How wonderful it must be to live in a world in which one is so far removed from normal existence that talking points and juvenile fantasies double as life. It has to be positively delicious to float through life on lofty ideals. But of course, such luxuries are reserved only for people like Bill Gates and certain members of the Marble Mafia. We commoners have to clamp down and take a big bite of a reality sandwich every day. For the latest example of D.C. Democrat disconnect, I offer you none other than — who else? — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-TikTok). Okay, that’s actually a pretty crowded field, so if you didn’t have AOC in the pool, that’s understandable.
Ocasio-Cortez made an appearance on The Daily Show on Monday, since, I suspect, the show has a propaganda goal that needs to be met on a weekly basis. Being a woman of means with few concerns about security, she was taking that tired old horse, “Defund the Police,” out for another lap. Apparently, she is miffed that NYC Mayor Eric Adams gave cops in the Big Apple a raise. According to the New York Post, AOC commented:
We are now at a point where officially, most officers are paid more than a teacher with a master’s degree serving these same kids involved in these same incidents. We are defunding safety, defunding our public schools, defunding our public pools, defunding our parks [and] defunding our libraries. When we are taking all of those resources and demanding that every single department — except the militarized one — be cut, we are sending a message about who and what we care about.
Yes, if only we had enough pools, parks, and libraries, crime would go away. Because criminals would rather splash around with a rubber seahorse or browse the fiction stacks than prey on others. Maybe when AOC leaves office, she can run for mayor of Chicago.
A recent New York crime victim — one of the congresswoman’s own constituents — has a different point of view. Last September, 33-year-old Elizabeth Gomes was attacked on a subway platform at the Howard Beach-JFK station. She was beaten, kicked, and dragged across the platform by a mentally ill homeless man, Waheed Foster, who had already been convicted of fatally beating his grandmother. Gomes’s injuries resulted in her losing one of her eyes. She appeared on “Fox & Friends” and commented, “Once you put safety first, everything else will go right after it. I cannot call a teacher if I need help. If a man is running me down, I cannot call a teacher. I’m going to have to call the police. I’m going to be praying for police, not a teacher.”
Related: Forget ‘Defund the Police.’ How About No Police, No Prisons, and No Jail Time for Murder?
Regarding funding teachers and cops, Gomes added:
We need both, but safety do[es] come first. If you don’t make these children safe in school, how would you make them want to go to school? Once anybody feels in danger in any kind of way, they wouldn’t want to go. You want to fix all these community places like pools and parks? But how would people want to go if there’s no safety? I believe safety come[s] with police officers.
There are, of course, two questions that need to be considered. The first is, where were the cops when Gomes was attacked? The other is, why would a mentally unstable man who beat his grandmother to death be on the streets in the first place? Of course, we both know the answers to those queries. Unfortunately for New York and other blue cities across the nation, things will not change until their leaders are separated from their utopian fantasies and personal ambitions and take issues such as crime seriously. Or are replaced. But it should be noted that AOC won her race handily last year. So it will be up to New Yorkers and the denizens of blue regions to decide when they have had enough, even if their leaders haven’t.
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