Fast Takes: Vagrants are not our ‘neighbors,’ AOC’s ‘craaaazy’ theory lives on and more

Urbanist: Vagrants Are Not Our ‘Neighbors’

“A Los Angeles city councilman just coined a new appellation for the drug-addicted vagrants who colonize city streets. They are ‘our neighbors,’” fumes City Journal’s Heather Mac Donald.

Hah! “‘Neighbor’ traditionally conjures the image of someone with an equal stake in one’s community as oneself,” while “the occupants of the feces- and drug-strewn trash sites” euphemistically called “encampments” “contribute nothing, pay no rent or taxes, and inevitably bring lawlessness and predation.”

They “almost invariably” turn down offered shelter and because “they want no interference with their unrestricted drug use.”

“Would [Hugo] Soto-Martinez and his fellow DSA members ask an encampment occupant to watch their children while they run an errand” as “one might with an actual neighbor? The instinctive answer is: Of course not!”

Fiscal watch: AOC’s ‘Craaaazy’ Theory Lives On

“Remember modern monetary theory?” asks The Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley.

That was Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “craaaazy” Woke 1 economic view that deficits don’t matter because government can print money and then raise taxes to tame inflation.

It predicted “what the government did during the pandemic,” leading to “persistent inflation and a $40 trillion debt.”

Yet “MMT still undergirds” Democrats’ agenda, even if they’ve “retired the term.”

Fed boss Kevin Warsh “wants no part of MMT,” but the left still pushes taxes: Sen. Bernie Sanders backs “a 5% wealth tax”; AOC proposed a “70% top marginal rate on income.”

She’s still pushing the “the woke economic idea that raiding the rich can pay for their wildest spending dreams.” What will it take “for them to wake up?”

From the right: Rise of the Hatemongers

By “commodifying rage,” Hasan “Piker is reportedly raking in a fortune, as are other hatemongers like Jennifer Welch,” seethes Jonathan Turley at Fox News.

On his Fear& LIVE tour, Piker led a “crowd in the meme song ‘We Are Charlie Kirk,’” all “laughing with joy.”

The “essence of this movement” — where “hatemongers on the left want to enjoy hate speech while accusing others of hate and intolerance” — is “to desensitize people, particularly young people, to violence and hate.” 

In our current “age of rage,” these new “berserkers offer the chance to hate completely and without remorse or reflection,” turning political violence and assassination into “nothing more than a sing-a-long.” 

Conservative: Raskin’s Antisemitism 180

Jamie Raskin has “offered a preview” of the “Democrats’ game plan” if they win the House this November, warns Bill Barr at The Free Press: He means to probe supposed Team Trump’s “false claims of antisemitism” at the Ivies, which he calls “an open-sea fishing expedition” based solely on a Post article.

But “this completely rewrites history,” as “the crisis of antisemitism in higher education” has “been unfolding in plain sight” since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and Gaza war “prompted anti-Israel students and activists to unleash a tsunami of harassment, intimidation, and violence against Jews on campuses throughout the country.”

When the “investigation actually began,” Raskin said he was “shocked and astonished” at academic antisemitism.

Now, notes Barr, he’s turned in “the direction in which the political winds are blowing,” since “anti-Zionism and antisemitism” pay “good dividends” in the Democratic Party these days.

Justice beat: DEI Ignores Reality

Despite constitutional prohibitions on racial preferences and Americans’ opposition to them, “progressives won’t give up” on DEI, observes Kevin M. Spivak at RealClearPolitics.

“Their race-obsessed thinking reduces America to intersectional classifications of oppressed and oppressor” — and “no group is seen as more oppressed and deserving of preferences than African Americans.”

Yet “about 12% of the students in Ivy League colleges are black”; “there are 61 black members in the House” and five black senators; 14 black billionaires and 1.4 million black millionaires; 10% of first-year medical school students are black, as are 8% of law-school students.

“Progressives should respect our values”: It’s past time for “restoring equality and the dignity of blacks by ending the disgrace of DEI.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board