Socialist Insanity as a Limited Hangout
One of the greatest features of the US government is the Federal nature of it that allows states and their cities to control most of the government that effects their citizens lives while leaving the big national stuff to the central government.
While it’s true that over the last 110 years that central government has stuck its nose further into American’s everyday lives, it’s still quite noticeable that local government still calls most of the shots. Even in the case of some large Federal programs the they control a good chunk of the spending, in addition to their own local policies.
But the real strength of this system becomes clear when local places go insane; people can escape them for other, more normal parts of America.
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California Continues to Slide
Native resident Victor Davis Hanson doesn’t mince words but wonders if the state has yet reached “critical mass”?:
- Taxes? It has the highest income and gas taxes in the nation.
- Roads? A Reason Foundation survey ranks it 49th among the states.
- Housing, gas, insurance, and electricity prices? The highest in the continental U.S.
- Illegal aliens, the poor, the homeless, the foreign-born, and welfare recipients? The largest numbers in the U.S.
- Public K–12 schools? Test scores in the bottom quartile.
- Poverty? Twenty percent live below the poverty line.
How did perhaps the most naturally rich and bountiful state in the union be brought so low? Simple:
The Left took total control—after millions of the embattled middle class fled. Millions more impoverished immigrants, legal and illegal, took their place. Left-wing Silicon Valley spawned some of the wealthiest elite liberal enclaves in the world.
The result was a neo-feudal society that was hardly democratic.
A huge part of that control has been the rulers ignoring the voters. Hanson lists votes for:
- Multi-billion bonds for new water reservoirs that the state then let environmentalists prevent being built. In fact some of the money was used to smash down old dams.
- Barring the use of racial preferences for contracting, admissions, and promotion in public institutions. The universities have simply ignored this and suffered no punishments from the CA government.
- Cleaning up voter rolls ending gerrymandering by having a bi-partisan committee – which was then destroyed by the Democrats. Hanson lists an incredible number of voting guardrails that have been wiped out (addresses, ID’s, ballot harvesting, ballot curing, – who cares). The result is that although 40% of the voting population are registered as Republicans they have just 13% of the House seats, and that will soon fall to four or five.
The result of all this:
Mass flight? Between 250,000 and 350,000 more Californians leave the state than move in each year.
…
In sum, import poverty; romanticize illegal immigration; demonize the middle class; drive out private-sector capital; and exempt elites from the consequences of their own ideology—and you’re left with a state where democracy dies, along with everything else.
But such corruption can carry on for a long time in what is still the wealthiest state in the union, Adam Smith’s “there is a lot of ruin in a nation”, to the fore. As such I don’t think it’s at a tipping point; what Hanson means by “critical mass” is that it may just implode, and then explode.
The State’s largest city, LA, is all of this on a smaller scale, with its metro system as a microcosm:
Every day, thousands of Los Angelenos take a deep breath, step out of their houses, and plunge themselves into a transit experience straight out of Mad Max. The city’s buses have become rolling homeless shelters, replete with drugs and feces. Its trains are home to murder and mayhem. As Daquan, a daily rider who works near the North Hollywood station told us, “You could kill somebody down there and just get away with it.”
The transformation has been swift and stark. Between 2020 and 2025, crime in the system more than doubled. What drove the change? L.A. Metro’s dedication to creating an equitable transit system, where all Angelenos—drug-addicted, homicidal maniacs included—can effectively ride free, without consequences.
In other words, Angelenos have been condemned to die underground, all in the name of racial justice.
Activists and their allies in city government have spent years laser-focused on driving cops from the L.A. Metro’s buses and trains. Their argument: making people pay to use the trains is racist.
But the California Democrat Party is learning nothing from all this failure – because the failure is the objective. And so the Democrat Party elsewhere is following CA’s lead, and in some cases going even further, like New York City.
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New York Business
One of Mayor Mandami’s policies is free bus travel, but luckily for his voters the system is actually run by New York State so he hasn’t been able to implement his ideas. Unfortunately even the promise is causing the same problems as in LA:
Political promises of “free buses” in New York City are contributing to a spike in fare evasion that is costing the city’s mass transit system millions of dollars, transit officials warn.
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The MTA reported that paid bus ridership fell nearly 8% in June compared to the same month last year. During Mamdani’s first six months in office, bus fare revenue fell by $31 million compared to the first half of 2025. Agency estimates show nearly half of bus riders now skip the $3 fare.
