It's Time to FIGHT for American Cities

Who will answer the call?

Dear Reader –

The safety of American cities is again on everyone’s mind, for tragic reasons. In Charlotte, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee seeking a better life was senselessly murdered on the subway, infuriating the nation. The violent criminal responsible had been released 14 times under North Carolina’s broken system. A judge who had never passed the bar, a city council that ignored public safety, and Governor Cooper’s “Task Force for Racial Equity” executive orders all made it harder to keep repeat offenders behind bars. This is part of a national pattern driven by leftist dogma and unaccountable NGOs.

"America will never be the same," wrote Charlie Kirk, showing the picture of the frightened young woman, before she died. As the attacker walked away, he boasted, “I got that white girl.” Outraged citizens are creating murals with her picture around the country, and President Trump has called for a swift trial and the death penalty. Millions of Americans are fed up and ready to stand up for their principles.

We had planned to release this yesterday, but evil struck again. The murder of Charlie Kirk has left America grieving and praying for his wife and children. Charlie was a friend I supported and admired, someone I knew as he grew from a young firebrand into an impressive leader at just 31. If you’re anything like me, his murder has left you resolved to fight even harder for our civilization.

Today also marks 24 years since Islamists attacked America on September 11, 2001—the event that inspired us to found Palantir to protect our country. Charlie had recently spoken more about the red-green alliance—Communists and Islamists uniting to tear down civilization. Nowhere is their success more visible than in our broken cities.

This is one of those moments that shows how badly we need more courageous leaders on the right. The answers below are clear—the question is which leaders have the resolve to act.

- Joe

It’s Time to FIGHT for American Cities

Cities are a measure of our civilization. From Aristotle’s polis to John Winthrop’s “city on a hill,” they have long stood as examples of human achievement and engines of prosperity. Aristotle famously taught that man is a political animal, and he saw the city-state as the pinnacle of human community, not merely a place to survive but the condition for the good life.

In America, we built cities on the frontier. They should be great. But right now, too many American cities are dysfunctional. In our largest cities—soon to host the Olympic Games and the World Cup—tents and filth line the sidewalks. Funds meant to address the crisis are funneled to left-wing NGOs. District Attorneys go soft on crime—or, in some cases, appear to encourage it. In cities like Chicago and Baltimore, entire neighborhoods have been abandoned by police, and murder rates rival those of much poorer countries.

For many on the right, left-run cities are too often treated as fodder for finger-pointing rather than as problems to solve. The columnist George Will, for whom I’ve had a lot of respect over the years, recently argued that a socialist mayor in New York would be “useful” as a warning about leftist policies. That is exactly the wrong attitude—surrendering the fight before it begins and ignoring how quickly massive city budgets, $115 billion in the case of New York City, can spread damage far beyond city limits.

To abandon our cities to crime and squalor is to surrender America’s future. Yet too many conservatives look away, content to assign blame instead of taking action. Republicans cannot afford to cede the nation’s economic and cultural centers to radicals. In states like Texas, where we hold strong majorities, there is no excuse. The power and responsibility to fix these problems is ours.

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It’s time for state leaders to act. In my home city of Austin, members of my own team at 8VC have had their homes and cars broken into, and others have been assaulted by unhinged individuals on the street.

The decline is the product of unchecked progressive policies that let violent criminals run free, foster visible squalor and illegal encampments, and divert dollars from public safety to activism. In 2020, the City Council cut or redirected $150 million—nearly a third of the police budget—and shut down the police academy for more than a year. The results were predictable: a force now 340 officers short, just as violent crime hit decade highs. The District Attorney’s office compounded the damage by missing indictment deadlines and releasing 263 felony suspects since 2024, including 70 charged with violent or sex crimes.

At the same time, local leaders spend taxpayer dollars on lobbyists who export their most left-wing policies and fight common-sense reforms on property taxes, school choice, and election integrity. In 2023, Texas local governments spent nearly $100 million on lobbyists. In 2024 alone, over $21 million went to cultural activism, including the Austin Gay Men’s Chorus, Austin Rainbow Theatre, and Thee Gay Agenda, which boasts of “queering spaces all over Austin.” It’s the local equivalent of USAID shipping billions abroad for activist crusades while basic security collapses at home.

Homelessness represents the worst of urban policy: mass suffering, ballooning costs, and a system that rewards failure with more funds. Austin’s next budget would devote over $100 million to homeless programs, triple the $30 million spent in 2018. It should come as no surprise to people who have followed our policy work that these funds did not reduce homelessness. In fact, the number of homeless people living in Austin has risen by 40%.

Other red states are allowing similar shenanigans. Nashville prioritized “belonging funds” for immigrants while property crime hit record levels. In Washington, D.C., a police commissioner was suspended for manipulating statistics to hide the city's failures. No doubt other cities are also lying.

And when crime and disorder drive businesses away, the whole state suffers: a rural manufacturer loses a contract, a small-town trucking firm misses shipments, an energy producer faces shrinking demand.

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President Trump is showing that we don’t have to accept urban decay as inevitable, taking steps that closely align with reforms we have long advanced at the Cicero Institute. His recent homelessness order forces federal agencies to withhold funding from cities that tolerate open drug use and squatting, encourages states to expand involuntary treatment, and prioritizes housing for women and children by separating them from sex offenders. Most importantly, it does what many states have refused to do: tie funding to real conditions on the ground.

The results speak for themselves and offer governors a blueprint. When President Trump deployed the National Guard to Washington, D.C., robbery fell 46% and carjacking 83%.

The lesson is especially urgent for cities like Austin. The city technically has a camping ban—we fought to pass it—but anyone who walks downtown knows it isn’t enforced. Under Trump’s order, Austin could now lose tens of millions in HUD, DOJ, HHS, and DOT funds for that failure.

At Cicero, we’ve outlined steps governors can take on homelessness and crime:

1. States must intervene when cities fail to keep order.

If police staffing falls below set levels and crime rises above them, state law should trigger automatic deployments, billed directly to city budgets. Governors have the authority to override progressive officials who let cities be pillaged. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt showed the way by clearing encampments in Tulsa and requiring the city to keep them gone. To sharpen incentives, states should also bar cities from raising taxes until crime drops below clear benchmarks.

2. States must empower citizens to hold cities accountable.

A camping ban without enforcement is a dead letter. Residents should have an app to report encampments or street crime in real time. If city police fail to respond within hours, state authorities should step in and, if the problem persists after 24 hours, clear it themselves. Costs are deducted from the city’s share of state tax revenue. Utah considered this model; other states should prove it can work.

Incentives should apply directly to taxpayers as well. If a neighborhood is overrun with encampments or open drug use, residents should receive property-tax rebates. Using the app, citizens could submit a photo of the problem, then confirm inaction by uploading another photo the next day. Each verified case would earn a proportional tax credit for the resident and their neighbors. The message to local governments must be clear: if they allow disorder to fester, they cannot continue charging citizens full price for services they fail to provide.

3. States need to confront addiction and severe mental illness as the real drivers of homelessness.

That means banning “harm reduction” programs that subsidize drug use, modernizing involuntary commitment laws, and expanding state-run behavioral health facilities. These clinics should be built in low-density areas, not downtown. All that is required is for the state to take charge from the irresponsible city activists. With federal barriers falling and billions in opioid settlement funds flowing to states like Texas, the resources are there to get it done.

4. States should demand radical transparency from NGOs.

Any nonprofit that takes even a cent of any government money should have to disclose every grant, sub-grant, and payment in a searchable, standardized format, with clear reporting of costs, outcomes, and independent audits. Funding must be tied to results, not political loyalty. This one reform would expose patronage networks, cut off subsidies to corrupt activists, and reveal why the left resists oversight.

Taken together, these four reforms give governors a clear blueprint: restore order, empower citizens, treat root causes, and expose the corruption that keeps cities trapped in dysfunction.

The first step is to care deeply about our civilization, which includes American cities—even if you don’t live in one. Urban decay erodes trust in our institutions and in America itself, leaving citizens blackpilled. Extremists exploit that despair using the old Marxist playbook: fuel grievance politics, tear down faith in our history, and extinguish hope for the future.

Zohran Mamdani wants to tear down not just our present but our history. He has endorsed abolishing private property for “free housing,” declared that “queer liberation means defund the police,” demanded the prison system be dismantled, and called for higher taxes on “whiter neighborhoods.” His father, Mahmood Mamdani, has gone further, branding America the “genesis of settler-colonialism.” This worldview breeds policies that would rot the Big Apple and undermine what America is all about: free people and free markets.

No wonder he once flipped off a statue of Christopher Columbus and demanded its removal. These activists want to tear down more than just our statues. To fight back, we must prove that our civilization is not flawed. If the American system works, our cities should reflect its strength, beauty, and breadth of possibilities.

It’s true that progressive policies are responsible for destroying our cities. But why are we letting the bad guys win? Much of the chaos is unfolding in red states, where Republican governors and legislatures could choose to be bolder leaders. The political machines that dominate urban life—sustained by the corruption and dysfunction of these cities—will not reform themselves.

Our leaders face a clear choice. They can watch our cities sink further into disorder, handing socialists a vacuum to exploit and demoralizing millions more citizens about the state of the West. Or they can intervene by harnessing state constitutional power to break the doom loop, root out corruption, save lives, and prove that great American cities are still possible!