The Left Is Turning Our Greatest Cities Into Ruins

in an assault caught on camera. The 77-year-old victim was walking home from work.

"There's only so much capacity that we all have to deal in a lawless society."

"Um, I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are like super overblown, and if you know, the ones that leave, like, bye. Um, so, I just don't know how you can be the mayor of a city and have that posture."

The history of the city, in a lot of ways, is fundamentally the history of civilization, and that's why cities are so important. This is what DSA, as in Democratic Socialists of America, style governance produces: catastrophe. Not caring, not compassion. Catastrophe.

Hey there, friends, fans, and foes of Dad Saves America. John Papola here, and I thought I would take this Friday, well, to talk about cities, the crazy people running them, the weird people inhabiting them, and why we should worry about that because it ends up impacting all of us. And well, nowhere is that more on display than this past week at the New York City Met Gala. You know, of course, you have the our modern royalty like Jay-Z and Beyonce, other hip-hop artists dressed like Groot rolling around in a recycle bin. You, of course, have a cavalcade of essentially gay men, which, you know, it's fashion. So, you're gonna have guys in dresses, lots of guys in dresses, kind of in endless supply. Oh, you've also got sort of a stylish Nazi outfit in leather. Is that what that is? Is that a Nazi outfit in leather? Is that a Hugo Boss Nazi outfit? I guess it is. But, you know, at the Met Gala, anything can happen. Um, and then it all shades into something like Klingon outfits. That's, I'm not a high-fashion guy. I lived in and worked in New York City for a long time. I always found this stuff weird. It all belongs in Star Trek. And it's creative. It's the arts. Um, I don't hate it. It's a, you know, it is kind of a shame that the men are all dressed pretty and the women all cover themselves in really bizarre ways. Here's Katy Perry looking like Destro. Um, maybe the biggest travesty is that this is what was done to Heidi Klum. Ah, I mean, that that is that really is literally the definition of a tragedy. You've got the obligatory 1% decrying the 1%. You know, the "tax the rich, eat the rich" AOC dress. That was one of these things. Uh, some of these human installations start to look like we might be part of a Pan's Labyrinth, a little bit. There's, you know, it's definitely artful. It's artful.

Enough of the silly stuff. Enough of the goofy, crazy stuff. There's a different kind of crazy going on in Gotham City, as we know. And it's, uh, it's the fiscal catastrophe being amplified and then some by the mayor, Zaram Mandani. But one catastrophe you can help avoid is missing the next Dad Saves America video because half of you are not subscribers to the channel. So, please do me a big favor and just hit that subscribe button so you won't miss our new videos as they come out. And well, now let's get back to it.

"New York City faces a budget crisis of a historic magnitude. We inherited a deficit larger than any since the Great Recession. Years of mismanagement and chronic underbudgeting, alongside a structural imbalance between what New York City sends to the state and what we receive in return, have taken a toll."

I'm going to pause for a second there because he's actually correct in that New York City, by being home to some of the richest people on planet Earth, and certainly in New York State, is going to be a net taxpayer. That is how his favorite thing, radically progressive taxes, work. You see, because rural people tend to be poorer than folks on Wall Street. You see the problem here? See the lack of scalability of his communism? Is he doesn't want the actual thing he says he wants because what he actually wants is international communism, but that would mean that all of the money of rich New Yorkers would be taken out of the city and sent elsewhere. But that is a problem for universal child care paid for by Ken Griffin, so of course it's a problem.

"We cannot close this deficit with savings alone. We need new revenue, and we need a structural reset in our relationship with the state because a crisis of this scale cannot be solved without state action. I want to be clear, we are not simply asking others to act. New York City is doing our part. We are committed to governing with the fiscal responsibility this moment demands. Speaker Menin and I have already identified meaningful savings, and we will continue that work carefully, deliberately, and without cutting the services that New Yorkers rely on. But we cannot do it alone. That is why we are standing together this morning to underscore what is at stake and to call on Albany to deliver additional revenue."

To call on Albany, this state, to send back the, you know, if you shrink the scale here of, "We would like to spend our money better than the state spends it." Yes. In fact, each of us individually would like that. But, uh, what is playing out in New York right now is something that's actually like a New York tradition, which is Democrats in Albany, um, being at war with the even more radical Democrats in New York City. I'll come back to one of the most hilariously dangerous examples of these kinds of battles. But first, let's hear from Albany, from a still quite blue governor of New York State, who's not as blue as the deep red New York City mayor.

"New York City leaders calling on Albany to help bridge a multi-million dollar budget gap in the city budget, but Governor Hochul says she has already helped enough."

"Look at your expenses." "Spend less." That was the message from Governor Hochul, who says she has already helped the city balance its budget to the tune of $4 billion. $4 billion is pretty damn good.

The smackdown from Albany comes after the mayor and council speaker set aside their own budget battles to join forces and push for even more state help.

These people talk like it's their money, like they haven't taken it from the public by force. It's just, it just never escapes me the, the hubris. You know, it's pretty good, like it came out of her pocket.

Noting she's already committed $1.2 billion to launch free child care for two-year-olds, $1.5 billion in unrestricted cash for the city, and approved a P.A.T. tax that would bring in another $500 million a year.

Finally, on the subject of not wanting to tax the rich, Hochul is set to meet with Citadel CEO Ken Griffin Thursday. Griffin was furious after Mandani posted outside his $238 million penthouse.

"This penthouse..."

"...making him a poster child for the P.A.T. tax."

"What upset me was the actual, the personal attack."

"And with the company's expansion in New York potentially in question..."

"...we'll talk about our future direction in New York."

The mayor thanked Griffin for one of his donations to the city at an NYPD memorial ceremony today. Also want to thank Ken Griffin for funding a memorial wall, which will open later this year.

Mayor Adams also thanked Governor Hochul repeatedly for the help that she's committed to the city so far. But if there is no more help to be had from Albany, the mayor will have to present a plan by May 12th on how he plans to dig the city out of its budget hole.

