Watch: 'Homeless Mickey Mouse,' crack smoke, and feces ravage streets of New York City



Zohran Mamdani, Democratic candidate for New York City's mayoral race, once suggested "the abolition of property" as a solution to homelessness. By the looks of downtown NYC, the communist visionary is going to need to seize a lot of property to achieve that goal if he gets elected.

A casual walk down the streets of Midtown Manhattan reveals a city ravaged by homelessness, illegal immigration, and drug abuse. With chaos as far as the eye can see, prospective visitors to the Big Apple will be shocked to witness the state of the sanctuary city.

'This guy was laying in his own crap in the middle of Times Square.'

As captured by independent reporter Oren Levy, the "harsh reality" that most ignore in the heart of the city is the insurmountable number of homeless people on the streets.

Not only are there thousands sleeping outdoors, but in 2025, the migrant and homeless crisis means sleeping on cardboard boxes or directly on the pavement in the middle of the sidewalk.

"Homeless individuals sleeping on the streets, using newspapers to clean themselves, openly injecting drugs and smoking crack — all happening all day and night," Levy wrote on X. "This is the state of New York City, and no one wants to talk about it."

RELATED: Zohran Mamdani casually says he would support the abolition of property in resurfaced video

 
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The investigative reporter has worked in the city for years, breaking stories about violent illegal aliens and child trafficking by gangs like Venezuela's Tren de Aragua.

Levy says he witnesses new evidence of the city's decay on a daily basis. For example, earlier this week, he saw a "homeless Mickey Mouse," an individual in a dress, wearing a Mickey Mouse mascot head, passed out alongside some luggage between two plants, outside.

"That was a first. I thought I was tripping when I saw that," Levy told Blaze News.

The rampant homelessness "shocks" tourists, the reporter said, and businesses are at their wits' end over the matter.

"It's a bad look for the city. Business and building owners have had enough too — this crisis has dragged on for years with no real solution. While migrants are placed in hotels and private rooms, our own homeless are left behind," Levy added.

RELATED: Mamdani’s socialist New York sounds great — if you don’t have kids

 
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Levy followed the mayor's office closely in 2023 and 2024, and originally thought Mayor Eric Adams had his hands tied when it came to the city's illegal immigration and sanctuary city laws. While the mayor said it was up to city council to change the city's status, Levy later found out the mayor did possess the power to make necessary changes but declined to do so.

"If the mayor really wanted to change parts of the sanctuary city law, he can easily do so by adding it to the Charter Revision Commission and therefore bypass city council," Levy explained.

As a result of inaction, Levy believes the streets have spiraled out of control and rival San Francisco in terms of literal filth. Look no further than a video from Tuesday, where Levy witnessed a homeless man laying in and wiping his own feces while on the street.

"This guy was laying in his own crap in the middle of Times Square NYC and yes he was also [wiping] his butt," Levy wrote on X.

 

Levy also hopes New Yorkers "wake up" before November's mayoral election, when Mamdani (D), Mayor Adams (I), former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (I), and Curtis Sliwa (R) go head to head for control of the city.

However, the New Yorker does not believe Mamdani will end the homelessness crisis with his "far-left agenda."

"Mamdani is anti-Israel, a socialist, and wants to replace cops with social workers," Levy insisted.

"It will not end well."

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You can't legislate healing: How divorce fuels homelessness



Founder of the Dream Center in Los Angeles Matthew Barnett has been on the front lines of the homelessness crisis for the past few decades — and what he’s discovered should change the way we view, and attempt to help, the homeless.

“What have you learned about homelessness during these 30 years? What do you think a lot of people just don’t understand about it?” BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey of “Relatable” asks.

“Every testimony we have at church — we have a four-minute testimony every church service, from somebody whose life has been transformed,” Barnett explains.

“90% of every testimony says, ‘My parents went through a divorce,’ or there’s some family breakdown, and that became the traumatizing event that put them in that situation.”


In addition to the family breakdown, Barnett believes that “the culture of drugs” and “openness to everything” has created “a culture where people just think it’s friendly to become addicted to drugs.

“But the breakdown of the family always seems to be the core issue when people are talking about a traumatic event that sent them into a situation or a negative spiral,” he tells Stuckey.

