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There’s something about the specter of armed guards in tactical gear patrolling a gas station in our nation’s birthplace that tells me things aren’t likely to get better in the United States anytime soon.
What’s next? Members of the Azov Regiment making sure no one disturbs your child’s birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese?
Witnessing the slow and inexorable demise of Philadelphia is like watching a loved one die from afar and being powerless to stop it. One by one, the tinsel idols from the rotting metropolis of my youth have fallen. They’ve destroyed South Street. They recently gang-raped a Wawa convenience store. I’ve seen the hard-knuckled poor-white neighborhood of Kensington fall victim to diversity and fentanyl.
North Philly is a massive wasteland just north of City Hall. At 46.7 square miles, it takes up more than one-third of the city’s total area. It is slightly larger than the Bronx and equally as dilapidated. Its landscape is pockmarked by abandoned factories and rotting row homes. 80% of its residents are either black or Hispanic, with the numbers tilted 60/40 in favor of blacks. Only about 10% of those who live in North Philly dare to be white.
North Philly was a huge industrial hub from the dawn of the Gilded Age to the slow and rusty dismantling of America’s industrial infrastructure.
In 1964, the area hosted two-thirds of the city’s 600,000 black residents. In late August of that year, false rumors spread that a pair of cops — one black, one white — had beaten a pregnant black woman to death. It led to four days of rioting and looting of white-owned businesses along Columbia Avenue. The riot “virtually destroyed the central shopping district of North Philadelphia,” accelerated the shutdown of factories, and caused a stampede of white flight toward safer pastures.
I’ve never known an urban area to recover after protracted riots. If North Philly is famous for anything these days, it’s for the endlessly blighted open-air drug markets of the North Philly Badlands.
North Philly is where I attended Temple University, and my sociology professor, a black Communist named Clark White, lamented that the area was one giant “food desert” and that racist bodega owners had to hide behind bulletproof glass to sell young black kids their grape soda pop and Jolly Rancher candy.
Lately, homicides have been so bad in the Cradle of Liberty that Philadelphia’s police chief, a black woman named Danielle Outlaw, lamented that “our officers, simply put, just can’t keep up” with them. The city’s District Attorney, a Soros-sponsored progressive named Larry Krasner, is facing impeachment proceedings due to the fact that his soft-on-crime policies have not, for some mystifying reason, led to a decline in crime.
Robberies are up 36.7% from last year. Overall crime is up by nearly 25%.
Philly cops now have to wear ballistic vests. At the end of the fiscal year 2019 — before COVID and the Summer of Floyd — the city had 6,590 officers. At the end of this fiscal year, the total number of officers had dropped nearly 10% since 2019.
The zip code where the gas station that recently elected to deploy paramilitary patrols, 19132, is smack-dab in the middle of the red zone when it comes to violent crime.
A flustered, frustrated, heavily accented, and well-meaning Pajeet gas-station owner named Neil Patel has made international headlines by hiring “heavily armed guards” swaddled in tactical gear to protect his property and the customers at the Karco gas station at the intersection of Broad and Clearfield streets in North Philadelphia.
You can buy Jim Goad’s Whiteness: The Original Sin here.
Though some locals have expressed concern about a sight that wouldn’t be out of place in the slums of Manila or Bogota but still seems shockingly Third World even for North Philly, Patel insists that his gas station has been crime-free ever since he hired the guards.
Patel says that his store has been ransacked several times by local ne’er-do-wells. There was a shooting at the store this past Easter. He says his tires were slashed and his windows damaged by criminals. He is eager to share footage of one wayward youth dragging his ATM machine out of the store in one piece.
“They are forcing us to hire the security, high-level security, state level,” Patel told a local FOX affiliate. “We are tired of this nonsense: robbery, drug trafficking, hanging around, gangs. . . . Selling their drugs openly. Cops here, they don’t do anything. Robberies, stealings, vandalizing my car.”
Patel also said that local residents should fear the criminals, not the armed guards: “This is the protection for the neighborhood and the customers.”
He told an NBC affiliate, “Lately we are completely tired from this all nuisance. Stealing, robbery, ATM missing. Middle of the night, nobody feels safe. And we are completely losing a lot of customers.”
The heist of the ATM proved to be “final straw” for Patel.
Enter Andre Boyer, a former Philly cop who runs the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania SITE (Strategic Intervention Tactical Enforcement) State Agents, whose official website describes it as “An Elite team of Agents, Investigators and a Tactical Response Crisis Team” that work in tandem with the state government. With their headquarters located deep in North Philly’s sclerotic heart, they promise the “the comfort and peace of mind in knowing your home, family and business are safe in our hands.”
