Everyone I know wants New York City to come back. We all hope for it. People say it will happen just like in the past.
It’s true that rats and criminals currently roam the streets, the city center stinks to high heaven, services seem to have fallen apart, and flash mobs raid stores with street fronts. Commercial occupancy isn’t even half of what it was before lockdowns.
Zombie-like figures are everywhere. As I recently discovered in midtown, one might be afraid of them except that they are too strung out to rob or kill. I’ve never been so grateful for substance abuse: It makes criminals too weak and stupid even to walk a straight line to get your wallet.
Surely, there will be a turnaround at some point, right? We can’t allow the world’s most marvelous city to become a permanent dystopian nightmare of collapse and ruin.
And what are NYC officials doing about this sad calamity? They are focused on curbing climate change; so they say. But their efforts in this regard are preposterously missing the target. Their every effort is making existing matters worse.
What they have done now is proposed restrictions on coal- and wood-burning pizza ovens. That’s right, the one food for which the city is most famous around the world—with 100-year-old pizzerias having served millions—is on the chopping block.
Of course, New Yorkers are furious. Citizens are throwing pizzas over the fences of city offices, and are making red-hot videos of denunciation. As a result, many pundits are saying that the proposal isn’t likely to go through. That might be right and it might be wrong.
However, if it’s shelved, the totalitarians in our midst still gain. They have forced residents to imagine something utterly egregious and then pretended to be responsive to public wishes.
What’s more interesting is why this proposal was made in the first place. It traces to a form of governance that has been around for decades now and received a huge boost with the lockdowns of 2020 and following.
The form might be called destructionism or public-policy sadism. It comes down to the desire to make people suffer by taking away signs of the good life from average people, while cordoning off the super-rich from the effects of their policies.
You surely noticed this in 2020. The officials were making every manner of crazy policy decisions that had nothing to do with mitigating a virus. They were closing basketball courts and skate parks. They put up Plexiglas everywhere, even though doing so reduced circulation in the building. They targeted bars, restaurants, concerts, sporting events, movie theaters, and raves. Anything that was fun was denounced as an occasion for virus spread.
What they sought and what they achieved wasn’t “curve flattening” but the creation of a sad, miserable, broken population that stood masked-up in long lines for provisions from state-approved stores and otherwise sat in lonely hovels while devouring media from state-approved streaming services. This pertained to both adults and kids.
The state-approved food wasn’t pizza from coal-fired ovens but garbage food from the bread aisles of state-approved big-box stores. The goal was the imposition of misery for the masses; it was regarded as the sound practice of public health. As a result, the average American got fat (29 new pounds on average), stoned (pot and liquor stores didn’t close), and sad (depression is a genuine pandemic).
They are approaching climate change the same way. Anything that is fun or delicious or otherwise edifying is being targeted by the sadistic state for elimination. Herein lies the significance of this attack on pizza. It gives us a clue about what they are really up to.
All over the world, World Economic Forum-inspired policies are targeting food production and meat in particular. It’s getting ever more expensive and we hear ever more about how and why bugs are a good replacement.
And incidentally, this pattern of torturing the people for collectivist goals goes all the way back to the 1970s, when bureaucrats demanded that we turn off the lights to save electricity and ration gas to deal with inflation. Matters have gotten worse through the decades.
They targeted functioning toilets and imposed a national law reducing tank size to 1.6 gallons, which is why none of them work as well as they once did. Plus with all the water restrictions, city pipes aren’t being naturally cleaned, which is why they stink. Energy-saving appliances mean that our refrigerators break after a few years and are increasingly restricted in their size. It’s essentially impossible to buy an iron that is strong enough to function the way it once did.
The most appalling deprecations have affected washing machines. It’s nearly impossible to find a new one that works properly. They attempt to wash with as little water as possible, as tepid as possible, while using detergent that no longer contains phosphates. Have you wondered why your clothes are no longer truly clean? That’s why. It’s all deliberate: suffering as a policy.
Don’t judge me, but as a person who likes clean clothes, I’ve actually taken to doing my own hand washing in the tub with vast amounts of extremely hot water, with phosphates and a long soak. Then rather than destroy the fabrics in a tiny dryer, I use a clothesline. It’s an arduous process and it all seems absurd, but here we are. I’m doing laundry the way my great-grandmother did it as a child.
As for light bulbs, remember when these people tried to ban incandescents and replace them all with the fake light of fluorescents? That was extremely cruel. Fortunately, LEDs came along to save our sanity.
Let’s also briefly mention the disaster of ethanol gasoline. They actually tried to replace a full fossil-fuel gas with corn, which is sticky and wrecks engine quality. That continues, with various bureaucrats and politicians promising to force ever more corn into our gas, and then force automakers to make more electric cars that make long trips nearly impossible.
Just watch: Once people have bought into the electric car bit, there will be another announcement. Those too are fossil-fuel problems and have to go. They want us all stuffed in mass transit. As for rural areas, who cares?
Do you see what’s happening? It’s all part of a pattern. They are trying to wreck a modern way of life and replace it with what I’ve called techno-primitivism. This is the species of corporativist control that assigns unelected bureaucrats to make arbitrary rules to reduce the standard of living.
Just remember this principle: The goal is to dismantle civilization by force. The excuses don’t matter. It could be water saving, energy conservation, virus mitigation, or ending climate change. Regardless, the real goal is wreckage for its own sake.
I’ve heard New Yorkers say that this attack on pizza is going too far. Good and, yes, it will likely be rolled back. If so, it’s only a temporary setback. The bureaucrats are playing the long game and have no intention of backing off.
The real solution is to fire them all, eliminate whole agencies, deregulate, slash taxes, and give citizens back their rights. This is the only way to wrest power from World Economic Forum-controlled bureaucrats. Anything short of that risks allowing the bad guys to keep trying these ghastly tricks.
