Hey kids, let’s start today with a quiz. Here’s a description of the social decay in a prominent big city:
“This is no longer a capital, it is a cesspit. No one works; the streets are filthy; there are piles of stinking rubbish in the courtyards. It hurts me to see how bad it has become. There is growing idleness and cowardice in the people and all of those base and criminal instincts…it seems are destroying [the country].”
Was that written about:
A. San Francisco
B. Chicago
C. New York City or
D. Washington D.C.
Many of you picked up on the reference to a capital, and might have chosen D.C. Others may have noticed the slightly archaic language, and suspected a trick.
And despite the fact that I am usually the most reliable of narrators, the suspicious among you were right. Even though the above quote could be aptly applied to any of our current sanctuary cesspits – er, cities – the passage was written by the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, in 1917.
He was describing St. Petersburg (then called Petrograd), not too long before Lenin’s Bolsheviks launched their murderous revolution. In the previous months, attacks on the social order had been encouraged and carried out by the party’s foot soldiers, and the deterioration of everyday life was accelerating.
It’s a sobering red flag (no pun intended) when you read a withering account of a doomed country’s downhill slide right before a historic tragedy and think, “Hey, I recognize that place! Which one of our major cities is it?”
Fortunately for us, we’ve got a chance this November to avoid the damage that befell Russia. The vocal, far-left fringe – then as now – represents a small minority, without as much widespread support as our egregious MSM would have us think.
And as a cautious optimist, I see plenty of encouraging signs for the country, despite the Petrograd-esque decay in the Dem-run cities.
For example, it was only a couple of years ago that a wave of “defund the police” measures were enacted all over the country. Democrat pols at every level staked their reputations on removing cops, and trumpeted the dawning of a new day, in which economic justice would reign and cities would thrive.
Annnnnddddd… Petrograd, 2024! Crime skyrocketed, businesses closed, no one was working, and there were piles of stinking rubbish in every courtyard.
Unexpectedly!
Now those Democrats’ faces are as red as Liz Warren imagines hers to be (#wemustneverstopmockingher), and nearly all jurisdictions who cut cops are scrambling to reverse course.
Similarly, the drive to decriminalize hard drugs has created growing pushback. When a decriminalization law was passed in deep-blue Oregon and went into effect in 2021, supporters smugly pointed to parallels to getting rid of prohibition, and confidently predicted the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, man!
Annnnddddd… Meth Mania, 2021!
How disastrous was that plan? It took America 13 years to reverse prohibition, but the results of this law were so horrific that even the imbecilic socialist dullards of Oregon managed to wise up and reverse it in only 3 years!
I am not making that up. A Democrat governor in Oregon – yes, she is female and gay (lucky guess on your part!) – signed a law criminalizing drugs last month. With the support of spineless Democrat Portland beta-mayor Ted Wheeler. And a headline the next day admitted, “Oregon Forced to Recriminalize Drugs After Disastrous Decriminalization Experiment.”
If I live to be as old as Joe Biden (RIP), I would never expect to read the sequence of words in my previous paragraph. It’s a Transgender Day of Visibility miracle!
Even in areas where Dems are stubbornly persisting in their terrible policies, public resistance is building, increasing the chances of a Trump victory in November.
The attempts to force Americans to buy EVs is looking more unrealistic and unpopular every day. The open border is now a nationwide disaster that can’t be hidden, and national Dems are sweating like a meretrix in church. The term “Bidenomics” became such a punchline that it has disappeared from the media.
The ghoulish and outrageous mania to push transgender policies, including mutilating surgeries on kids and allowing dudes to beat the crap out of women in various sports, has gotten as ugly as “Admiral” “Rachel” Levine joining the gals of the View for a group photo. Many states and some sporting organizations have passed rules recognizing biological reality, and the first of what should be a flood of lawsuits have been filed against doctors on behalf of kids whom they sexually mutilated or injured.
And then there’s John Fetterman.
