Hugs for thugs: Democratic mayors are at war with reality.
As Woke dreams of Dem mayors get amplified, and regular Jims (Crotty, Wilson)––who know what reduces crime and homelessness––get no love, it's clear we've crossed a Rubicon into post-truth insanity.
As I survey the well-meaning if childish incompetents play-acting as adult mayors of our most globally important cities--Eric Adams (New York City), Karen Bass (Los Angeles), Muriel Bowser (Washington, DC), London Breed (San Francisco), and Brandon Johnson (Chicago)––I notice a common aversion to empirically proven solvencies.
In Los Angeles, voters had an easy choice for mayor in 2022. On the left, there was community organizer, friend of Fidel (Castro), and Congressional Black Caucus Chair, Karen Bass, who once spoke at the opening of a Scientology center, a cult she praised as a civil rights pioneer. Her second claim to fame was refusing to attend Donald Trump’s 2016 inauguration, demonstrating the requisite Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) bona fides that earned Bass a serious look as Joe Biden’s 2020 running mate in an openly racist, sexist, and possibly illegal selection process limited to black women.
In a Los Angeles that’s become an unchecked and profligate Chicago-style Machine, Republicans are a closeted secret society––with secret names (e.g., Friends of Abe) to avoid detection. The only election that matters in LA, as in Chicago, is the Democratic primary. The only person who could conceivably win against Bass would be another putative Democrat.
As the City of Angels reeled from the viral spread of homeless encampments, smash-and-grab impunity, absurdly high taxes, crushing regulations, and pot-induced enervation, Democrat Centrist billionaire Rick Caruso seemed like the antidote. As with former LAPD Police Chief Bill Bratton (who brought Harvard criminologist James Q. Wilson’s wildly successful broken windows law enforcement strategy from New York to LA in the early 2000s) and Peter Ueberroth, who ran LA’s profitable 1984 Olympics (earning him Time Man of the Year), Caruso would restore faith in a city battered by Progressive-enabled mayhem and “mostly peaceful” left-wing political violence. As LA prepared to host World Cup 2026 and the 2028 Summer Olympics, a globally respected CEO was the obvious choice, not some lifelong partisan more worried about policing racist, sexist, anti-Semitic diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) mandates than building a safe, clean, and world-class metropolis.
Caruso checked all the boxes: chair of the board of trustees of his undergraduate alma mater USC (Bass merely attended), president of the L.A. Police Commission (where he recruited rock star Bratton), and Pepperdine Law grad. At just 26 years old, Caruso was tapped to run the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (made famous by the film Chinatown), the youngest commissioner in the city’s history. As a successful real estate attorney––“The Walk Disney of Retail,” per Forbes––Caruso developed The Grove, an impressive outdoor shopping experience connected to LA’s beloved Farmers Market. A devout Catholic, Caruso funded several groups that improved the health and well-being of LA children.
Compared to this “high-minded man,” a Karen Bass properly formed in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, not to mention the Enlightenment’s Descartes and Diderot, would have declined to run, instantly recognizing the superior candidate before her. But one of the gobsmacking features of Woke ideology is the cornerstone myth that a person “is owed” something––higher office, a promotion, a job, easier treatment by cops, judges, and admissions boards––as a consequence of their race. MLK’s vision is outré today. It’s no longer about “the content of one’s character” but “the color of one’s skin.” Bass campaigned on such racial entitlement: A. She was a black woman: B. She would magically pare being nice to criminals—who, in LA, are mostly persons of color—with reductions in crime.
Bass beat Caruso in a tight race. The city has been in free fall ever since.
Karen Bass is not some freakish outlier. Today’s Democratic Party is rooted in a random element of natural selection that, per Darwin, has zero to do with anything, let alone the survival of the species: skin pigment. Unlike most of us, who stand down when faced with our comparative incompetence, the Woke ideologue doubles down. Whatever defects in ability, experience, or performance, let alone delusional law enforcement fantasies divorced from reality, Woke leaders can always claim that “white supremacy” and “systemic racism” lurk behind every criticism or failure. Guilty white liberals fold on cue, their concerns buried and forgotten.
This was the very race card played by Harvard President Claudine Gay, who, upon her deserved firing, blamed “racial animus,” instead of her chronic plagiarism and tone-deaf appearance before a House Committee investigating anti-Semitic violence on college campuses, which, no surprise given Gay’s golden parachute “punishment,” has metastasized at Harvard and elsewhere since.
As Gay and our Un-Fab Five mayors know, the key to the Woke political project is the racialist lie. The lie that most cops are racist. The lie that America is a fundamentally racist nation. The lie that blacks are unjustly arrested at a far greater proportion than their share of the overall population when, in fact, they are arrested far less than their outsized share of the violent criminal population would suggest (the Ferguson Effect at work). The lie that crime goes down when we’re kinder to crooks. The lie that if we institute no-cash bail, dismantle the “carceral” state, and give “folks” free housing, illegal drugs, and food, they will be grateful and civilized, see the error in their ways, and seek gainful employment.
