Last week, I received an email from a friend. As a former U.S. Army intelligence officer during the Cold War, he carried out clandestine collection operations for the Defense Intelligence Agency in Germany, and later worked as an international war correspondent for the Associated Press. He's served on numerous corporate boards and is a military historian and lecturer. The email from him was to let me know that he'd just posted this on Facebook:
I have been in Denver for the past few days. I can tell you this once great and once beautiful city has become a leftist cesspool. With a Democrat mayor and governor, what else can you expect? Drug fueled tent encampments are all over the city with a major one just below the Capitol. Lots of graffiti and hateful anti-Trump racist Black Lives Matter slogans. Major government buildings are fenced off to prevent people from getting on the grounds or to prevent them from being attacked. Driving around, my main impression is this is a decaying civilization. If you are not strong enough to defend it from the barbarians, you are bound to lose it.
What happened to Atlanta and Denver also happened to virtually every Democrat-run city in America
The rapidly decaying civilization my friend observed in Denver is nationwide in scope, and has been in a state of inexorable decline long before the recent race riots destroyed large sections of more than 140 U.S. cities, including the one where I live, Atlanta.
When I was a student at Georgia Tech in the mid-1960s, Atlanta was a clean, safe and truly beautiful city. Then along came a well-intended, but horribly misguided, war: the war on poverty.
Over the intervening half-century, Atlanta, like Denver, became an unsafe eyesore marked by urban blight, vagrants defecating on public sidewalks, boarded-up houses, vacant lots, abandoned buildings, rat-infested public housing, gang graffiti everywhere, inexcusably sorry schools, generational poverty and, of course, the inevitable offshoot of such wretched living conditions: chronic despair endured by millions of disadvantaged people in America's rundown inner cities, crime infested urban war zones entirely unfit for human habitation.
After the bulk of $22 trillion in anti-poverty funding was siphoned off by blue state and blue city elected officials to expand their political empires with money intended to help lift the black underclass, urban America is in worse shape than ever, a humiliating national tragedy by any measure.
What happened to Atlanta and Denver also happened to virtually every Democrat-run city in America. I do not say that as a partisan swipe. I say it because it is true. Decades of progressive rule has bred a snake's nest of dysfunctional cities: Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit, Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Charlotte, Cleveland, Baltimore, Newark, New York City, the nation's capitol, and on and on and on.
Dysfunctional cities where mayors do fist-pumps as Americans taught to hate their country burn U.S. flags and tear down statues of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant and Francis Scott Key, composer of the National Anthem.
Dysfunctional cities where mayors order police departments to stand down to clear the way for rioting and looting carried out by violent Marxist revolutionaries hiding behind the noble cause of racial justice.
Dysfunctional cities where mayors look the other way as masked anarchists attack police with guns, knives, two-by-fours, metal pipes, explosives spiked with nails, smoke bombs, rocks, bricks, bottles of frozen water, spray paint, bleach, spit and who knows what else. Federal agents sent to Portland to prevent destruction of a U.S. District Court may have been permanently blinded by anarchists who beamed laser light at their eyes. Please click here to see a sampling of the raging anarchy that's been going on in Portland for nearly ten straight weeks, all while the city's Democrat mayor and the state's Democrat governor watched as portions of the city were methodically reduced to burned-out rubble.
Dysfunctional cities where mayors give a wink and a nod to rioting and looting in rare instances when police wrongfully kill a black person, but remain stone silent as black on black homicides in the cities they run leave thousands of African Americans dead each year, including dozens of young black children caught in the crossfire. Although nearly 450 people—450!—have been murdered in Chicago so far this year, the city's Democrat mayor mockingly rebuffed President Trump's offer to send federal law enforcement officers to help quell the carnage. Only after 15 people were recently shot outside a Chicago funeral home did she appear to begrudgingly change her mind.
Dysfunctional cities where mayors refuse to enforce their nation's immigration laws, and now demand that big chunks of police department budgets be handed over to them so they will have even more money with which to further entrench the uninterrupted Democrat rule that bears sole responsibility for having run urban America into the ground.
A great country committing suicide, city by city by city. What a shame.
To understand how thoroughly Democrats have unilaterally decimated America's once-thriving cities, or on the image to see what the four Chicago ex-offenders pictured below had to say in 2014, when President Obama was still in office.