While mainstream discussion around homelessness is politically charged and full of debates surrounding policy, Stuckey has also noticed that it doesn't seem like political changes hold any answers.

“It doesn’t really seem like in most cities, including in Los Angeles, that we’re going in the right direction,” she tells Barnett.

“Oh, we’re spending so much money — it’s unbelievable — on homelessness,” Barnett says of the city.

“It costs us $7,500 a year to house someone, rehabilitate them, educate them. It costs like $175,000 a year to incarcerate them or deal with the issues of homelessness per person.

“So there’s no accountability. There’s no reason for people to really grow,” he continues.

“It would almost be better if you gave everyone $10,000 to rebuild their life who went through a one-year, structured faith-based type of program.

“But there’s just no incentive to change. There’s no incentive for people to want to go forward. We're trying to legislate something that is dealing with the heart,” he adds.

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Voters loved the socialist slogans. Now comes the fine print.



Zohran Mamdani’s surprise victory over Andrew Cuomo in last week’s New York City Democratic mayoral primary catapulted a full-bodied Democratic Socialist program onto the national marquee. In his midnight speech, he claimed, “A life of dignity should not be reserved for a fortunate few.” His win marks Gotham’s sharpest left turn in a generation — and that’s saying something.

The recipients of his promise are slated to receive an economic makeover that treats prices as political failures. His platform freezes rents on more than 1 million apartments, builds 200,000 publicly financed “social housing” units, rolls out city-owned grocery stores, makes buses fare-free, and lifts the minimum wage to $30 by 2030, all bankrolled by roughly $10 billion in new corporate and millionaire taxes.

If Mamdani’s program collapses under its own weight, the case for limited government will write itself in boarded-up windows and outbound moving vans.

A week later, reality is beginning to set in.

Mamdani means what he says. On his watch, public safety would become a piggy bank. During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, Mamdani posted, “No, we want to defund the police.” He wasn’t being metaphorical. His current blueprint would shift billions from the NYPD into a new “Department of Community Safety” — even as felony assaults on seniors have doubled since 2019.

Mamdani’s program may feel aspirational to affluent progressives, yet to many New Yorkers it lands like an ultimatum.

Forty-two percent of renter households already spend more than 30% of their income on shelter; now they are told higher business taxes and a slimmer police presence are the price of utopia, which helps explain why tens of thousands of households making between $32,000 and $65,000 — the city’s economic backbone — have left for other states in just the past few years.

Picture a deli cashier in the Bronx. She’s not reading City Hall memos, but she feels the squeeze when rent rises and her boss mutters about new taxes. She doesn’t frame her frustration as a debate about “big government” — but she knows when it’s harder to get by and when it’s less safe walking home. The politics of the city aren’t abstract to her. They’re personal.

Adding insult to injury, the job Mamdani wants comes with a salary of roughly $258,750 a year — more than three times the median city household income — plus the chauffeurs, security details, and gilt-edged benefits package that accompany the office. Telling overtaxed commuters that their groceries will now be “public options” while banking a quarter-million dollars in guaranteed pay is the policy equivalent of riding past them in a limousine and rolling down the window just long enough to raise their rent.

Layer onto that record a set of statements many Jewish New Yorkers regard as outright hostility. Mamdani is one of the loudest champions of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement; last year he pushed a bill to bar certain New York charities from sending money to Israeli causes and defended the chant “globalize the intifada,” drawing sharp rebukes from city rabbis. The day after Hamas massacred 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023, he blamed the bloodshed on “apartheid” and “occupation.”

All this lands in a metropolis with the world’s largest Jewish community outside Israel — about 1.4 million residents — whose synagogues, schools, and small businesses have weathered a steady rise in hate crimes. For them, a would-be mayor who treats Israel as a pariah and shrugs at chants of intifada isn’t dabbling in foreign policy; he’s telegraphing contempt for their safety and identity at home.

Republicans see an inadvertent gift. Mamdani’s New York will soon be measured against the lower-tax, police-friendly model many red states — especially my home, Florida — have advertised for years.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Law Enforcement Recruitment Bonus Program has mailed more than 7,800 after-tax checks of $5,000 to officers relocating from 49 states, including hundreds from New York precincts, while Florida touts a 50-year low in index-crime reports and unemployment below the national average. IRS data shows Florida netted 33,019 New York households in the latest year, with average adjusted gross income near $185,000.

