Real Systemic Racism Was On Full Display In Chicago

The 2023 Mayoral Election in Chicago, perhaps the bloodiest and most lawless city in the United States, is in the books. Astonishingly, and I use the word literally, the anti-law enforcement candidate prevailed over someone who was honest enough to say there was a violent crime problem in the Windy City.

Brandon Johnson, a Cook County commissioner and a former union organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union, who exists as a life-long devotee to machine politics in the infamously corrupt Cook County in Illinois, defeated Paul Vallas, a former superintendent/CEO of schools for Chicago, Philadelphia and a recovery district in Louisiana, and Chicago municipal budget director under Mayor Richard M. Daley. The race was close in an election that saw a shamefully anemic voter turnout of just 35.15%.

There were two definitive, two-fold differences in the candidates. First, Johnson was caustically Progressive in his devotion to the anti-law enforcement movement; part of the “defund the police” crowd that thinks no-cash bail for violent criminals is a good thing. He stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the embarrassment that is Cook County States Attorney Kim Foxx, a George Soros-funded placement.

Conversely, Vallas based his candidacy, in large part, on the reality that Chicago has a horrendous violent crime problem that needs to be addressed with proactive law enforcement policies; policies that would honestly address the root cause of the mentality that values life less than a pack of cigarettes even as they took immediate action to make the city safer.

(As an aside, Mr. Vallas not only balanced the budget while in charge of the Chicago Public Schools, he left his tenure with the Chicago Teachers Union pension fund fully funded. Johnson has no managerial budgetary experience to speak of.)

In a city where gangs rule the streets, where major tax-revenue-generating corporations are exiting at a pace never seen before because of the crime (and taxes), where law-abiding citizens actively avoid the cultural centers in the city for fear of becoming victims of violent crime – in a city that saw 695 people murdered (536 of them Black) and 3,258 people shot (the overwhelming number of victims Black) in 2022, the choice between the candidates for any voter that values life was abundantly obvious.

But the value of life to a Chicago voter, evidently, is trumped by one thing above all: Race. Both candidates in the contest were Democrats, but Johnson is Black and Vallas is White. With Johnson being anti-cop and Vallas running predominantly on a law and order platform (with superior budgetary skills) there can be no other way to explain the outcome of the election.

I Reject Your Disingenuous,
Self-Serving, Neo-Fascist Labels

Right off the bat, I want to say that I reject and condemn the idea that an ideologically jaded group of elitist frauds can unilaterally decide that the definition of a word can be dramatically and fundamentally changed to suit their needs. A perfect example of this comes in the arrogance of the ideological Left in insisting that the definition of “racism” has somehow morphed into a meaning that permits them to be racists themselves even as they use the label as a weapon against those who don’t march lock-step to their ideology.

I also reject and condemn the notion that any race is exempt from executing racism. Further, I reject that any race is infected with the poison of racism from birth; that a person is more prone to being racist because of the color of their skin.

To condone the bastardization of the English language for ideological and politically opportunistic purposes, and to believe one person cannot be racist because of the color of their skin while another is “genetically” racist because of the color of their skin, is to exist in a heightened state of arrogance that fully crosses the line into the imbecilic.

Racism, by its core definition – sans the idiocy of the Critical Race Theory/Race-Baiting Movement – is the practice of viewing and/or treating someone differently because of the color of their skin; judging someone and/or assuming something about someone, solely based on the color of their skin. That’s it. Simple.

But the manipulative elites in academia – the ideologically arrogant who have crossed the Rubicon into the imbecilic – have contorted themselves into nonsensical origami in their quest to redefine “racism” as not about skin color. In their imperious world, racism is tantamount to exclusive to White people, all others – especially Black people – are exempt.

Again, I reject and condemn the idea and I suggest that instead of just rolling over and allowing the cretins of academia to bastardize our language we all – every one of us – reject their manipulative redefinition of words.

Call me what you like, I reject your labels. I continue to stand with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his contention that we should judge people based on their character and not on the color of their skin and that goes for all skin colors. And I certainly stand with him in his insistence that you cannot paint an entire demographic with the stains of those who came before them.

The Value Of Life To Chicago Voters

There isn’t a day that goes by in the City of Chicago that doesn’t see one particular scene repeated, and all too frequently. On the South Side, on the West Side, on the Near West Side, and even on the traditionally peaceful North Side, destroyed parents – mothers – weep behind crime scene tape as they kneel next to body bags that hold the corpses of their children; 695 in 2022, 797 in 2021, and 772 in 2020.

In 2019, when now former-Mayor Lori Lightfoot – who, like Johnson, is a Black Hyper-Progressive Democrat – brought her radically Leftist anti-law enforcement policies to Chicago, there were only (and I apologize to the families of the murder victims for using the word “only”, I am using it for contextual purposes) 498 homicides in Chicago.

Only the politically disingenuous and the intellectually stunted are blind to the truth that Progressive policies in Chicago have resulted in a massive increase in homicides and violent crime in the city.

I say politically disingenuous because it appears there is an epidemic of partisan blindness in Chicago, even internally within the imperialistic Democrat Party.

The New York Times reports:

“Mr. Vallas pitched himself to voters as a tough-on-crime technocrat who would hire thousands more police officers and make the city safer than it has been since the pandemic when shootings and homicides spiked. But he also spent much of the campaign trying to convince voters that he was a devoted Democrat…

“‘It was pretty obvious for me,’ said Annie Wang, 22, a business analyst who lives in the South Loop. ‘Johnson is the much more progressive candidate. Vallas was closer to the Republican Party. That made all the difference.’

“Rufus Burns, a 73-year-old resident of Chicago’s West Side, voted for Brandon Johnson for Chicago mayor on Tuesday. But it was really more of a vote against Paul Vallas. ‘A Republican in disguise,’ he said of Mr. Vallas.” (Emphasis mine)

“That made all the difference.” ”A Republican in disguise.” Nothing about the constant sound of gunfire ringing out through the air every night or the endless parade of body bags. Vallas wasn’t Progressive enough. He wasn’t from a preferred demographic. He didn’t worship at the altar of victimhood. He wasn’t “not White.”

InThe End…

As the warmer months of summer approach, the shootings, the rapes, the robberies, the carjackings, and, yes, the murders will begin to rise in the City of Chicago.

The undermanned and tactically handcuffed Chicago Police Department will once again exhaust its budgetary overtime because too many frustrated police officers have left its ranks due to the dysfunctional policies of a hyper-Progressive City Hall.

Honest leaders in Chicago’s Black community will continue to plead for help in making their neighborhoods safe; safe for their children to play in; safe for the people who live in their neighborhoods to come and go without fear of being shot or robbed; safe from the bullets that fly through living room windows. But their pleas will fall on the ears of the politically opportunistic and ideologically jaded.

Nothing will change. Camera-hungry, race-baiters will monopolize the media, advancing preferred narratives about victimhood and blameless violent crime, all steeped in the false narrative of a redefined racism that lays the blame for all of it – crime, murder, poverty, and societal divide – at the feet of someone other than the person looking back at them in the mirror.

And parents – mothers – will continue to weep behind crime scene tape as they kneel next to body bags that hold the corpses of their children.

Explain to them how I am a racist for preferring a White man who cared more about the safety of their city streets than Chicago’s Progressive Democrats do.

Call me a racist. I just don’t care anymore.

The voters of Chicago had the chance to turn a corner away from the blood that runs swiftly through the streets of the Windy City. But its Black community made race and politics more important than the safety of their children.

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