Next up is something even the West Coast dingbats haven’t tried yet: actual government owned and run businesses, starting with grocery stores designed to give people cheap food – including a 30% discount on basic items like produce, meat, milk, cheese and bread – to help them escape the clutches of those evil capitalists who run local bodegas and other small stores.
As a normie your first question will be how they’ll avoid the usual fate of cheap and/or free stuff – empty shelves caused by people just taking everything. The answer will not surprise you; more control, including even ID’s that prove the customers are New Yorkers (also note how he hands this off to a forgettable aide, who can be blamed later in true Stalin-Beria style).
https://twitter.com/Brick_Suit/status/2084366374139514921
In addition these stores will be protected from going broke by not paying taxes or rent. The city already had a Q&A session with local shop owners where the latter quickly realised that Mamdani’s gang was trying to discover what the most profitable items were.
If you’re thinking that this will drive private enterprise stores out of business that is the whole point, and is always the point. Socialism and communism destroy functioning systems so that they can present themselves as the solution to all of the problems that they themselves have caused.
As a result the locals are suing the city, and ironically they’re immigrants:
MBC [Multicultural Business Coalition] — formed earlier this year to create a unified front against Mamdani’s grocery policy — includes 50 chambers of commerce representing Asian, African, Caribbean, Hispanic, Middle Eastern and Jewish-owned businesses in New York.
The nonprofit MBC plans to raise $1 million to fight some of the mayor’s initiatives, Garcia said, adding that the suit “should be a non-partisan initiative.” The group plans to send a letter in the coming days notifying Mamdani’s office of its plans to take legal action.
All these businesses, and others, will soon be hitting even bigger problems:
This past July 2 and 3, Con Edison ran out of options and imposed rolling blackouts in parts of the North Bronx and Southern Westchester County.
The writer, Manhattan Contrarian, reckons that the grid operators are competent and have various tricks up their sleeves that may prevent larger blackouts. But the fact that even these small, “rolling” blackouts are happening at all is a sign that the system is approaching its stress limits.
Now all this comes courtesy of decisions made long before Mamdani appeared on the scene, so he can’t be blamed, although given that those decisions were rooted in a paler version of his ideology he’s also in no position to point fingers:
At least since New York passed its Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) back in 2019, it has been clear that trouble has been coming for New York’s electrical grid. The CLCPA effectively prohibits construction of new fossil fuel power plants, even natural gas plants; and the old ones are aging and are forbidden to be replaced or upgraded. Supposedly, lots of wind and solar generators were going to be added to the system. But those have been slow to come and, more importantly, can’t be counted on to generate anything when you need them. In addition, new construction of such things has now been stalled by the end of federal subsidies. At some point the lines of diminishing reliable generation and increasing demand would have to cross.
The war against fossil fuel power plants is a given, but you may be stunned to learn that a non-GHG emitting power plant also got it in the neck:
https://twitter.com/ingelramdecoucy/status/2072450619332239462
Naturally the MSM is up to their armpits in this as well, with the recent blackouts meriting only a “one sentence in the sixth paragraph of a July 3 article that is otherwise reporting on the heat wave that hit that weekend”. Well of course; this is all their ideology as well.
New York Taxes
Even in the Age of Debt, all this wasteful and stupid spending requires increased tax revenue, and just increasing tax rates (which in many cases Mamdani also does not control), new taxes are needed, sold as usual as being Paid By The Rich. Thus Mmdani’s new “pied-a-terre” tax policy, which was explicitly sold as a levy targeting wealthy owners of luxury second homes in NYC, like billionaire Ken Griffin (the tax’s name means a second home, although the literal translation from the French is “foot/feet on the ground”):
As usual it’s turned out to be more than billionaires:
https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/2081814516124311686
Longtime residents — some who have called the Big Apple home for decades and own a single abode in the city — told The Post they were shocked to get hit with five-figure tax bills they believe were mistakenly mailed out, and are now being forced to navigate a bureaucratic labyrinth to prove it. “Whoever’s behind this, who I can only assume is the mayor, didn’t take the 30 seconds to research,” said Karen Young, president and founder of New York and Paris-based beauty marketing company The Young Group, who has lived in New York since 1972.
FFS, given how much coverage this got in the MSM and Social Media – including that little video from Mamdani himself in front of Griffin’s place, how could you not know that Mamdani is not behind it? What’s the bet that Young voted for him! Nevertheless her whinging continues:
She was stunned when she received a letter from the city Department of Finance asking for $43,000 in pied-a-terre tax on her West 95th Street brownstone, which she’s lived in with her husband for 30 years.“Is this a witch hunt?” she asked, exasperated….“I just sort of line up all of these things and think ‘why are you picking on us?'” Young said. “As a faithful New Yorker since 1972, I find it not only insulting but painful,” she fumed, “Is anybody paying any attention, or any thinking, or two minutes of research. Just look me up!”
Witch hunt? You’ve hit the nail on the head sweetie. He’s “picking on you”, and many others because there are never enough witches to feed the socialist system or, more importantly, be blamed for its failures. See Stalin, Joe and Tse-tung’, Mao – plus all their clones. Read some history.
Young said she went to the DOF’s website to attempt to prove her permanent residency — but quickly hit a brick wall.
“It’s a cumbersome process to prove that I’m a primary resident, which just seems absurd. My jury summons come here, I pay my taxes from here, my utilities,” she said.
Despite the department telling her the process to appeal or challenge the bill was as easy as uploading a driver’s license, Young said she was forced to pay her estate lawyer to get the proper documentation after spending three fruitless hours on the website trying to do it herself.
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Ah yes. The bureaucracy is to blame. I’m sure Mamdani will trot that out at some point. The better phrase is this one: “If only Stalin knew”.
Speaking of purges of old comrades…
New York Culture.
Long time Democrat and writer, Roger Simon, formerly of the East and West Coast Liberal Mafia but ejected in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, pulls no punches in the headline of his Substack piece.
The Jews Should Leave NewYork
Exit the city to save it… and yourselves
Living in Miami Beach, I can see this migration happening around me in real time. For a long time, when I have been talking to New York (and California) friends on the phone, they have been asking me, at first tentatively, what it’s like beyond their blue state bailiwicks. Now I detect an urgency in their voices.
For the Jews it’s an old story; the telltales might be small – Simon refers to a recent stabbing of an Asian and a Jew by a “mentally unstable” man, who just happened to be yelling ‘Allahu Akbar’ at the time (amazing how many people who yell that are “mentally unstable” – but to ignore them has proved lethal in the past. Other telltales are much larger:
“In February 2024, a few months after The New York Times published an investigation into the sexual violence that occurred on October 7, 2023, Rama Duwaji, the wife of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, liked an Instagram post referring to the ‘mass rape’ hoax that was ‘fabricated’ by the paper.”
Simon points out that there is also another story that is nowhere near as old, but very much connected to the Mamdani’s and their supporters and voters:
Not all will do so. Some are too frightened or too embedded in fusty left-wing politics that has repeatedly failed.
A lot of Jews undoubtedly voted for Mamdani, as they faithfully do for Democrat candidates in the city. Responding to comments on his post, many from Jews, which reflect this sad blindness, Simon points them to this article, which story fits all of the foregoing.
It’s about one David Bergelson, a Soviet Jewish poet who very much believed in communism, and also his like-minded Jewish comrades. They wanted to build a special place in the USSR:
Birobidzhan: once the center of the hopes of Jewish Communists like Bergelson for creating a ‘Jewish’ culture that would replace Judaism with Communism, replace the Bible with Das Kapital, and would jettison Hebrew and replace it with Yiddish.
“As a Jew, I feel more intensely in Birobidzhan,” Bergelson had argued less than two decades before his murder. “In Birobidzhan I will help build a glorious Jewish culture, socialist in form and national in content, which can serve propaganda purposes… I wish to partake of those fascinating, delectable juices of life that our Soviet regime bestows upon me.”
Within the context of the system it is not ironic that he and others like him, went after Jews who didn’t comply:
After having championed a ban on Hebrew, shut down synagogues, murdered countless Jews for the crimes of ‘Judaism’ and ‘Zionism’, the Yevsektsia and the Yiddishists were themselves purged in the 1930s, followed by growing crackdowns on Yiddish literature, and any Jewish Communists in America who could swallow the idea that their old friends had really been spies and terrorists, soon had to also swallow the alliance between Nazism and the USSR.
After being arrested, imprisoned for three years, and tortured by the NKVD into confessing that he was a Zionist, Bergelson, along with other writers, was executed in 1952, The Night Of The Murdered Poets, a spinoff of the Doctor’s Plot, where Jewish doctors were tortured and executed.
As Battlestar Galactica put it, “All of this has happened before… and will happen again… again… again…“.
#AntisemitismJewHatred #California #CommunismAndCommunists #LosAngeles #NewYorkCityNYCAndState #SocialismAndSocialists #ZohranMamdani