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Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg were the true Progressives

A 16-year-old daughter was on Metro North heading back home from the city when that freak October 2012 snowstorm hit. Her train stalled at the 125th Street station; roads were impassable and it was getting dark.

Uggh.

“You can stay with Uncle Mike,” I texted. “He’s at 80th and York.”

“Got it covered,” she shot back. “Gonna stay @ friend Colleen’s sister’s.”

“Where about?”

“Bed Stuy.”

Uncle Mike was a wonderful host.

The last time I was in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn was in the mid-1990s. I was there to interview a young mother who had turned an old cast iron bathtub into a bed for her infant son. “Bullets can’t get through it,” she explained. Twenty years later, town houses are selling in Bed Stuy for upward of $3 million, according to a recent news story. Young people are moving there in droves. My fears were of a neighborhood that no longer exists.

It’s wonderful to see what’s happened to NYC, but at the same time, I have to admit, I cringe as a former Rudy Giuliani campaign volunteer at how quickly the bad old days have been forgotten. “Progressive” hipsters have moved en masse into parts of the city that were once veritable war zones, thanks to Mayor Giuliani’s, and later Mayor Bloomberg’s, unwavering insistence on proactive policing. But voting data shows the very same hipster demographic that enjoys the fruits of those policies overwhelmingly supported Bill de Blasio for mayor, a candidate who ran on a pronounced anti-NYPD platform, in my opinion.

What really drives me nuts are the crunchy white faces I see in the crowds protesting the NYPD. Many of them, certainly, are transplants to Williamsburg, Inwood, Crown Heights and other communities that were resurrected by the very policing they’re now railing against.

I swear, there’s nothing more obnoxious than a bridge-and-tunnel radical.

One year into the “progressive” de Blasio administration cops are being instructed by superiors to police less aggressively. Why take the risk of protester backlash?

Wonder where the hipsters will move when it all begins to come apart . . .

William F. B. O’Reilly is a Republican consultant.