Crime-ridden Chicago shows what's wrong with Democrats in a failing city

If the message from this week's Democratic convention is, “We're going to make America more like Chicago,” run for the hills.

After nearly 100 years of democratic rule, the Windy City is a lost cause. Rising crime, high taxes, crippling debt, crumbling infrastructure and a declining population are just some of the hardships its citizens endure.

Chicago is the murder capital of America – someone is shot here every two hours and someone is killed every 17 hours. So far this year, 353 victims have been murdered in Chicago, most of them black. The murder rate is five times higher than in New York.

“The Democrats wanted to hold the convention in a safer location, but Beirut was not available,” one joker joked.

A one-week facade

Of course, none of this unpleasantness will be seen by the 35,000 convention-goers and 15,000 media members who are coming to Chi-town this week. The DNC has built a large wall around the convention grounds that it does not intend to build on the southern border.

Mayor Brandon Johnson has temporarily suspended his “anti-racist” crime policy and ordered his city’s beleaguered police officers to finally enforce the law so that everyone can go home and argue that Chicago’s crime wave is a MAGA conspiracy theory.

“Extraordinary efforts are being made to ensure that the Democratic National Convention is safe and secure, while outside the bubble, people are being murdered weekly, daily and hourly,” said Gianno Caldwell, the Fox News political analyst whose 18-year-old brother Christian Beamon was murdered in a still-unsolved shooting in Chicago in 2022.

“Chicago has become the wild, wild west,” says Caldwell, whose foundation, the Caldwell Institute for Public Safety, is dedicated to helping victims of violent crime in his hometown.

“Having grown up on the south side of Chicago, I understand how progressive politics systematically kill innocent lives. . . The city is suffering, and it is suffering even more under Brandon Johnson and [Gov. J.B.] Pritzker. If you just look at the number of shootings and murders, Chicago is a lot different today than it was when I was growing up.”

He says the families of the shooting victims feel helpless. “When you're a poor family in great despair, there's nothing you can do. You don't even have the means to organize a funeral.”

And he points to the different legal systems in the city. Two teenagers were charged with a single misdemeanor in June after they attacked a couple in downtown Chicago so brutally that the woman lost her unborn baby.

Justice for me, not for you

But when a man poured a Big Gulp Root Beer at progressive prosecutor Kim Foxx, he faced two charges of aggravated assault.

Foxx's office regularly prosecutes people for minor assaults that leave victims with permanent injuries. But when Foxx's dignity is violated, she strikes back with the same intent.

That's Chicago for you.

Johnson, a radical who advocates defunding the police, is even further to the left than his hated predecessor Lori Lightfoot, who last year became Chicago's first female mayor in more than 30 years to lose re-election.

Like Kamala Harris, Lightfoot was a former prosecutor, but her lenient policies toward crime ultimately destroyed her candidacy. Like Harris, she was the first black woman elected to her office. She came into office as a blank slate and then tied everything to racial issues. At one point she even declared that she would only speak to non-white journalists.

Chicago's already serious crime problem grew even worse under her leadership. Gangs began looting luxury stores on the Magnificent Mile, and criminal youths rampaged through the streets of downtown, trampling on cars and terrorizing citizens.

Car thefts, robberies and shootings are commonplace in the black neighborhoods in the south and west of the city.

Like Harris, the George Soros-backed Foxx has effectively decriminalized various crimes, including thefts of less than $1,000, and reportedly dropped more than 25,000 criminal cases.

Last year, the state of Illinois followed New York's example and passed a more lenient sentencing law that handcuffs police officers and eliminates bail requirements, making it easier for liberal judges to release violent habitual criminals back onto the streets.

The result is that two-thirds of voters in Chicago do not feel safe, and nine in 10 voters over 50 have considered moving to safer areas in the past year, polls show.

Companies are fleeing the city, including Boeing and Ken Griffin's hedge fund Citadel, because they cannot guarantee the safety of their employees.

Chicagoans thought Lightfoot was bad, but Johnson's commitment to Chicago's sanctuary city status and exploitation of racial grievances have taken crime and unrest to a new level: The influx of illegal immigrants threatens to bankrupt the city's crumbling budget and angers Chicago's black residents.

Last week, a black pastor warned Democrats that many black Chicagoans are so fed up that they are considering leaving the party.

“Blacks have been members of the Democratic Party for over 60 years and we have nothing,” Pastor David Lowery Jr. told reporters. “Our community has nothing… All we have is crime and problems.”

Like his predecessor, Johnson blames “white supremacy” for Chicago’s ills, even though the city has had both black and brown mayors for 40 years.

A former teacher and organizer with the militant Chicago Teachers Union, Johnson specializes in speaking up for the bloated education bureaucracy that continually fails Chicago's children.

Failing the children

Despite spending twice the national average on education, nearly $30,000 per student per year, fewer than a quarter of Chicago's students can read at grade level and fewer than one in five are proficient in math. The situation is even worse for black students: Only 17 percent can read and 8 percent are proficient in math.

Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates echoes Johnson in blaming standardized tests, which she says are “junk science rooted in white supremacy. [and] born from the eugenics movement [which] has always tried to view black people as inferior.”

As a reward for its betrayal of Chicago's children, the union is demanding an additional $50 billion in raises and other benefits for its members, which would increase the average teacher's salary by 50 percent, to nearly $145,000.

To finance all of this, Brandon wants to raise taxes. “Seventy percent of the large corporations in the state of Illinois have paid no corporate tax,” he said last year. “And that kind of fiscal restraint has … led to poverty, which of course has led to violence.”

When Kamala Harris and Tim Walz take the stage in Chicago this week, they will feel right at home.

The deep blue city is a showcase for the policies they want to impose on the rest of the country.