Escape from New York.  Now.  If you can. That seems to be the thinking of hundreds of thousands of Big Apple denizens as the city, recently one of the safest in the world, devolves into a dystopian hell at the hands of demented progressives.

Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and his former police commissioners such as Bernard Kerik, who headed up the NYPD force from 2000 to 2001 and directed the police response to 9/11, can only watch and weep as the city they had so successfully cleaned up rapidly descends into chaos and carnage.  This Nightmare in New York is brought to you courtesy of Gov. Andrew Cuomo; Mayor Bill de Blasio; and a cast of thousands of Black Lives Matter protesters, anarchists, and street thugs.  The once vibrant city is turning into a virtual no-go zone of looted shops, shuttered store windows, and skyrocketing murder rates.  The number of shooting victims is up 51% this year so far, and that tragic trend is accelerating.  In June of this year, there were 250 shootings, as opposed to 97 in June of 2019.

New York was already reeling from the highest coronavirus death toll in the (formerly) United States, due in large part to Gov. Cuomo approving the transfer of thousands of recovering COVID-19 patients to nursing homes at the height of the pandemic.  Then the rioting began, and Mayor de Blasio's response was to shame cops and propose cutting his city's police department budget by more than one billion dollars.  (That's one thousand million for those of you who were educated in the city's public schools.)

The Dimwitted Duo have caused a mass exodus, with 500,000 mostly middle-class New Yorkers fleeing the city thus far and many more likely to follow.  Half a million New Yorkers heading for the proverbial hills.  That's more than the entire population of Minneapolis, where all the madness started.  Of course, with the Minneapolis City Council repeatedly voting to disband its police force, the entire population of the "Mini apple" may head for the hills as well.

The Big Apple is rotting and shrinking.  Needlessly.  Minneapolis is, too — as are many other large American cities.  The rioters and the elites are together making these cities uninhabitable for everyone else, including the police.

And they call it "social justice."