Counter-Currents
Lori Lightfoot
1,679 words
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders…
— Carl Sandburg, “Chicago”
“City of Big Shoulders”, did you say, Carl?
Chicago voters, understandably, opted for a bigger set of “big shoulders” to be Boss Mayor on Tuesday, February 28. Incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who some years ago wandered off the set of The Walking Dead and into the Windy City, came in third in the run-off election with a whopping 17.09% of the vote.
According to the Chicago Sun, “Lori Lightfoot, the first Black [sic] woman and the first openly gay person ever to serve as mayor of Chicago, on Tuesday became a one-term mayor.” She was also the first Chicago mayor to lose in 40 years.
One wonders, perhaps, if Her Honor had read Sandburg’s poem, and with him being a white guy and all, had thought a bit of one-upmanship was in order. Chicago, “City of Big what,” though?
“Tool maker,” she may have been thinking, but — as we’ll see shortly — not exactly in a Sandburgesque sort of way. Back in March 2022, Mayor Lightfoot had embarked on a city improvement plan that involved tearing down statues of white guys because “whiteness” these days is controversial, unlike shooting your server at McDonald’s for giving you cold fries. According to the Daily Beast, Lightfoot ordered the removal of “a controversial statue of Christopher Columbus [that was to be included in] . . . an annual parade organized by the city’s Italian American community. The prominent statue, which stood near Lake Michigan downtown, was one of several Columbus statues around the city that Lightfoot had ordered removed in the wake of social-justice protests in the summer of 2020.” (italics added) The “stormy, husky [or is it dusky?], brawling” social-justice warriors that same summer were busy looting and dismantling Chicago’s Magnificent Mile:
Downtown Chicago as of 2021 had emptied out:
When the Chicago Italians pushed back and Park District Deputy General Counsel George Smyrniotis protested Lightfoot’s directive for the statue in a Zoom meeting, she responded with the dignity and diplomatic polish you’ve come to expect from a member of today’s feral underclass that rules big cities: “You are out there stroking your dicks over the Columbus statue. My dick is bigger than yours and the Italians, I have the biggest dick in Chicago.”
Only in 2022 America. Only from a black lesbian in yet another failing, once-great city.
For the citizens of Chicago, this must have been very confusing. Lesbian? Big ****? Or, maybe not. Maybe they were hearing this as “I’m the biggest dick in Chicago,” which would explain why she came in a dismal third in the runoff election the following year.
Carl Sandburg, an Illinois native, wrote “Chicago” in 1913. The poem ends thusly:
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.
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Butchering hogs, stacking wheat, and making tools are what the people who lived in the Second City used to do. No more. Nothing of Lori Lightfoot’s Chicago resembles the early twentieth century’s muscular, energy-charged Chicago of Sandburg’s verse. Reading the poem with its rough-and-tumble motifs of criminality, fecundity and physical vitality one hundred years after it was written — black criminality, to be more precise — is the dominant image of Chicago. Instead of “Freight Handler to the Nation,” “as of June 17, 2021, Chicago leads the nation in mass shootings, average approximately one per week.”
Some ancient history: In the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago’s North Side on Valentine’s Day of 1929, four gunmen, allegedly sent by mobster Al Capone, gunned down seven men in a garage at 2122 North Clark Street. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre shocked the world and made international headlines. It was shocking because such a piece of slaughter was unprecedented. This was back before shooting up your street was the recreational pastime of choice in certain Chicago neighborhoods where, numbers-wise, many weekends match the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in the production of bullet-ridden corpses. “Certain” is the key word here.
The predominately white North Side is safe, relatively speaking. According to Crain’s Chicago Business, “the homicide rate for the city’s four North Side police districts . . . last year [2021] was 3.2 residents per 100,000, according to analysis of data from the University of Chicago Crime Lab — lower than Evanston’s, Champaign’s and Springfield’s, based on data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
On Chicago’s West Side, you might say, homicide is a “horse of a different color” with third-world statistics:
The per-capita murder rate in the Chicago Police Department’s 15th District in Austin has climbed 274% between 2010 and 2020, to 115.2 per 100,000 residents. In the 11th District, serving Garfield Park, the increase was 114%, and the per-capita murder rate reached 146.8, according to data from the University of Chicago Crime Lab.
