Killing Chicago

Far too many of America’s major cities are proving to be ungovernable. Or, should we say, ungoverned. Fear not, however. You have probably noticed that these dysfunctional centers of urban chaos are governed by a very diverse group of leaders. As you know, it is the diversity that counts, not the ability to govern.

So, put that one in your peace pipe and take a few puffs.

Now, Francis Menton of the Manhattan Contrarian blog shifts his focus away from the Big Apple toward the Windy City. (via Maggie’s Farm) That would be Chicago, a Democratic redoubt if ever there was one.

Menton asks a salient question: Is Chicago circling the drain? Which is a nice way of asking whether it is being flushed down the toilet. After all, the Black Lives Matter movement just attacked a Ronald McDonald House, the better to harass sick children. Undoubtedly, the BLM protesters wanted to punish the children for their white privilege.

When not opining on whether or not Chicago was circling the drain, Menton was calling it and several other American cities, basket cases:

My first blog post on the subject of Chicago was way back in 2012. In that post, I placed Chicago in the special category of American cities that I called the “basket cases” — places with declining populations, astoundingly high rates of violent crime, in every case mostly black on black, and, of course, uninterrupted rule by leftist Democrats for generations.

The Chicago crime rate is the stuff of legend. During the Obama years, when the city was for the most part led by Obama’s former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, the murder rate continued to rise, unabated. Under Mayor Lori Lightfoot it has continued to rise:

The violent crime rate also clearly qualifies Chicago for the label of basket case.  Murders hit a peak of 756 in 2016 (about 28 per hundred thousand people, compared to a rate for the U.S. as a whole of about 5 per 100,000).  After a few years of modest declines, murders are on track to equal or top the 756 this year, with 440 through July.  In fact, July 2020 just set a new record for most murders in a month, with 105. 

A couple of days ago riots and looting broke out in Chicago’s main shopping district, the Magnificent Mile. It was incited by something of a misunderstanding:

Apparently, on Sunday there was an incident where the Chicago police shot and injured a black suspect. The police claim that the suspect was armed and had shot at them first; but they have no video to prove that. Whether the police behaved wrongly remains to be established, and if they did, the officers in question should be dealt with accordingly.

The local Black Lives Matter movement incited the rioting. It demanded the abolition of the Chicago Police Department. The correct term for what happened is insurrection: :

But there is no justifying what followed. On Sunday night into Monday there was a first wave of looting in the downtown area. On Monday, the Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter put out a press release that dropped all pretense of “peaceful protests” and explicitly sought to justify the looting, while also threatening further violence:

The mayor clearly has not learned anything since [the killing of George Floyd in] May, and she would be wise to understand that the people will keep rising up until the CPD is abolished and our Black communities are fully invested in. Contrary to Mayor Lightfoot’s position, Black lives are and always will be more important than downtown corporations who siphon Tax Increment Financing (T.I.F.) money, while avoiding taxes, and exploiting the labor of Black and Brown Chicagoans. These corporations have “looted” more from our communities than a few protesters ever could. . . . [Some] commentators seem to believe that the immense wealth that has been hoarded in downtown Chicago is in some way all of ours. The South and West sides have seen no benefits to this hoarding. 

. . . When protesters attack high-end retail stores that are owned by the wealthy and service the wealthy, that is not “our” city and has never been meant for us.

More importantly, Menton examines the thought process involved in the BLM manifesto. I think he is being very generous in calling it a thought process:

I’m just completely mystified about the thought process.  Let’s assume the worst for the police as to the incident on Sunday.  Even so, how is that somehow a bigger issue than the well-over-300 blacks murdered so far this year in Chicago by people who are not the police?  And again, even if you assume the worst about the police incident, how is looting an appropriate response?  Encouraging young black people to go out on looting sprees is making them completely unemployable in any professional job and ruining whatever chance they might have had for high paying jobs and careers.   The demonstrators shout “black lives matter” while they destroy black lives by the hundreds or thousands.

We are witnessing the complete dead end of the progressive movement in Marxist idiocy.  Over to you, Mayor Lightfoot.  You have gotten where you are by mouthing trendy progressive mumbo jumbo.  What’s your next move?

Menton makes a very important point, one that needs to be underscored. The young people who are out there looting and pillaging stores are not putting themselves on the path to good jobs. Rioting and looting are not valued job skills. These young people are being encouraged to develop a skill that is best used in criminal enterprises.

And, of course, it’s not just the rioters. Forcing people to associate blackness with crime is a losing game. It has caused significant reputational damage and has set back the cause of civil rights for decades.

As Atlanta Mayor Bottoms so aptly put it: “We are better than this.”