Career criminals, like terrorists, don’t see things that way. They are cost-benefit creatures. In contravention of state and local laws and fact-based reality, rogue Woke prosecutors across the country have routinely decided not to prosecute crimes like trespassing, shoplifting, malicious destruction of property, and disturbing the peace. Politicians and prosecutors can justify this dereliction of duty under the mantra of dismantling “criminal justice infrastructure,” but criminals don’t care about rhetoric or ideology. When they see softness––which they perceive as weakness––they pounce.
It's no surprise that Bass traffics in such progressive poppycock. After all, she displayed an affinity for non-scientific hokum––the part reflects the whole––in her support of Scientology, which is rooted in phrenology-like chicanery that cult members call “auditing.” LA has long been home to cult fanatics, from Aimee Semple McPherson to The Manson Family to The Source. Bass’s soft-on-crime fantasies––which make the gated libs of Brentwood, Bel Air, and Beverly Hills feel warm and fuzzy inside––are part of this wacko trend. An LA voting public primed to accept the lies of Santa Monica yoga gurus, TDS-afflicted entertainers, and Black Lives Matter opportunists like Patrisse Kahn-Cullors is primed to embrace the lie that thugs just need hugs.
Bass recently bragged about getting 30 of the city’s nearly 50,000 homeless into homes. If you are part of a critical theory cohort that believes “math is racist,” you’re not bothered by the mayor’s obscenely underwhelming statistic. Bass plans to spend $1.2 billion to house, feed, and clothe “the unhoused,” a faux solvency that has failed wherever it has been tried. The empirically effective homeless solutions of banning urban camping, prosecuting quality-of-crimes, ending sanctuary city status, deporting illegal immigrant felons, and tough love—stay in a shelter, get treatment, or go to jail—escape the Bass brain trust, which can likely quote chapter and verse from Ibram X Kendi but who knee-jerk reject empirically effective strategies because they might improve the well-being of their base, freeing them from Democratic big-government servitude.
I met Karen Bass once while she was getting her nails done at a salon near the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill. Usually, I wouldn’t talk to Senate or House mandarins lest I contradict some high-level political strategy of my office. But Bass was my representative in Congress. So, I broke protocol. I found her friendly, accessible, and polite. My beef with Bass is not personal. Like the other Un-Fab Five mayors, she wants to see fewer black men behind bars. We share that passion. I started an after-school debate and speech program in the South Bronx to address this crisis. But her approach is rooted in ideology, not facts.
The same misguided experiment is being tried six hours north in San Francisco, the poster child of failed Woke governance. Things have gotten so surreal there that last week, San Francisco Mayor London Breed shamelessly claimed that crime had shockingly plummeted in the open-air drug and defecation market that is her City by the Bay. Then, as the mayor was figuratively sitting on the dock of that bay, the facts rolled in. Arrests are down––not per capita crime––because, in the post-George-Floyd arson glow, demoralized SF cops have been told to stand down. As part of the city’s “police reform” (read: arresting fewer persons of color), SF no longer prioritizes property crimes. Cops aren’t even allowed to pursue thieves (including smash-and-grab crews) if no one is in harm’s way. No surprise that half the retailers in SF’s once-vibrant downtown––turned zombie doom loop––have closed. The city’s formerly robust Valencia Avenue has seen most of its shops close, too, leaving fewer marks for San Francisco’s unfettered criminal class. Crime has migrated outside the city’s urban core to surrounding police precincts, where it has mushroomed 44% in the city’s more residential Taraval police district. Burglaries alone have risen 19% in Ingleside and 6.2% in the Richmond District. Even with massive out-migration on Breed’s watch, robbery is still up overall by 12.5%, car theft is up by 7.5%, and murder is up 2.1%.
How did these incurious ideologues reach the pinnacle of local power? What salient attribute said to voters, ‘This is the courageous, best-in-class genius who will tackle crime, homelessness, illegal immigration, and debased levels of learning with a much-needed no-excuses mindset?’”
As if on cue, the newly installed CEO of government-funded Democrat disinformation arm, National Public Radio, answered that query by saying the quiet part aloud. Katherine Maher, responding to Uri Berliner’s claims of extreme left-wing bias at NPR, said the following with a straight face:
"Perhaps, for our most tricky disagreements, seeking the truth, and seeking to convince others of the truth, might not be the right place to start. In fact, our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done. Now, that is not to say that the truth does not exist, nor is it to say that the truth isn't important. Clearly, the search for the truth has led us to do great things, to learn great things. But I think if I were to really ask you to think about this, one of the things we could all acknowledge is that part of the reason we have such glorious chronicles of the human experience and all forms of culture is because we acknowledge that there are many different truths."
There we had it. Objective truth no longer guides the Democratic Party and its media minions. Logic, prima facie evidence, scientific fact, and rational thinking are now the sworn enemies of their broader Woke Project: the wholesale remaking of America along racialist lines. The Un-Fab Five mayors are not mere enablers of that project. They are its product.