Yes, you are reading those numbers correctly: 146.8 homicides per 100,000 in two precincts on the Chicago West Side versus 3.2 on the North Side. That makes Chicago “world class” in the production of homicides, and no longer “Player of Railroads.”
Those homicide rates are up there with the most violent cities on Earth, according to data analytics company Statista. The world’s most violent city, Tijuana, Mexico, has a murder rate of 138 per 100,000 residents.
When parts of your town are more lethal than Tijuana, it’s safe to say that the people running the city either don’t care, or they are dangerously stupid — and probably both.
As far as the color of Chicago’s astronomical murder rates:
Racial Diversity, Austin neighborhood, Chicago
African American: 77%
Hispanic:17%
White: 4%
Racial Diversity, Garfield Park, Chicago
African American: 89%
Hispanic: 4%
White: 4%
Birds fly. Flowers bloom. Summer follows spring. Blacks are busy killing blacks in Chicago. Does anyone really believe that either of the two runoff election winners from Tuesday who will face each other in April are smart or competent enough to make Chicago’s West Side safer than, let’s say, Caracas or St. Louis?
You can buy Jef Costello’s Heidegger in Chicago here
The two Tuesday runoff winners, one of whom will be Chicago’s mayor after the April runoff election, turned out to be Chicago’s favorite sons, Leopold and Loeb. No; I actually meant Paul Vallas and Brandon Johnson. Looking at them, I have to go with John McEnroe and say, “You cannot be serious!”
Finishing first was the 69-year old Vallas, a Democrat. At his victory party on Tuesday, Vallas told his supporters: “We will have a safe Chicago. We will make Chicago the safest city in America” — a statement that demonstrates that he’s even more deranged than his predecessor.
Vallas appears to be a life-long public sector political hack with much of his career spent as an administrator of large, urban public-school systems, including stints as CEO of the Philadelphia and Chicago public schools. The resume of your typical big-city public school head honcho is a case study in “falling upward”: this type’s modus operandi is to make a quick getaway after he’s messed up the schools where he’s at and move to a bigger place to showcase incompetence on a larger scale. The Chicago Public Schools (CPS) over which Vallas ruled for a time exist for a single reason: to prove to any residual doubters that, with the schools left to the teachers’ unions and the school administrators, the taxpayers will be fleeced and the students will emerge as functional illiterates:
Nearly 83 percent of students in CPS are either black or Hispanic, and, unfortunately, they have the lowest scores.14 percent of black 11th-graders are proficient in English Language Arts and just 13 percent are proficient in math. Hispanics aren’t much better, with just 25 proficient in reading and 27 percent proficient in math.
Former Chicago Mayor William Daley removed Vallas from his CEO position at CPS in 2001 for failing to progress with student test scores. In his mayoral run, Vallas is definitely hoping to fall upward.
Vallas’ opponent will be 46-year-old Brandon Johnson, also a Democrat. He is Cook County Commissioner and a Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) organizer.
For his campaign for mayor, Johnson has received $930,000 from the CPS Teachers Union and more than a million dollars from the American Federation of Teachers. Lightfoot told the New York Times back in 2021 that the CTU wants to be in charge of the city government. The CTU running the city government would be a bit like Myer Lansky as head of United Way, or Ted Bundy in charge of a battered women’s shelter.
The Chicago Teachers Union is far-Left, corrupt, and incorrigibly hostile to any reform that might improve public education.
From City Journal:
Many children who remain in the [CPS] schools have no escape route; district-wide, all students have registered declines in academic performance. Reading and math proficiency scores have fallen by as much as 30 percent during the past decade, according to data obtained from the Illinois State Board of Education. At the end of the past school year, just 20 percent of third- through eighth-grade students on average were proficient in reading; only 15 percent were proficient in math.
To bolster your confidence that Johnson, who is black, would be up for the Chicago mayor’s job, this is what he told his supporters after his victory on Tuesday evening:
“A few months ago they said they didn’t know who I was. Well, if you didn’t know, now you know,” Johnson said. He thanked the unions that supported him and gave a special shout-out to his wife, telling the crowd, “Chicago, a Black [sic] woman will still be in charge.”