Project those trend lines a few years and Mamdani’s New York grows grim: a shrunken police force responding to more 911 calls; fare-free buses draining MTA dollars and stranding riders; municipal groceries undercutting bodegas until subsidies vanish; office-tower vacancies sapping property tax receipts just as social housing bills come due. The skyline still gleams, but plywood fronts and “For Lease” placards scar street level. Meanwhile states that fund cops, respect paychecks, and let entrepreneurs stock the shelves siphon away residents and revenue.

RELATED: Don’t let rural America become the next New York City

  Terraxplorer via iStock/Getty Images

Republicans running in 2026 scarcely need to draft the attack ads, yet they must pair fiscal sobriety with moral urgency — protecting the vulnerable, rewarding work, and defending faith. Mamdani’s primary victory shows romantic egalitarianism still electrifies young voters; statistics alone won’t counter a pledge of universal child care and rent freezes. This indeed won’t be a case of “promises made, promises kept.”

If his program collapses under its own weight, the case for limited government will write itself in boarded-up windows and outbound moving vans.

Should the city somehow thrive — safer streets, balanced books, real wage gains — progressives will demand that Congress replicate Mamdani’s policies nationwide. That is federalism at its most honest: two competing philosophies running side by side under the same national sky, with citizens free to relocate from one laboratory to the other.

For now, the lab results favor the model that backs the blue, protects the paycheck, and keeps the ladder of opportunity in good repair. Voters — and U-Hauls — are already keeping score. By decade’s end, the scoreboard will show which vision truly loved New York’s working families and which merely loved the sound of its own ideals.

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When did America's public libraries become homeless encampments?



What happened to libraries?

No, I’m not talking about school libraries being turned into propaganda factories, shelving what amounts to textual pornography for middle school students, all justified under the guise of “inclusivity.” That’s a discussion for another time.

One December, as my wife left the library, a homeless man spit across the stairs onto the back of her dress. She turned around to find him quite satisfied with himself.

I am talking about the fact that across the United States, a tragic number of public libraries have turned into daytime homeless shelters and temporary asylums for the mentally ill, the insane, and generally disturbed.

Furious George

Go to any public library in any big city, and you will see a security guard slowly patrolling the quiet floor. Every once in a while he wakes up a bum up who’s sleeping on a bench behind the periodicals.

“No sleeping,” he mumbles as he nudges the drowsy man. Unkempt and disturbed homeless men in their 50s hunch over the computers while mothers pull their 3-year-olds close, hurrying past on their way to the children’s section.

Hanging around, right inside the lobby in the winter, the insane argue as a fight is about to break out. You walk by, head lowered, hoping to get inside without attracting any attention.

Great expectorations

Years ago my wife and I lived in Milwaukee. The library there was like any city’s library. A big, beautiful building right downtown full of books — and vagrants. So many of these old city libraries are so structurally stunning, and there is something darkly poetic in this. These grand buildings, built at a different time, a higher time, now lower than ever.

The bricks are the same, but their purpose has been degraded. One December, as my wife was leaving, a homeless man spit across the stairs onto the back of her dress. She turned around to find him quite satisfied with himself. This is the current state of these once-great testaments to literacy.

There may be no greater metaphor for our collapsing society than the demise of the library. Before everyone had money to buy the books they want, the library was a lifeline. Before the internet and before everyone had a telephone in their homes, the library was an oasis of knowledge. In the desert of the new world, the library was a miraculous thing. It was a symbol of civilization itself.

Goodnight, literacy

Today, however, people don’t read. They can, I think. But they don’t, that’s for sure.

They watch TikTok and rot their brains consuming gutter slop content. The majority of the population no longer desire the library like they once did. They, of course, still need the library, but they don’t want the library. This is another part of the story that is the demise of the library. The people are degenerating.

Of course, some people still read. I read, you read, we all read here. What are you doing right now, after all? But many of us buy our books. Personally, I end up buying books so I can support the author and own the book myself.

