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 almost a century of Democratic rule, the Windy City is in a sorry state. Soaring crime rates, high taxes, massive debt, deteriorating infrastructure, and a shrinking population are just some of the problems faced by its residents.
Chicago is the murder capital of America — with someone shot every two hours and someone killed every 17 hours. This year alone, 353 people, mostly 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,” joked one commentator.
A weeklong facade
Of course, none of the unpleasantness will be visible to the 35,000 conventiongoers and 15,000 media descending on Chicago this week. The DNC has erected a large wall around the convention area, something they refuse to do at the southern border.
Mayor Brandon Johnson has temporarily suspended his “anti-racist” crime policies and instructed his city’s beleaguered police to enforce the law for once in order to debunk the theory that Chicago’s crime wave is a result of MAGA influence.
“There are extraordinary efforts to ensure the safety of the Democratic convention, while 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 injuries 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 rampant 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.
As a result, 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.
Businesses are fleeing the city, including Boeing and Ken Griffin’s Citadel hedge fund, because they can’t ensure the safety of their employees.
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 problems, despite the city having had black and brown mayors for 40 years.
A former teacher and organizer with the militant Chicago Teachers Union, Johnson focuses on pleasing the bloated education bureaucracy that continues to fail Chicago’s children.
Failing the Students
Despite spending nearly $30,000 per student annually, which is double the national average, less than one-quarter of students in Chicago can read at grade level, and fewer than one in five are proficient in math. The statistics are even worse for black students, with only 17% able to read and 8% proficient in math.
Chicago Teachers Union president Stacy Davis Gates attributes the poor performance to standardized testing, which she describes as “junk science rooted in white supremacy and born out of the eugenics movement that has always sought to see black people as inferior.”
In exchange for what some see as a betrayal of Chicago’s children, the union is pushing for pay raises and other benefits for its members, totaling an additional $50 billion that would increase the average teacher’s salary by 50% to nearly $145,000.
To fund these demands, Brandon proposes raising taxes. “Seventy percent of large corporations in the state of Illinois did not pay a corporate tax,” he stated last year. “And it’s this kind of financial constraint on our budget that has led to poverty and violence.”
As Kamala Harris and Tim Walz make an appearance in Chicago this week, they will find themselves in a city that reflects the policies they wish to implement nationwide. Chicago, a deeply blue city, serves as a model for the initiatives they advocate for.
