Philadelphia’s ‘Crime-as-Carnival’ Dem Culture
A case study in how progressive policies spawn nihilism and hopelessness.
In 2022, Philadelphia Magazine revisited one of its annual features, the 100 most influential Philadelphians of the year.
There were few if any surprises in the rubber stamp list: sports kings, drag queens, “Sizzling CEOs,” progressive/ left-wing City Council members, DA Larry Krasner, the latest and hottest restaurant chef, elite liberal film festival personalities and — last but not least — UPenn’s trans swimmer Lia Thomas.
“That is so Philadelphia,” one might say, and one would be correct.
“Thomas, who has only rarely spoken with journalists,” the magazine stated, “has remained outwardly stoic, steadfast, the picture of perseverance—likely the same traits that helped her excel in the sport to begin with. (They’re also traits that will come in handy in law school, where Thomas has said she intends to study civil rights and public interest law. She’s grown passionate about ‘fighting for trans rights and trans equality,’ he told ESPN.”)
Missing from the magazine’s list, as usual, were personalities with a conservative bent — commentators, writers, athletes, et cetera. That is, anyone with an opposing view, a contrarian by birth or conviction.
Judging from the overall tone of the magazine, you would not know that the city is in the midst of a major crisis.
A quick survey of recent Philadelphia Magazine articles:
“How to Make a More Kid Friendly Philadelphia.”
“Philly Teens Need to be Included in Our Public Spaces.”
“8 Ways to Make Philly Streets Safer for Kids.”
But what if it is the kids who are making the streets unsafe?
Consider what occurred in September 2022 when more than 100 black teens, some as young as ten, ransacked and destroyed a WAWA store in Philadelphia’s Mayfair neighborhood.
Consider the massive Center City flash mob of some 350 to 400 teens in September 2022, who ransacked businesses, jumped on police vehicles and climbed street poles.
One little teen — somewhere there’s a mother who loves him so — even shot off a gun.
Philadelphia Magazine, historically, has always had a fun, frivolous kick to it: best chef, best hairdresser, best nail salon, best tattoo artist, best retail sales clerk.
But there was a revolution in October 2020 when the magazine went woke, and hired its first female editor, Kate Dailey, and its first Black Lives Matter advocate editor-at-large.
Since then, it’s been a woke fiesta at the magazine, where it’s now acceptable even to refer to the magazine’s first publisher, D. Herbert Lipson, who died in 2017 at age 88, as (in off-the-record comments) an “old racist.”
The magazine has a special symbiotic relationship with the (Leftist) Philadelphia Inquirer where the latter feeds off the editorial castaways of the former.
That’s easy to do because the journalists are all from the same hive.
Meanwhile, in the real world outside the magazine’s orbit, Pew Charitable Trusts made the determination in 2019 that Philadelphia’s population has been dropping steadily.
That drop has been verified by Drexel University’s Lindy Institute, which reported that thousands of people have left the city since the pandemic.
These surveys are careful to downplay the exodus of people by affirming that those leaving the city “still love it” and would prefer to stay were it not for “a job transfer” or “a desire for a change of scenery.”
Can this be categorized as a bit of spin? Since when does someone go through the Herculean task of moving to another city just for “a change of scenery?”
The degree to which these surveys go to find a silver lining in the city’s population exodus is tortured at best.
Still, one cannot escape the fact that two-thirds of the recipients stated that their quality of life improved after leaving Philadelphia.
This is very damning, especially because it serves as proof that progressive Democrat policies have laid waste not only to Philadelphia but to Pennsylvania’s other largest city, Pittsburgh, which has also fallen victim to crime, rampant drug use and out-of-control homelessness.
“Pittsburgh is running full speed into the abyss as progressives gain more political power, and Philadelphia suffers from a George Soros-backed District Attorney’s soft-on-crime approach that has enabled the lawlessness,” The Mercury reported just a few months ago.
