It surely hasn’t escaped your notice that cities roiled by rioting and violent crime in drug-filled neighborhoods and with (of course!) declining populations are run, and have been run, by Democrats for decades.
It has been 50 years since Rochester had a Republican mayor.
But, alas, it would be impossible today to turn the “model city” of Rochester into someplace people chose to live.
And, due to its shrinking population, you watch, the next thing will be to fill it with third world refugees (with Catholic help) as Biden promises that starting in October the first of 125,000 Africans, Middle Easterners and Asians will be landing in America.
Daniel Greenfield has a piece at Frontpage magazine this week that you should read as a cautionary tale, that is, if you haven’t been sufficiently cautioned already about Democrat governing principles.
The Democrat Model for the Future is the Worst City in America
I’ve only snipped a bit to whet your appetitive beginning with this you-can’t- make-this-up news worthy of a Saturday Night Live skit (if SNL wasn’t so PC).
As murders rose 56% and shootings shot up 90%, Rochester decided to offer iPads in exchange for “working handguns and assault rifles”. No questions asked. A week after the “largest gun buyback in Rochester history”, four people were shot in just one day.
Five months after announcing that she wanted to reimagine the police, Mayor Lovely Warren was indicted on campaign fraud charges.
You can’t make this up!
Last month, her husband was busted in the takedown of a drug ring. The cops found a semi-automatic rifle in her home. Warren, who had allied with Bloomberg’s Everytown gun control group, claimed that she knew nothing about the weapon.
It couldn’t have been too shocking since her husband had already been convicted of armed robbery.
Mayor Lovely Warren blamed the whole thing on racism….
Greenfield goes on….
Rochester isn’t suffering from excessive criminalization, but decriminalization. And the last thing a city overrun with drugs needs is more drugs, or police defunding, EV chargers, demolishing highways, or any of the other “progressive” gimmicks that Democrats keep jumping on.
The media is right. Rochester is a model. And a cautionary tale.
The former booming industrial city is a model for what the Democrats want to do to America, gutting industrial bases, replacing work with welfare, and then using black people as lab rats for radical social experiments like drug legalization and police defunding with deadly results.
Being a “model city” now means having every toxic leftist policy idea tested on you.
Democrats have failed at the most basic elements of governance in Rochester. And yet they keep rolling out exciting new ideas to fight global warming or transform society when they can’t even handle their existing responsibilities.
Rochester is the 5th poorest city in the country. It’s also one of the dirtiest, it has the worst schools in the state and some of the lowest literacy rates. The graduation rate hovers between 40 and 50 percent. 75% of Rochester’s children are being raised by single parents.
If Mayor Lovely Warren really wants to “close the wealth gap between Black and Brown people and our White neighbors”, then she might want to start there, instead of writing checks for black people from drug money while turning Rochester streets into war zones with police defunding.
And, it is all the fault of “systemic racism.”
And then they blame the corrupt, violent, and impoverished hellholes their economic and social policies created on “systemic racism”.
There is much more.
And, in case you have forgotten, Black Lives Matter went on a wrecking spree there, in a city run by blacks, last year.
Changing the subject! See my post yesterday at RRW about how the number of mosques in America is mushrooming.
CAIR Trumpets 31% Increase in Number of Mosques as US Muslim Population Expands
How the hell is Warren still Mayor.
I got recruited for a job in that dump once and I regard it as the worst place I ever lived. It wasn’t an industrial city like the article states, but more a white-collar tech town that failed to diversify its economy. Like Detroit chose to throw all its eggs in one basket with the auto industry, Rochester decided to throw all its eggs in one basket with Kodak and the camera / film industry. Like the auto companies, the folks at the top of Kodak figured they were too big to fail, made stupid and corrupt decisions, never bothered to look into digital cameras, and by the end of the 90’s Kodak and Rochester (lovingly referred to as Crapchester by the locals) was on the ropes. The Democrats had their hooks dug in deep for decades, but there was enough money coming into the place that it was able to function reasonably well but, when Kodak died, the town died with it, while the parasites stayed.
Interestingly, if ever there was proof that highways “cut off poor neighborhoods”, it would be that city—and it’s a good thing! The ghetto in that town, while small, is exceptionally violent, poor and dangerous for some reason and, if it weren’t for barriers like the highway and the river, the whole city would have turned into a ghetto years ago. You can tell Rochester was a decent place to live once, but what of it? Most of the freedom-loving people left places like that years ago and the slaves that are left love their chains. It isn’t a nice place, never will be again, the weather is awful, infrastructure just about shot, and I’ve been suggesting for years that, if we have to take on all these “refugees”, stick them in New York State—AND KEEP THEM THERE. I spent a lot of time in that region back in the day and I’ll attest that most of the people living there are happy living their Democrat dream and, as much as I hate to see once-great cities laid to waste, I have a hard time shedding tears for places like Crapchester. They got what they asked for.