September 21, 2026

UNEXPECTEDLY: Mamdani: Quality of Life, Efficiency, Rooting Out Fraud Have “Somehow Come To Be Seen as Somehow a Right-Wing Concern:”

Life I said, unexpectedly:

Tweet continues:

See the entire defund the police movement and homelessness nonprofits in California. Gavin Newsom promised to end homelessness and instead it ballooned on purpose.

This is why there was such enormous flip out over Trump renovating the reflecting pool or Spencer Pratt’s campaign.

Once people realize that things can be improved a lot of nonprofits and public union/money dries up. There is a reason why cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, and now Denver all look the same because they are all run by the same people running the exact same scam.

In May during L.A.’s Spencer Pratt boomlet, Christopher Rufo tweeted:

Spencer Pratt grew up in a California that delivered all of the public services in the background without much fuss, and consequently, one could live out the California archetypes of the surfer, the burnout, or the party animal, and it was more or less as depicted in the movies…Pratt has a better understanding of the California Dream than a rigid, humorless apparatchik like Nithya Raman, who views the state as raw material for an ideological formula.

In contrast, as Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2024 of Chicago’s Mayor Daley:

Daley was a real New Deal-style liberal, but he would have no use for Shorism or Lakoff-ism. He barely spoke American. He once declared he was proud to welcome the “poet lariat” of Chicago. He complained of his enemies, “They have vilified me, they have crucified me, yes, they have even criticized me.” He famously defended the Chicago police (which, we should concede did some indefensible things) by saying “Gentlemen, get the thing straight once and for all—the policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder.”

But he knew how to get snow cleared.

Again, I’m not trying to romanticize Daley, but I guarantee you a great many current residents of Chicago (or New York, Portland, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.) would be far, far, happier to pay taxes for Daley-style government than to pay for what they have now—even if you convinced people that taxes are really just membership fees.

Democrats in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York would similarly accept a lot of corruption in their local government — if it still delivered basic services, such as fighting crime, putting out fires and repairing roads:

As Democrats continually move back and to the left, back and to the left, they continue to cede a massive amount of ideological ground to the right:

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Not to mention, the English language itself. When even Van Jones notices how crazy the lefty lexicon has gotten over the past decade, and how off-putting it feels to those not in the cult, it may be too difficult to temporarily reel the smugness back in: ‘I’ve Never Met A LatinX:’ CNN’s Van Jones Tears Into Left-Wing Rhetoric.

 

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll