Why NYC Matters
A Letter from the Canaries in the Coal Mine
By guest contributor Edwin Colter.
In the cult classic Escape from New York (1981), Snake Plissken (Kurt Russel) is sent into Manhattan to rescue the President of the United States. Manhattan has been turned into a prison island due to rampant crime problems that were seemingly unsolvable in that alternate reality. The only sensible solution was apparently to wall off the island and transport prisoners there to rule themselves. Such crime dystopian films represent a curious state of affairs because they are so ungrounded in reality. Crime is such a problem in that world that Manhattan must be turned into a mega-prison, but they have enough political will power to achieve such an insane result. It begs the question: If there was enough political will power to do this, why not just solve the problem through conventional means like we actually did?
John Carpenter wrote the script in the 1970s, which was a much more violent time in America. In fact, even today, when people talk about the “crime” in cities like NYC, it pales in comparison to the actual crime rate in the ’70s and ’80s. The thing was, is that back then, we actually decided to do something about it. We began locking criminals up, in large numbers and for lengthy sentences. There are other popular theories as well around why crime came down, from the Freakonomics abortion argument (which I confess some sympathy to) to the elimination of leaded gasoline. New York City benefited most from the reign of Rudolph Giuliani and the broken windows theory. It was not a difficult theory to understand or implement. If you crack down on small crimes, you are likely to catch the criminal element who also graduate toward more violent crimes. The people jumping turnstiles or breaking windows for fun need to be addressed firmly and harshly.
It worked, and the city really cleaned up its act. In fact, almost the entire country and most of the rest of the world used many policies that came out of NYC at this time. London, for example, was able to reduce black-on-black violence through targeted stop and search of young black men who were arming themselves. Of course, this measure and the other measures implemented in NYC have been under steady and continued attack from the Left for almost my entire lifetime. If you’re a Millennial like me, you were born into one of the safer eras but have lived through a very real decline in safety over the course of your own lifetime. Interestingly enough, though, today much of the violence New Yorkers most fear is the random schizo-driven violence of the homeless violent vagrant population. It is less the targeted criminal they fear. The evidence recently from San Francisco’s BART has also proven the original broken windows hypothesis: by installing incredibly difficult-to-defeat fare gates, lo and behold, general crime and disorder on the subway went down!
This is all a long introduction to say that the American Right should care deeply about New York City and even San Francisco. These are the premier cities in America, and NYC is THE CITY of the world, for better or worse. The American Right’s rhetoric and discourse for the past 25 years about cities has basically been to “abandon them,” and to a large extent, most have. I’m a work commuter into the city itself. The Metro North trains are full of White men in suits who have come to see NYC as a mere economic zone for them to transact in. Their families may come in on the weekends from Westchester or Greenwich to see the Met exhibits or watch the Yankees play, but an entire class of people has effectively abandoned the cities. What remains has been totally co-opted by the Left, and we’re really seeing that play out with Mamdani and his DSA comrades. It’s very clear that the main supporters of Mamdani’s wealth redistribution agenda are a toxic combination of downwardly mobile White liberals, first-generation non-White “Americans” educated in the U.S., and recently imported migrants who vote as directed. American exceptionalism has ensured that we aren’t quite Brazil or South Africa, but once again, something new and more disturbed.
Civilization itself depends upon a relationship between the city and the rural. Modern America has the urban, suburban, and rural. We’re all familiar with the destruction and reconstruction of the American city. The displacement wrought upon it by both technology and ideology. Power ultimately does rest within the cities, though; the modern age is one of centralization, and thus what happens flows outward. The imperial capital of Washington, D.C., nominally changes ownership every four to eight years, but the other centers of power in the U.S. are less in flux, and in most places, the Right has ceded them or had them stolen. What happens here will happen where you are tomorrow. The very idea that the Commonwealth of Virginia would end up with gun laws closer to those of NYC than of Alabama would have seemed lunacy to suggest 35 years ago. It is both demographic and ideological change that have swept through. Whatever you believe about the events of September 11th, the archival footage of the city then shows the absolute lunacy of the notion we ever fought a War on Terror. There are more Muslims now in the five boroughs than there were then, and we now have elected officials who would not just dance but cheer.
