By John Ruberry
President Donald J. Trump isn’t the only public official prone to Twitter rants. Yesterday after a trip to Chicago’s lakefront on a hot and humid day, the city’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, let loose on her constituents.
“It’s called a pandemic, people,” she Tweeted. “This reckless behavior on Montrose Beach is what will cause us to shut down the parks and lakefront. Don’t make us take steps backwards.”
That “reckless behavior” consisted of people gathering at the beach. Chicago’s 18-miles of lakefront parks were closed–they were guarded by Chicago police officers for most of the spring and much of this summer. The cops remained posted at these parks during the riots and looting in May–by people presumably spreading the COVID-19 virus. Riots of course are now, by the liberals, viewed as free speech. After the Lake Michigan parks opened, Lightfoot dispatched an army of “social distance ambassadors” to enforce safe-distancing. I reckon that this snitch army took Saturday off.
Leftist mayors like Lightfoot, Bill de Blasio in New York, Ted Wheeler in Portland, Jenny Durkan in Seattle, and Ethan Berkowitz in Anchorage, they, as I’ve similarly remarked before, love “the people,” but not people. They believe they rule over automatons, faceless entities consisting of countless “Julias,” the void visage featured in the notorious and creepy “Life of Julia” Barack Obama campaign video from 2012. Of course these Julias need an enlightened being, blessed with the correct knowledge, the wisdom of liberalism.
Someone of course like Lightfoot.
At Montrose Beach yesterday Lightfoot saw, like a child in a bedroom, toy soldiers or Barbie dolls to be ordered about. “The people” not people.
Chicago is making national headlines of course for violence, or more specifically, people shooting other people, sometimes killing them.
Late last month a 9-year-old boy was shot to death while playing in a vacant lot. The next morning on Twitter Lightfoot blamed “a bullet,” not the alleged shooter.
“When a 9 year old’s life is ended by a bullet,” she said in that Tweet, “we must all be outraged. These deaths are not mere statistics. And prayers alone will not sooth a broken heart.”
The gang culture that dominates many Chicago neighborhoods is the city’s real problem. And many gang members think it is fine to indiscriminately fire guns at people. Such as the unidentified hoodlum who shot 15-mourners at a funeral home ten days before the 9-year-old was slain.
In a reply to her own Tweet about the murder of that child, Lightfoot added, “Gun violence is every bit a public health crisis as COVID-19.” When I saw that Tweet I thought she had come around, as I thought she Tweeted “gang violence” instead of “gun violence.” If you scanned the brain of Lightfoot you won’t find the words “individual responsibility” paired together.
And if you are from one of those states that Lightfoot labels as a coronavirus hot spot and you visit to Chicago, you may be subject to social media monitoring to ensure you are quarantining.
Thank you Big Sister.
The ultimate responsibility for Lightfoot are the hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans, most of whom, I hope, are not automatons, the ones who voted for Lightweight. She won all 50 of Chicago’s wards over Toni Preckwinkle, who is possibly even more left-wing than Lori, in a runoff election.
What was it that H.L. Mencken said about democracy? Ah yes, here it is, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
UPDATE 4:30pm EDT: The mayor also known as Beetlejuice today dispatched police officers to block off access to Montrose Beach. And snow fencing is also preventing access to the beach on this hot and humid Sunday.
John Ruberry regularly blogs just north of Chicago at Marathon Pundit.