Since Ed Gainey became Pittsburgh’s mayor in January 2022, crime and homeless statistics there have imploded.
In August 2023, four teenagers in the Duquesne area of Pittsburgh were shot when shooters fired into a large crowd of people hanging out in a parking lot.
“We will convene our rapid response teams to make sure we are caring for the victims’ families and ensuring they have access to the support and resources they need….We will solve the root cause so that we can attempt to stop more violence,” the mayor said.
Democrat mayors like Gainey like to say how they want to get guns off the streets, as if that will solve the problem of violence and improve the quality of life in their cities.
Yet how do you do this if the murderers for the most part belong to the subculture of gangbangers and gangstas, people who can get new guns seconds after their old guns are taken away?
Where there’s a gangsta will, there’s a gangsta way.
In Philadelphia’s Northern Liberties neighborhood in late August, sixty-year-old Peter Chan was beaten to death in a carjacking by a group of males on motorcycles and face masks who drove up beside him as he sat in a parked car waiting to pick up his wife. The suspects still remain at large.
Peter Chan was not attacked with a gun but with fists.
It should be noted that this area of Fishtown and Northern Liberties is an upscale neighborhood with $600,000 warehouse condos, fussy little (gated) dog parks, and specialty restaurants that primarily serve moneyed ex-New Yorkers and woke millennials who hate Donald Trump.
The area has had 26 carjacking incidents so far this year, despite the fact that it is home to the 26th Police District, the station where many of these same ex-New Yorkers and millennials in 2020 demanded defunding of the police.
In 2022, hit-and-run deaths in Philadelphia reached an all time high, accounting for at least one in four traffic fatalities in the city.
Philadelphia’s nihilistic Dem culture– which includes the toleration of a massive open air drug market in the Kensington section where one sees users passed out on the sidewalk, covered in scabbing, or seeping flesh wounds while others amble about in a daze, often with blood running somewhere on their bodies—has contributed to the Crime-as-Carnival atmosphere here, where cars with tinted windows plough into pedestrians (legally) crossing the street, knocking them out of their sneakers and killing them, then speeding away.
In May 2023, a 38-year-old mother walking with her 3 children across the 1400 block of John F. Kennedy Blvd, a downtown area with lots of office buildings, was hit by a speeding jeep going the wrong way. The mother was killed, one daughter injured critically, and the two other children were knocked out of their shoes.
Speeding vehicles crashing into motorcycles, bicycles or pedestrians crossing the street is now a common occurrence:
Welcome to Philly, the City That Knocks You Out of Your Shoes.
This grunge Dem culture also encourages the drug-addicted homeless to use the subway system as a shelter.
On the Market Frankford El, junkies ride day and night, sleeping, eating, spilling food, acting out and changing in and out of clothes. I once observed someone shaving and taking a ‘seat bath’ with dozens of handy-wipes. .
While Philadelphia’s Mayor Kenney rests peacefully until the completion of his term, Pittsburgh’s mayor refuses to address the real problem: that being that it is not society’s job to raise your child.
Mayor Gainey claims to be searching for a root cause of Pittsburgh’s violence, crime and drug problem, but he doesn’t seem to realize that it will not come from the Dem-Marxist “reinvention” of the nuclear family, especially as it relates to black families.
“Job training” for disadvantaged teens sounds good on paper but if these teens have no family structure for support or on which to build, you’re just building castles in the air.
Thom Nickels
Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism.
Reader Interactions
Bottom line: Lawyers are the worst. If you like them and think they should have more money, vote for Democrats.
COUNT THE LAWERS IN THE IMAGE BELOW. ALL BRIBES SUCKING GAMER LAWYERS!
The Evil of the Democrat Party
Masking the true carnage to protect leftist fairy tales.
