Take two things and put them together. First, this, which I’ve seen in many different forms on social media lately, usually from small accounts (here’s another example):
Keep that statement in mind as we move to the next part. I shot this video today, on Manhattan Place in Koreatown — central Los Angeles — between 7th Street and 8th Street, a mixed-generation neighborhood full of children and the elderly. It’s only twenty seconds long, so it won’t take much of your time to see it for yourself. Just watch what it reveals.
In a neighborhood of clean and well-maintained apartment buildings with pleasant gardens, people open their bedroom windows to a giant homeless encampment that’s covered in garbage and surely crawling with rats. You can smell it from the end of the block, because the dirt of the lot is the toilet (and the garbage can) for the people who live in that encampment. I’m sorry that I can’t get odors on video, but maybe I can call Vegas and book the Sphere for a few nights. “Full-immersion Los Angeles, one week only.”
Put yourself in that building, with a bedroom window that opens onto the piss and shit stench and the open drug use, with homeless neighbors who steal from the neighborhood and patch into your electricity (which you get to pay for).
I didn’t go through the hole in the fence to explore the encampment, because some dude inside started yelling at me in a way that was a bit more aggressive than I felt like dealing with, but you can get a decent sense of it from the sidewalk.
For a premium, you can get an apartment with a balcony that overlooks the giant open toilet.
I looked in on that neighborhood because it was in the news last night, and KTLA can afford a helicopter to give you a better view:
In this news story, you can read details about the response from city government: “Mayor Karen Bass’ Office said it’s dispatching outreach workers to the growing encampment on the Manhattan Place lot to engage with the unhoused.” But no worries, because the local member of the Los Angeles City Council is on it:
"Our office has been working to move the city to act on this for several months. Because it’s private property, there is a whole process set up that often takes years," Yaroslavsky's office said in a statement.
The city is going to engage with the unhoused, but the process can take several years. Los Angeles. The blue zones. California.
At least some red zones struggle impotently with similar problems, with maybe somewhat more emphasis on cleaning, but Uniparty America is producing unmistakable decay in the quality of neighborhoods and cities:
People don’t want to live in shit, and they really don’t want their children to live in shit, but we don’t have a politics that seems able to address that desire. Our politics mostly doesn’t reach the street.
I was near Koreatown today because the Trump administration organized a raid by immigration agencies on MacArthur Park a while back, and worthless Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass shamelessly depicted that dangerous open-air drug den as a clean and safe place where children play and families picnic. I wrote about that nonsense at the time, but I wanted to follow up and see if anyone has made any progress at all in addressing the misery and ruin in a place where everybody knows about the problem. So I walked toward the park:
And then I walked into the park:
And then I walked back to my car:
Doing great! Almost all cleaned up!
I’m sensitive to the problem of posting pictures of drug addicts, by the way, and I know that’s someone’s child, but I also think we need to see reality. I don’t know how to resolve the tension between those competing values.
The idiot mayor of Los Angeles spends her days like this:
Everybody covered this MAJOR CONFLICT, by the way. What did you do in the Great Flag War of 2025, grandpa?
Normal people: I want to be able to walk down the street where I live without encountering danger, filth, and misery.
Politics: How about a fight over who gets to be symbolically mourned with lowered flags when they’re murdered?
The Democratic Party has simply no ability at all to address any form of real problem, anywhere, ever, and they live entirely on symbol-focused theatrics. They’re useless, or worse than useless and on into the category of being actual agents of ruin. The best argument for much of the Republican Party is that it’s maybe a bit less than a half-step ahead, most of the time, with the exception of the HUGE NAZI who actually thinks cities should be clean and safe. You can argue over the wisdom of using the National Guard to address disorder in the cities, and it’s the last approach I would want to see, but you don’t get to that choice without a massive and relentless failure in a bunch of extremely basic local effort. Pick a city and drive around if you doubt it. Offer not valid in Coeur D’Alene.
Politics is not delivering the thing people most obviously want. Elected officials and political parties mostly don’t seem to be trying.
I live in NYC . More people don’t care if they live in shit than you could ever believe .
25 year retiree of the NYC Sanitation Department here.
I could tell you stories that are unimaginable unless you had my first hand experience.
Please don’t forget that these people ALLOW drugs dealers to deal death right out of the apartment buildings their kids bounce a ball on the steps of .
I’m 64 years old , seen dozens of waves of immigrants from all over the the world and there’s one thing I know for sure …. they’re not all the same .
That’s a child’s dream . Some cultures are inherently inferior and will shit where they sleep , no problem.
On the other hand, I’ve watched the poorest of the poor , families with nothing , get off of airplanes in these same neighborhoods-different cultures however - with brown skin and in one generation raise doctors , nurses, architects, teachers ….. simply because they stressed the value of a education and the free public school education system in America .
Putting the liberal lie to rest once and forever about how the system doesn’t work.
Some cultures , black American culture for one , can’t get out of its own way .
Every time I see that lying Karen Bass' name, never mind hear her voice, or God forbid see her image with her idiot's smile and fake cheeriness (when she's not doing her fake angry ranting act), I remember the sick, sinking feeling I had when my husband and I were evacuated from the January fires and I saw her peddling her piles of horse$%@# to L.A. residents on the local TV news. I knew NOTHING good would come from her being mayor for L.A. residents who had lost everything and who only wanted desperately to GO HOME, as we did. She and her minions are useless, money-grubbing, power-mad bottom-feeders. Calling them communists almost gives them too much credit.