If the message of this week’s Democratic National Convention is “We’ll make America more like Chicago,” run.
Nearly 100 years under Democratic control, the Windy City has fallen into dire straits: rising crime, rising taxes, mounting debt, crumbling infrastructure and a declining population are just some of the hardships facing its residents.
Chicago is the murder capital of the United States. Someone is shot every two hours, and someone is murdered every 17 hours. So far this year, Chicago has had 353 murder victims, most of them black. The murder rate is five times higher than New York City’s.
“The Democrats wanted to hold their convention somewhere safer, but Beirut was unavailable,” one joker quipped.
A week of pretense
Of course, none of this unpleasantness will be visible to the 35,000 convention-goers and 15,000 reporters descending on Chicago this week. The DNC has built a major wall around the convention site but has refused to build one on the southern border.
Mayor Brandon Johnson has suspended “anti-racism” crime policies and ordered the city’s beleaguered police officers to enforce the law once and for all, as everyone goes home saying Chicago’s crime rise is a MAGA conspiracy theory.
“While extraordinary efforts are being made to ensure the safety and protection of the Democratic National Convention, people outside the bubble are being murdered every week, every day, every hour,” said Jeanno Caldwell, a Fox News political analyst whose 18-year-old brother, Christian Beamon, was killed in Chicago in an unsolved shooting in 2022.
“Chicago has become the Wild Wild West,” said Caldwell, who devotes his life to helping victims of violent crime in his hometown through his foundation, the Caldwell Institute for Public Safety.
“Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, I understand how progressive policies have systematically taken the lives of innocent people. … Chicago is hurting, and Brandon Johnson and [Gov. J.B.] “Mr. Pritzker, if you look at the number of shootings and people being killed, Chicago is a lot different than it was when I was growing up.”
He said the families of the shooting victims felt helpless: “Poor families are in despair and there is nothing they can do. They don’t even have the money to hold a funeral.”
And he points to the disparities in justice in the city: In June, two young men were charged with one misdemeanor after brutally attacking a couple in downtown Chicago, leaving the wife to lose her unborn child.
Justice is for me and not for you
But after a man threw a Big Gulp Root Beer at progressive State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, Foxx was charged with two felony counts of aggravated assault.
Foxx’s office typically charges people with misdemeanors for much more serious attacks that leave victims with permanent injuries, but punishes harshly when her dignity is violated.
That’s Chicago.
Johnson, a radical who advocates cutting the police budget, is further to the left than his disliked first-term predecessor, Lori Lightfoot, who last year became Chicago’s first mayor in more than three decades to lose reelection.
A former prosecutor like Kamala Harris, Lightfoot’s soft-on-crime policies ultimately undermined her candidacy. Like Harris, Lightfoot was the first Black woman elected to the position and came into office with a clean slate before inflicting race on everything, at one point declaring that she would only speak to non-white journalists.
Chicago’s already serious crime problem worsened under her watch: gangs began looting upscale stores on the Magnificent Mile and delinquent teenagers rampaged through downtown streets, stomping on cars and terrorizing residents.
Carjackings, robberies and shootings have been rampant in black neighborhoods on the south and west sides of the city.
Like Harris, Fox, who is backed by George Soros, has effectively decriminalized a range of crimes, including theft under $1,000, and reportedly dismissed more than 25,000 felony cases.
Illinois last year followed New York’s lead by passing a generous crime bill that put police in handcuffs and eliminated bail, making it easier for liberal judges to release violent repeat offenders back onto the streets.
After all, two-thirds of Chicago voters feel unsafe, and nine in 10 voters over 50 have considered moving to a safer location in the past year, according to the poll.
Companies including Boeing and Ken Griffin’s hedge fund Citadel have pulled out of New York because they cannot ensure the safety of their employees.
Chicago residents thought Lightfoot was to blame, but Johnson’s emphasis on Chicago’s sanctuary city status and his exploitation of racial resentment have angered black Chicagoans, pushing crime and disorder to new levels and threatening to decimate the city’s crumbling budget with an influx of illegal immigrants.
Last week, a black pastor warned Democrats that many black Chicago residents are fed up and considering leaving the party.
“Black people have been in the Democratic Party for over 60 years and we have nothing left,” the Rev. David Lowery Jr. told reporters. “We have nothing in our community. We have nothing but crime and problems.”
Like his predecessor, Mayor Johnson blames “white supremacy” for Chicago’s ills, even though the city has had black and brown mayors in office for the past 40 years.
Johnson, a former teacher and radical Chicago Teachers Union organizer, specializes in pandering to the bloated education bureaucracy that continues to fail Chicago’s children.
Children’s failure
Despite spending twice as much as the national average on education, at about $30,000 per student per year, fewer than a quarter of Chicago students are proficient in reading at grade level and less than one in five are proficient in math. The numbers are even worse for black students, with only 17% proficient in reading and 8% proficient in math.
Chicago Teachers Union President Stacey Davis Gates has echoed Johnson in denouncing standardized tests as “junk science rooted in white supremacy.” [and] Born out of the eugenics movement [which] They have always tried to portray black people as inferior.”
As retribution for failing Chicago’s children, the union is demanding higher pay and other benefits for its members, totaling an additional $50 billion, which would increase the average teacher’s salary by 50 percent to nearly $145,000.
To pay for all this, Brandon wants to raise taxes. “Seventy percent of the largest corporations in Illinois don’t pay corporate taxes,” he said last year. “And that kind of restraint on our budgets leads to poverty and, not surprisingly, to violence.”
So when Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz take the stage in Chicago this week, they’ll feel right at home.
This deep blue city has become a showcase for the policies they are trying to impose on the rest of the country.
