If the message of this week’s Democratic National Convention is “We’re going to make America more like Chicago” then run for the hills.
After nearly 100 years of Democratic rule, the Windy City is a basket case. Soaring crime, high taxes, crippling debt, crumbling infrastructure, and a declining population are just some of the miseries inflicted on its citizens.
Chicago is the murder capital of America — with someone shot every two hours and someone killed every 17 hours. So far this year, 353 victims, most of them black, have been murdered in Chicago. The homicide rate is five times higher than New York’s.
“Democrats wanted to hold the convention somewhere safer, but Beirut wasn’t available,” quipped one wag.
A weeklong facade
Of course, none of the unpleasantness will be visible to the 35,000 conventiongoers and 15,000 media descending on Chi-town this week. The DNC has built a big wall around the convention area that they refuse to build at the southern border.
Mayor Brandon Johnson has temporarily suspended his “anti-racist” crime policies and ordered his city’s beleaguered cops to enforce the law for once so that everyone will go home saying that Chicago’s crime wave is a MAGA conspiracy theory.
“There are extraordinary efforts to make sure the Democratic convention is safe and protected, whereas people outside the bubble are being murdered on a weekly, daily and hourly basis,” says Gianno Caldwell, the Fox News political analyst whose 18-year-old brother Christian Beamon was murdered in Chicago in a still-unsolved 2022 shooting.
“Chicago has become the wild, wild west,” says Caldwell, who has dedicated himself to helping victims of violent crime in his hometown through his foundation, the Caldwell Institute for Public Safety.
“Having grown up on the South Side of Chicago I understand how progressive policies are systematically killing innocent lives . . . The city is hurting, and hurting even worse under Brandon Johnson and [Gov. J.B.] Pritzker. Looking purely at the numbers of shootings and people being murdered today, Chicago is much different to when I was growing up.”
He says the families of shooting victims feel helpless. “If you’re a poor family in great despair there’s nothing you can do. You don’t even have the resources to get a funeral together.”
And he points to the disparate nature of justice in the city. Two teens were charged in June with a single misdemeanor after attacking a couple in downtown Chicago so savagely that the wife lost her unborn baby.
Justice for me, not thee
Yet when a man tossed a Big Gulp root beer at progressive State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, he was slapped with two felony charges for aggravated battery.
Foxx’s office routinely charges people with misdemeanors over far more serious attacks that result in permanent injures to victims but throws the book when her dignity is bruised.
That’s Chicago for you.
Johnson, a defund-police radical, is even further to the left than his loathed one-term predecessor Lori Lightfoot, who last year became the first Chicago mayor in more than three decades to lose re-election.
A former prosecutor like Kamala Harris, Lightfoot’s soft-on-crime policies ended up destroying her candidacy. The first black woman elected to her position, like Harris, she came to office as a blank slate and then injected race into everything, at one point declaring she would only talk to nonwhite journalists.
Chicago’s already serious crime problem ballooned on her watch. Gangs began looting luxury stores on the Magnificent Mile and delinquent teenagers rampaged through downtown streets, stomping on cars, terrorizing citizens.
Carjackings, muggings and shootings are endemic in black neighborhoods in the south and west of the city.
Like Harris, George Soros-backed Foxx has effectively decriminalized various offenses including thefts of less than $1,000, and reportedly has dismissed more than 25,000 felony cases.
Illinois followed New York’s lead last year with a lenient crime bill that handcuffs police and eliminates cash bail, making it easier for liberal judges to release violent habitual criminals onto the streets.
The upshot is that two-thirds of Chicago voters don’t feel safe and nine in 10 voters over 50 have considered leaving for safer pastures in the past year, according to polls.
Business are fleeing the city, including Boeing and Ken Griffin’s Citadel hedge fund, because they can’t keep their employees safe.
Chicagoans thought Lightfoot was bad, but Johnson’s embrace of Chicago’s sanctuary-city status and exploitation of racial grievances has taken crime and disorder to a new level, with an influx of illegal migrants threatening to bankrupt the collapsing city budget and angering black Chicagoans.
Last week, a black pastor warned Democrats that many black Chicagoans are so fed up they are considering deserting the party.
“Black people have been with the Democratic Party for over 60 years and we have nothing,” Pastor David Lowery Jr. told reporters. “We don’t own anything in our community . . . All we have is crime and problems.”
Johnson, like his predecessor, blames “white supremacy” for Chicago’s ills, even though the city has had black and brown mayors for 40 years.
A former teacher and organizer with the militant Chicago Teachers Union, Johnson specializes in pandering to the bloated education bureaucracy that keeps failing Chicago’s kids.
Flunking the kids
Despite education spending double the national average, at almost $30,000 per student annually, less than one-quarter of Chicago’s students can read at grade level and fewer than one in five are proficient a math — and it’s worse for black students, with just 17% able to read and 8% proficient in math.
Taking her cue from Johnson, Chicago Teachers Union president Stacy Davis Gates blames standardized testing, which she says is “junk science rooted in white supremacy [and] born out of the eugenics movement [which] has always sought to see black people as inferior.”
As a reward for their betrayal of Chicago’s children, the union is demanding pay rises and other perks for its members, totaling another $50 billion that would boost the average teacher’s salary by 50 percent to nearly $145,000.
To pay for it all, Brandon wants to raise taxes. “Seventy percent of large corporations in the state of Illinois did not pay a corporate tax,” he said last year. “And it’s that kind of restraint on our budget that has . . . led to poverty, of course, that has led to violence.”
So, when Kamala Harris and Tim Walz take the stage in Chicago this week, they will feel right at home.
The deep blue city is a showpiece for the policies they want to impose on the rest of the country.
