New York City: The Big Apple or the Red Apple?

Originally posted at American Thinker.

New York City’s Mayor de Blasio has been sworn in, and his remarks at the ceremony proved that he is unabashed in his affection for progressivism.  De Blasio vows to level the playing field, punish the rich, share the wealth, and further the progressive vision in the City That Never Sleeps.

 

Mr. de Blasio’s words even made “bedeviled” Bill Clinton feel comfortable enough to acknowledge his usually deeply disguised radical left-leaning ideology.  Speaking directly to Slick Willy, who attended with Hillary “Claw Her Way to the Top” Clinton, de Blasio said, “[O]ver 20 years ago, when a conservative philosophy seemed dominant, [Clinton] broke through — and told us to still believe in a place called Hope.” 

 

As for presidential hopeful Hillary, de Blasio thanked her for informing America that “It Takes a Village” to raise a child.  Things got so blatant, Department of Sanitation chaplain Reverend Fred Lucas, Jr. of the Brooklyn Community Church even went so far as to call the city that used to symbolize opportunity and success a “plantation.”

 

De Blasio thanked Andrew “Fewer Guns, More Abortion” Cuomo and former mayors “Nanny State” Bloomberg and David “High Crime and Taxes” Dinkins, the latter of whom de Blasio credits for being the reason he met his wife, self-avowed former lesbian Chirlane McCray, the first openly gay person to run Dinkins’S City Hall.

 

Mayor de Blasio thanked Chirlane and his two children, son Dante, who resembles Clarence Williams III from the Mod Squad, and daughter Chiara, who recently admitted to struggling with substance abuse.

 

De Blasio even thanked his family from Italy, a country where, before he was a fascist, Mussolini was a socialist like de Blasio and got the Italian people to accept a dictatorship by getting them to falsely believe that he got the trains to run on time.

 

From there, de Blasio sounded like Barack Obama, whipping up a crowd with socialistic drivel when he reminded his audience that New York City is a place where “big dreams are not a luxury reserved for a privileged few.”

 

De Blasio declared, “New York has faced fiscal collapse, a crime epidemic, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters. But now, in our time, we face a different crisis — an inequality crisis.” 

 

What de Blasio forgot to mention is that the “inequality crisis” he hopes to rectify was created by all the wealthy liberals he just thanked for attending his swearing-in ceremony.

 

Nonetheless, in a time when terrorism and crime remain a threat to New York City, de Blasio feels that even if the city remains a rat-infested terrorist target, his priority is to “put an end to economic and social inequalities” that the smiling group of bobble-heads cheering him on helped advance.

 

The way Mr. de Blasio proposes to accomplish that goal is through a “new progressive direction.”  The mayor is so committed to “progressivism” that he mentioned the word six times.  He brought up “progressive direction … impulse … income tax … reform … vision.”  He even vowed to transform the five boroughs, Lord have mercy, into a more “progressive place.” 

 

After acknowledging and thanking communist sympathizer and keynote speaker Harry Belafonte, without a moment of hesitation, de Blasio mentioned “challeng[ing] the status quo” in a similar way to Progressive Era champions like Danish/American social reformer/photographer/journalist Jacob Riis and Hillary Clinton’s own psychic muse, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as Al Smith, Franklin Roosevelt, Frances Perkins, and Fiorello La Guardia.

 

According to the new mayor, those individuals, like himself, were on a mission to expose corporate greed and welcome immigrants, as well as “blaze a trail of progressive reform and political action” by “taking on the elite” and standing up for “social and economic justice!”

 

How exactly does Mr. de Blasio plan to rectify the current “inequality crisis” he feels plagues the city, because he did compare NYC with the evil horse-drawn carriage era of Charles Dickens’s French Revolution Tale of Two Cities.

 

Based on his promises, the de Blasio Revolution plans to expand the Paid Sick Leave Law; to “require big developers to build more affordable housing” (emphasis on require); expand community health centers in neighborhoods in need; and “to protect the dignity and rights of young men of color” by messing around with a highly successful crime deterrent called stop-and-frisk.

 

With the Clintons’ approval, de Blasio stressed that he didn’t want New Yorkers “to see our city … as the exclusive domain of the One Percen[t]” — the group the Clintons as well as many others on the dais have comfortably settled into.

 

Evidently, Mayor de Blasio thinks that bureaucratic pre-K and after-school programs are the only way to ensure that, like his daughter Chiara who struggled with marijuana and alcohol, “our kids get on the right path and stay there.”  That’s why, in order to accomplish that “common cause” goal, de Blasio will tax the wealthy and use those monies to finance an “It Takes a Village”-style “full-day universal pre-K and after-school programs for every middle school student.”

 

With Bill and Hillary nodding “yea” and “amen,” predictably de Blasio demeaned “far right … trickle-down economics [and] ‘[r]ugged individualism.'”  And despite Michael Bloomberg feeling the need to address obesity in New York City, de Blasio felt moved to quote Fiorello La Guardia, who said, “I, too, admire the ‘rugged individual,’ but no ‘rugged individual’ can survive in the midst of collective starvation.”

 

The new mayor outlined the basic tenet of redistribution of wealth when he asked his audience to “please remember: we do not ask more of the wealthy to punish success. We do it to create more success stories.”

 

Failing to explain who decides what is unequal or unjust or how his policy strengthens people, de Blasio stressed the notion of “[a] city that fights injustice and inequality — not just because it honors our values, but because it strengthens our people.”

 

In the wake of de Blasio’s swearing-in, it’s clear that newly minted Hizzoner has big plans to create his idea of a more equal, more progressive New York.  That means if the guy Bill and Hillary Clinton enthusiastically swore in has his way, the Big Apple is about to become the Red Apple.