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In 2022, Philadelphia Magazine revisited one of its annual features, the 100 most influential Philadelphians of the year.

There were few if any surprises in the rubber stamp list: sports kings, drag queens, “Sizzling CEOs,” progressive/ left-wing City Council members, DA Larry Krasner, the latest and hottest restaurant chef, elite liberal film festival personalities and — last but not least — UPenn’s trans swimmer Lia Thomas.

“That is so Philadelphia,” one might say, and one would be correct.

“Thomas, who has only rarely spoken with journalists,” the magazine stated, “has remained outwardly stoic, steadfast, the picture of perseverance—likely the same traits that helped her excel in the sport to begin with. (They’re also traits that will come in handy in law school, where Thomas has said she intends to study civil rights and public interest law. She’s grown passionate about ‘fighting for trans rights and trans equality,’ he told ESPN.”)

Missing from the magazine’s list, as usual, were personalities with a conservative bent — commentators, writers, athletes, et cetera. That is, anyone with an opposing view, a contrarian by birth or conviction.

Judging from the overall tone of the magazine, you would not know that the city is in the midst of a major crisis.

A quick survey of recent Philadelphia Magazine articles:

“How to Make a More Kid Friendly Philadelphia.”

“Philly Teens Need to be Included in Our Public Spaces.”

“8 Ways to Make Philly Streets Safer for Kids.”

But what if it is the kids who are making the streets unsafe?

Consider what occurred in September 2022 when more than 100 black teens, some as young as ten, ransacked and destroyed a WAWA store in Philadelphia’s Mayfair neighborhood.

Consider the massive Center City flash mob of some 350 to 400 teens in September 2022, who ransacked businesses, jumped on police vehicles and climbed street poles.

One little teen — somewhere there’s a mother who loves him so — even shot off a gun.

Philadelphia Magazine, historically, has always had a fun, frivolous kick to it: best chef, best hairdresser, best nail salon, best tattoo artist, best retail sales clerk.

But there was a revolution in October 2020 when the magazine went woke, and hired its first female editor, Kate Dailey, and its first Black Lives Matter advocate editor-at-large.

Since then, it’s been a woke fiesta at the magazine, where it’s now acceptable even to refer to the magazine’s first publisher, D. Herbert Lipson, who died in 2017 at age 88, as (in off-the-record comments) an “old racist.”

The magazine has a special symbiotic relationship with the (Leftist) Philadelphia Inquirer where the latter feeds off the editorial castaways of the former.

That’s easy to do because the journalists are all from the same hive.

Meanwhile, in the real world outside the magazine’s orbit, Pew Charitable Trusts made the determination in 2019 that Philadelphia’s population has been dropping steadily.

That drop has been verified by Drexel University’s Lindy Institute, which reported that thousands of people have left the city since the pandemic.

These surveys are careful to downplay the exodus of people by affirming that those leaving the city “still love it” and would prefer to stay were it not for “a job transfer” or “a desire for a change of scenery.”

Can this be categorized as a bit of spin? Since when does someone go through the Herculean task of moving to another city just for “a change of scenery?”

The degree to which these surveys go to find a silver lining in the city’s population exodus is tortured at best.

Still, one cannot escape the fact that two-thirds of the recipients stated that their quality of life improved after leaving Philadelphia.

This is very damning, especially because it serves as proof that  progressive Democrat policies have laid waste not only to Philadelphia but to Pennsylvania’s other largest city, Pittsburgh, which has also fallen victim to crime, rampant drug use and out-of-control homelessness.

“Pittsburgh is running full speed into the abyss as progressives gain more political power, and Philadelphia suffers from a George Soros-backed District Attorney’s soft-on-crime approach that has enabled the lawlessness,” The Mercury reported just a few months ago.

Since Ed Gainey became Pittsburgh’s mayor in January 2022, crime and homeless statistics there have imploded.

In August 2023, four teenagers in the Duquesne area of Pittsburgh were shot when shooters fired into a large crowd of people hanging out in a parking lot.

“We will convene our rapid response teams to make sure we are caring for the victims’ families and ensuring they have access to the support and resources they need….We will solve the root cause so that we can attempt to stop more violence,” the mayor said.

Democrat mayors like Gainey like to say how they want to get guns off the streets, as if that will solve the problem of violence and improve the quality of life in their cities.

Yet how do you do this if the murderers for the most part belong to the subculture of gangbangers and gangstas, people who can get new guns seconds after their old guns are taken away?

Where there’s a gangsta will, there’s a gangsta way.

In Philadelphia’s Northern Liberties neighborhood in late August, sixty-year-old Peter Chan was beaten to death in a carjacking by a group of males on motorcycles and face masks who drove up beside him as he sat in a parked car waiting to pick up his wife. The suspects still remain at large.

Peter Chan was not attacked with a gun but with fists.

It should be noted that this area of Fishtown and Northern Liberties is an upscale neighborhood with $600,000 warehouse condos, fussy little (gated) dog parks, and specialty restaurants that primarily serve moneyed ex-New Yorkers and woke millennials who hate Donald Trump.

The area has had 26 carjacking incidents so far this year, despite the fact that it is home to the 26^th Police District, the station where many of these same ex-New Yorkers and millennials in 2020 demanded defunding of the police.

In 2022, hit-and-run deaths in Philadelphia reached an all time high, accounting for at least one in four traffic fatalities in the city.

Philadelphia’s nihilistic Dem culture– which includes the toleration of a massive open air drug market in the  Kensington section where one sees users passed out on the sidewalk, covered in scabbing, or seeping flesh wounds while others amble about in a daze, often with blood running somewhere on their bodies—has contributed to the Crime-as-Carnival atmosphere here, where cars with tinted windows plough into pedestrians (legally) crossing the street, knocking them out of their sneakers and killing them, then speeding away.

In May 2023, a 38-year-old mother walking with her 3 children across the 1400 block of John F. Kennedy Blvd, a downtown area with lots of office buildings, was hit by a speeding jeep going the wrong way. The mother was killed, one daughter injured critically, and the two other children were knocked out of their shoes.

Speeding vehicles crashing into motorcycles, bicycles or pedestrians crossing the street is now a common occurrence:

Welcome to Philly, the City That Knocks You Out of Your Shoes.

This grunge Dem culture also encourages the drug-addicted homeless to use the subway system as a shelter.

On the Market Frankford El, junkies ride day and night, sleeping, eating, spilling food, acting out and changing in and out of clothes. I once observed someone shaving and taking a ‘seat bath’ with dozens of handy-wipes.  .

While Philadelphia’s Mayor Kenney rests peacefully until the completion of his term, Pittsburgh’s mayor refuses to address the real problem: that being that it is not society’s job to raise your child.

Mayor Gainey claims to be searching for a root cause of Pittsburgh’s violence, crime and drug problem, but he doesn’t seem to realize that it will not come from the Dem-Marxist “reinvention” of the nuclear family, especially as it relates to black families.

“Job training” for disadvantaged teens sounds good on paper but if these teens have no family structure for support or on which to build, you’re just building castles in the air.