Quoting data from the FBI and the Philadelphia police, Boyer recently posted on Instagram that carjackings at Philly gas stations have more than tripled in recent years. Under a picture of Patel’s gas station at Broad and Clearfield, Boyer posted:
Citizens now realise [sic] Philadelphia law enforcement and city council leaders as well as the mayor’s office. [sic] Just don’t have a clue or the answers to combat this growing ticking bomb that’s just increasing along with the shootings and homicides in Philadelphia. . . . Make no mistake folks, it’s dangerous out here. It’s the wild wild west In Killadelphia.
Under another picture of Patel’s gas station, Boyer posted the caption:
We’re Pennsylvania State Agents and we’re not security. Basically, what we do is security details when the public calls upon us when the police can’t be there. . . . My guards go to training every other week, they’re proficient with [their guns] and with their taser, they know the law.
After the specter of rifle-toting guards in Kevlar vests patrolling a North Philly gas station made international headlines, Boyer told a local TV station, “The first week there was tension from the public seeing someone with an AR shotgun [sic] walking around.” He said some people would ask, “Why are you here? Are we in Beirut?” But now he says the locals have welcomed them:
I think they feel a little more at ease. One woman, she told me, “I don’t even have to turn my car off. I can go in, get a cup of coffee, and come back.” . . . You shouldn’t have to worry about, “Am I going to come home after going to the gas station?” People shouldn’t have to live like that.
I talked with Boyer on the phone yesterday. He said that ever since news of his agents patrolling a gas station broke, he’s been contacted by people all over the country requesting his services.
I told him that I attended college at Temple University in North Philly and that my soul winces whenever I see what was once, a very long time ago, both the nation’s biggest city and its capital sliding further into degradation and ruin. When I mentioned that North Philly never quite recovered from deindustrialization, Boyer quickly dismissed any suggestion that the city’s crime rate was related to education or poverty or the minimum wage. He said that in his long experience as a police officer, he eventually concluded that of every ten people who go to prison, only two will change their lives and that the rest are simply rotten apples with no motivation to better themselves.
“It’s sad that it’s come to this,” he told me.
I agree. I’d like to think Philly isn’t hopeless. I’d like to think many things.
This is where the nation was born, so this will be where the nation dies.
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19 comments
No doubt there are many who visit C.C. to read Jim’s columns. If our hapless and seemingly doomed White race survives into the next millennium, Jim will be remembered.
I find it reassuring that his guards are proficient in the use of their AR shotguns. They can be a handful.
For the society to have even a remote chance to recover it would be wise to heed the advice of Tommy Sotomayor: Ban ngz not guns
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjI7YKg_eoo&t=212s
I think you may have found Ye a running mate.
https://www.usacarry.com/why-we-carry-neighbor-shot-over-parking-dispute/?fbclid=IwAR1oaJeShn7fjJM2T62kRyZ1OK1hkN8BkYxhTLuoWpPLaeadjM5sgtHeTeA
Growing up I never understood why Stallone depicted Philly as being so so dumpy in the Rocky movies but then I went there and was like ah ok, that’s why. Because it is. A dump.
And so Andre and his brothers will collect state tax money to stand guard. Does he have any economic incentive to help his people fix the problem or fix it one way or another. This is a downward spiral. This is the very model of an African state. At what point does throwing money at this in perpetuity become too high of a cost?
Philadelphia boasts the Masonic Lodge of Benjamin Franklin and other prominent colonial, Revolutionary and American luminaries. The men in my family were Masons and my father wanted me to become one. Right before it was clear he was closing in on his last good healthy years I had him come out to the east coast for a good visit. One of the things I planned and did with him was take him to Philadelphia for a patriot tour and to see that Philadelphia lodge.
From the train station we could walk to all of our destinations. We arrived a half hour before the lodge opened. Outside in the yard and up the street were homeless people sleeping and living in boxed tents. Some black activists of some sort were picketing for justice on another block. It was filthy and disgusting. We looked up at the building and appreciated the architecture and beauty of the design. We made it inside once it opened. It was an astounding and beautiful building on the inside. Gorgeous marble staircases, statuary honoring the great men who crossed oceans and settled the initial frontier and set up civilization on a stone age continent.
One irony is that this lodge featured multiple rooms that themed based on geography and architectural style. It wasn’t an egalitarian homage per se, but it was built by Masons who honored and appreciated the craftsmanship and architecture of the high cultures in human history. I don’t think their appreciation for things well done or well built even by non Europeans was in any way a statement that all cultures and people are equally civilized.
I read this article and got an uneasy feeling. Today Andre and his brothers are guarding Rajeet’s gas station on the bad side of town. What happens when the whole town is the bad side of town? What happens when there is no money to pay Andre and his brothers to guard anything? What happens to the lodge and the heritage sites, (whose docents by the way seemed to have funny interpretations of the Constitution and where blacks who had no role in it were given one)? Maybe this decade’s guards become the next generation’s warlords. Do they sell off the lodge or turn it into a fentanyl factory?
I am grateful my father and I were able to see that together while it still exists. I am also grateful that he isn’t around anymore. It would kill him and my grandfather to see what has happened to our country. My Dad always believed in the silent majority and trusted that things would be righted. It wasn’t naivete, it was just ignorance of the demographic numbers and time passing a man by.
Right before Falkor and a melancholic Atreyu discover the Ivory Tower, flying through dead space after the Nothing has destroyed all of Fantasia, that’s how I feel about what remains of salvageable amerika. I’ll leave the hopes for posthumous actual punitive justice for creatures like larry krasner to the faithful; if amerika died in 2020, what new form will history extract from its self-wreckage and where to from here?
1543 homicide victims in Philly since the start of this decade. About 6786 shooting victims. I’m guessing about 80% of victims were black with much of the rest various hispanic victims in North Philly. In a city of about 1.6 million. As of the 2020 census, the black population is about 630 thousand. Because I mostly look on mankind with paternalistic benevolence, I genuinely feel bad for people. For all people who were ever stuck in the ghetto. To have the value of your labor stolen. Redlined, discriminated against, sometimes brutally policed. Never knowing the feeling of true safety. Vice beckoning at every opportunity, whores, pimps, and illegal narcotics. The consumption and selling of illegal narcotics. That speedily leading to ill health, prison time, and sometimes violent death and generally making the world of say, Macbeth, seem like a Disney film in comparison. The fact is, this is the 21st century, (imo looking already to be the most consequential ever) in the most powerful country on earth. The level of gun violence and mayhem in North Philadelphia and West Philadelphia should disturb people, but for most it doesn’t. Some aren’t even cognizant of it, and some uneasily understand but never acknowledge it at all. Stray bullets hitting people. Victims shot over and over. Larry Krasner is a failure, no matter what dimwitted Krasner voters may think. His plea deals are ludicrously lenient, he doesn’t believe in goint after illegal gun possession as a crime-fighting strategy, good lawyers are leaving fast. Total dereliction of duty, total lack of good sense. Because of this we have crime appropriately befitting the end of days. Krasner is probably the most glaring example, but there are many others. If we make it through this year, let alone this decade in one piece, I know this will be proven, that the people responsible for this travesty, are just that, demonstrably responsible, and I don’t think what remains of historical judgement will be kind.
Really the only thing to do at this point is to pray that all people find redemption in Jesus Christ, with due apologies to Muhammad. And that the wickedness that can grow in frightened souls is defeated.
Pray people find redemption in Jesus?
Yeah–that makes sense–leave it to someone who may or may not do a thing about it but for people like you it beats getting involved.
Pie in the sky by and by.
“To have the value of your labor stolen.”
Blacks RECEIVE something like a trillion dollars a year MORE from the government than they pay into the government. This has been going on for decades so do you want to tell me whose labor is being stolen?
Some blacks are taxpayers and some whites are welfare leeches though. I agree it’s not fair for us to keep subsidizing them and I don’t think the solution to poverty is shoveling money at the problem. I was talking more generally though of the whole 400 year history of blacks in America, and for everyone who works low wage jobs for big corporations when I say ‘stolen labor.’
Nearly 60 years ago left wing radicals subverted the government and redirected it in favor of blacks and, despite the huge advantage that gave them in society, they’ve done absolutely nothing to better themselves as a people. The violence and vice they live in is of their own making. The idea that anyone else is responsible for their condition is pure left-wing radical propaganda.
Wherever there is a high number of blacks, there is high crime, poverty, filth and violence. They aren’t locked in their ghetto, they create a ghetto everywhere they go. Blacks can only live peacefully where there is strict law and order and severe consequences. That’s why most of black Africa uses strict law and order and severe penalties. It’s all that works.
“Witnessing the slow and inexorable demise of Philadelphia is like watching a loved one die from afar and being powerless to stop it.”
I feel that way about the whole country.
Not sure how I’m supposed to feel about this story. So the Patel opens up a no-name gas station in a neighborhood where Texaco fears to tread (“Karco”?), planning to be the Rockefeller of North Philly, $1.47 fill-ups and a Colt .45 at a time. But lo and behold, the locals aren’t quite as sympathetic as depicted on Netflix, and for some mysterious reason, the metropolitan police commissioner and DA fail to appreciate the enrichment or vibrancy that Patel offers as the entrepreneurial immigrant. So Patel pays some chest-pounding black dude toting an “AR shotgun” to convince his cohort to steer clear.
I have about as much empathy as when peering into a terrarium, and I’m not convinced that any of these characters deserves a seat on the ark.
Whiteness The Original Sin has an evil twin by a queer NYC professor. Teaching white women how they can only fight white supremacy by having children with nonwhites. Meet “Nice White Ladies” by Jessie Daniels.
North Philly gets all the attention now, but back in the 1970s, the abandoned sections of South Philly struck fear into suburbanites. A lot of my friends grandparents held their ground, refusing to leave.
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