The Patriot Post® · De Blasio's Socialism Is Wrecking New York City
Being mayor of New York City, America’s largest metropolis and one of the world’s true international cities, is a high-profile job. Yet it rarely leads to higher office, and no sitting mayor of any city has ever become president of the United States. In fact, no mayor has ever even come close to winning the White House. Even Rudy Giuliani, whose solid leadership following 9/11 earned him the nickname “America’s Mayor,” failed in his 2008 bid after leaving office at the end of 2001. And only Grover Cleveland and Calvin Coolidge had even previously served as mayors.
Nevertheless, New York City mayors wield political influence beyond their municipal borders. They live and work in the media capital of the world, they manage government budgets that are larger than all but a handful of states, and they govern a population of 8.3 million that dwarfs that of other American municipalities. In a city that prides itself on producing brash, even egotistical, people, it’s virtually impossible to be a New York mayor and be low profile.
And so it is with the current mayor, Bill de Blasio. Entering the halfway point of his second term, de Blasio has been part of the national political conversation since first taking office in 2014. Being a mayor of a major city, it’s safe to assume that de Blasio is left of center; that is the nature of big-city politics in modern America. Few people outside of NYC know who he is, even after his pathetic 2020 presidential run, which lasted all of four months. It would be a mistake to underestimate de Blasio, though, or the harm he can do to the country through the ideas that he champions. See, Bill de Blasio is no ordinary liberal mayor. In fact, the case could be made that de Blasio is a stone-cold Marxist.
De Blasio was born Warren Wilhelm Jr. in 1961 to left-elite parents. His father was Warren Wilhelm Sr. (Harvard and Yale) and mother was Maria De Blasio (Smith College), both of whom had government jobs but left under suspicion of having communist sympathies. His alcoholic father abandoned the family when Warren Jr. was seven and later committed suicide. Because of this, Warren Jr., who was raised along with his siblings by his mother, later changed his name to Bill de Blasio – taking his mother’s maiden name, and Bill was a nickname.
De Blasio spent most of his young life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but moved to NYC to attend New York University and later Columbia to pursue his interest in politics and government. Always holding close to his parents’ leftist ideals, de Blasio went to Nicaragua in the 1980s, where he gained sympathy for the Soviet-backed communist Sandinista regime. The Sandinistas had an iron grip on the country, imprisoning and murdering civilians and fighting the U.S.-backed Contras. De Blasio was impressed with the socialist style of government. According to The New York Times, de Blasio returned from that visit with “a vision of the possibilities of an unfettered leftist government.”
In 1989, de Blasio entered NYC politics, joining the mayoral campaign of Democrat David Dinkins and later becoming an aide in his administration. The Dinkins term was marked by a sharp rise in crime and a drop in public services. His failed four years paved the way for Rudy Giuliani in 1993 and a historic metropolitan turnaround that extended for 20 years through Giuliani’s two terms and Michael Bloomberg’s three terms.
Along the way, de Blasio married hardcore leftist lesbian Chirlane McCray. McCray had already gained fame in leftist circles for coming out as a black lesbian when she met de Blasio in the Dinkins administration. They were married in 1994 and spent their honeymoon in Cuba, the Caribbean “communist paradise” that was off-limits to Americans before Barack Obama unilaterally lifted the ban in 2011.
De Blasio then joined Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection effort, which ingratiated him with the Clinton mafia. He was rewarded for his work with a regional directorship with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which put him in charge of the New York-New Jersey region. In 2000, de Blasio managed Hillary Clinton’s successful U.S. Senate campaign and parlayed that into a New York City Council seat that he held for two terms. He then served as the city’s public advocate during Bloomberg’s last mayoral term, which gave de Blasio citywide name recognition and a platform to run for mayor.
New York City is now a one-party town where politics is almost exclusively dominated by the Democrat Party. This means that the only political competition de Blasio had during his rise to power was among other Democrats. And like other Dems, all he ever really had to do was survive the party primary. General elections are usually a blowout, as was de Blasio’s 2013 mayoral win and his 2017 reelection.
After being sworn in by transplanted New Yorker Bill Clinton in 2014, de Blasio immediately set to work unraveling the work of Giuliani and Bloomberg. He ended the city’s stop-and-frisk policy, a policing tactic that helped keep crime in check. He fought against charter schools, campaigned for a $15 minimum wage, reduced punishments for misdemeanor arrests, and then went so far as to back a policy that eliminated bail for all but the most heinous crimes. The city’s jails emptied out, and lifelong criminals began plaguing the streets. It’s easy to see why de Blasio has strained relations with the New York Police Department, which, thanks in part to recent leftist attacks on law and order, has led to reduced patrolling and a slew of early retirements in the NYPD. Misdemeanor crimes have been ticking upward for much of his term and violent crime has risen dramatically in recent weeks.
De Blasio is now presiding over a nearly $100 billion city budget, a number that is virtually impossible for the public to support thanks to high taxes and fees that hit every sector of the economy. Businesses are moving out of New York City or are going under altogether. And that was before New York was hard hit by Covid 19 deaths and economic disaster, and the enormous surge in crime after de Blasio joined the “systemic racism” parade and set about to defund the police, with deadly consequences.
But de Blasio remains undeterred.
When asked in a 2017 New York Magazine interview why he has not made greater strides toward “income equality,” Mr. de Blasio replied, “What’s been hardest is the way our legal system is structured to favor private property.” He added, “If I had my druthers, the city government would determine every single plot of land, how development would proceed. And there would be very stringent requirements around income levels and rents. That’s a world I’d love to see.”
De Blasio can at least be credited for being honest about his Marxist bona fides. Most other leftists aside from Bernie Sanders still hide behind the Democrat banner in a vain attempt to fool the public. But de Blasio knows that the leftists in America are on the march, and he’s counting on the movement gaining strength and on himself being one of its national leaders.
The damage de Blasio has wrought over New York City demonstrates what one proud socialist can do in just six years, wiping out decades of prosperity and sending thousands of people fleeing to other states (this writer included). Bill de Blasio is the poster child for socialism at work in America. Remember him well.
(Updated)