New York City has changed from a melting pot of cultural diversity to a sewer infested with crime, riots, and the worst global outbreak of COVID-19, resulting in a draconian lockdown.
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s blatant anti-Semitism targeted Jewish mourners when a beloved Rabbi passed. By contrast, the far-left Democrats embraced mass protests that turned into riots, attacks on police, arson, and looting. As Frank Sinatra famously sang, “Start spreading the news, I’m leaving today.” That’s exactly what Big Apple residents are doing — fleeing New York because it has devolved into chaos.
As evidence that city dwellers are fed-up, even the biased New York Times confirms that mass flight has begun since the lockdown and subsequent uncontrolled street violence.
“In March, the United States Post Office received 56,000 mail-forwarding requests from New York City, more than double the monthly average. In April, the number of requests went up to 81,000, twice the number from a year earlier. Sixty percent of those new requests were for destinations outside the city,” the N.Y. Times reports.
Outside the Tri-State area, Florida topped the list of places New Yorkers fled. The U.S. Post Office processed upwards of 1,800 requests for the Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach areas alone. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was fearful New Yorkers would spread the contagion to the Sunshine State, and his fear proved correct.
While the fake news and establishment media are pinning relocations on the pandemic, residents have reasons that won’t be cured by a vaccine.
“New York is not recognizable. The city is a city that’s enraged. New York is not the place that it was. Everyone is leaving. They’re moving to Florida. They’re moving to other places. It’s very sad, actually, to see what happened,” President Donald Trump said. “Crime is way up, shootings are way up, murder is way up. It’s just unbelievable.”
Until the pandemic sent residents into lockdown — with the exception of rioters — the city’s murder rate had been on the rise. MS-13 gangs carried out a string of brutal assassinations that went unchecked until the DOJ and FBI intervened. An 8 percent rise in murders occurred from 2018 to 2019, and the city was on track for another spike until Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered people to Shelter in Place.
Mayor de Blasio, in response to rising crime, targeted and removed support for the NYPD. In the aftermath of the George Floyd riots, the Democrat mayor has committed to defunding the police department by $1 billion.
“We are reducing the size of our police force by not having the next recruit class. We are reducing our overtime levels. We’re shifting functions away from police to civilian agencies,” Mayor de Blasio said. “We think it’s the right thing to do.”
And residents have responded by moving to safer communities all across the country. Approximately 1.4 million people left New York since 2010, more than any other state. Becoming the world’s epicenter for COVID-19, followed by unrestrained mob violence, has now exacerbated the situation.