Our largest cities are being run by progressive politicians that have been working very hard to implement extremely ambitious progressive agendas. So how is that working out? In this article, I am going to check in on the three largest metropolitan areas in the United States to see how they are doing.
Have they been transformed into “liberal utopias” that can serve as examples to show the rest of the world how they should be doing things? Not exactly. Instead, conditions have gotten really bad in each one of them and things are getting worse with each passing day.
Let’s start with New York City. According to Wikipedia, the Big Apple is part of the largest metropolitan area in the United States. Almost 20 million people currently live in the region, and thanks to progressive law enforcement policies retail theft has risen to ridiculously absurd levels…
Retail theft is on the rise, with robbery, burglary and other crimes increasing by 22%.
And while 327 offenders accounted for 30% of New York City’s 22,000 retail theft arrests in 2022, recidivists were arrested almost 6,600 times, for an average of 20 times each.
The results of this are obvious: Merchants have made approximately 63,000 complaints — most going unresolved.
Meanwhile, New York City is being absolutely flooded with migrants. Liberals love the idea of migrants pouring into this country illegally until the time comes when they must take care of them directly.
At this point, the Big Apple has run out of space to put more migrants, and so they have decided to start sending some of them by bus to nearby counties…
Following New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ announcement last week that the city will bus some migrants to hotels in nearby counties temporarily, officials in Orange County and Rockland counties filed lawsuits attempting to stop the plan – even as some migrants have already arrived.
The counties have also issued executive orders barring the arrival of migrants and asylum seekers.
It could be argued that conditions are even worse in the second largest metropolitan area in the United States. Close to 13 million people live in Los Angeles and surrounding areas, and right now the region is facing the worst drug crisis that it has ever experienced.
A flesh-eating drug known as “tranq” was originally popularized in Philadelphia, but now it is “saturating the streets of Los Angeles”…
A flesh-eating “zombie drug” called xylazine has been saturating the streets of Los Angeles with severe, deadly effects when mixed with illicit opioids.
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s officials launched a new program to track the troubling prevalence of the substance, which is a sedative typically used by veterinarians to anesthetize animals.
We have never seen anything quite like this before.
This drug can make people stagger around in a stupor for hours, and it can also cause extremely painful sores that can literally rot your skin away…
Also known as “tranq” or “tranq dope” on the streets, xylazine has become increasingly present in the illicit drug supply. The drug can be cooked down into a powder form and mixed with illicit opioids such as heroin and fentanyl or pressed into counterfeit pills or sedatives.
The “zombie drug” nickname stems from the substance’s known effect of rotting the skin.
Many addicts live in the numerous tent cities that have blossomed all over the City of Angels.
One of these homeless encampments that was established very close to the border of Beverly Hills ended up creating a tremendous amount of controversy…
A homeless camp that mushroomed into a sea of tents neighboring Beverly Hills has finally been broken up after disgruntled residents complained for weeks that the tent-dwellers were using and selling drugs at the site.
Furious residents of the upscale enclave of Beverly Grove watched in horror as scores of homeless people set up camp on San Vicente Boulevard last month.
They have described how the tent-dwellers are fighting ‘all hours of the day’ while also using and selling drugs at the encampment.
Needless to say, the third largest metropolitan area in the United States knows all about crime, drugs and homelessness. Voters actually got rid of Mayor Lori Lightfoot in the last election because conditions have deteriorated so badly in the Windy City.
But they replaced her with a guy that is even more liberal, and now a number of CEOs are warning that their companies will permanently leave if Brandon Johnson goes through with all of the new taxes that he is promising…
Companies are already vowing to leave Chicago over additional taxes promised by its new mayor – a progressive tasked with addressing the city’s dwindling image under predecessor Lori Lightfoot.
Sworn in early Monday, Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson beat out more moderate Chicago schools CEO Paul Vallas earlier this month to earn the hallowed spot – something business leaders like CME Group Inc are already peeved about.
Appearing on a podcast Sunday, the chief executive of the country’s foremost financial derivatives exchange, Terry Duffy, voiced his distaste over additional taxes planned by the ex union organizer, who was endorsed by Bernie Sanders.
Personally, I don’t understand why those companies are still there.
Chicago has become a perpetual nightmare, and that isn’t going to change any time soon.
Of course the same thing could be said for hundreds of other cities. In Baltimore, a business owner that has operated in her local community “for more than four decades” is finally throwing in the towel due to rising crime…
The latest incident comes as a mom-and-pop business, operating in Baltimore City for more than four decades, has been forced to shutter operations because of numerous armed robberies.
Jody Rosoff, the owner of Doc’s Smoke Shop in Baltimore’s Highlandtown neighborhood, told local media Fox 45 that she has been robbed at gunpoint for the second time in six months and just recently had to shoot an intruder.
She said her business has been operating in the city for decades and now has to close up shop because “it’s not safe for anybody on this street that’s a small business owner.”
The liberals that run these cities don’t like to see the headlines that their policies have created.
But instead of fixing things, in many cases they simply bring crime rates down by making it extremely difficult for normal citizens to report crimes.
If your crime never gets formally reported, it doesn’t show up in the crime statistics, and that makes those that are currently in charge look better. But nobody can deny what is happening all around the country.
Crime is completely and utterly out of control, and it is getting worse with each passing year.
At this point things are so bad that the Postal Service is actually being forced to replace thousands of mail receptacles from coast to coast…
USPS also said there has been a higher volume of theft incidents from mail receptacles.
In fiscal year 2022, there were 38,500 thefts. In the first half of 2023, there have been over 25,000.
To address this, USPS is establishing harder blue collection boxes at 12,000 locations across the U.S.
There is chaos in our streets on a nightly basis.
This is our country now.
If things are this bad in 2023, what will our largest cities look like once economic conditions severely deteriorate in the years ahead?
We have reached such a critical turning point in this country, and we desperately need leadership.
Unfortunately, Joe Biden is running the show in Washington and Democrats are in charge in virtually all of our biggest cities. Things are going to continue to get worse for quite some time to come, and that is really bad news for all of us.
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Article cross-posted from End of the American Dream.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
I have done my part, I obey the law, I pay my taxes, I go to work every day, I follow current events so I can make informed decisions, and I participate in elections. I also jump through all of the “social hoops” I have to when I am out in public, so I can fly under the radar and avoid being a target of radical leftists, screaming Karens, and social justice warriors.
That said, most people that I associate with are pretty much the same, so who are the idiots in our society who keep voting Democrat? These people are a major part of the problem here. It’s easy to just blame the progressive politicians, but let’s face it, they would not be able to inflict their damage if the mental midgets we are forced to share our country with would just stop electing them.
I don’t want to be a fascist but come on already, how much more damage can we allow these people to do to our country? With all the damage they are causing I am finding it more and more difficult to see the benefits of allowing stupid people the right to participate in our elections.