"You know, this reminds me of, um, well, one of the best quotes from good old Margaret Thatcher. Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money."

It's all other people's money when you're dealing with government, and they always run out. And so you end up with this bizarre thing where, uh, Mandani is abusing a private citizen, Ken Griffin, and doxing him, and then kissing up because he realizes he can't afford to lose him.

"You know, it's a love-hate thing. So, like, you know, right now, I really love them, though."

It's so ironic. Now, uh, Ken, as you heard, really didn't like being doxed by the mayor of New York City very much.

"Um, I was going to do this, wanted to do this interview outside your apartment, but I thought, I thought it would be creepy and weird. Um, so, how did you feel about the mayor's little video?"

"Um, it was creepy and weird."

Agreed. I mean, like, knock, knock on the window, like, huh?

And of course, he's talking about this, this cutesy, this cutesy little, "Aren't I cool?" And Gen Z thing.

"Well, today we're taxing the rich."

So kitschy, so cool, so edgy. So, what comes next when you have highly mobile, wealthy people that you depend on to pay for your schemes? Well, they're highly mobile. And so, this host will ask about 350 Park, a major piece of real estate in New York City that I guess, um, well, that Citadel was thinking about building or trying to decide what to do with. And those plans may have changed.

"So, where does that leave us at 350 Park?"

"That leaves us with the fact that we went to Miami and revised our building plan to make it a bigger office building."

"You're bailing?"

"So, so what do we do at 350 is still a point of discussion internally. But what is no longer a point of discussion is that Miami is now, you know, when we moved from Chicago, there was a debate between New York and Miami. I don't know how you exit Chicago, land of deep blue psychopathy at every conceivable level, straight up to the state, and even consider New York City. But when you're in finance, you know, you do have to go where the industry is. It's unquestionably true that we made the right choice. I'll leave it at that. It's unquestionably true that we made the right choice. And now, and now what the mayor of New York has made clear to my partners, and principally my New York partners, my New York partners, is that we need to double down on our bet in Miami because we want to be in a state that embraces, that embraces business, that embraces education, that embraces personal freedom and liberty, and that embraces people having an opportunity to live the American dream, and a dream of earned success, not a dream of redistributive handouts that leave people dependent on government for their lives and their livelihoods in a way that takes away dignity and honor."

So, you might hear one of the wealthiest Americans talking about handouts and not liking that. I understand that. But the fact is that it's deeply disempowering to be put into a state of permanent dependency. It is not love. That's fake. That's fake compassion. That trapping people in the welfare state is not being compassionate. And we have to be unflinching in recognizing that. But in some ways, the, what Ken is talking about when it comes to education, I find far more diabolical. And Mandani is just the latest in the more radical mayors of New York to go on the offense against highly effective schools for actually mostly, like, working-class students and families, namely the Success Academy. Uh, former guest of the show, Bill de Blasio, who whose policies I also deeply, deeply oppose, was a similar enemy of, uh, the private and charter schools. But, well, just let's just hear one more thing from Ken about this because it's, uh, Success Academy is one of these, uh, private school systems, charter school systems in New York that delivers phenomenal results and is therefore hated by liberal Democrats who are basically just tools of the teachers union thugs.

"And when Mandani shuts down the gifted programs that educate the future engineers that will create prosperity in our country, he leaves all of us far poorer."

"But New York public schools have struggled now for several administrations. How about we give Success Academy a chance to open more schools in New York?"

"Been a big supporter."

"Right. If you want to actually raise the standard of living for New Yorkers, raise the skills that they have to bring to the job market."

"This is the charter school in New York that just does an incredible job. Uh, the charter school in New York that actually, as a charter school system, outperforms the most affluent communities in all the state of New York with the demographically most challenged population in the city."

"Yes."

"And there are five Success Academies opening in Florida in the next two years where her work is embraced by our political leaders who want to see the children in Florida have an education and to have a bright future."

I hope to at one point have Eva Moskowitz, the founder and CEO of Success Academy, on the show. In many ways, Success is probably the closest thing we have in the US to our guest and friend Katherine Birbalsingh's Michaela Community School in London. And similarly, it is working-class, and often black and brown. Not that that matters, but yes, it is black and brown kids who go to these schools and succeed in ways that they otherwise couldn't in the schools that Mandani and his ilk would like to force them to attend. So, um, whatever you think about billionaires, and whatever, if you care about kids, you should want succeeding schools to expand and failing schools to go away. And if you don't, you don't really care about kids.

But of course, Mandani is not the only radical taking over major cities. We now have a new communist mayor of another once beautiful city, Seattle.

"Mayor Wilson, we all know the taxing climate has dramatically changed since your campaign. As a new progressive, do you still think progressive taxes are an easy and promising solution?"

"Um, I've never thought that they were easy. Um, as someone who's been fighting for progressive taxes for a very long time, I can tell you they are not easy."

I love the use of "fighting." You're fighting. You're talking, you know. I don't think it's a fight. I don't think it's a fight to just yell about stealing other people's money. I just, that's not really a fight. But yeah, let's keep going.

"It was very, very exciting to see the millionaire tax pass through the legislature. Actually, one of my early, like, I guess I would say, like, the first big citywide coalition, big campaign that I helped to run was back in 2017, right after Trump got elected for the first time. Um, and, uh, we ran a campaign, uh, where we were basically pushing the Seattle City Council to pass an income tax on high-income households, knowing that that was going to be legally challenged because we have this, you know, big history in our state of, um, you know, 1930s court decision saying that you can't do a progressive income tax."

Yes, Washington State has uniquely, for its location, for its coast, been an income tax-free state. That is no longer true. The tax-and-spend crowd has flipped them. As blue states get bluer, and red states welcome all of their former residents.

"That was a measure that passed unanimously through the council and then got tied up in court. So, and at that time, I mean, the idea that you would have the state legislature pass a progressive income tax was pretty far-fetched. So, it's just really, really exciting, um, about 10 years later to see that actually happen."

