Refugees of another age
By John Kass
No wonder that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson continues to suffer those crippling panic attacks of his.
Chicago is falling apart. He’s completely out of his depth. He was unequipped for the job and his campaign was all about slogans, Marxist rhetoric from his allies in the Chicago Teachers Union, and race. Now those who can are in a rush to leave. He’s falling apart. His administration is falling apart. And the city is falling apart rapidly.
Forget the fake news “joy” of the Democratic National Convention that oozed out to promote Kamala Harris. She won’t help the city. And forget the corporate media cheerleaders who’ve tried to paper-over the city’s infected wounds to promote Democrat power. I spent 40 years covering the city’s politics.
Throughout that time the joke was that any time things looked bad, at least we weren’t Detroit. But now that’s an insult to Detroit which is on the ascent. And the people of both cities know it. The city’s self-inflicted wounds are septic now.
Chicago, the city of my birth, the great city of great restaurants and earthy but realistic politics, is now a city that is unaffordable and unsafe. The public schools prepare Chicago schoolchildren only for prison, not success in life. Public transportation is dangerous and filthy and smells like a urinal. Only the poor use it or those who have no other choice. The city government is a billion dollars in debt. And the public schools are a billion in debt. Where’s the money? Johnson has no clue.
And now things will get worse beginning today. Chicago, already plagued by violent crime and will get worse beginning Sunday. That’s because Johnson let the contract for the revolutionary crime-fighting technology called ShotSpotter to lapse without a replacement. Although it alerted police to gunshots, Johnson derided it as “walkie talkie on a stick.” Mayor Johnson campaigned against it, loudly insisting that it led to “over-policing” which is code used by leftist Democrats to refer to arrests of black youths by police. It’s a racial thing with him. And with all those who backed him politically.
Black aldermen, representing black residents who are most often the victims of violent crime, have tried to keep ShotSpotter alive, knowing that it could lead to more arrests of racial minority gang members, but Johnson has promised to veto any plan to save it. And corporate media types tie themselves up in knots trying to explain a simple, but terrible truth:
The mayor of Chicago would rather protect the violent over his citizens. He’d rather embrace repeat gang offenders than the people who need his protection. As the corrupt corporate media becomes anxious and defensive about Johnson’s self-destructive reasoning, like the clownish leftist fools mocked by Matt Walsh in “Am I a Racist?” a great city is dying.
Now Johnson’s approval rating is an abysmal 27 percent makes him the most unpopular mayor of a Democrat Convention city in decades.
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