Depending upon your time horizon, these cities are not worth fighting for. So get out.

Los Angeles, New York, Chicago (a column by John Kass)

Democrat Anguish Will Only Get Worse

By John Kass

Sunday June 29, 2025

From New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, the big cities that are led by Democrats are dying. And the Democrats who lived there know this. It presses down upon them.

And the recent ascent of the surging wild-eyed communist Zohran Mamdani over the tired and listless female groper and grandma killer Andrew Cuomo in the New York Democrat mayoral primary? It’s a gateway into the anguish of the Democrats.

“People go to cities and states where they can invest money and get a return on their investment,” billionaire grocer John Catsimatidis told Fox News after Mamdani’s stunning victory. “That’s what capitalism is all about. They’ll take a vibrant city and kill it.”

The left has already killed Chicago. Los Angeles was burned by fire and riots. New York still has a pulse, but the communist will squeeze the vibrancy of the city that never sleeps. And if things don’t go his way, his army will tear the city apart. Some of us have seen this movie before. It ends with illiterate cave dwellers wandering past the broken Statue of Liberty, unaware of what it once meant.

Those who remain in the dying cities are left with the festering Democrat trinity: decaying civic infrastructure, high violent crime, crushing high taxes. And public schools controlled by the Democrat storm troops of the teachers’ unions that can’t even teach children to read and write as the AI revolution sweeps down on the globe while raking away the illiterate chaff.

Others who loved their towns and urban life are desperate to get out, left to feed on anguish as they flee. Only those who can’t leave remain. It is the dystopian nightmare.

If you get your news from corrupt left wing legacy media, you might not know this, but the big cities have never recovered from the do-nothing George Soros prosecutors who refused to prosecute violent repeat offenders, the prosecutors playing the race card again and again to win elections and re-elections.

Likewise, the cities never recovered from the destruction and looting of the Black Lives Matter riots in the 2020 “Summer of Love.”

The three major cities are led by hard leftist socialists if not outright communists, and their goals are to defund the police, reduce or abolish the jails and prisons, promote universal healthcare, end cash bail, decriminalize drug possession and fight federal immigration enforcement targeting illegal migrant aliens.

And the decay spreads, as the great cities circle the drain. Those who love those great cities are left with an increasing sense of dread.

That’s why I selected August Friedrich Schenck’s painting titled “Anguish” as the opening image for this column. It depicts a mother sheep, a ewe, mourning the body of her lifeless lamb. They are surrounded by a murder of crows. They edge closer to feed on the carcass. They are pitiless.

What feeling does it give us?

Grief and despair. And helplessness.

The same emotions I feel after loving the dying city where I was born.

All this should be no surprise. It was written. After America spent decades embracing illegal immigration as Democrats hunted voters and corporate Republicans hunted cheap labor. Sentimental leftists embraced illegal immigrants who did not have the slightest affinity with the United States—except appetites for federal welfare—the end should have been apparent. And corporate media whipped them on.

Unchecked migration has fundamentally remade the electorate in the major cities. And Democrats change politics by changing voters. That is what the Democrat open borders policy was all about. Replacement.

Add to that decades upon decades of leftist indoctrination in the schools of education, and teachers cleaving to the communist Howard Zinn for “A People’s History of the United States.” Even sitting in the lap of Satan, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, founder of the Soviet state, must be laughing at us all.

The always insightful Orthodox Christian conservative moralist Rod Dreher sees what happened in New York as a referendum on the left on the Democrats. In “Mamdani’s Big Apple Intifada” in his Substack, Dreher writes:

“Left-wing voters in New York City, like their MAGA peers nationally nine years ago, lashed out against what they regard as a failed liberal establishment, electing a charismatic populist who promised a clear break with the past. We on the Right can shake our heads and laugh at how dumb New York liberals and progressives were to choose a candidate as politically inexperienced and radical as Mamdani, but don’t miss that this was also a referendum on the Democratic Party itself, and the party’s style of politics.”

New York flirts with disaster, nominating a hard leftist zealot to be mayor. Los Angeles is still in spasm after the leftist violence there. And my hometown, Chicago, is dying.