"I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are like super overblown, and if you know, the ones that leave, like, bye."

You're the mayor of a city and you're mocking your tax base. The tax base that you, again, you absolutely claim that you need to stick around so that you can tax them more. Again, I don't see how the math on this works. This flippant mockery of the successful people of Seattle didn't go unnoticed by the press, the local press, that is, because there's still, like, local media that's not completely corrupt, like the New York Times. Seattle's mayor is declining further comment about a series of viral moments that have overshadowed any sort of policy discussion and raised new concerns about her leadership. The incidents have garnered national headlines from coast to coast and sparked questions about who is running the city.

"If you know, the ones that leave, like, bye."

So, sometimes comments that somebody like the mayor makes can have real repercussions in terms of actual, you know, economics for the city, jobs, and the business climate.

"I think it's concerning anytime we have elected officials wanting to say goodbye to the job base, goodbye to the tax base of their economy."

Chris Johnson is the president of the Association of Washington Business and says a spring survey of members suggests more are now looking to relocate out of state.

"Do you see that? What is the expected timeline of your relocation?"

"One to two years, 44%."

One of the things that just continues to be an amazing talking point from the radical left, in this regard, is, "Well, these people are so wealthy, they're not going to leave." You don't think they're going to leave? It's the logic of vice taxes. You see, we are told that we have taxes on things like cigarettes at extremely high percentile levels because it's a vice, and we're trying to discourage the behavior. It's called a Pigouvian tax. Oh, we want to tax things that we should have less of. And that is true. When you tax things, you do, in general, get less of them. But in the case of the vice taxes, particularly the vices that are addictive, it turns out they are relatively, um, demand inelastic, as economists like to say, which is another way of saying, you know, poor people that go on a smoke break, they're going to buy the cigarettes. And so Pigouvian taxes on vices end up being deeply regressive and punish the working class. This is why, you know, progressive Mayor Bloomberg with his soda taxes in New York City was just taxing poor people. If you tax rich people, they can just leave because why give communists more of your money so they can waste it?

"With 91% putting a pause on expansion because of state policy..."

"...the movement of people, both individuals and their businesses, is real." Also, Washington State, who just passed a 9.9% tax on incomes over $1 million. The bill's passage coming around the same time Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who has an estimated net worth of over $3 billion, announced his move to Florida.

Not just move himself down to Florida, but he's moving his entire company, Starbucks, out of the state of Washington. That's huge. Now, if you happen to not live in Washington State, but just for some reason noticed KOIN News, the local ABC affiliate news station, it might be because you're one of the 20 million people, I guess, 19-something million viewers of Seattle is Dying, a documentary news special that was released seven years ago and had a subsequent sequel that obviously went mega viral. And here's just a little taste of the Seattle that, well, is actually set to expand. This is the part of Seattle that will expand under Mayor Wilson.

"What if Seattle is dying and we don't even know it? This story is about a seething, simmering anger that is now boiling over into outrage. It is about people who have felt compassion, yes, but who no longer feel safe, no longer feel like they are heard, no longer feel protected. It is about lost souls who wander our streets untethered to home or family or reality, chasing a drug which in turn chases them. It is about the damage they inflict on themselves, to be sure, but also on the fabric of this place where we live. This story is about a beautiful jewel that has been violated and a crisis of faith amongst a generation of Seattleites falling out of love with their home."

This is what DSA, as in Democratic Socialists of America, styled governance produces: catastrophe. Not caring, not compassion. Catastrophe. And one of the reasons why, um, why that happens is because the ideology that's at work here, one that purports to be caring, starts with an assumption that basically no one's ever responsible for their own actions. Everything's luck. Everything's circumstance. We are all victims of circumstance, including and especially criminals. If you are committing a crime, then actually prosecuting you is criminalizing poverty. That is what these people believe, and that is what leads to things like this.

Seattle Mayor Katy Wilson is hitting the pause button on the city's CCTV cameras. The mayor announced today she's halting the growth of the pilot program, a project launched under the Harrell administration last spring as part of the Realtime Crime Center. While existing cameras will remain active, at least one narrow reproductive and gender-affirming care clinic is being powered down immediately.

Of course, got to have the child mutilation center be free to, uh, to conduct its child sacrifice to Moloch without the watching eye. And, and I will just say for the record, I have very mixed feelings about public cameras. Uh, you know, they assume essentially that all public spaces are de facto owned by the police state. I might even be able to find some areas of agreement with Katy Wilson and her types on these issues up to a point. But when you have the kind of street violence and lawlessness that has been allowed to take root in Seattle, you have to be realistic about what you're going to do to try to overcome that. And this is a completely understandable way to do it. But of course, it's far better to mask the problem than address it directly.

"The Stadium District is one of the only places that's getting two dozen new surveillance cameras that are going to be installed this spring, but they're not going to be turned on unless there's a real threat."

So, how does that work? Well, we bought the cameras with your money that we took from you. We've installed them again with your money, with like, union labor at really outsized rates and time, again, taken from you, driving up your cost of living, but we're going to leave them turned off until there's a problem. Now, I don't know which problem, other than coordinated Antifa riots, which she might participate in. How does this work exactly? How do you know in advance that something horrible is going to happen that you want to record? Of course you don't.

"I am pausing expansion of this pilot until we have completed a privacy and data governance audit and taken significant steps to strengthen our policies."

Right now, 62 police CCTV cameras are installed along Aurora Avenue, downtown, and the Chinatown International District. But expanding the cameras to new neighborhoods is now on hold, as Mayor Katy Wilson acknowledged this is a deeply divided issue.

Deeply divided. You know what I bet she's not deeply divided on? I bet she agrees, although maybe not. It's possible, uh, with the kill switches that are being put in cars by the federal government, you know, because of that, that of course restricts individual driving and freedom. And so, can't have any of that anonymous mutilation of children. That's all fine. It's not just children though that are at risk in Katie Wilson's Seattle. The elderly are at risk. And sometimes these cameras, well, help keep the bad guys at bay.

