Progressives’ Top Victims

It’s astonishing how regularly progressive “innovations” end up doing serious damage to already vulnerable groups.

Take crime. In New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia and elsewhere progressive DAs and other electeds made sweeping “reforms” these past few years: ditching bail, decriminalizing quality-of-life offenses and hamstringing cops.

Surprise: Crime shot up. Here in New York major crimes are up 34.2% over the past year, reversing the trends of a quarter-century. Gun violence is nearly double pre-pandemic levels. In Frisco, murders are up almost 37% from pre-pandemic levels.

Who suffers most? In 2020, 65% of New York murder victims were black, though just 24% of our population is. Blacks and Hispanics were 63% of San Francisco shooting victims, though they combine for only 18% of the population. Equity? Bull. On education, liberal public-school districts across America have been lowering or jettisoning standards in the name of fighting white supremacy.

Mayor Bill de Blasio did his level best to end Gifted & Talented programs because of black and Hispanic underrepresentation. Similar programs across the country got hit. Another “reform” is to re-engineer admissions to selective middle and high schools to “improve” the racial mix.

These moves did nothing for the “underrepresented” (unless you count being forced into a school where you’re not prepared to compete). They did, however, severely dent the prospects of another minority group: Asians.

Add to that disastrous COVID school closures. Data shows only 37% of black first graders nationwide are on track to hit literacy benchmarks this school year, a massive drop from 51% in 2019. For Hispanics it’s 42%, down from 54%.

And on literacy, progressives have long sacrificed kids to ideology. Witness their decades-long war on phonics, which ensured that generations of kids failed to learn how to read well (or at all). Guess who was most affected?

For some of these innovations, time is running out. San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin faces a likely recall; LA’s soft-on-crime George Gascón faces a second recall vote. Manhattan’s own Alvin Bragg has walked back some of his worst policies, and the next governor may well remove him for refusing to do his job. Woke school-board members got the boot in San Francisco. Anti-phonics guru Lucy Calkins has recanted her idiotic theories.

And that’s all to the good. But so much damage was done first. Sure looks like woke policy is more about playing with lives of the powerless than making them better.