America’s Cities Dying in a Woke World

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America’s Cities Dying in a Woke World

If the wages of sin is death, surely the wages of woke must be the death of America’s cities.

Take Chicago.  It has the best architecture, those beloved and once again hapless Cubbies, a truly Magnificent Mile on the shores of Lake Michigan, deep dish pizza, Harold’s fried chicken, and a wonderland of a Navy pier.

Yet, to enjoy any these Windy City treats is to risk a carjacking and the crossfire of warring gangs.  Chicago is the car-jacking capital of, and most gang-infested city in, America. 

Chicago’s woke “sanctuary city” status has now left it at a tipping point into chaos because of the open borders policies of Joe Biden.  Fully one third of Chicago’s projected $538 million budget deficit for 2024 flows from its flood of illegal aliens. 

Meanwhile, over 10,000 migrants are scattered across the city in temporary shelters or, get this, housed in Chicago police stations.   These poorly educated illegal aliens are crowding out black and brown Chicagoans at the lower end of the labor market, driving down wages and sparking angry confrontations.

Then there is the roller coaster, trolley car ride of a city where excrement literally does roll downhill -- San Francisco.  In this moral desert of Nancy Pelosi and Gavin Newsom, homelessness, public defecation, and drug addiction are now Frisco’s finest art.

The woke failure I have witnessed up close and personal is my once beloved Washington DC.  I went to BCC high school across the border in Bethesda, Maryland, and spent countless days honing my basketball skills -- and learning all I’ve ever needed to know about race relations -- on the predominantly black DC playgrounds.  The nights I spent with my girlfriend at the Howard Theater rocking to Motown remains one of my life’s fondest memories. 

Today, however, DC is dead to me.  I am officially a Florida resident and only occasionally return to the DC Swamp to deal with my legal issues. 

To refresh, U.S. v. Navarro is a landmark case destined for the Supreme Court.  In contradiction to the Department of Justice’s own more than 50-year policy, I am the first White House advisor ever to be charged with standing up to Congress in defense of executive privilege and the Constitutional separation of powers.  But the specter of a possible two year prison term – I’m to be sentenced on January 25 -- is not what has soured me so thoroughly on DC. 

What has soured me is Washington’s descent into Woke Hell.  It began shortly after the Wuhan virus pandemic started in early 2020.   Woke Mayor Muriel Bowser would lock down the city longer than almost any other in America – and then double down with a mandatory vax policy.

This one-two woke punch rapidly accelerated the hollowing out of Washington’s business districts and commercial real estate already reeling from a pandemic spurring suburban flight and a remote worker explosion.  Channeling her inner Angela Davis, Bowser then threatened desperate commercial real estate landlords with building takeovers.

Bowser likewise followed the lead of other woke cities – L.A., New York, Philly, Seattle, et. al. -- in slashing millions from DC’s police budget while seeking to turn police departments into social worker centers.  The result has been an exponential increase in the crime rate – surprise, surprise.

Washington’s metro rail system has also suffered dramatically from declining ridership as people have fled the city and remote workers no longer need to ride tin cans to work.  Yet, Bowser has made it all so much worse by refusing to meaningfully crack down on the numerous scofflaws that regularly ride the Metro rails for free.

These scofflaws not only deprive the system of needed revenues.  They also often terrorize the paying customers.  The last time I was on the metro, I almost got caught in a gunfight crossfire – just saying.

A clueless Bowser – please look in the mirror Muriel -- is now up in arms over the recent announcement by the Ted Leonsis, the owner of the Washington Capitals hockey team and Washington Wizards and Mystics basketball teams.  His Monumental Sports & Entertainment conglomerate plans to move out of the downtown Capital One arena to a state-of-the art facility in Alexandria, Virginia.

And who can blame Leonsis: What once was a vibrant, family friendly environment around the Cap One arena has, under Bowser’s woke “leadership,” descended into a cavalcade of pimps, hookers, dope dealers, beggars, betting parlors, pick pockets, grifters, and violent homeless schizoids.  While the police force now shows up in greater numbers,  it is willing to show any of that force, much less make any arrests because of the woke dictates from on high.

Here's the unintended comic coda: Shortly after the Cap One arena closure announcement, the DC Metro announced another type of closure.  This was the temporary closure of the Galleria Place metro stop, the critical “red line” artery stop that brings folks in from the greater Washington area to the Capital One arena.   If Leonsis and company needed another excuse to beat feet, this ill-timed closure surely provides that.

As the Terminator might say: Hasta la vista, baby.”  Not just to Washington DC as we once knew it.  But to every woke city in America.

Peter Navarro served for in the Trump White House as manufacturing czar and chief China strategist.  Follow Peter at