New York City has become a post-American city. Those of us who still exist in its orbit are well aware of that. We live it daily, and we know the dangers that await. For all its failings, to some extent the most remarkable thing is that it shakily holds together. For all the random homeless and criminal violence around the city, it is still transformed from the 1970s. Cities tend to hold an ability to regenerate and survive as long as the stock that makes them up are capable of doing so. There is a reason that the Judge Dredd 2012 Karl Urban reboot was filmed not in NYC but in Johannesburg, a city that has truly fallen if there ever was one to fall. Mega-City One may be modeled on New York in the same way Gotham was, but it found reality in a fallen South Africa. New York is unique not only to America but to the world, but so much of that uniqueness has been steadily eroded and continues to be undermined. It’s part of the mythos at the core of America that hard work matters and that you can make it. It may not be entirely true or ever have been, but the city that birthed the myth did that when it was almost entirely European. Without New York, there would be no Trump; without Trump, no MAGA. For all their recent failings and flaws, that sheer force of nature that manifested itself to give us some breathing room originated in the city itself. Perhaps Trump’s greatest transformation has been to leverage the ability to make a New Yorker loved by an Arkansas man who’d never dream of visiting the city.
New York matters because it is the front line. It was in the 1900s as well. Whilst I welcome all White American men today of Italian descent, it must be accurately remembered that their mass influx into the city brought with it a reign of anarchist terror. It was not just the likes of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and the Russian emigres who stoked such tensions at the time; it was also the Bresci Circle. In fact, it was likely an Italian anarchist terror cell that was responsible for one of the most audacious terrorist plots of the age. Back then, these recent immigrant communities were hotbeds of left-wing radical agitation, and a full century later, we see history repeating itself. Back then, it was the work of WASP elites who got the situation under control, and it remains to be seen if similar can be done now. The parallels to the past and today are obvious and painful to see, with DSA now claiming victories. It should also be noted that that radical wing has taken a seat in Colorado now. What starts in NYC seems to spread.
One last note on the enduring value of NYC is that it remains a cultural capital as well. For all the wokeness that has seeped into the country, the city still acts as a patron to the arts and the achievements of all civilization. You can see it any day of the week (except Wednesday) at The Metropolitan Museum. You can still hear Wagner performed at the Opera. These are all part of our cultural inheritance, and it is still somehow kept alive in the city that so many of us ask how a right-minded man could live in or work in. There remains a group of us close by in the fight for the simple fact that we are still here and this is still our heritage.
Whilst I’m not yet a formal member of the OGC, I have been fortunate enough to get to know some of the great men running the Nathan Hale Society, which is the local NYC chapter. I asked them a simple question: Why does what happens in NYC matter to the rest of the country?
Here are some of their answers:
NYC is a leading indicator of what will happen [to] your U.S. city in the next decade… Ethnic resentment politics are coming to your city. The Hard Left is not putting away the “woke”; they are picking up different grievances to throw at the population. That’s why you need to pay attention to NYC politics. This playbook will be used in your major city soon enough. Will you be prepared to deal with it? America has left the normal paradigm of African-American-vs.-White grievance politics and are now in a brave new world. All the global tribes are here now, and they are usually the underclass. Brace yourself.
What happens here is important for so many reasons, one being that it is a cultural hub that sets the precedent for what is culturally acceptable for the rest of the country. If you surrender that, you surrender a tremendous weapon against our enemies. Spend enough time in a place like this, and you will actually begin to understand why we believe the things we believe. You can’t escape the glaring truth as soon as you step out your front door. A parade of caricatures that would make A. Wyatt Mann blush. But it is our home and our country. It has a rich history, and some things are still charming and beautiful. It has an undying and undeniable sprit that inspired men like Nathan Hale, the namesake of our chapter, to take risks that ultimately led to him being hanged in Manhattan by the British in 1776. We find ourselves here again today, in enemy territory, taking risks because it is worth saving.
So the next time you find yourself dismissing NYC or other such leftist-dominated places as lost and hopeless, do remember that good men continue to exist in them and are on the front lines. We either hang together or go to the gallows alone. As long as Heritage Americans hold on in and around these places, there is something that can pass for hope as the long night draws in.
Once the dollar supremacy comes to an end and, by extension, the welfare state, the various ethnic trash that infest that once great city will need to either decide to stay and actually make their own way or leave back to their ancestral homelands. My hope is that will come on the heels of an invasion of hordes of enraged White men, bent on revenge and Reconquista, who will cleanse this land once and for all.