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Mark down Tuesday, April 4, as the night Chicago died.
That’s when we learned that Second City voters narrowly elected Brandon Johnson as their next mayor. This is a city that was flattened during the reign of Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who lost in the first round of voting for Chicago mayor because she didn’t finish in one of the top two spots. Lightfoot, elected in 2019 after a career as a federal prosecutor who then held several appointed positions in Chicago, shut down the city for more than a year during COVID-19. She also bankrupted small businesses, allowed rioters to burn down whole neighborhoods, presided over the worst crime wave in 50 years and let the schools go to hell.
Now, the voters have selected Johnson. Elected to the Cook County Board of Commissioners in 2018, Johnson narrowly won the mayoralty of America’s third-most-populous city on April 4 over Paul Vallas, a former Chicago schools CEO and a Democrat who presented himself as a political moderate compared to the far-left Johnson.
The incoming mayor may turn out to be a worse mayor than Lightfoot. Johnson’s occupation is an organizer for the teachers unions. The unions spent several million dollars on the race. They got their man.
What this means is that Chicago’s municipal government will now be a fully owned subsidiary of the Chicago Teachers Union. (Can you imagine what the union contracts are going to look like?) This is a city where, in roughly two dozen schools, zero children can read or write at proficiency level.
Johnson said that crime and shoplifting from local schools are societal problems. And he may continue Lightfoot’s policy of not prosecuting people who rob stores — often owned by minorities.
It’s not just Chicago that has become a war zone. Portland, Seattle and San Francisco were not so long ago the crown jewels of the West Coast. They were said to be progressive cities that worked. No more. Now, they are unlivable. San Francisco is overrun with homeless people on seemingly every downtown street corner, feces on the sidewalks and trash everywhere.
In Portland, major businesses are pulling out in the aftermath of the takeover of the radical anarchists during COVID-19. Crime is so rampant that Walmart recently said “adios,” shutting down its last store. Rains PDX, a clothing store in Portland, shut down last November after a string of break-ins made it impossible to stay open. This printed sign pasted on the door says it all:
“Small businesses (and large) cannot sustain doing business, in our city’s current state. We have no protection, or recourse, against the criminal behavior that goes unpunished. Do not be fooled into thinking that insurance companies cover losses. We have sustained 15 break-ins … We have not received any financial reimbursement since the 3rd.”
For the first time, Seattle is losing population. To be “progressive,” Seattle is imposing a massive capital gains tax increase — socking it to the rich. So they are fleeing the city and Washington state.
One of the nation’s top demographers, Wendell Cox, has been analyzing the just-released Census Bureau data on county population. He found that “during the late 2010s and before the pandemic, population growth and domestic migration transitioned toward smaller metropolitan areas from larger ones. That outmigration is accelerating.”
The nation’s 10 largest counties have lost more than 1 million residents since 2019. The biggest losers have been the counties that are home to New York and San Francisco and Chicago’s Cook County. Even Los Angeles County, the nation’s most populous county, with just under 10 million people, is now contracting.
Welcome to the real-world impact of progressivism. Instead of worker paradises, the Left has transitioned our once-shining cities into slums, murder zones, homeless encampments and boarded-up stores. They have become cults of economic and political quackery — and tragically, few Democrats have the courage to speak out. They are worried about being called racists when the reality is that the victims — of terrible public schools, high murder rates and an anti-business creed — are the minorities they say they care so much about.
The three poisons of America’s leftist cities are 1) high taxes, 2) schools that don’t educate and 3) crime running rampant. As mayors such as Rudy Giuliani of New York City proved in the 1990s after the Big Apple had been driven to its knees, all it takes is committed leadership to fix these problems. Things can change quickly, as they did in Manhattan.
The fact that Chicagoans have elected not a reformer, but a deformer, suggests that inner-city residents still don’t get it — or they don’t care. Or they are all on the payroll of the city governments that are going bankrupt. Alas, our cities can’t be saved if the voters in these metropolises don’t want to be saved.
Who counted the votes? The teachers’ union?
”Alas, our cities can’t be saved if the voters in these metropolises don’t want to be saved.”
