AOC’s Wild Theory Persists as Vagrant Crisis Grows Unchecked
A Los Angeles councilman faces criticism for calling homeless encampment occupants "neighbors," which critics say obscures the reality of drug use and urban decay.
According to New York Post, City Journal’s Heather Mac Donald sharply rejected the characterization, noting that the term “neighbor” traditionally evokes someone with an equal stake in the community.
The occupants of what officials euphemistically label “encampments” — in reality feces- and drug-strewn trash sites — contribute nothing to their surroundings, pay no rent or taxes, and invariably bring lawlessness and predation to the areas they occupy, Mac Donald argued.
These individuals almost invariably refuse offered shelter, primarily because they want no interference with their unrestricted drug use, she noted.
Mac Donald posed a pointed question to councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez and his fellow Democratic Socialists of America members: Would they ask an encampment occupant to watch their children while running an errand, as one might with an actual neighbor? The instinctive answer, she suggested, is obviously not.
Modern Monetary Theory’s Persistent Influence
Meanwhile, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s discredited economic theory continues to undergird Democratic fiscal policy despite being publicly abandoned, The Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley reports, as New York Post notes.
Modern monetary theory — the “craaaazy” progressive economic view that deficits don’t matter because government can simply print money and raise taxes later to tame inflation — predicted what the government did during the pandemic, leading to persistent inflation and a $40 trillion debt.
Though Democrats have retired the term itself, MMT still undergirds their agenda. Federal Reserve figure Kevin Warsh wants no part of MMT, but the left continues pushing massive tax increases: Sen. Bernie Sanders backs a 5% wealth tax while Ocasio-Cortez has proposed a 70% top marginal rate on income.
She remains committed to the progressive economic idea that raiding the rich can pay for their wildest spending dreams, Finley observed.
Commodifying Hatred for Profit
Hasan Piker is reportedly raking in a fortune by commodifying rage, as are other hatemongers like Jennifer Welch, legal scholar Jonathan Turley warns at Fox News.
On his Fear& LIVE tour, Piker led crowds in the meme song “We Are Charlie Kirk,” with audiences laughing with joy at the mockery.
The essence of this movement — where hatemongers on the left want to enjoy hate speech while accusing others of hate and intolerance — is to desensitize people, particularly young people, to violence and hate, Turley argued.
In the current age of rage, these new berserkers offer the chance to hate completely and without remorse or reflection, turning political violence and assassination into nothing more than a sing-along.
Raskin’s Antisemitism Reversal
Rep. Jamie Raskin has offered a preview of Democrats’ game plan if they win the House this November, former Attorney General Bill Barr warns at The Free Press: He means to probe supposed false claims of antisemitism at Ivy League universities by Team Trump, which he calls an open-sea fishing expedition.
But this completely rewrites history, according to New York Post. The crisis of antisemitism in higher education has been unfolding in plain sight since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and Gaza war prompted anti-Israel students and activists to unleash a tsunami of harassment, intimidation, and violence against Jews on campuses throughout the country.
When the investigation actually began, Raskin himself said he was shocked and astonished at academic antisemitism.
Now he has turned in the direction the political winds are blowing, Barr notes, since anti-Zionism and antisemitism pay good dividends in the Democratic Party these days.
DEI Ignores Achievement Reality
Despite constitutional prohibitions on racial preferences and Americans’ opposition to them, progressives won’t give up on diversity, equity and inclusion programs, Kevin M. Spivak observes at RealClearPolitics.
Their race-obsessed thinking reduces America to intersectional classifications of oppressed and oppressor, with no group seen as more oppressed and deserving of preferences than African Americans.
Yet the reality contradicts claims of systemic exclusion: About 12% of students in Ivy League colleges are black; there are 61 black members in the House and five black senators; 14 black billionaires and 1.4 million black millionaires exist in America; 10% of first-year medical school students are black, as are 8% of law school students.
Progressives should respect American values, Spivak argues. It’s past time for restoring equality and the dignity of blacks by ending the disgrace of DEI.
With information from New York Post
