Chadwick Moore

To this day, my iPhone still changes the word ‘too’ to ‘TPP,’ a reminder that about five years ago I must have texted frequently about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Although my phone still can’t figure out that I’ve never once intended to write the word ‘ducking’, this annoying correction happened again the other day when I happened to be watching old footage from the 1999 World Trade Organization riots in Seattle. The scene looked nearly identical to antifa’s summer of discontent just a few months ago, with largely Caucasian, black-clad, masked-up youth throwing a temper tantrum in one of our nation’s central business districts. Even those rioters’ chants were identical to today’s far-left. ‘Whose streets? Our streets,’ they bleated in the video.

Andrew Cuomo, the Emmy-award winning governor of New York, made a dangerous U-turn into the cold-hearted world of Trumpism during a speech and series of online posts Monday, in which he appeared to advocate for the wholesale slaughter of more old people in his state. The comments, which but a few months ago would have got any doctor or plebeian banned from social media and branded a heartless granny-killer, were a statement of the obvious: lockdowns aren’t working and New York has held its citizens hostage in an economic and mental vice-grip over nothing. Well, not nothing. The timing of Cuomo’s hard-right shift cannot be ignored.

Have you met Tina? You may have seen her this month leading a charge outside Mac’s Public House on Staten Island, protesting a second wave of economic terrorism against small business owners enacted by Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo.The fiery, bombastic blond with the thick New York accent and colorful vocabulary has shown up at anti-lockdown events across the city, broadcasting footage to her 206,000 Twitter followers at a time when everyday New York Republicans are having a bit of time in the spotlight. https://twitter.com/RealTina40/status/1335652275532992512 A couple of years ago, the city cheered Vickie Paladino, a mom from Queens who was driving home one day and saw de Blasio surrounded by reporters on the street.

Here’s a question no one will ask. How is it possible the Republicans — the party universally deplored and maligned by Hollywood, Big Tech, and all of mainstream media — consistently manage to pull off far better production quality in broadcast content than the Democrats?This was fully evident Monday on night one of the Republican National Convention where the GOP delivered a sleek, well-produced, visually and audibly impressive presentation to American voters. Stack that next to what we saw from the Democrats last week, who have virtually every millionaire and billionaire in Hollywood and Silicon Valley on their ideological side — yet apparently, that support doesn’t extend to basic production, styling, or home office assistance.

On night two of the Democratic National Convention, Jack Schlossberg, son of Caroline Kennedy and grandson of President John F. Kennedy, hammered a cynical final nail in the coffin of the more palatable and moderate party that his grandfather once represented.Speaking in a slight lisp, Schlossberg, who was named in 2017 to Vanity Fair’s ‘best dressed list’, intentionally perverted one of the most iconic quotes in American political history.‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,’ John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural address on January 20, 1961.On Tuesday evening, the former president’s grandson tossed that old-timey sentiment aside, while still trying to capitalize on JFK’s memory.

Conservatives in a place like New York — squirming daily beneath the iron heel of a newly hawkish progressive minority — will tell you, like gay hanky-codes of yore, all the right-wing dog whistles to watch out for on the streets. The American flag is a big one. The once innocuous sight of a stranger sporting the stars and stripes on a t-shirt or hat, or outside a business, is now a good indicator you’re encountering someone who plans to vote Trump in November. Our nation’s flag is like garlic and holy water to the Black Lives Matter sentry. Unless it’s upside-down. Mask defiance is another.

Joan Didion wrote that New York is a city only for the very rich, the very poor and the very young. That was in her cult classic 1967 essay ‘Goodbye To All That’, in which she created the farewell-to-New York genre. It’s a quote I carried with me through my twenties, from one grim apartment to the next, each smaller, farther out and more expensive than the last. This is simply the nature of the place, I told myself. If you don’t like it, move somewhere else. Many of us emerged from Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s luxury dictatorship in the aughts with a sense of battle fatigue.