Just like drug addicts.
”Alas, our cities can’t be saved if the voters in these metropolises don’t want to be saved.”
Just like drug addicts.
As long as they continue to vote for Democrats Chicago will never see any end to Crime, Corruption Vice is the Windy City of Democrat Windheads
Even Pittsburgh, PA is losing its ‘downtown’ to crime and homelessness. Maybe you don’t see it in your visits to cities, but I see the obvious ‘decay’ in DC, Detroit and Philly. Downtown … not the suburbs. Take a look ,,,
Your obtuse comment makes me wonder if you have.
This de-evolution/dissolution will not stay isolated to Democrat areas. It is spreading – intentionally – to the suburbs and rural areas. The government will soon have the power to overrule zoning laws and eliminate single family homes. That is to kill the American dream once and for all in the interest of D-I-E.
This, plus the flooding of third world illegal alien peasantry by the now tens of millions will prevent normal red state America from being able to act independently from the centralized tyranny of DC.
People who desire a peaceful national divorce will be prevented from having it. Yugoslavia ’92 here we come. Or worse.
The low IQ idiots in Chicago voted to get rid of the incompetent Mayor Lightfoot for many reasons with rising crime among the most concerning.
We thought maybe the people of Chicago are finally waking up. Then they turn around and vote in someone even more radical and racist than Lightfoot. Mayor Johnson is even more racist than Lightfoot and is a big proponent of defunding the police and using that money towards social programs.
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Did they really vote, though? This is Chicago, home of Obamaian cheating ,fraud, extortion, bribing. It doesn’t make sense to me that the voters would be fed up with the execrable Lightfoot only to *vote* for an even more execrable Johnson. This smacks of being yet another installation, rather than a legitimate election
You could be right.
You can find maps online that show where Johnson’s vote percentages wrre highest and of where crime in Chicago is highest. There is a high degree of correlation with Johnson also getting votes in leftist-white areas, which put him over the top. You just can’t fix stoopid.
For the sake of equity, I’ll give your post a grade of C. You would have received a higher grade had you actually successfully challenged the evidence.
I’d write more but I’m tired from stepping over all the homeless people in Seattle and San Francisco. Hopefully, caring liberals will pool their own money and open up stores so that we don’t have to be lectured about food deserts for the next 20 years.
Lol. Pay us a visit in NYC and let me know when. We can meet on Amsterdam Ave, and 114th, in front of the gate at Columbia. We can spend a couple of hours in the late afternoon, sitting on benches outside the Manhattanville Houses, watching all people and activities clueless progs think don’t exist. Then we can take a quick stroll through Morningside Park as it gets dark. The quicker the better. I hope you’re in decent shape, and don’t look away when you get mad dogged.
“The three poisons of America’s leftist cities are 1) high taxes, 2) schools that don’t educate and 3) crime running rampant.”
But the floor upon which all that stands is Leftism and multiculturalism – which is anti-western. It is a totalizing pagan religion containing MANY poisons, designed and COORDINATED GLOBALLY with the cooperation of our leftist elites in government, to “deconstruct” us and then “build back better.”
CAN ANYONE NAME EVEN ONE MAJOR AMERICAN CITY NOT IN CRIME MELTDOWN???
Among the 25 largest U.S. cities, San Francisco has had the highest property-crime rate in four of the most recent six years for which data is available, bucking the long-term national decline in such crimes that began in the 1990s. Property crimes declined in San Francisco during the first year of the pandemic, but rose 13% in 2021. Burglaries in the city are at their highest levels since the mid 1990s. There were 20,663 thefts from vehicles last year—almost 57 a day—a 39% increase from the prior year, although still below the record of 31,398 in 2017, according to the police.
Zusha Elinson
Many years ago, while in my teens, we traveled to California, the trend setter for America, to visit relatives. I couldn’t wait to see the sites, maybe even a movie star. Now, after having lived in California for 54 years, and since left, I would avoid all of the major cities. And it isn’t just California!
Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the very definition of insanity.
Unless you are DemocRAT Voter.
Apparently, you have no sense. What democrat run craphole do you live in?