Mayors from hell: Democratic leaders are destroying our cities

OPINION:

Democratic mayors are turning our once proud cities into “Freddy Krueger’s Playhouse.”

On Christmas Day, two teens from South America were stabbed as they had breakfast in New York’s Grand Central Terminal by a man shouting, “I want all the White people dead.”

The alleged assailant had 17 prior arrests. The last time he was in court, on Nov. 7, a judge put him back on the street.

Welcome to the hell of urban America.

Thanks to far-left mayors, blue cities are on a downward spiral of crime, drugs, homelessness and despair. Those with a survival instinct are getting out fast.

New York has lost 100,000 residents since 2022. The New York Times reports that 25,000 college graduates have left San Francisco since 2021. Apparently, they had a problem with human feces on the street where they lived.

San Francisco spends $1 billion annually on its street people. Democratic mayors keep shoveling money at the problem, which keeps getting worse. If they understood basic economics, they’d know that you get more of what you subsidize.

Democrats control big cities the way Hamas used to run Gaza. Of the 25 most populous U.S. cities, all but three are in the hands of Democrats. Boston and Chicago haven’t had a Republican mayor in almost 100 years.

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu recently made headlines for holding a segregated holiday bash — her “Electeds of Color” party.

A graduate of Harvard Law School and protegee of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Ms. Wu is a shameless race-baiter. At a St. Patrick’s Day breakfast, she complained that she was used to “dealing with problems that are expensive, disruptive and White.”

Her honor often whines about how “invisible” and “othered” she felt growing up. As mayor, she sold out Asian parents by limiting the number of White and Asian students admitted to the city’s elite exam schools.

New York Mayor Eric Adams blames the exodus from the Big Apple on the city’s rat population. If only he could find hotel rooms for them.

He’s handling the influx of illegal immigrants (116,000 since April 2022) not by calling for border security or pushing to repeal New York’s sanctuary city status, but by bleating that Washington isn’t giving him enough money.

He’s become a cheerleader for the Titanic. “We’re not coming back. We are back!” Mr. Adams beams in his custom-made $2,000 suits. He should be handling publicity for the president’s reelection campaign.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser agrees with Ms. Wu that it’s all about race. The Metropolitan Police Department has lost 500 officers since 2020. Even members of Congress are getting carjacked and robbed at gunpoint.

But Ms. Bowser has her priorities straight. She had a stretch of pavement in sight of the White House designated Black Lives Matter Plaza.

She appointed a commission to decide which monuments to dead White oppressors should be removed from the nation’s capital.

In 2018, police officers were required to take critical race theory indoctrination. All of this must make residents and visitors alike feel safer.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson may be new to the job, but he has excellent knee-jerk credentials as a former official of the city’s radical teachers union. When a juvenile mob looted stores in the South Loop and assaulted passersby, he cautioned, “It is not constructive to demonize youth who have been starved of opportunities in their own neighborhoods.”

Unfortunately, the starved-for-opportunities youth — who’ve turned the city’s streets into a shooting gallery — aren’t deprived of bullets.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has a history of radical activism going back to the 1960s when she was a member of the pro-Castro Venceremos Brigade.

When the city’s Korean stores were targeted by rioters, Ms. Bass explained, “If people burned down those stores, they must have been unhappy with them.” In 2020, her office co-sponsored a briefing that designated policing as “a core institution of white supremacy.”

How have we come to this? It’s as if a zombie apocalypse happened in blue cities, and the undead are eating voters’ brains.

As more solid citizens are forced to flee, those remaining are part of what H.L. Mencken called the Booboisie — dupes who believe that all of their problems are caused by government not giving them enough stuff, and of course, White supremacy.

Blue cities are the result of a cancer of greed and ignorance on which Democrats thrive. Mayors from hell are the Pied Pipers of perdition.

• Don Feder is a columnist with the Washington Times.