On June 11, 2020, during the occupation of Seattle’s Capitol Hill by a fashionably diverse crew of BLM radicals, Antifa goons, stoned baristas, and well-intentioned soccer moms, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan proclaimed that the arson, assault, battery, theft, and vandalism that defined the season might well be Seattle’s “Summer of Love.”
On June 28, socialist Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant led a mob of protesters to Durkan’s home. Two days later, Durkan demanded that the council investigate and expel Sawant for doxxing her. Then, on July 1, Durkan issued an executive order for the Seattle police to clear the area and make Capitol Hill part of America again.
That was just the first dent in the woke armor.
During the riot season of 2020, the Democratic mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul did little to halt the practice of burning squad cars, terrorizing local merchants, and stripping local markets bare of Tide Pods, the cryptocurrency of amateur criminals. Then, on May 13, 2021, nearly a year later, 20-year-old Daunte Wright was accidentally killed during a traffic stop by a Minneapolis officer who mistook her handgun for a taser.
The next day, the Twin City mayors held a press conference, where they expressed sympathy for the family of the victim, but also imposed a curfew, declared zero tolerance for rioting and looting, and called on the National Guard to maintain order.
To quote Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey:
The anguish we are suffering cannot translate into violence. Destroying livelihoods, destroying locally owned businesses that our communities have poured their hearts and soul into for decades, and the unraveling of the sacrifices that people have made for so long, that cannot, that will not be tolerated … . And as of this afternoon, I have declared a state of emergency in the city of Minneapolis. And we are following that up with a curfew that will begin at 7:00 p.m. tonight.
Cut to San Francisco, where progressive Mayor London Breed had been soft on crime for years. In 2018, she asked then-California Gov. Jerry Brown to pardon her older brother, Napoleon Brown, who was serving a 44-year sentence for armed robbery, pistol-whipping a restaurant manager, and pushing a woman passenger out of his getaway car in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge, where she was killed by an oncoming driver.
In Breed’s letter to the governor, she said her brother’s freedom is “what’s best for both Napoleon and society overall.” Fortunately, Brown refused to commute Napoleon Brown’s sentence.
All this was before San Francisco made international headlines as the “Grab & Go” epicenter of the world. Because Chesa Boudin, the district attorney who was raised by domestic terrorists Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, refuses to prosecute any shoplifter who steals less than $950, five Walgreens and six CVS pharmacies permanently shut their doors.
And in a nationally televised event, on Nov. 18, a crew of undocumented shoppers invaded Union Square, and relieved Louis Vuitton of nearly its entire inventory.
It’s unclear if Breed has a soft spot for high-end retail, but something snapped, because on Dec. 14, she directed her newfound disdain for crime a mile east, to San Francisco’s historically crime-ridden Tenderloin District. She announced her plan to assign more police to the Tenderloin, and to begin arresting drug users.
“It’s time for the reign of criminals who are destroying our city … to come to an end,” Breed said. “And it comes to an end when we take the steps to be more aggressive with law enforcement … and less tolerant of all the bulls— that has destroyed our city. What I’m proposing today and what I will be proposing in the future will make a lot of people uncomfortable, and I don’t care.”
Encouraging signs can even be found in Chicago, where Mayor Lori Lightfoot has put considerable distance between herself and the worst progressive Democrats.
On Jan. 4, the Chicago Teachers Union voted not to report to work the next day, robbing over 300,000 students of classroom time, and free hot lunches, and forcing parents to either miss work or leave their children at home without supervision.
Lightfoot was quick to respond. “This walkout by the teachers union, which is illegal, has had cascading negative ripple effects not only on the students in their learning, their social and emotional welfare, but also on the families themselves,” she said. “So, I’m going to be on the side of the parents fighting every single day to get our kids back in school.”
These are just a few examples. The excesses of the extreme left are so counter to logic and decency that even America’s most progressive mayors are finding them impossible to swallow.
I haven’t even mentioned the nascent beef between newly elected New York Mayor Eric Adams and super-squishy District Attorney Alvin Bragg, but it promises to be major.
The new year is barely a few weeks old and stuck deep in winter, but to me, these are signs of hope. I look forward to a spring and summer where this anti-woke momentum builds and builds, till our cities and our country see profound change on Nov. 8.
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