Did Karen Bass have a rash of studies that confirmed the utility of her all-carrot, no-stick approach to crime and homelessness? Did DC Mayor Muriel Bowser consult leading criminologists when she told cops to stand down in the face of BLM riots and a smash-and-grab and carjacking epidemic she blamed on racism and white supremacy? As DC homicides have soared by 33% year over year and robberies by 70%, on the heels of a 110% rise in motor vehicle theft, a 113% rise in sexual abuse, and a 300% rise in arson, the Mayor of our nation’s capital asked for Congress to not override her city council’s decision to halve the penalties for armed robbery and armed carjacking!
Meanwhile, Mayor Brandon Johnson called for reparations funding to reduce Chicago’s violent crime epidemic! Like Bass in LA, Johnson defeated a law-and-order Democrat in the only election that matters in his de facto one-party city, the Democratic primary. A new Mayor was supposed to change course after the crime-enabling regime of Lori Lightfoot. Instead, Johnson doubled down on soft-on-crime nuttiness, campaigning on the promise that defunding the police was a “political goal.” Soon after his election, gangs of teens descended on downtown Chicago, shooting guns, breaking windows, and robbing stores. Johnson’s response: don’t “demonize” youth. As the Chicago Police Department remains underfunded and understaffed, Johnson has poured over 100 million dollars into social welfare. Armed robbery increased 56% in just the first six months of his tenure.
These five mayors are not concerned with what works to make cities safer, more prosperous, and more innovative. What matters for them is subjective experience, false and self-enriching narratives, expanding the intrusive and infantilizing power of government, and exacting legal and extra-legal revenge on their political enemies while doling out the fruits of their enemies’ labor according to Socialist criteria unconnected to expertise or accomplishment.
These Soros-backed tools are not students of The U.S. Constitution, let alone The Federalist Papers. They are not invested in the perennial values that made America, in its pre-CRT prime, the envy of the world: personal responsibility, hard work, discipline, delayed gratification, lifelong study of the classics, and severe consequences for violent behavior. They are not our best and brightest. They are our Woke and Wokest, racialist grifters who've risen their party’s ranks not through genius, talent, and wisdom but through the lockstep embrace of an un-American catechism of victimhood, identity and social engineering that is bringing crime and anarchy in its wake.
Yet, weirdly, few people shout the transparent truth: "These emperors have no clothes! These partisans reached their Peter Principle level of mediocrity years ago! We can do better!"
How did we get here? Why is almost everyone with a modicum of historical intelligence silent and complicit? Because we are too bamboozled by the daily assault of fight-or-flight marginalia? Because we’re too scared of being labeled “racist” or “sexist” to utter the unvarnished truth? Because we are so ashamed of our heritage, success, intelligence, and drive that we are willing to throw it all away as penance for distant crimes we never committed? Because we think we can hide behind guarded compounds as banshees, gunsels, and zombies stalk the streets outside? There’s no haven, my friends, and you can never be Woke enough. The Antifa terrorists, Hamas Youth Brigades, and anarcho-TDS-syndicalists that corrupt Democrats have enabled will be gunning for all of us soon enough.
How long must this absurd self-sabotage and punishment pantomime continue? At what point, at what mythical bright line, at what level of madness and mediocrity will we have redeemed ourselves for the sins of slavery? At what point do we finally say, “Enough! We are, at long last, cracking down on crime. We are ending no-cash bail. We are deporting illegal immigrants. We are backing the blue. We are returning to the Enlightenment values that made America the envy of the world!”
As America faces serious threats, both foreign and domestic, Americans are rightfully unnerved by the laughing-gas demeanor of our Jamaican-Indian Vice President, who is only another Biden pratfall away from becoming leader of the free world. It’s as if her every audience is some stoner version of kindergarten.
But Kamala Harris’ childish happy talk is not an aberration. It is common among the five mayors before us. Here is San Francisco Mayor Breed getting oddly giddy over the arrival of giant pandas as her city implodes around her. Childish rhetoric is born of childish thinking. Santa Claus is real!
Though today’s Woke reductivist mayors want everything to be about race, this catastrophe of the commons is not about race. It’s about bad and failed ideas versus good and proven ones. The Democrat-turned-Republican mayor of Dallas, Eric Johnson, is black. His city has the lowest crime rate of the ten largest cities in the country. Crime in The Big D is down in every single category. That’s because Mayor Johnson adequately funds the police, enforces the law regardless of race, and works to beautify his city with protected green space that gives people hope and pride in their environs.
I wonder what catastrophic prospect will spur the Un-Fab Five mayors to get religion, too. Maybe the fear of a Democratic “bloodbath” in November? Watch for the performative pre-election “law and order” pivot, especially from Karen Bass, who just endured a break-in at home with her family. It must have been one of those “white supremacists” stalking the bucolic boulevards of Hancock Park.