The city of Chicago might as well not exist to Democrats on the national stage. Yes, that party has ruled the city with an iron fist since 1931, and the dead there has a remarkable turnout rate for elections, but in Washington, DC, the city doesn’t exist. Joe Biden and the swamp gang don’t mention it because they’d have to acknowledge the piles of dead bodies the city racks up annually. While they’ll show up occasionally in the region for a photo-op, they won’t talk about the murders, the drugs, or the terror citizens there feel on a daily basis. It is, for lack of a more perfect word, evil.
Republicans have zero say over what happens in Chicago; everything terrible there is directly a result of liberal policies. All the blood spilled drips off the hands of Democrats. They know it; they don’t care.
Why would they? What consequences have Democrats faced for their failure? In the last 92 years, there hasn’t been a blip on the radar of a threat to Democrats winning elections there, so why would anyone give a damn? The city had a chance to pull up, just a little, from its nosedive when they tossed out the incompetent Lori Lightfoot in the mayoral primary last year. But rather than go with a more sane option, they voted for someone even worse. The new Mayor gets more upset when someone refers to murderous goons as a mob than he does any of the murders in the city.
Why is anyone supposed to care if the people who live there don’t? If you continually vote for people who beat the hell out of you, why would people care that you’re regularly getting the hell beat out of you?
Still, it’s an embarrassment to Democrats to see what Chicago has become. The same goes for Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and every other city controlled by Democrats for generations. Not all the crime, not all the death, the pointing out of the crime and the death by Republicans. That’s what Democrats are concerned with – the extent to which the white, suburban chardonnay-swilling soccer mom who votes blindly for Democrats become aware of the indifference with which the progressive power structure views human life and how those dots are connected in their heads between the violence and their “safe” lives. If those voters realize they aren’t more than a few election cycles away from their quiet slice of life being overrun by the same mentality, they might not slavishly vote and donate to Democrats.
These Democrats in power only care about anything to the extent that it can harm their electoral prospects. In these killing fields called cities, those electoral prospects are unburdened by responsibility – Democrats will continue to mine the votes of people who’d elected the morons they’ve elected to mayor’s offices in perpetuity. It’s the suburbs they’re afraid of losing.
It tells you something that the left doesn’t care about all the murders. From “Black Lives Matter” to “Shut up about all the black people getting murdered by black people,” people don’t look to politicians for intellectual consistency. It’s one thing when the neighborhood liquor store or downtown shoe shop gets looted by a group of “teens,” it’s something else entirely when it hits their suburban salon or boutique of choice.
The thought of that keeps Democrats up at night. The thought of that makes Democrats believers in walls, at least metaphorical ones enforced by culture and police. If that wall is breached… lookout.
In the meantime, Democrats have to do something, usually, the bare minimum, to pretend to care about the carnage they really only seek to contain. Which brings us back to Chicago.
In their latest attempt to put a Band-Aid on a bullet wound, the Democrats in the city are calling for a ceasefire…between the hours of 9 am and 9 pm. This, presumably, means it’s game on from dusk till dawn. It’s like holding “The Purge” every night, just as long a suburban Karen can make it home safely from her early dinner downtown. The people who live there…screw them.
It truly is evil. But to not practice evil, you have to view the people being harmed as, well, people. Then you’d have to care about them on top of it. Since the days of slavery, Democrats haven’t viewed black people as people. That’s an “I’m better than you” attitude, not one based on skin color, so the black leadership in the city carries it with them as well.
As long as the violence can be maintained as a “made for TV event,” specifically made for Fox News, nothing will change because there’s no threat to Democrats. Scores of people will continue to die, children will continue to have their future set on fire by a failed education system, and Karen will still get her suburban mani-pedi with her morally superior future cirrhosis circle of friends while watching Bravo, utterly oblivious to the destruction in the wake of her voting habits. And Democrats will laugh all the way to the end.
They’re going to be in for a rude awakening when they get to Hell.
