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Chicago’s Labor Day weekend delivered the same sickening product it always does under Brandon Johnson and the Lightfoot machine that came before him: corpses, wounded teenagers, and a City Hall that treats mass shootings like a branding problem. By Monday morning, official tallies showed six dead and 17 wounded since Friday evening. Those numbers don’t even cover the whole holiday weekend. They never do. Officials rush to the microphone before the last body is identified so they can brag about it being a “historically peaceful” summer while families are still waiting in emergency rooms. To say it illustrates an unprecedented level of contempt for the citizens of Chicago would be an understatement.
Johnson and Lightfoot have spent years dressing up failure as compassion. The administration crows that June through August produced 122 murders—the lowest summer total since 1965—and that last year’s violence dropped from the post-2020 catastrophe. Fine. The drop is real. It’s also nowhere near good enough. A city that still stacks up six homicides and nearly two dozen shooting victims in part of a holiday weekend is not turning a corner. It is managing a slaughter and calling the slightly smaller pile of bodies a victory.
Black neighborhood leaders have had enough. Some have asked President Trump to send the National Guard. Others say they would vote Republican for mayor for the first time since William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson’s last term began in 1927. When the people living in the kill zones start begging for federal troops and a GOP mayor, the experiment is over. The far-Left project has failed them in blood.
Walk the streets on any given weekend and the policy is obvious: near non-policing of the crimes that terrorize working people. Teen takeovers—social-media mobs that seize intersections, spin cars, jump hoods, and often end in gunfire—roll on with barely a slap. Residents documented multiple Labor Day takeovers on the South Side, including a ring of fire near Lake Shore Drive. Officers arrive late or not at all.
Carjackings and smash-and-grabs follow the same script. Predators move fast. The city lectures. Lightfoot taught the Chicago Police Department that aggressive enforcement would be punished. Johnson, a Chicago Teachers Union organizer installed by that same union, kept the doctrine: root causes, violence interrupters, listening sessions. Meanwhile, the kids who can’t read are organizing the next takeover and the next carjacking.
Los Angeles, the supposed belly of the beast of progressive liberalism, finally decided the farce had gone far enough. Early this month, a coordinated operation smashed a South LA takeover with more than 150 officers, drones, and partner agencies. Sixty-nine arrests. Five hundred seventy citations. More than 200 vehicles impounded. One hundred twenty-eight juveniles cited for curfew. Seven guns seized. The police chief said it was “only the beginning.”
Meanwhile, Chicago still kneels at the altar of victimhood wokeism and pretends these takeovers are misunderstood youth culture.
One city is reclaiming its streets. The other is writing press releases while another 15-year-old takes a round in the back of the head, only to end up in a cold drawer in the morgue.
A lion’s share of the blame for this—both governmental and societal—belongs to the Chicago Teachers Union. The CTU has owned the fifth floor for decades. Johnson is not an independent mayor. He is the union’s delivery system.
Chicago Teachers Union members’ pay climbs. Student proficiency collapses. Dozens of schools report 0% math proficiency. Reading scores are a disgrace. Chronic absenteeism sits near 40%. The union’s answer is always the same: more “community schools,” more politics, more ransom notes to Springfield. It’s extortion under the banner of social justice.
The union doesn’t exist to teach children. It exists to keep power, protect dues, and produce the next generation of both victims and offenders. Until that grip is broken, Chicago will keep manufacturing illiteracy and then act shocked when those same kids take over an intersection at midnight, guns blazing.
This isn’t complicated.
Lightfoot presided over the 2020 implosion and never rebuilt the will to enforce the law. Johnson arrived promising a kinder, woke alternative to “over-policing” and delivered the same funerals in the same neighborhoods to the same families. Officials celebrate percentage drops while mothers bury sons and daughters.
A slightly lower body count is not public safety. It’s a talking point for people who don’t live where the shots are fired. When community leaders in those neighborhoods say they want the Guard and a Republican mayor, they aren’t reciting conservative talking points. They are describing the wreckage.
Chicago was a great American city. It won’t be one again while far-Left policy treats lawlessness as a grievance instead of a crime. The incomplete Labor Day body count is the point. It’s what you get when ideology outranks order. Teen takeovers will continue until someone ends them the way Los Angeles just did—with impoundments, citations, and cuffs instead of workshops. Carjackings and smash-and-grabs will continue until the people who commit them expect to be hunted. Schools will keep failing until the union that runs them is thrown out of City Hall.
Fence off the CTU. Eject the woke-Left faction that has run this city into the ground. Take education seriously instead of using children as political props. Until that happens, the Windy City will keep dying one holiday weekend at a time.
The numbers from this Labor Day are incomplete. The indictment of Johnson, Lightfoot, and the policies that produced them is not.
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Chicago just makes me sick EVERYTIME I have to drive there. Chicago really is a beautiful city but because of the ineptitude of the FUCKING TEACHERS UNION and City Hall, taxes are everywhere. Now our stupid ass governor is tapping into the toll system to get additional funds that should be illegal. The toll authority was set up to finance the toll roads, not bail out the poorest run county in the country.
I'm moving out as soon as I can, hopefully before they bankrupt me.