Seattle police officers rushed to Third and Pike after a 77-year-old man was attacked on April 19th. Surveillance video from Seattle's Realtime Crime Center shows the attack unfold. You can see the victim try to move out of the way, but the two suspects follow him. Then suddenly, the shorter man strikes first, and both push the victim to the ground. The victim lies defenseless on the sidewalk, and the suspects walk off.

"Did you hit somebody over there?"

"No, sir."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm positive."

"All right. 'Cause there's about three people that pointed you out."

SPD says at first, officers were only given information about one suspect. It wasn't until they reviewed surveillance video that they realized a second person was involved in this case. Prosecutors say surveillance video played a crucial role.

"Absolutely helpful. It's so helpful when you have that because jurors now expect that."

So, that footage is just completely upsetting. That poor man assaulted by just outright degenerates. Just, just degenerates. And again, I don't know why this brand of progressive feels like they can have compassion for people who are psychopathic and no compassion for the actual people that get victimized for real. I don't mean victimized by systems, which is just wordplay. I mean, like, beat up on the street victims.

New tonight, Seattle police are searching for this suspect who they already caught once following a violent attack on a 77-year-old man. Body cam video shows the arrest on April 19th at Third and Pine in downtown Seattle.

"Come here."

"Yeah, come here. I'll come."

29-year-old Ahmed Osman was taken into custody after witnesses pointed him out as one of the two suspects in an assault caught on camera. The 77-year-old victim was walking home from work when Seattle police say Osman and another man hit him, knocking him down. He suffered a broken arm, knee, and a laceration over his eye. He's still in the hospital. In custody, Osman denied he was involved and even tried to name-drop. While being walked back to the patrol car, he told the officer he worked for the state and hinted he had connections in city government.

"You know, Katie."

"Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah."

"Yeah. The, the mayor."

"Yeah. Yeah. Yeah."

"That's it. That's almost, that's my last word."

Osman was released just two days later because detectives needed time to investigate, including obtaining this video and interviewing the victim in the hospital. Now that he has been formally charged, he has a felony warrant for his arrest with bail set at $200,000 once he's in custody.

It is not true that poverty makes you do that. That's just false. Being poor and being a violent criminal don't need to correlate. They don't, they aren't the same thing. And treating violent criminals like they don't have agency over their actions because maybe they're poor, or maybe they're even not, well, that, that's just, it's literally siding with the robbers. It's just the worst. And I just don't know how you can be the mayor of a city and have that posture when the safety of your population is really the most important thing you do as a mayor.

But of course, uh, what is going on here is the complete ideological possession of these folks. And, uh, you know, repeated guests of the show, um, Brett and Heather, made an observation that I found pretty interesting and very telling about the, the deep roots of this particular kind of mayoral lunacy.

"The very large city of Seattle, which has just elected a new mayor. She is the daughter of David Sloan Wilson. He is an evolutionary biologist. He's most famous for his revival of a concept called group selection, based on the idea that altruism pays in a much more general sense than evolutionary biologists typically believe. And in that context, it is fascinating that his daughter has become the mayor of Seattle and seems to have picked up the same misunderstanding, which is now, um, being manifest in policy."

So, what is the misunderstanding Brett's talking about? Well, briefly, as I understand it, the, the idea that Mr. Wilson, Professor Wilson, of course, it's like, of course it's all academics. It's the pure Bolshevik style of person she is. But, uh, basically the concept is this: if you have two different groups of groups of tribes, let's say, just competing for resources in the evolutionary competitive landscape, the group that coordinates with each other, that cooperates, and is therefore more, I guess, altruistic, is likely to out-compete the more selfish, barbaric group that's at each other's throats and can't coordinate and can't, you know, develop any kind of like shared strategy. That's the group, uh, evolution concept here that Brett points out was fundamentally debunked along several dimensions and is not what is considered to be true.

How can we know any of this? It's, there's limits to our knowledge on these matters. Um, but at least in terms of his own discipline, his desire to say that sharing is caring works, and we evolved to be just pure sharing is caring, isn't supported by his fellow evolutionary biologists. And there's an important reason why.

"The individual within the group of altruists who is at greatest advantage is the selfish individual. That a cheater who takes advantage of the altruism of the other members of his group but does not contribute by being altruistic himself is the most successful within the group of altruists. So every group of altruists is torn apart by basically cheaters, right? That's it's a collective action."

Sound familiar?

Yeah. Right.

Sounds like humans.

Sounds like life on Earth.

It sounds like life on Earth. And it is exactly the misunderstanding of socialists who expect this, "We all pull together and come out ahead," ideology to work. And it doesn't, because in the end, the mistake is always the same. Socialism and communism punish those who are productive and reward those who are lazy. And, uh, you know, Heather, who is has become increasingly the more based of the two, in the best possible way, uh, you know, she's got a couple zingers in here. This may not be fair, but you know how, um, using a bad understanding of evolution to justify eugenics became known as scientific racism. This is like scientific socialism.

"Yeah, you're right. You're right. Using a, let me think, a mistaken understanding of evolution and how things work to justify policies that are, like, crazy."

You know, it can never be forgotten that the birth of the progressive movement in the United States was also the birth of the eugenicist movement. Diabolical monster. President Woodrow Wilson was a racist eugenicist, and so were most of his peers, including, um, famed abortionist Margaret Sanger, eugenicist. This was the "trust the science" of their time, and it continues to this day. And socialism is just, well, macro eugenics for the economy. That's what it is. And it is interesting to watch the academic version of this misunderstanding flow down a lineage, ahaha, to the now mayor of Seattle, who is apparently confused in this very way.

I love the evolutionary biology jokes. It does seem like she's sort of just appealing to exactly, well, gosh, I can't even think of all the people who have pointed out that, um, financially upwardly mobile, highly educated, single women, childless single women have are looking to the state to take care of them absent something else in their life that will. And so there's an appeal here to that. You know, those who would use vocal fry to affect social change.

