
Is he going to provide an NYPD detail to every bus driver once he makes those buses free and the buses become traveling homeless shelters? Or is he just going to let them suffer at the hands of the criminals, addicts, and mentally deranged who will take refuge on those buses? I think we all know the answer to that. Mamdani thinks he's special and gets to have special treatment, while the citizens of New York who don't have the means to hire their own private security will have to suffer from the problems his policies create.
A Cincinnati city council woman has little feeling for her constituents, either. After seeing the viral videos of the violent mob beating of two white people at an annual music festival, she said that those who were injured "begged for that beat down." That includes the woman who was knocked unconscious after she tried to help the man who had been pushed to the ground and pummeled by his assailant. The woman wasn't doing anything, but a black woman in leopard print spandex came up behind her, pulled her hair, and threw her to the ground.
According to President Pro Tem of the Cincinnati City Council Victoria Parks, the woman "begged for it." Parks made the remark in the comments of a Facebook video that showed what happened before the viral beat down. The two men, one black, one white, clearly had some kind of issue and started fighting. For Parks, that's a good reason apparently for a group to pummel two people, stomp on a man's head, and leave a woman unconscious in the street.
With leaders like these, it's so wonderful that so many of our cities are heading to ruin. And there's no reason for it. We have such a beautiful and rich culture and instead of celebrating it, furthering it, or stewarding it for future generations, we blame ourselves for not meeting our highest expectations. We say to ourselves, "because we haven't met our highest expectations everything we've done to this point must be trash in need of destruction."
It's just not true. That we haven't reached our loftiest goals is not a reason for shame, not a reason to keep going, and not a reason to abandon the course that got us this far, to skyscrapers, the wild supermarket bounty, or the opportunity that is available to those willing to grind to earn them.
