Given that I remain a denizen of a small rural community in Alaska, I'm (still) an odd one indeed to be writing about the state of America's urban areas and Democrat/leftist jurisdictions. If you've been reading my work at all, you know I grew up in a rural setting in Iowa and am now a content rural dweller myself. I have little time for cities, despite having lived in them for four decades. I find them unpleasant; crowded, noisy, and, to be honest, they smell bad. I like the clean country air of the Susitna Valley, and if that means I have to put up with the occasional moose blocking my driveway, that's fine.
So, why am I still worried about America's cities? Because our cities are the beating hearts of our nation. Much of the country's economic activity happens there. Urban areas host much of the country's industry and academia. What's more, our cities used to be the pride of the nation, but that's less the case now. Case in point: Los Angeles, California, where the metropolitan transit system has become, as City Journal puts it, a crime-ridden hellscape.
Every day, thousands of Los Angelenos take a deep breath, step out of their houses, and plunge themselves into a transit experience straight out of Mad Max. The city’s buses have become rolling homeless shelters, replete with drugs and feces. Its trains are home to murder and mayhem. As Daquan, a daily rider who works near the North Hollywood station told us, “You could kill somebody down there and just get away with it.”
The transformation has been swift and stark. Between 2020 and 2025, crime in the system more than doubled. What drove the change? L.A. Metro’s dedication to creating an equitable transit system, where all Angelenos—drug-addicted, homicidal maniacs included—can effectively ride free, without consequences.
There's a reason for this sudden crash, and it's largely due to woke policies on the part of the Los Angeles city government, chief among them the notion that fare enforcement is "racist." Yes, that's overt nitwittery, but we have seen the like before from the big, blue cities.
Activists and their allies in city government have spent years laser-focused on driving cops from the L.A. Metro’s buses and trains. Their argument: making people pay to use the trains is racist.
Helming this effort was the Labor Community Strategy Center, its offshoot the Bus Riders Union, and a wider coalition of activists. The center believed that, at root, Metro’s fare-enforcement policies were designed to create a “sterile lily white rail experience,” as its black indigenous and “[q]ueer” co-director, Channing Martinez, put it. Martinez hoped to pressure Metro, a “South African Apartheid pass system,” to institute free fares, abolish the transit court system, and nullify the L.A. Sheriff’s long-held ability to enforce fares aboard the trains.
It worked. The city slashed fare enforcement, then slashed the level of law enforcement devoted to the systems.
Today, Metro hardly enforces fares. Agents conducted only about 5,000 fare checks per month in 2025, down almost 100 percent since 2016. In 2020, Metro instated a “Fareless System Initiative Task Force” to examine how a fare-free system could advance equity. “Equity is very, very important to us,” former Metro CEO Phil Washington said.
In short: activists demanded that L.A. Metro make fares free. And now, with hardly any legal pressure, the city has effectively done it.
When you let the nuts win, what you get is predictable.
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And, there's nothing quite like video to show just how bad things have gotten. I won't subject you to this one, of a guy... pleasuring himself on the train, but it's there. But then, there's this one, overt violence on the metro train:
To say this video by @stevengregory demonstrating the horrific violence Metro riders are subjected to is disturbing and near impossible to watch is a gigantic understatement.
— Kevin Dalton (@TheKevinDalton) April 21, 2022
Los Angeles deserves leaders that make it a priority to end these all too common attacks. pic.twitter.com/FNtQgUJiz5
Then, there's this story:
Hero police officer in Pasadena California gets shot in the leg during intense battle with a sexual assault and shooting suspect.
32 year old Malcolm Buchanan, sexually assaulted a woman a the Sierra Madre Villa Metro station and then shot a good Samaritan that tried to step in and stop the attack.
Officer Bryan Vasquez tracked down the suspect, a shootout ensued. The suspect is dead. The officer sustained a gunshot wound to the leg, underwent surgery, and is recovering.
This post brought to by Gavin Newsom, reminding you that crime is down in California
Of course, it's a lot different when you're a city official cranking out a photo-op, when you have the cops do a sweep of the train before you board; I'd bet serious money that's what happened here:
The Los Angeles Metro is a much different experience if you aren’t a nepo baby career politician in charge of Los Angeles Metro. pic.twitter.com/BlqQK1cz2w
— Kevin Dalton (@TheKevinDalton) May 30, 2025
The people, the honest, working people of Los Angeles, deserve better than this. But this has been wrought in service to a "woke" agenda, wherein ordinary enforcement of the law, not to mention the ordinary rules of civil behavior, have been rendered "racist," providing an effective license for goblins and bums to do as they please. Now, it looks a lot like riding the metro trains and buses in Los Angeles involves taking one's life in one's hands, and that's inexcusable.
And yet, it's not at all unlikely that the city will put the inept Karen Bass back in office as mayor. That's what needs to change, if the City of Angels is ever to be redeemed; but it doesn't look like it's going to happen this year.