Before his stroke, he was the worst mayor of the worst-run small town in PA. During his campaign, he was less mentally agile than AOC, and less articulate than Joe Biden. But as he’s recovered, he’s started saying sane, true things almost half the time. Which gets him over the very low bar of “best Democrat senator in the country.”
In fact, while I’m in a happy, post-Easter mood, let me send you into the weekend with a story that combines two of my column’s regular categories: “We Don’t Hate the Media Enough” and “Celebration of Excellence.”
The latest chapter of this story is happening in the polar opposite of 1917 Petrograd: Florida.
My state has its problems, as every place does. Our summers are brutally hot and humid, recent hurricanes are playing havoc with insurance prices, and we’re facing the kinds of challenges caused by success (rising prices, more crowding).
But we’ve got a great governor who has been under sustained attack by the MSM since the day he took office. They smeared him over covid, they lost their Schiff when he sent illegals to Martha’s Vineyard, and they mocked him when it looked like Disney had put one over on him.
But then it turned out that he was right about covid, and right about illegals. And then he beat Disney like Caitlin Clark beat LSU. (That’s right, folks: my first and last ever reference to women’s basketball. But that game last week was actually great.)
So last week NBC took another shot, in an article that explained why everybody who thinks Florida is succeeding is wrong. In a state with 23 million people, they found a handful of gripers who fit their narrative, and let them gripe. And after mentioning that “hundreds of thousands” of people have moved here, they ominously noted that 500,000 left in 2022.
Which doesn’t sound good, until you notice that in another paragraph they mention in passing that more than 700,000 people moved in in 2022. And while I’m no mathmetologist, it seems like 700K is larger than 500K.
NBC was roundly mocked for that story – commenters noted that “NBC News apparently has no idea how net migration works,” and even lefty election analyst Nate Silver said, “Sorry, but Florida is popular.
But then the Palm Beach Post told NBC to hold their beer, and ran a column with the headline, “DeSantis blames undocumented immigrants for health care costs. His report costs taxpayers more.”
The story told about the “online dashboard” that DeSantis created to collect and publicize the data about how much illegals cost Florida taxpayers, then reported that while the state spent $566 million on uncompensated health care for illegals, DeSantis spent $577 million on the dashboard!
Ooh, they had him now! It’s an outrage! How the hell does anybody spend half a billion dollars on an online dashboard??
Except that when the story ran, it took about 30 seconds for hundreds of readers to fact check it. And it turned out that the online dashboard had cost $5K to set up, and that the entire budget request for the data collection (which included another state agency as well) was $567,882.
Not $577 million. $567 thousand.
Which is considerably less than the $566 MILLION that Florida has been stuck with because of Biden’s flood of illegals.
Of course, when the paper and the reporter discovered their error, they apologized profusely and ran a Page-1 correction of their laughable mistake.
HA! I kid.
They actually “stealth edited” the column to remove the accusation, without acknowledging their mistake, or the change. Which gave DeSantis the opportunity to spend a couple of minutes justifiably pummeling them for their unprofessional and dishonest behavior.
Man, I hope we someday have the chance to have that guy as our president!
Seriously though, I hope somebody from the Trump campaign has seen the story about Florida’s online dashboard, and is working on a national version. Several columns ago, I called for something like that, only to find out now that it already exists.
I could see a national “dashboard” displaying updated and transparent totals of all of the costs of Biden’s illegally opened border. One category could be “crime,” with breakdowns of the numbers of car accidents, thefts, assaults, rapes, murders, etc.
Another could break down the enormous costs by type: medical costs, food assistance, housing assistance, education assistance, processing costs, costs to arrest, try and imprison, etc.
And then every time any Democrat complains about not having enough to spend on anything – infrastructure, social programs, increased pay for inert government workers, fresh burial wrappings for Imhotep Pelosi – we could call up the dashboard and say, “Well, if we hadn’t spent $65 billion on Biden’s illegals, maybe we could do some of that. Oh wait, now it’s $66 billion.”
If anybody knows any big shots in the GOP, please pass this along!
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 