Those who would use vocal fry to affect social change. What is vocal fry? You might be wondering. Well, it's this.

"Is talking like this bad for my voice or job prospects or life in general? What is up with vocal fry?"

The answer to all of those questions is yes. You know who didn't have vocal fry? The Iron Lady. She didn't have vocal fry.

"Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money."

That's right. No vocal fry there. No lispy upspeak. None of that. However, the, uh, you know, the Mandani administration, as I will continually abuse this clip from time to time, uh, is filled with the vocal fry crowd.

"For centuries, we've really treated, um, property as an individualized good and not a collective good. And we are going to try and transitioning to treating it as, um, a collective good and to towards a model of shared equity will require that we think about it differently. And it will mean that, um, families, especially white families, but some POC families who are homeowners as well, um, are going to have a different relationship to property than than the one that we currently have."

And it turns out in New York City, there are POCs who are already experiencing a different relationship to their property, in this case, their business property, because Mayor Mandani is going whole hog on some latent, ridiculous, idiotic law that, well, just just listen.

Roberto Beltry opens and closes his storefront gates with a remote control. But what's out of his control is that his security grills are no longer going to be considered compliant.

"We have this gate installed. This is a new gate. Nobody ever said a word."

By July 1st, businesses with solid roll-down gates are required to replace them with gates that are at least 70% transparent. So, this is some dumb law that was put on the books in 2009 and obviously not actually acted on because it would induce a massive cost burden on all of these businesses while also reducing their security. So, it is about as hateful a law as possible, and the fact that it got passed at all is a travesty. But of course, you know, the easiest thing to do for new communists running cities is open up the register of crazy talk that was already passed and just say, "We're going to actually start enforcing this nonsense."

He says he's concerned about people looking into his business when it's closed, and new gates could cost thousands of dollars.

"Huge financial burden onto me at a time when things are hard right now for businesses."

David Estrada is executive director of the Sunset Park Business Improvement District. He says, "Of the 600 businesses along this stretch of Fifth Avenue, only 40 of them are currently in compliance."

Hear that? Virtually everybody is no longer in compliance with the law. You know, this is again, this is the "show me the man and I'll show you the crime" tactic. Whether they even put this into actual action or not, they now are reminding everybody, we can do this to you at a moment's notice. The Department of Buildings is responsible for enforcing the law, and the agency says they're reaching out to business owners across the city. A spokesperson tells News 12 that come July 1st, enforcement will rely entirely on 311 complaints, and building inspectors will not be sent out proactively looking for non-compliant security grills. Read another way, we're going to rely on your fellow neighbors and busybodies to rat on you because that won't have any negative effects on the culture of the city. It's not at all like the Soviet Union that made that a fixture of the society to rat on each other, including your own family members. How's your new relationship with your property going, New York City? Not great. Looks a lot like the Gotham of Batman. Sounds a lot like Bane in the weakest of the, uh, Christopher Nolan trilogy.

"Gotham is yours. We give it back to you."

"The people."

Yes. Yes. And by "to you," I mean to me, the power. That is what's going on.

Well, on the other side of the country, in Los Angeles, a city that literally is, uh, routinely on fire, uh, there is an unlikely candidate using Hollywood's worst nightmare, artificial intelligence, to, well, put his own spin on Batman.

"Please, I'm begging you. There's homeless drug addicts in front of the schools. My children aren't safe."

"Look, if you were a transgender migrant, I could get you a free seat."

"Let's move the drug addicts closer."

"Bass already solved crime. I endorse her."

"Next. Joe Rogan as Commissioner Gordon."

"Please, I just want to rebuild my home. It's been over a year."

So, I, I don't endorse this guy, you know. Uh, you have to make up your own mind about politicians, but that is some killer satire and also deeply frightening about the future of, um, of our society as AI makes deepfakes fundamentally impossible to detect. We're just rolling along with that. I guess it's just, yep, here it is. Now, you can just do that now with a couple prompts. It's kind of amazing.

What are we looking at here? How should we think about this? Because you might be thinking, "Hey, you know, you're just picking on these crazy town cities, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York. I don't live there. It doesn't affect me." Of course, in this case, "me" has been affected repeatedly. I did live in New York City for quite a long time. Um, I live in Austin, Texas, whose city council's packed with whack jobs and who has gone in the wrong direction on crime because of their democratic socialist quackery instead of taking, you know, seriously the fact that you need to protect the citizens. Friend of the show, a repeat guest Joel Kotkin, has written extensively on this, and one of the things he says about what cities are for: the sacred, the safe, and the busy. That these are the essential elements of cities. Early cities were centered around religious monuments, whether that was the Catholic Church and throughout Christendom in Europe, or going all the way back to the Aztec civilization, the pyramids. The sacred was a magnet, a centerpiece, quite literally, of our cities. And when you think about, like, the origins of culture, cities play a very profound role in that, both because of the way they have always incorporated the sacred and the religious, and because of the way they've brought people from a lot of different places together.

The history of the city, in a lot of ways, is fundamentally the history of civilization, and that's why cities are so important. And it's important to look back and think about the way, um, the way cities and city politics is essentially the original politics, the original polis. It's no accident that Greek democracy grew in the era of the city-state. Greeks believed cities to be the perfect size for governing. Aristotle claimed that no higher form of social union was possible than that of the city-state. He believed that participation in the apparatus of the state was not just a right but a duty. A city allowed for sufficient social bonds and the ability for everyone to comprehend the extent of the state. Greeks had no real desire to grow their cities into larger nations or empires. Unfortunately for the Greeks, the empire came to them. Over in Italy, a city-state named Rome began to have imperial ambitions, and by the end of the Republic had figured out how to control both land and sea. All Mediterranean city-states fell to Rome, and that first era of the city-state was over. It was only after the Roman Empire fell that city-states reemerged in the power vacuum.

This leads us to rule number four for city-states: Don't be near large empires. Find areas with fewer natural enemies. Italian city-states like Florence, Milan, and Venice flourished in medieval Europe. Sandwiched between the Holy Roman Empire and the power of the Pope in Rome, these cities thrived on the ambiguity of who was in charge exactly. The governments of these city-states tended to oscillate between republics and monarchies but remained largely independent for hundreds of years. This is the era of the Medici in Florence and Machiavelli writing *The Prince* about the politics of the time.

The notion of the modern nation-state also changed things for city-states. One of the things about Italy, as an American of Italian descent, who's been to Italy many times, that culture of the city is especially strong in that country. It was one of the last countries to actually unify in Europe. And the sense in which you are from your city is incredibly strong in Italy. The notion of being Italian in a unified sense in Italy is weaker than in other parts of Europe as a national identity. City identity, being Roman, being from Naples, being Venetian or Milanese. These are the identities that still to this day hold sway. Being a Sicilian, it's like, are you even Italian? You're kind of, you know, you're even more, you're even more bound to your region if you happen to be Sicilian, of which I am no small part. And I think the thing about that is that's not distinct to Italy. It is true modern civilization. It is true about America. It is true about the world. We live in cities. We don't live in states. We don't live in countries. Not really. We live in our cities. We work in our cities. We drive within our cities. We send our kids to school in our cities. Whether that's a bigger city or a tiny city, the city is, as Aristotle was saying, kind of the optimal unit of governance.

And one of the things that makes cities great is you can leave them when they suck. The cost of exit from your city is substantially lower than the cost of exit from your state or your country. And one way I tend to think about freedom is that it exists in tension or in opposition with the cost of exit from your circumstances. So you are free to quit your job. You will lose that source of revenue, that source of income, but it really won't cost you anything else. You can quit. You're relatively free to quit. You are certainly free. It's easy. It's costless to walk out of a store whose products and services you don't like. The cost of exit is basically zero. It's the time it takes to walk out. The cost goes up, the freedom goes down. And I think this is actually a unified way to think about freedom in our politics, and it's also in the way we use the term freedom in our own vernacular. When someone says, "I'm not free to quit my job because I get my health insurance from my job and I would lose it." That's entirely the government's fault, by the way. That is a government scam. It doesn't have to be that way. But that notion of freedom that I am constrained in my actions and therefore less free is also a true definition of freedom. And so when we think about what matters, what to focus on, where we can make change, the challenge with cities, and I think this challenge is profound, and I think it's the reason why there's only two major cities in all of, uh, the United States that have Republican mayors. Well, Miami had a brief Republican mayor, and I think, you know, the level of sort of far-left psychopathy among the almost entirely Democrat mayors varies. There's very moderate Democrat mayors, and there's complete socialist whack jobs like Zoran Mandani and Katie Wilson, but they're all Democrats except for two.

The culture of cities and the tension between cities and rural life in the United States. Well, um, that has played a profound role in shaping our political life today and the emergence of radical progressivism. In the beginning of the 19th century, technological innovations such as the steam engine and power loom started transforming the global economy. Work that had been done by artisans in villages was now done in factories by unskilled labor. New firms and factories would locate in cities to find enough workers, and workers moved to cities to expand their options for work. Cities started to grow fast. People were moving to cities faster than housing could be built, and many of the migrants couldn't afford good housing anyway. Workers also had to live within walking distance of their factory, as no practical mass transit existed yet. Overcrowding became a serious problem. Sanitation was terrible. Human waste was typically disposed of in on-site septic tanks or cesspools. Cities smelled terrible. Disease was a constant threat. The smoke coming off the factories added to the noxious environment. It really is important to understand that the city of the mid-1800s was not a nice place to be. For many people, it was their first experience with urban living, and it was profoundly negative. And this aspect of the emergence of cities and the Industrial Revolution that was taking place that drew people into cities, you know, we have to contend with radical communism in part as a reaction to this process. Why? Why did that happen? Uh, how should we think about that? And why does it continue to linger? Well, that last part, I'm frankly not sure I know the answer to, but I think why it happened is exactly as this clip points out, that the concentration and the density of the experience, and just being in such close quarters with a lot of people, gave rise to different kinds of dynamics, to essentially mob dynamics in many cases. Uh, that's where unionization comes in, where, uh, strikes and union worker revolts take shape in response to these conditions. It's worth remembering that, uh, life on the farm was also kind of terrible. In fact, the reason why people were moving into cities in droves, not just in the United States, but across Europe, uh, from the hinterlands into London for years and years and decades, was because the opportunities really were that much better. The life on the farm was really, really hard and really dangerous, and your whole family could starve to death because of a failed crop harvest or...

because of bad weather. One of the things that cities fundamentally did was create the division of labor and specialization that gives rise to modern life. Having that concentration of people, that concentration of different companies that produce different elements that can go into the uses of other companies. You're not going to do the entire supply chain yourself. You're going to need a lot of different people contributing to it. You need all these people to do modern stuff. You need a lot of people. And so cities made that possible.

So everything we take for granted in our modern life requires the kind of human density that cities provided and still provide. Which is why more than half of planet Earth's population lives on about 1% of the land mass called cities to this day. That number has only continued to increase over time. But that concentration, that density, that difficulty brought new challenges. And those new challenges manifest in progressive politics. That is what happened. That is why you get the communist manifesto being published in London in 1848. That's why it happens when it happens. It is the observation of industrialization and the conditions of workers in factories that gives rise to marks. uh not that much longer 50 years later Upton Sinclair is writing the jungle of making similar observations. The critiques are reasonable. The the critiques of the conditions as compared to imagined better are fair up to a point. But this is why they happened. The solutions in the case of Marx are are gobbledygook for a whole host of reasons. But the criticism has always been there. And of course, we've always had critics.