Often the books that I end up buying are a little off the beaten path, so they won’t be found in the library. Though I do use the library for a host of more general research purposes. Nevertheless, I know I am not the norm and neither are you. People don’t read.

Do people refrain from reading because of the homeless in the library? Probably not. People don’t read because people are getting dumber and their attention spans are fried.

Crime and... crime

But there is a certain percentage of people who visit the library less because of the general anarcho-tyranny of the situation inside. My wife stopped visiting the library after she got spit on. I stopped after being worn down by the generally depressing scene of disheveled men sleeping next to the nonfiction.

The homeless invasion of the library is a tragic example of a society that no longer has the will to keep order as it ought to be kept. The reason vagrants populate the library is the same reason cities tolerate shoplifting and general disorder. The institutions responsible for keeping order and maintaining a decent public space are too cowardly to do so. They sacrifice the rights of the upstanding citizen for the sake of the dysfunctional and disturbed.

You might think that this all sounds too harsh. One might protest, “Homeless people have a right to be at the library too!” Well, to a degree, they do. But vagrancy is a thing, and we all know what it is.

A farewell to harms

There was a time when our public spaces were kept more orderly. When those disturbing the peace were told to move along and if they didn’t go on their own, they were made to go. The homeless have rights, but so does everyone else. Public spaces deserve to be orderly, and if our government and institutions can’t ensure that, then they are failing.

There is a bigger question running like a thread through all this. Is it humane to turn the insane loose on the streets? For a while people were institutionalized; that was our solution. But then we stopped, and for the past few decades or so we’ve thought the best option was letting people go free, even if they end up harming themselves or others.

Which way is the right way? That’s a big question. I don’t know what the exact answer is. I’m not sure there’s a solution that makes us all feel good. But what I do know is that the scene of mentally ill homeless people disturbing everyone else and turning the public library into a homeless shelter is an acute example of societal dysfunction and degeneration.

There is something dark, depressing, and poignant about the scene of the city library today. This place where people used to learn before they fried their brains is now a homeless shelter.

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Charles Barkley trashes San Francisco as 'rat infested' ahead of city hosting 2025 NBA All-Star Game



Hall of Fame basketball player Charles Barkley once again criticized San Francisco as a dirty city, much to the dismay of his co-hosts.

While covering highlights of an Indiana Pacers versus Detroit Pistons game, TNT host Ernie Johnson spoke specifically about the great season Pistons player Cade Cunningham is having.

Cunningham is averaging a career-high 24.3 points per game through 38 games and is also putting up his best numbers for rebounds and assists per game.

As the broadcast team was discussing if Cunningham was going to be selected for the 2025 NBA All-Star Game in San Francisco, Barkley let it be known — once again — that he isn't a fan of the city.

"Hey listen, [if] he doesn't make the team, I'm not going. I'm not going to that rat-infested place out in San Francisco."

"Stop, man!" host Johnson pleaded.

As the highlights continued, Barkley squabbled with co-host Shaquille O'Neal as another former NBA great and co-host Kenny Smith was heard laughing at the exchange.

"Y'all are not gonna make me like San Francisco," Barkley reiterated.

"We're not, I know! Just keep it to yourself," Johnson enforced.

Barkley, still asserting his opinion, added, "No, no, no, no, nope."

'We love San Francisco!'

The exchange wasn't the first time Barkley had harsh realities to promote about the city by the bay.

In fact, Barkley made similar remarks during a live broadcast of the 2024 NBA All-Star Game in Indiana.

Barkley described the city as being filled with "homeless crooks," but this time, Golden State Warriors forward Draymond Green was there to take offense.

Barkley had asked Hall of Famer Reggie Miller about having the choice of "being cold or being around a bunch of homeless crooks in San Francisco"; this caused Green to immediately interrupt.

"That's crazy!" Green said.

Reporter Taylor Rooks then replied, "We love San Francisco!"

"No, we don't!" Barkley insisted.

"Yes, we do!" Green came back.

Barkley then argued that residents "can't even walk around" in the city, causing Green to insist that they can.

Barkley declared, "Yeah, with a bulletproof vest and security!"

The 2025 NBA All-Star Game airs on February 16 on TNT and will feature four teams, with Barkley, O'Neal, and Smith selecting the players for three of them.

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