By Brian Cates July 6, 2021 Updated July 6, 2021 The Epoch Times – Viewpoints |
All throughout the 1990s and 2000s there was a constant national debate in this country about which “model” was the best for each state to follow: the “red” conservative model or the “blue” liberal model.
I don’t think there’s much of a debate left at this point; it’s pretty clear who won the argument and why, as millions of families and businesses vote with their feet to flee the blue states for red states. And the COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated the red state victory.
While blue states tended to stay locked down and highly restrictive long after much of the danger from the COVID-19 virus had passed, which depressed the local economies, red states opened up far earlier and enjoyed a robust economic recovery.
Antifa and Black Lives Matter-inspired riots were also being allowed to wreak a devastating amount of havoc in some blue states and cities.
And now that the pandemic is over and a new radical “woke” Biden administration is in the White House, the national separation between the red and the blue is becoming even more apparent.
As President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party make it abundantly clear they’re pursuing a “woke” agenda for the entire country, what I have taken to calling “The Red State Firewall” continues to go up as a shield against that agenda in almost half the U.S. states.
Red state governors such as Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas are leading the way as their state legislatures make it clear with a bevy of newly passed laws that they will not submit to the Washington woke culture—on election reform, gender issues related to girls’ sports’ programs, border security, and much more.
These red states are making it abundantly clear they fully intend to go their own way and assert their state’s rights in the face of an increasingly dictatorial Washington.
Meanwhile, the governors and state legislatures of the blue states continue to march resolutely toward the abyss. Governors such as New York’s Andrew Cuomo and mayors such as Lori Lightfoot have belabored to make it clear they’re 100 percent behind the Biden agenda and are welcoming it with open arms.
A Blue Crime Wave
On June 24, Oakland City Council voted to defund its police department by more than $17 million, even as the city is being plagued by an increase in violent crime.
And Oakland is far from alone.
Almost all the large cities in Democrat-controlled states that spent the past year defunding their police departments are now in the grip of a growing crime wave. New York City, Portland, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles are just some of the more than 20 major U.S. cities that reduced their spending on their police departments in response to activism by Black Lives Matter in the wake of the death of George Floyd.
Meanwhile, the comparison between current violent crime rates this year compared with last year is simply astonishing.
According to Fox News, crime has exploded during this year in the major urban areas of the country that are under Democratic control:
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Atlanta: homicides up 58 percent and shootings up 40 percent;
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New York City: homicides up 13 percent and shootings up 64 percent;
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Portland: homicides up 533 percent and shootings up 126 percent;
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Chicago: homicides up 5 percent and shootings up 18 percent;
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Los Angeles: homicides up 22 percent and shootings up 51 percent;
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Philadelphia: homicides up 37 percent and shootings up 27 percent.
Chicago’s numbers don’t look all that bad until you remember the city has been a literal warzone for several years now.
Yet the city’s current mayor, Lori Lightfoot, acted bewildered that anyone thought she bore any responsibility for this when challenged by a reporter in a recent press conference about Chicago’s rampant crime.
As she dismissed all criticism of her handling of the city’s criminal justice and policing issues, Lightfoot said she was pretty sure what was driving 99 percent of this criticism of her job performance: racism and sexism.
They’re Not Going to Stop
It should be clear by this point, if it wasn’t already, that these Democrat politicians aren’t going to stop pursuing the insane “woke” policies that are engendering chaos in their cities. These governors, mayors, and city council members may not even be psychologically capable of stopping.
They’re pampered bureaucrats who live in gated communities with their own armed private security. Whenever they travel about the city, they have their armed bodyguards with them. No matter how bad the crime in the city gets, it will never touch them.
They fully understand more people will die and become the victims of violent crimes if they keep defunding their police departments, abolishing bail, and emptying the prisons. And then they keep doing these things anyway.
Alarmed citizens who approach these mayors and city council members as if they have little or no comprehension of the very real cost in human lives their benighted “social justice” policies are causing are wasting their time. Nothing is being communicated to these city authorities that they don’t already know.
The only thing that matters to these political elites is that they self-congratulated themselves by defunding their police departments. And when they feel the urge for more narcissistic virtue-signaling, a new round of police defunding and prison-emptying will begin.
This alarming virtue-signaling psychosis of liberal politicians has grown to the point they can now effortlessly and without any qualms offer up a multitude of human sacrifices to their own glory. Sure, more people will die if they defund their police and turn loose violent criminals, but you have to understand: The most important thing here is these city officials proving to Black Lives Matter that they’re not racists and how “woke” they are.
Since they’re not going to stop, all you can do is either move away or try to vote them out.
A Lie So Brazen Only a Cultist Could Believe It
As the crime numbers in these blue states and cities continue to climb like a jet headed for the stratosphere, Democrats have frantically tried to escape accountability for their failed criminal justice policies by desperately claiming this is all the fault of Republicans.
After more than a year of watching Democrats coo at and snuggle with the blatantly Marxist Black Lives Matter movement, which has been loudly calling for defunding the police and abolishing prisons and meeting with great success in both endeavors in blue-controlled cities, suddenly the progressive base is being told their Democratic Party Big Brother needs them to instantly forget all of this. So, they have. Now The Party requires them to believe … something else.
Biden spokesperson Jen Psaki attempted to articulate this incoherent narrative to Fox News reporter Peter Doocy in a recent White House briefing.
Are Democrats really expecting their base to believe that Republicans did this?
Yes, they do expect their base to believe it. And much of their base will believe it.
Because we’re living in Orwell’s 1984. As in that dystopian novel, the ‘Truth” is whatever the Party says it is today. What the Party was saying yesterday is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what Big Brother is telling them to believe right now. They have spent several decades training people dedicated to the left’s causes to participate in their own brainwashing.
Loyal Democrats can go for a year saying “defund the police!” then cheering as Democrat cities take millions in funding from their police departments, to then instantly switching to saying, “Why would Republications do this? Why would they defund these police departments in all of these cities?! Why are they causing this massive crime wave?”
And their conscience doesn’t bother them at all while they’re doing that, because they have won the battle within themselves. They have come to genuinely love Big Brother.
Blue States Must Change Their Leadership
The sad fact is that while many of the conservative states are thriving and will fully recover from this pandemic, we’re going to see the progressive states heading in the opposite direction as their “woke” politicians pursue bad social policy that will keep them descending toward a heretofore unimaginable level of dysfunction and chaos.
For that reason, it matters more than ever who wins local and state elections. Let’s hope the continuing fallout from the 2020 election leads to the vital election reform that America so desperately needs.
Changing the political leadership in these large urban cities is the only real way to reverse the trends of out-of-control crime and decline. This is going to be exceedingly difficult because well-entrenched Democrat political machines have been in power in many of these cities for decades, in some cases more than half a century. But it’s the only way the growing rift between red and blue America can begin to mend.
Until enough of the voters demand a change, and their votes are honestly counted, the divide between the red and the blue is only going to grow.
Brian Cates is a writer based in South Texas and author of “Nobody Asked For My Opinion … But Here It Is Anyway!” He can be reached on Telegram at t.me/drawandstrikechannel.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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