Johnson is apparently banking on the Chicago electorate being even slower learners than the CPS graduates.
So, the next pair of “big shoulders” to step up and turn the Windy City around will either be a failed CPS administrator or a water-carrier for the corrupt teachers’ unions. With either one, Sandburg’s Chicago, a “city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning” will be on its way to an American-style Third World slum run by race-hustling kleptocrats. It will be a place where “proud to be alive” will have given way to “hope to stay alive.” Anyone who can, will leave.
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12 comments
I will never think of Lori Lightfoot, AKA Biggus Dickus without remembering her “COVID Destroyer” outfit she wore to a press conference.
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My God.
I missed that one. Thankfully.
I wonder if Valas was the head of Chicago public schools that proceeded Barbara Byrd Bennett the former “CEO” ( that never fails to crack me up) of Cleveland public schools? She fleeced the Chicago school district because she had casinos to go to. She’s still where she belongs as far as I know.
Chicago is finished. The great black migration has finally done its work. The influx of Mexicans didn’t help matters. Then there was the deindustrialization that our rulers cooked up to enrich themselves by using cheap foreign labor. Lightfoot is not to blame for the condition of the city. She’s a symptom, not the cause. It’s a case of demographics as destiny. The outcome of the runoff will be a matter of curiosity, but not of great importance. Vallas would be a less competent Rahn Emanuel, who was chased out of town by the Negroes after two terms. Johnson would be a supercharged Lightfoot. The fat lady is entering stage left.
By the way, it’s Richard M. Daley, not William.
A big chronicler of Chicago was Mike Royko. His Boss, about Mayor Daley, was always enjoyable to read, and that Daley, for all his flaws, had a crusty greatness of sorts compared to a bug like Lightfoot. But there seems to be a complete collapse of any kind of leadership anywhere. As you have shown in this article, there is merely a list of woke nonentities waiting in line, and the system seems determined to perpetuate this.
I was a suburban cop in a collar county adjacent to Cook (Chicago) back in the 90’s when the city began to demo all the public housing (Cabrini / Robert Taylor etc..) and offer vouchers to move the population anywhere outside of the city.
Literally overnight, the driveway through a local suburban apt complex that had previously quietly housed seniors became an open air drug market, and you had to leave your maglite in the squad each time you got out – even at night – because you would have to throw it away when you had to, inevitably, chase someone down.
Elderly people would call you to their 1 room apt and break out crying that they were afraid to leave the tiny room, because it had become Cabrini Green almost overnight, and even if you found a way to arrest these transplants, they were largely juveniles and were facing only a brief incarceration. The Vice Lord and BGD ‘officers’ had long since learned (in the City) to have only juveniles handle drugs directly, knowing that little could be done to them while the operations went on undisturbed.
The most startling aspect of how dysfunctional Chicago’s population is, is even more notable when you consider that for at least 3 decades or so, they have actively exported and incentivized the most dangerous and criminal individuals to migrate OUT of Chicago, either to collar counties, elsewhere in Illinois, or out of state with vouchers and payments. This is now also paying grim dividends up in Milwaukee and Minneapolis.
I think an honest and truthful analysis requires an admission that to a significant extent, it is cowardice / opportunism to simply attempt to pass this racial issue off on Lightfoot or as ‘Democrat rule’ since the exact same problem exists in places like Englewood and Harvey, that were once fully functional, desireable locales, entirely white populated, and Democrat / Union neighborhoods.
In the case of Harvey the town once elected one of the few remaining white males in town as mayor, long after the population was almost entirely black, in a last ditch effort to try to restore some sort of order. This is not failing schools or ‘democrat’ rule, it is truthfully a factor of Chicago being a primarily White city when it was built and when I was born there, and being a super-majority Black and Hispanic city today. This is politically incorrect today, but it makes it no less factual.