The city of Chicago might as well not exist to Democrats on the national stage. Yes, that party has ruled the city with an iron fist since 1931, and the dead there has a remarkable turnout rate for elections, but in Washington, DC, the city doesn’t exist. Joe Biden and the swamp gang don’t mention it because they’d have to acknowledge the piles of dead bodies the city racks up annually. While they’ll show up occasionally in the region for a photo-op, they won’t talk about the murders, the drugs, or the terror citizens there feel on a daily basis. It is, for lack of a more perfect word, evil.
Republicans have zero say over what happens in Chicago; everything terrible there is directly a result of liberal policies. All the blood spilled drips off the hands of Democrats. They know it; they don’t care.
Why would they? What consequences have Democrats faced for their failure? In the last 92 years, there hasn’t been a blip on the radar of a threat to Democrats winning elections there, so why would anyone give a damn? The city had a chance to pull up, just a little, from its nosedive when they tossed out the incompetent Lori Lightfoot in the mayoral primary last year. But rather than go with a more sane option, they voted for someone even worse. The new Mayor gets more upset when someone refers to murderous goons as a mob than he does any of the murders in the city.
Why is anyone supposed to care if the people who live there don’t? If you continually vote for people who beat the hell out of you, why would people care that you’re regularly getting the hell beat out of you?
Still, it’s an embarrassment to Democrats to see what Chicago has become. The same goes for Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and every other city controlled by Democrats for generations. Not all the crime, not all the death, the pointing out of the crime and the death by Republicans. That’s what Democrats are concerned with – the extent to which the white, suburban chardonnay-swilling soccer mom who votes blindly for Democrats become aware of the indifference with which the progressive power structure views human life and how those dots are connected in their heads between the violence and their “safe” lives. If those voters realize they aren’t more than a few election cycles away from their quiet slice of life being overrun by the same mentality, they might not slavishly vote and donate to Democrats.
These Democrats in power only care about anything to the extent that it can harm their electoral prospects. In these killing fields called cities, those electoral prospects are unburdened by responsibility – Democrats will continue to mine the votes of people who’d elected the morons they’ve elected to mayor’s offices in perpetuity. It’s the suburbs they’re afraid of losing.
It tells you something that the left doesn’t care about all the murders. From “Black Lives Matter” to “Shut up about all the black people getting murdered by black people,” people don’t look to politicians for intellectual consistency. It’s one thing when the neighborhood liquor store or downtown shoe shop gets looted by a group of “teens,” it’s something else entirely when it hits their suburban salon or boutique of choice.
The thought of that keeps Democrats up at night. The thought of that makes Democrats believers in walls, at least metaphorical ones enforced by culture and police. If that wall is breached… lookout.
In the meantime, Democrats have to do something, usually, the bare minimum, to pretend to care about the carnage they really only seek to contain. Which brings us back to Chicago.
In their latest attempt to put a Band-Aid on a bullet wound, the Democrats in the city are calling for a ceasefire…between the hours of 9 am and 9 pm. This, presumably, means it’s game on from dusk till dawn. It’s like holding “The Purge” every night, just as long a suburban Karen can make it home safely from her early dinner downtown. The people who live there…screw them.
It truly is evil. But to not practice evil, you have to view the people being harmed as, well, people. Then you’d have to care about them on top of it. Since the days of slavery, Democrats haven’t viewed black people as people. That’s an “I’m better than you” attitude, not one based on skin color, so the black leadership in the city carries it with them as well.
As long as the violence can be maintained as a “made for TV event,” specifically made for Fox News, nothing will change because there’s no threat to Democrats. Scores of people will continue to die, children will continue to have their future set on fire by a failed education system, and Karen will still get her suburban mani-pedi with her morally superior future cirrhosis circle of friends while watching Bravo, utterly oblivious to the destruction in the wake of her voting habits. And Democrats will laugh all the way to the end.
They’re going to be in for a rude awakening when they get to Hell.
No comments:
Post a Comment