EDITORIAL: When leftists have to live with the results of their own policies

It’s a lot easier to support liberal policies when you don’t have to live with the results.

See if you can spot any common threads between these stories.

In recent weeks, New York City Mayor Eric Adams has talked about illegal immigrants in his city in increasingly dire terms.

“This issue will destroy New York City,” Adams said at a town hall meeting earlier this month. He added, “All of us are going to be impacted by this. I said it last year when we had 15,000, and I’m telling you now at 110,000. The city we knew, we’re about to lose.”

Just two years ago, he put forward a much different message. “As Mayor, I’ll always defend our undocumented communities and fight to ensure that they have the support and protection needed to thrive in our city,” he posted on X in June 2021. He then quoted himself from a mayoral debate, “We need to ensure that (undocumented immigrants) receive health care and protection. … We also need to make sure we treat them with the respect and dignity they deserve.”

He’s not the only one changing his tune.

Shivanthi Sathanandan is the Second Vice Chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. In 2020, she wrote on Facebook, “We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department.” In another post from that year, she expressed her approval of the Minneapolis School Board ending its contract with the police.

She wrote something very different on Facebook earlier this month. She described a horrific beating she received outside her home and in front of her children.

“I have a broken leg, deep lacerations on my head, bruising, and cuts all over my body. And I have rage,” she wrote. We need to “catch these young people who are running wild creating chaos across our city, and HOLD THEM IN CUSTODY AND PROSECUTE THEM.”

It’d be quite difficult to prosecute criminals, if she’d succeeded in dismantling the police. But now she thanked the police for its help.

Another one: Stacy Davis Gates is the president of the Chicago Teachers Union and is Black. She has bitterly fought school choice, even though Chicago has some of the worst public schools in the country. She wrote last year that “school choice was actually the choice of racists.” She also claimed school choice has “racist origins.”

And she sends her oldest son to a private school. She later explained that school was the best fit for him. Great. So why deny others that same opportunity?

The hypocrisy in these situations is obvious, but there’s a deeper takeaway. Even the most radical liberals aren’t interested in living with the consequences of their own ideas.

This commentary initially appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.