Mention the name “Rhode Island” and many Americans will scratch their heads. A glitzy New York suburb? A down-market Caribbean vacation spot? Maybe a cancelled reality series from the producers of Survivor and Top Gear? The sad truth is that Rhode Island is none of these things, and a little bit of all of them.

In fact, the name denotes an odious slice of the northeastern United States where political hacks and prostitutes, college professors and pension-padding state workers vie for power in a sickening pageant of progressivism. Most scandalous of all: this blister on our body politic is not an island by any measure, but it is a full-fledged state!

As a wholly accredited state, Rhode Island enjoys all the federal privileges of much more established, ethically accountable places such as Texas or Iowa. Yes, you heard that right, this bankrupt backwater, so corrupt it put its local mafia out of business decades ago, somehow warrants a full slate of Representatives in Congress and two Senators, despite being no larger than a Kentucky pig farm.

The reason why Rhode Island is so very dangerous — and why it poses a threat to the financial health of the United States — is that the people there have pioneered a new form of radical liberalism that can be simply described as, crony socialism. This is a state where “I know a guy” is the unofficial motto and where the vast majority aspire to live off the government teat. The government, in turn, has been forced by its all-powerful unions to fund every possible expense, from pension credits for legislators’ jail time, to outsized overtime pay for firemen, which in one instance reached $218,000 in a single year. Where does the money come from? By taxing any hint of private enterprise into extinction.

When the state ultimately goes belly up, will hardworking taxpayers from the rest of the nation foot the bill? Will the Democrat Party attempt to impose the Rhode Island model on other localities to hasten our march to socialism? Whatever the future holds, one fact does not bode well for our children: the toxic mix of union power and liberal entitlements has helped “Lil Rhody” attain the highest per capita rate of marijuana abuse in the country.

From Roger Williams to Rogue’s Island

To understand why America is burdened with such a geographic gaffe, we must look back to the 17th century when a scoundrel by the name of Roger Williams decided to turn away from Christianity and “go native.” It was 1636 and a cruel winter was pounding the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Our land’s earliest religious pilgrims needed to work together to survive the cold. Fearing the rigors of all that, Williams absconded to the south of Boston with a rambunctious band of Indian warriors. He set up a hedonistic little village on the edge of a swamp. The place was called “Providence Plantation” and the rest, tragically, is graffitied across our nation’s history.

Pirates, slave traders and political dissidents soon made Providence Plantation and the surrounding colony of Rhode Island their home. These miscreants prided themselves on Williams’ independent streak and had very little patriotism for the birth of this nation. In fact, Rhode Island was the first to lynch a British trade ship for its foreign wares, while being the very last of the original thirteen colonies to ratify the United States Constitution. This misbegotten municipality quickly became so notorious for its vice it earned the nickname, “Rogue’s Island.”

In the 19th century, hordes of boozy Irish and Italians took refuge here, opting for a land of rocky soil and deeply rooted incompetence rather than any place with a Puritan work ethic. They brought with them so much graft that noted historian Lincoln Steffens dubbed Rhode Island a, “State for Sale” and wrote a damning indictment of its widespread corruption.

Is it any surprise that such an indolent people would be the first to introduce America to the debauched distractions of the circus, the car race, motion pictures and socialist strikes by women? They even had time left over to pioneer the worst of hipster facial hair fashions and turn the estimable United States Navy into a hotbed of homosexual carnality. This inspired one temporary resident, Edgar Allen Poe, to invent the genre of horror literature. Poe needed a fictional escape from the real life terrors he found himself surrounded by every day in Rogue’s Island.

The Cianci Curse

Today, Rhode Island is most notorious for Supreme Court Justices who perform mafia weddings, a sex festival so raunchy that even Bill O’Reilly couldn’t get it shut down, a credit union crisis so severe it triggered America’s S&L meltdown, a mayor who regularly appeared high on cocaine in public, a governor not afraid to dumpster dive for his graft, a legislature so incompetent it inadvertently legalized “indoor prostitution,” the $5,000 bribes required to pass police exams, the $50 bribes that lower your property taxes, a degree of political correctness so extreme that they tried to rename manholes, “personholes” so as to not offend female construction workers, state workers whose greatest dream in life is to retire on fake disability claims so that they can comment angrily on every Providence Journal article from the comfort of their Florida vacation homes without interruption, a tax-avoiding scumbag who introduced middle-aged male frontal nudity to primetime television, a library system so bankrupt it needed liberal buffoon Alec Baldwin to bail it out, policemen who would rather dance in the streets in fancy jodhpurs than do actual work, brutal Satanic rituals aimed at naïve college students, homeless “artists” who seize public malls as their private living quarters, a river so polluted that officials regularly light it on fire to burn off the trash, a drunken public so easily amused that they celebrate these river fires as spur-of-the-moment fertility rituals, some of the most insanely leftwing institutions of higher learning in our nation and an abhorrent trend of anti-American graffiti that was unscrupulously usurped by a wanted felon and used as a crucial element in Barack Obama’s propaganda campaign, thus insuring his seizure of the White House… And then there’s that state mascot, a cartoon character named Stewie Griffin (who is, in fact, a gay infant obsessed with bestiality). That state “appetizer” (calamari, which is also a codeword for a crude homosexual sex act). And that sad, sad state “Holiday Tree.” Thanks Governor Grinch!

Let’s not forget college rapist and ex-con Vincent J. “Buddy” Cianci, Jr.! While Mayor of Providence, this ludicrously toupéed cretin kidnapped a local business leader and beat him down with a fireplace log. The state’s Attorney General and several policemen were there to cheer Mayor Buddy on. Months later, when the whole sordid tale became public, Cianci was forced by law to resign. Of course, the illiterate electorate re-elected this thug a few years later. His comeback was so rife with corruption that the feds formally named his office (beneath an extravagant gilded cupola) “Plunder Dome.” From cops to councilmen, every municipal palooka fought for “a piece of the action.” During his final days as mayor, Cianci hid out in his city’s gay discos where he cultivated a devoted following of drag queens.

When the FBI finally swooped in, the mayor was charged with racketeering, conspiracy, extortion, witness tampering and mail fraud. The judge pardoned his hairpiece but Cianci himself spent the next five years at the Federal Correctional Institution at Fort Dix. Upon his release, the crook was celebrated as a local hero and only weeks ago it was announced that, yes, rapist Buddy Cianci is once again running for Mayor of Providence!

Clam Cakes, Back Hair & Weather Mystics

Friends might say I’m obsessed with Rhode Island, but these are just the quick jottings of a casual observer. I had the misfortune of spending a summer in this place a long, long time ago (my uncle was attached to the Navy College in Newport). Of all my dreadful experiences there, the one most deeply etched in my memory is the time I saw two of “Lil Rhody’s” most beloved heroes — John Ghiorse and Art Lake — fight it out in front of the Blue Grotto restaurant, as a posse of Patriarca toughs held a half dozen Providence patrolmen at bay. Lake and Ghiorse happened to be the local weathermen and their tussle was over whose “Doppler” had more oomph. As oracles of sudden rainstorms and school cancellations, these men were worshipped as mystics among the superstitious population of Rhode Island. Much like the state itself, it was not a pretty sight.

Speaking of sights, it should be noted that Rhode Island has no noteworthy landmarks if you discount the methadone clinics, crumbling factory buildings and ample parking lots. The entire place rises only a few feet above sea level, which may explain why it smells of low tide and car exhaust everywhere you go. Its beaches are rocky and cold; its women no different. These types of gals wear their hair colored like straw and teased to laughable heights. Their favorite perfume combines the mystery of warm beer with the glamour of halitosis. You could say the men aspire to be guidos, but they’d need vocabulary lessons from Jersey Shore and major back waxing to rise a notch above their current armpit-scratching, ape-like status. (Wannabe guido culture is so big in Rhode Island that even the local Jews, French-Canadians and Portuguese are now gelling their hair and racing down I-95 in souped-up Camaros.)

Providence, the capital and most populated city, has been devoid of commerce and industry for half a century. In its place, a gang of universities has set up shop. These wackadoodle socialist training centers spit out a regular parade of sullen alums who quickly graduate to listless hipster lifestyles in those decrepit old warehouses. Other than that, Providence is only notable for Cianci’s crimes, though locals celebrate a comic book high rise and a Depression-era hot dog cart as if they were the Twin Towers and the Alamo combined.

Lil Rhody’s cuisine consists of a damp, fermented ball of griddle grease known as a “clam cake” and a type of liquefied pink slime called, the “Awful Awful.” The dialect here is painfully throaty and high-pitched at the same time. A screechy rat-a-tat-tat of language, punctuated with “yeeeh” and “wicked” and “like” every four or five words. “Yeeh, like the Foxy Lady is wicked cool cause they got, like, that Legs N’ Eggs special, my mutha working there, she’s like “You gots to go!” and anyhow she out meetin’ guys now cause my fadder down the ACI for that thing… But he knows a guy.”

Revoke Rhode Island

How can we, as Americans, respond to the economic and political quagmire that is Rhode Island? As evidenced above, the state has utterly forfeited its right to exist as a fully vested territory of this country. It is so small, so incestuous and so corrupt, that its crony socialism has become the defining characteristic of her people. To put it bluntly, Rhode Island needs to be stopped before its disease of radical liberalism spreads any further and puts all of our nation’s children at risk.

Unbelievable as it may sound, Rhode Island does have its cheerleaders. Mark Patinkin and the folks at Buzzfeed regularly extol the virtues of America’s smallest state. Yet they rarely touch on the very serious issues raised here (I could throw in a litany of other names these journalists never mention in their “Best of Rhode Island” lists, such as Claus Von Bulow, Alan Shawn Feinstein, Peter Gilbert, Phillipe & Gorge…. but all this doom and gloom has made me weary.)

Some have suggested slicing the state down the middle and giving half to Connecticut and half to Massachusetts. Personally, I’m not a fan of pawning off palookaville on the neighbors, but it is a thought. The Navy Corps of Engineers often dynamites decommissioned ships and lets them sink to the bottom of the sea. There’s something romantic about the idea. Some day that detritus may attract a bit of seaweed and a few fish, giving someone such as myself a pleasant afternoon of sport if he anchors nearby. Considering all the headaches that Rhode Island has caused the elder generation of this nation, I think it would be a fitting end for this wicked little state.