I say this as an outsider with no direct attachment to Chicago prior to my own parents arrival there, but the population of todays’ Chicago did not build it in the first place. It is somewhat sadly amusing for me as someone with southern roots to recall the violent protests in Humboldt Park, as northerners attempted to prevent forced ‘integration’, which has today left Humboldt park as a gang infested, non-white neighborhood – the vast majority of the white population that built the area has long since fled.
That said, the second half of this analysis is that the reason all of these people internally migrated to Chicago in the first place (and were living on lower wacker drive in droves, according to the stories I heard) was because it was once the premier manufacturing destination in the US.
I am not suggesting that there are not very real race disparities at the mean average in behaviour and outcomes that play a primary role in this disaster unleashed. The democrat city cop-out is merely a useful lie, since the truth is verboten.
The key factor is, the forced integration of any population is not going to work, if any/either of those populations cannot first be shown to have the capacity to live peaceably in a civil society that consists only of them. If that test cannot first be met, all the cuckold media and political dogma is merely dooming others to a nightmare that cannot suceeed.
All that said, given that the original magnet was jobs- cities like Chicago, Detroit, St Louis etc.. were test dummies for a scheme of corrupt outsourcing of production and massive insourcing of cheap labor (Reagan amnesty) that were not within the control of local entities like the Daley machine to either fight off or endorse.
Its tempting to call this outsourcing of domestic production that kicks off with ‘Free-Traders’ in both parties – but primarily the folks who now try to posture as ‘conservative’ – as insane. This was in no way crazy or insane, it was well planned and deliberate – folks like Gingrich will go to the grave rich men for what they helped inflict as they got paid to deindustrialize the midwest, along with other regions, in the name of a false ideology.
There literally was no other outcome but a disaster of one flavor or another that would or could arise by the ruling elite betraying the domestic population to this extent. If people lie for profit in one instance, they will lie for preservation/profit in any other instance. Remember this when you hear chirping about ‘lightfoot’ or ‘democrat cities’ – these are mere symptoms.
The actually malady long preceded them.
It’s notable that Vallas, while certainly not a reactionary of any sort and likely not too bright was fired from his position as CEO for balancing the budget by abridging that absurd pensions teachers were receiving and was canned on behalf of the teachers union. While he’s not going to “Make Chicago Great Again™️” he’s likely to at least put a spanner in the teacher’s unions plan to seize lasting formal power.
Unless there’s a way to get blacks and Hispanics out of the continent, all of America’s cities are completely destroyed, and they all have no future.
Why celebrate Lightfoot’s demise? They’re going to elect the other black candidate who will keep his foot on the same gas pedal
Obviously, it won’t make any difference who wins the runoff. But what if someone like Rudy Giuliani were elected. He turned NY City completely around after the terrible David Dinkins and New York City was a pretty nice place to be in the early 1990s. Is it absolutely impossible that Chicago could be fixed even if a Rudy G could be elected?
There won’t be many more Rudys. I was living in NYC back then, and yeah, with simple commonsense and moderately conservative anticrime policies, his mayoralty made a huge difference.
But my sense was that was the last gasp of pre-woke white Democrats, along with some fearful white liberals, waking up in the name of saving their urban neighborhoods and property values. It was the “white ethnics” who turned in desperation to Rudy – old Irish, Italian and even some Jewish Democrats. Blacks and Puerto Ricans didn’t substantially support him (though the lawful among them certainly benefitted from him). Liberals are everywhere at all times fools who have a very hard time grasping inegalitarian reality. But they were always more naive than outright evil.
Today’s white knee-benders are a whole other category. They are some kind of lunatic – evolutionary biological defectives whose genomes, I assert, have been behind most of the disgraceful periods of fanaticism in white history (medieval heresy hunting, witchburning, Thirty Years’ War, French Revolution, Marxism-Leninism {Gentile component}, Sixties’ Third Worldism, now wokeness). They cannot be reasoned with, and they will never relent: their utopian dreams are simply too ‘real’ to them, too much a core of their self-image and psychological constitutions. Will they do as whites mugged by reality did three and more decades ago (Nixon ran in ’68 on Law & Order), and surrender their grandfathers’ FDR liberalism in the name of basic public safety? I don’t think so.
I know nothing about Chicago. How powerful is the Mayor there relative to the City Council (or whatever that legislating body is called)?
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