This book, Dirty Old London, speaks to this Victorian age. The filth, the grime, the desperation. At least when you're in the hinterlands, the air was clear and clean. You could have the calm of walking outside and seeing the blue sky and the green grass. Those were ameliative realities of natural life compared to of course dying being trampled by your horse and dying or having your kids trampled by your steer and dying and all the dying was always happening. There was always lots of dying. You know where there was also lots of dying and also lots of city planning? The Soviet Union. When you think about Russian cities, those cold, plain, mid to high-rise buildings are what come to mind. They're often set in nondescript landscapes on the edge of cities. In this video, we'll learn more about how the elimination of private property, dedication to providing housing for all, and the encouragement of communal living led to very different cities in the Soviet Union when compared to Western counterparts.

And so, you're basically going to hear exactly what Zamondi, Katie Wilson, and their kin and their and their cadre and their comrades want. They want this. They sound just like this because it is what they believe. For those needing a very brief history lesson, the Soviet Union, more formerly known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, existed from 1922 to 1991. The Soviet Union was a byproduct of the 1917 Russian Revolution where Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin overthrew the successor government to the Romanov constitutional monarchy. The Bolevik government instituted state socialism with strong central government authority over local planning. They believed that the physical form of city should reinforce the principles of Soviet socialism and city should be reimagined with that goal in mind. Private property was eliminated and all land was in control of the central state. And of course, routinely glowed up. Hassan [ __ ] was proudly reading his lenin while wearing a $5,000 uh decorative ring recently. And you know he's he is a typical example of the Mani mindset, the urban cosmopolitan metgala elite who like socialism uh and believe in equality so long as they're a little more equal than the rest of us, which is exactly, by the way, what the Leninists believed. >> All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. more equal than others. Come on, we should leave while we still can. >> Lenin was quick to say that actually, yeah, power to the people, sort of kind of, but really we need a vanguard of true Bolsheviks to run everything. And if we hold elections and the rabbel put people in we don't like, well, we'll just maybe kill all those people and everyone who voted for them, which is what happened routinely. So all this equality talk has always been just uh right behind mass murder. The mass murder was so quick to come in places like the Soviet Union. It can never be forgotten. It can never be stated too frequently.

The basic principle of Soviet city design of this era was that everyone should be spending their time outside in communal environments working, eating, socializing and so on. I guess the goologs in Siberia were also like working, eating and engaging in outdoor environments. Keep in mind, of course, this whole place, the outdoor environments was always cold and snowy. Thus, Soviet housing was built with the barest minimum of living space. The result was buildings that were basically dormitories, and that's how they are used today. They were built in the constructivist style, so they were not only small, but plain. Perhaps unsurprisingly, living full-time in industrial style dorm rooms was not popular with the general public. This phase did not last long, >> but screw them. I mean, that's really all it ever boiled down to. Yeah, that was all talk about the public and the people inequality. This phase did not last long. The next prominent apartment building type is often referred to as the Stalinka, as they came to be associated with the Stalin era from about 1930 to 1950. They came in two flavors. Smaller cinder block structures were built for the working class, while larger brick buildings with ornamentation were for the Communist Party elite. Of course, because the equality, the animal farm equality is always there. It's always it's always animal farm equality. >> Free and equal. >> Free and equal. Free and equal. >> When Kersef became leader of the entire Soviet Union, he scaled up the Russian housing program to the entire nation. At the peak of the program, 60 million people lived in Kchovkas. That's the entire population of Italy. I mean, what kind of neighborhood did all those koshovkas create? The answer was the micro rayon, which translates to micro district in English. So, that's the word I'm going to use instead of butchering that word over and over again. Micro districts were the urban building blocks of new Soviet cities and the additions to existing ones. They were areas of around 10 to 60 hectars that housed around 20,000 people. They also included senior centers, child care, schools, shops, and restaurants. The idea was that everything a person needed on a daily basis, except work, would be within 500 meters of a resident's home. Micro districts would also include things residents needed less frequently, such as healthcare facilities, but not every micro district would have one. They were spaced such that a resident would be no further than 1500 meters from it. Micro districts were typically surrounded by arterial streets. They were designed so that residents could access everything in their micro district on foot. In other words, every time you hear walkability in 15minute cities from these urbanists, these central planners, they're literally just talking communist gobbledegook. The the agenda 21, for those of you who used to watch Glenn Beck when he was on TV and talked about the UN's agenda 21, had all of this stuff, all the talk of sustainability in city design, it is all just straight out of the Soviet Union. every every one of these ideas is just like a warmed over rehash of failed sterile symmetrical Soviet central planning. That's all this stuff is. Our our new vanguard elite in New York and Washington and Los Angeles and beyond. Every one of their ideas has been tried. Every single one. None of them are new. If there's one thing you get out of my romps through history is a reminder that every bad idea has already been tried. We will try it again because we are a flawed fallen creature. But that's the facts. And this all failed. The whole architecture of it collapsed. This stuff didn't work. And the reason is because of good old Maggie Thatcher's truism. Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money.

