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About a month ago, I was in Portland, Oregon, ostensibly to cover the riots outside an ICE facility. But what surprised me even more was the total lack of order in the miserable streets of the city. Don’t look now. But the same kind of disorder could come to New York City.
Four years ago, as Democratic Socialist Bill de Blasio was ending eight years of disgraceful and mismanagement of Gotham City, the New York Post tasked me with a walk around midtown Manhattan to document the destruction he had wrought.
To be clear, New York City in 2021 wasn’t as bad as Portland or San Francisco now, but it was very bad.
Here’s how I explained it at the time:
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“Some people are lying half-naked on the concrete of the sidewalk, others are wearing little gags, raising meager funds for illegal purchases. Others are wandering the streets shouting incoherently like Times Square preachers. A man in a flowing dress dances seductively across the cab-strewn traffic of Eighth Avenue and lands on a light pole to perform a kind of striptease.
Zohran Mamdani, the leading candidate for New York City mayor, is spending huge sums on personal security for his campaign and personal life, despite previous calls to defund the police. (Reuters/Brendan McDermid and New York Police Department)
“The city’s response to all of this these days seems to be doing nothing.”
Fortunately, Mayor Eric Adams quickly worked with the NYPD to improve many of these issues upon taking office in 2022. Just a few months into his term, the scent of marijuana wafted between the glass towers and steel towers, but at least the people selling the drug in cardboard boxes with scales were gone.
Douglas Murray warns that MAMDANI’s socialist policies could lead to a London-style decline in New York City.
As a former police officer, Adams understood that quality-of-life crime was a major threat to the city and established a quality-of-life team, or “Q Team,” at the police department to deal with low-level street crime, although he eschewed the controversial term “broken windows policing.”
This is exactly the kind of effort that Zany Zohran Mamdani has promised to eliminate as he plans to replace the police response with that of social workers and the homelessness industrial complex. This is the exact same plan that destroyed Portland.
A protester reacts as law enforcement officers deploy smoke grenades to disperse people gathered outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters in south Portland, Oregon, October 5, 2025. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)
This week, Sophie Vershbow, a writer for New York magazines Esquire and Jezebel, posted this very impressive X post: He said, “None of Zohran’s big proposals (free busing, free child care, rent freeze) will directly affect my life because I’m privileged AF and don’t want kids. I want to vote for him because every New Yorker deserves to have their basic needs met and live with dignity. It’s that simple.”
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This is the attitude that led to Portland’s corruption. And Vershbow is right. She will be largely unaffected. Brunch and cocktails will continue to be served. There will still be an Uber to keep her “privileged AF” safe on the subway.
And given that Vershbow doesn’t care about children, who cares if she has to pass by a few drug addicts or sprawling corpses? This is difficult to explain to children, but too easy for adults to ignore.
Zohran Mamdani is pictured with a supporter as he arrives at an anti-Trump event in Staten Island. (Deirdre Heavey/Fox News Digital)
De Blasio has done well to bring New York to that breaking point by 2021. Times Square was not a place you would want to take your kids, but fortunately for Adams, voters rejected his socialist policies.
It seems unfathomable that the Big Apple is prepared to return to the miserable socialist wages it recently experienced and was voted out of. But to be fair, if Mamdani wins, he will likely do so with less than 50% of the vote.
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Find out what quality of life issues will be like in Portland if that happens. It took de Blasio eight years to undo the generational advances of Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, but Zohran will hit the ground running.
New York’s wealthy who choose not to avoid skyrocketing taxes like Portland will do just fine. Like communist leaders, they suffer no deprivation from Marxism. To them, this is not a death sentence for a once great city, but simply a grand and loving experiment.
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It was the people of Portland who destroyed their hometown by refusing to police the streets, refusing to deal with the homeless and addicts, and driving small businesses into the ground with impunity theft.
Unfortunately, it looks like New Yorkers will soon follow suit and things could get uglier than ever in Gotham.
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