The world is watching the drug addled and the mentally ill, the machine-gun-toting tyrants and the petty thieves cavorting in the anarchy of Seattle’s occupied “no-cop” zone and wondering what has gone wrong with American youth.
We see them fighting, overdosing, peeing their pants in public, ranting incoherently or, as one young woman was recorded doing, manically fighting an imaginary foe with half an orange skin stuck like a mask to her mouth.
It’s a dystopian freak show and we get to watch it, thanks to videos posted online by intrepid conservative infiltrators such as Andy Ngo from The Post Millennial and Jack Posobiec from One America News Network.
The occupation of the six-block zone in the center of Seattle by protesters from Black Lives Matter and other socialist and Antifa groups is now in its second week and it shames the nation.
No sooner had progressive Democratic Mayor Jenny Durkan ordered the cops to evacuate their police station than the activists announced the socialist paradise of CHAZ was no longer part of America.
The first thing they did was set up a border wall, policed by heavily armed, aggressive men, led by “warlord” Raz Simone, seen on video Sunday opening the trunk of his Tesla and doling out AR-15 automatic rifles to teen anarchists.
On Saturday, a video showed a man on a microphone demanding cash from white protesters.
“I want you to . . . give $10 to one African American person from this autonomous zone.
“The white people . . . I see you, I see every single one of you and I remember your faces.”
Local business Car Tender was robbed and set on fire Sunday night. The owners called 911 more than a dozen times but police never showed.
Police Chief Carmen Best has said that serious crimes, such as rape and extortion, were occurring in CHAZ but her officers are unable to respond.
Durkan defends this armed occupation as a “block party” akin to the “summer of love.”
The wokest precinct in one of the wokest cities in America is reaping what it sowed.
When it comes to law and order, Durkan’s abdication of responsibility is in the tradition of liberal mayors across the country, especially New York’s Bill de Blasio.
The lawlessness didn’t start with the George Floyd protests. It is just the end stage in the evolution of a city that has reached a breaking point, with law-enforcement officers who aren’t allowed to enforce the law, a legislature intent on decriminalizing felonies and emptying jails, and judges refusing to lock up violent recidivist criminals. Sound familiar?
In Seattle we see the future of New York.
It’s a perfect storm: weak progressive mayors with a laissez-faire attitude to drugs, homelessness and crime, coupled with vain, ambitious governors, in Andrew Cuomo and Washington state’s Jay Inslee.
Durkan’s predecessor, Ed Murray, was regarded as the most liberal mayor in the country. He began the rot by disempowering police, and crime soared.
He was forced to resign in 2017 after being accused of child abuse, rape and sexual molestation. He denied the allegations but the city had to make large payouts to two of the surviving young men.
Durkan continued the tradition of homeless encampments, and drug-impaired and mentally ill people wandering the streets, as depicted in the chilling 2019 news special, “Seattle Is Dying,” by local TV station KOMO-TV.
The inevitable anarchy of CHAZ/CHOP now being watched by an aghast world is a concentrated microcosm of what too many American big cities endure because liberal mayors have emptied jails and allowed criminals and drug addicts to colonize the streets.
Both Seattle and New York have what they call a homelessness problem, but it actually is a drug and mental-illness crisis, which no one has the courage to address.
Instead of helping those who can’t help themselves with mandatory rehabilitation and proper mental-health treatment, and locking up the drug dealers who prey upon them, these mayors facilitate their agonies with a callous indifference masquerading as compassion.
In both cities small signs of disorder are ignored.
For instance, de Blasio decriminalized public urination in 2017.
The next year he told the NYPD to stop arresting people caught smoking marijuana in public.
It’s the opposite of the successful “broken windows” theory of crime reduction that begins by mending small signs of disorder.
Albany’s bail-reform laws, requiring that suspects be released without bail, even on many felony charges, along with COVID-driven jail releases, have conspired to make the streets even less safe.
Murders are up by more than 25 percent this year.
The thug who punched a 92-year-old woman to the ground in Gramercy Park last Friday reportedly is a registered sex offender who has been arrested more than 100 times. The police do their job and are betrayed by the legal system.
Yet de Blasio wants to slash police funding to appease Black Lives Matters protesters and NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea is abolishing the anti-crime unit that played such a crucial role in getting guns off the street.
Shea understandably is retreating in the face of hostility from anti-cop protesters and cowardice from City Hall.
But it bodes ill for the future, which is all too close in Seattle.
A slice of ‘gotcha’ hypocrisy
More embarrassment for the Never Trumpers of the Lincoln Project as co-founder Rick Wilson tried to play the “cancel” game with Domino’s Pizza.
“You just killed your brand,” he tweeted this week, hoping to sic the online mob onto the fast-food giant by reposting an exchange from 2012 in which Domino’s thanked White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, then a college student, for a tweet praising its pizza.
It shows how deep Wilson will dig to find dirt on the Trump administration.
But he soon got his comeuppance when the Twittersphere spotted Instagram photos, on his and his wife’s accounts, of their boat with a cooler onboard, decorated with the Confederate flag and the words: “The South Will Rise Again.”
But the best retort came from Domino’s: “It’s unfortunate that thanking a customer for a compliment back in 2012 would be viewed as political. Guess that’s 2020 for ya.”
Touché.
Jail crooked Shel already!
Why isn’t Sheldon Silver in prison yet? The disgraced former Democratic speaker of the State Assembly was convicted in 2016 on federal corruption charges and sentenced to 12 years. He won an appeal but was retried and found guilty again in 2018 and sentenced to seven years. Two years later, he’s still a free man. It smells like special treatment for a Democratic partisan.