>> The money that's always talked about is not actually money. The the thing where our money comes from, where our income comes from, is our productivity. That's it. Income is a function of the creation of value for other people. That's where you get a paycheck. It is not money. We don't make money. We create value for others. And if we get money, that money either came from us creating value in exchange or somebody else doing it and giving it to us either voluntarily or through the state because they stole it from somebody else. Or it's stolen through money printing, which is just eluding the value of the the creation of others to spread it around in a way that not one in a thousand will understand what's going on. And so it's the Lenin himself said that the best way to destroy a society was to inflate the currency. This was a broadly understood fact uh for a very long time. And so the money printer types, they really know that they are pushing the button of total societal destruction, which is why we have to be far more fiscally sane than we currently are. Um, but why why doesn't it work? Why don't all their expert schemes pay off? Why don't all these planners, these city planners, these central planners, why can't their perfectly manicured society turn out to be beautiful and efficient? Well, this battle of city level communism, city planning communism actually played out in the 1960s in New York City in a profound way. There's actually a great like multi-part documentary series about New York called New York that goes into this in detail. And there is a Soviet style central planner by the name of Robert Moses. And this want to be god of the city of New York, Robert Moses. Well, as he proceeded to lay concrete upon concrete through New York City, he encountered an unexpected foe in a freedomloving woman by the name of Jane Jacobs. And her insights into the nature of what a city really is proved to be profound, prophetic, and ultimately correct. Jacobs was an activist and journalist living in Greenwich Village. Moses was New York's master builder, responsible for the construction of many bridges, freeways, and public housing projects. He was losing influence by the 1960s, however, and Jacobs, along with other activists, managed to halt the lower Manhattan Expressway project. Jacob's book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is a critique of modernist planning and urban renewal and became one of the most influential books on planning. And one of the things that's interesting about Jacob's is there was a there's a documentary about this battle. uh you know again this is in the before times in the pre2010s where you know film and television and Hollywood's always been left but it you know there was still kind of sanity and sometimes accidental truth that we could stumble upon especially if it wasn't a man uh delivering the truth. Listen to this clip this first this first statement from Jacobs at the start of this trailer. It says it all. I think it's wicked in a way to be a victim. >> It's wicked to be a victim. I like her right from the start. >> Absolute power corrupts absolutely. And Robert Moses was absolutely powerful. >> He wanted to wipe the slate clean, start all over again. >> That was the battle. not just the rejection of victimhood, but what Jacob was fundamentally argued in her book was that cities are alive and that actually the way they emerge is not from some top-down plan where you just look at a grid. In fact, uh they they are a product of the people of the city building it piece by piece, step by step, mixed use, living together, smashed together, as messy and complicated as it as it as it actually is. That's what makes a city alive. Cities emerged in particular places, usually because of ports and resources, and built out from there. It's very rare historically to find purely master planned cities that truly work. Now, New York does have a grid that was planned, but the contents of that grid, the businesses, the people that live there, that is a bottomup phenomenon. That is not something that Zaranom Donnie or Katie Wilson can decide and have it work. It's why the Soviet city planners ultimately failed. Freedom is local. We know for ourselves what we need, where, and when. That is the most fundamental reason why their ideas of communism, even at the city level, tend to fail. Cuz they don't know what we need. They've got some cockami idea that you should force every business to rip out their protective screens while also decriminalizing theft. And somehow that won't destroy the place. This is what happens when you have centralized power. This is why power corrupts absolutely because they lack the knowledge. They lack the incentives. They lack the information. And one of my favorite examples of just how far you can push individual freedom and choice is the fact that you often don't even need traffic lights for very complex traffic patterns to emerge. They are in fact optional. This is an intersection in Ethiopia, but you can find videos like this throughout the world, especially the third world for sure, but through India and many other places. If you watch it, if you look at the pattern here, what you see looks like a flock of birds flying together without crashing. But they're people. They're people in cars, which doesn't even make any sense because we all know people suck at driving. We all know that the road is filled, frankly, with a lot of holes. And yet, look at this. This is what freedom looks like. It's messy. It's complicated. It's It's hard to manage. It's impossible to predict. And yet, when each person driving their own way, pursuing their own plans and purposes is free to do so, it turns out most of the time they they find their way without crashing. That's the facts. That's why freedom works. Now, you need to be prepared for freedom. You can't do this with children who've never driven a car. So we as parents need to prepare our kids, need to form them to be free, to be ready for this because this is what their life is going to be like. Their life is going to be like this intersection, completely impossible to plan, completely filled with chaos. But most of them will drive through that intersection just fine with a little bit of help from us, but mostly the help to help themselves. So that's one lesson. But the one other lesson that I really want to leave us with today is that we live in an age where the centralization of our politics and our in our interest, our attention is just as much of a problem as the concentration of power itself. We as a people have spent too much of our energy expecting the president of the United States to solve all of our problems. whether he's a liberal, a Democrat, a conservative, or Republican, there is only so much he can do or she can do, it's mostly nothing. It's mostly not much that they can do because they're far away and because they have the same 24-hour day that we do. So, if you want to get engaged in politics in a way that feels meaningful, you should follow in the footsteps of Jane Jacobs. I have tried to do this myself. Get involved in your city. Get involved in the in the city council, in the the committees. This stuff is kind of aggravating and you get to see firsthand how suddenly your neighbors can get warped by a sense of power and that's a good lesson too. But if we who believe in America and believe in individual freedom and and fundamentally sort of conservative in the American sense principles don't get involved in our city politics if we don't step up and lean into this, all of our cities will be run by psychopaths, by democratic socialist whack jobs who want to reinstitute the Soviet Union one more time just because, you know, it was never really tried. And of course, the Greeks offered a lot of wisdom, especially Plato, who wrote, "One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics, is that you end up being governed by your inferiors, which we have seen to be an exactly prophetic statement in our cities. We've got to get in the game on this. This is the this is the future of the country playing out at the level of the most important unit of governance we have, our cities." And my son actually has worked in the public works of our city. So there's a lot of things you can do to get engaged in the community at the city level where you actually see a difference being made. And that is about the most positive thing I can offer you in terms of political action because there's nothing more dis disconcerting than throwing all your energy into some political thing and then having it be completely out of your hands. But that's the nature of national politics. It doesn't need to be the nature of all politics, especially local politics. And one more thing about that, one of the reasons why, because the left is quite smart on these things, the reason why they've been able to capture our school boards, our city councils, our commissioners, and committees, is because most people aren't paying attention. And that is a great thing for those of us who are sane to exploit because that means there's not that much ground you need to cover to make a big impact. There isn't that much competition. You're you're going to be up against a lot of vocal fry. And you know what? I think you can handle it. I think you can take it on. I think you can beat the Lisby upspeakers at their own game. We've got to do it. So, I hope this is helpful. I hope this gives you something to think about, something to do. Let me know in the comments down below. I know you will. If you want to support what we're doing, there's a bunch of ways you can head to dadsavesamerica.com or you can become a subscriber. It's a Substack and helps support what we're doing. You can, of course, uh buy some of our merch. It's great. I do really drink out of this mug all the time. Of course, we are a nonprofit studio and so you can make a donation over at dadsavesamea.com. And of course, I hope you have a great weekend.