Chicago’s Mayor Brandon Johnson is a confused communist completely out of his depth. His opponent, the educator Paul Vallas understood management and budgets, but Vallas was a white man, and therefore unacceptable to the Chicago media and the left wing shock troops of the Chicago Teachers Union. They installed Johnson as their useful idiot. And Johnson’s old boss, the racist leftist known as Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle joined with the destructive element that we call AWFLs (Angry White Female Leftists). And Johnson was installed.

You want to open up a restaurant? There is an overabundance of empty commercial space in the city that used to work, courtesy of the BLM riots. And now Johnson has vetoed a teen curfew ordinance that would have let Chicago police shut down violent “teen takeovers” that get out of hand, sending a message that Chicago has given into anarchy.

Who wants to invest in Chicago businesses now? Nobody.

Adding even more gall to the cup of taxpayers, consider that after decades and decades of Democrat control of the legislature and State Supreme Court, the average retired state worker gets nearly $25,000 more than those who work to support them (meaning lowly taxpayers).

In Los Angeles leftist activists and aggressive muscle from SEIU are about following and harassing ICE agents. And a short car ride away, the Democrat vice mayor of Cudahy, Cynthia Gonzalez called on street gangs to attack federal immigration agents.

“Not for nothing, but I want to know where all the cholos are at in Los Angeles? 18^th Street, Florencia, where’s the leadership at?” said Gonzalez on video. “You guys are all about territory and this is 18^th Street, and this is Florencia and you guys tag everything up claiming hood. And now that your hood is being invaded by the biggest gang there is, there ain’t a peep out of you.”

“It’s everyone else who’s not about the gang life that’s out there protesting and speaking up,” she said. “We’re out there fighting our turf, protecting our turf, protecting our people and, like, where you at?”

And U.S. Attorney Bill Essyli filed a lawsuit against Orange County for refusing to hand over records showing non-citizens illegally voting, casting ballots.

For Republican political operatives, the elevation of Mamdani is a gift. “I’d describe it as Christmas in July for the GOP,” said Sen. John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Democrat.

But for the nation, it’s a threat.

Consider this from the communist Mamdani, who sounds like the deranged Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, channeling his do-nothing Soros prosecutor zero Kim Foxx and Boss Toni Preckwinkle:

Zohran wants to empty the jails, as Boss Toni and Mayor Panic Attacks have done in Chicago.

Mamdani and Johnson sell the fiction they’re with the working class. But Mamdani owes his victory in New York to wealthy white elites. And Johnson owes his to the AWFLs and the Chicago Teachers Union and Boss Toni. And Castro organizer and LA Mayor Karen Bass is also encouraging violence, as are the others, because the left is all about force, all about violence.

Mamdani insists–with the smug assurance of a boy of elite leftist privilege–that violence is a nothing “construction.” Is that how the hard leftists talk at their cocktail parties in Soho and the Upper East Side?

Or is that how they talk when illegal migrant street gangs like Tren de Aragua club them to the ground, their women screaming, the leftists crawling on the pavement spitting blood during a robbery.

Is it what the leftist Menshevik’s believed up until the moment the Bolsheviks devoured them in the streets? If you’ve kept your eyes open you’ve seen this playing out in our big cities.

After Johnson, Bass, Mamdani have finished preening and what will be left of their cities?

The murder of crows edge closer, And the violent bear it away.

About the author: John Kass spent decades as a political writer and news columnist in Chicago working at a major metropolitan newspaper. He is co-host of The Chicago Way podcast. And he just loves his “No Chumbolone” hat, because johnkassnews.com is a “No Chumbolone” Zone where you can always get a cup of common sense.

BTW: Mamdami won the debate because he didn’t say his first trip abroad would be to Israel. In fact, he said he’s staying home — to deal with issues at home. From a purely strategic political POV, he did what voters are craving: promised to focus on what’s in front of him. Very Trumpian...

I think this candidate spells the end of NYC, however. And I also think that if you’re in retirement or close to it, these crumbling blue cities are not worth fighting for.

Sorry, it’s enough already.

I’m done.

And I’m OUT.