I noticed this at Don Surber’s spot on Sunday and thought it worth bringing up
Proud to be #400 Like. You nailed it, sister! Reactionary does not begin to describe the #TDSafflicted#DonkeyBadgeMedia activists. I don’t know. Cats and laser pointers? Oh, and to be clear, destroying 1500 buildings in Minneapolis is not peaceful protest. It’s a blitzkrieg. pic.twitter.com/TgysdKLiyf
I don’t think the people in the bubble really understand what this is doing to the voters because they dismiss all sources outside of the MSM.
However social media from facebook to twitter to parler to instagram means that these stories and sources get out to folks. They may not live politics but the see it and will act accordingly.
I told you about my liberal nephew in Minneapolis who on January 1st was a nevertrump Democrat who will be, as he put it, “crawling over broken glass in a mask to vote for him in November” after the riots. These people have friends and family all over the country who have been told of these riots.
I think that like John Stewart belatedly trying to rally the left in 2010 late October when the reality of the situation finally dawned on him, the Antifa / media / democrat left along with the Deep staters who have enabled them are going to figure this out at the last minute and realize that they are about to lose.
That’s when, like a rat in a corner they will become panicked and the most dangerous. A Trump victory means
Federal prosecutions of those already arrested will actually happen with a lot more to come.
Investigations actually started will progress from the phony Russia Probe to reviewing tapes of riots
Cities that enabled this stuff knowing they will not be bailed out if they back down will have to actually enforce the laws.
And companies intimidated by the woke mob who helped fund them will decide that they’d better get right with Trump while they still can
And that’s not even mentioning use of RICO statues to go after those folks and foundations that have been funding these riots directly which is going to be fueled by this:
A Supreme Court ruling just stripped Soros’ Open Societies entities abroad of 1A “rights” they were taking advantage of influencing US policy w Soros’ foreign orgs & ops. Now they are deemed foreign, & have no US right to free speech, & activities can be considered threatening pic.twitter.com/HVhpkHQRKg
In short once these folks realize all this is coming I expect one last violent outburst in an attempt to stop it.
It will be bad, very bad. In fact I would be shocked if it didn’t include at least one actual assassination attempt on the President with more to come after he wins both enabled by nevertrumpers still working in government worried about investigation.
I am hoping that I’m wrong about all of this (particularly the last because the violent backlash if it succeeds will be horrible, particularly for the left) but I suggest being ready in case I’m not.
About twelve hours after I finished my DTG post last week about Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s get-tough policy on sunbathers in Chicago at Lake Michigan, Chicago became Detroit. That’s not to say that you can now drive for miles in America’s third-largest city–for now–and see nothing but a few lived-in homes among the vacant lots and abandoned houses. Just as you didn’t encounter that in Detroit after the destructive riots there a few days after the 1967 riots faded away.
The Motor City hit rock bottom in 2013 when it declared bankruptcy.
These things take time. Detroit is turning things around now. But its vacant lots will be there for many years.
“Seventy percent of Chicago’s economic activity takes place in and around downtown,” Mike Flannery said last night on his Flannery Fired Up program on Fox Chicago, “and it’s in more peril now than ever before.”
And that’s where the looting, likely directed by Antifa, was centered late last Sunday night and early Monday morning–in and around downtown. Flannery called it “Sad, organized-crime looting.”
So the simple story is that economically speaking, the heart of Chicago is the Loop and North Michigan Avenue, the latter has been known as the Magnificent Mile for decades. You kill that and Chicago dies. Welcome to Detroit.
Last Sunday afternoon a 20-year-old Englewood man was shot by Chicago police officers; he has since been charged with first-degree attempted murder. The accused allegedly shot at the police. A rumor spread online–or was it a manufactured lie?–that the cops shot instead shot an unarmed 15-year-old boy in the same impoverished Englewood neighborhood.
Then came the looting later that night.
The coordinated manner of the looting consisted of mobile criminals, a few of them armed, that quickly descended on the Mag Mile. Some of them came with specialized tools such as drills to hasten the break-ins. There were reports of U-Hauls being packed with stolen goods. The thieves were more organized, Flannery remarked, than the 400 police officers dispatched downtown to confront them.
Much like the people of Englewood, the residents of the downtown area–and the business owners–don’t feel safe there. That’s not to say the folks of the South Side–or the even-worse off West Side–don’t deserve to feel safe. They certainly do. Some of that 70-percent-of-Chicago’s-economic-activity makes its way to the city’s poverty-stricken areas. Should they receive more of it? Probably, but that discussion will belong to shoulda-happened-looking-back rants that you’ll find on Reddit soon.
A few days after the most recent round of looting it was reported that Macy’s is considering leaving the glitzy Water Tower Place mall on North Michigan Avenue, or just perhaps they’ll just downsize there. Under the Marshall Field’s name Macy’s was an original tenant of the mall. What of the smaller operations, the family-run retail outlets who have been devastated with two rounds of looting in just over two months? When they leave, because they don’t have the big names, it won’t make big news. But when Chicago’s downtown area is dominated by boarded up store-fronts with signs declaring “Move in now–lease rates reduced again–first month free!” you’ll know the downtown descent is well under way.
As for the residents of the Loop, the Gold Coast, Lincoln Park, and Lakeview, unlike those people in Englewood, they can afford to move and swallow selling their homes at a loss. A lot of them will. “Why should I stay here?” many will wonder, “there is so much crime, there are no good restaurants here, and there are no decent places to shop.”
You don’t believe me? Here’s what Alderman Brian Hopkins (2nd), a Lightfoot opponent, said on that same Flannery Fired Up show. He decried “the economic devastation and the blow to our collective psyche,” as well as “the sense that people have that they can’t live here anymore, their safety is at risk if they try to live here.” Hopkins believes with the right actions Chicago can be saved. Lightfoot certainly knows that she is facing a severe crisis. But I suspect because she is an ideologue she is incapable of instituting meaningful policy changes.
Right now I believe that for Chicago it’s a matter of mitigating its decline and fall. The looting and riots are of course just a symptom. Chicago hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1931 but it’s best-known mayor–and possibly its best-ever–was machine boss Richard J. Daley, who ruled America’s then-second-largest city with an iron fist from 1955 until 1976. He was a New Deal Democrat–with a strong law-and-order bent. But Lori Lightfoot is Chicago’s first leftist mayor. After the spring round of looting and riots she seemed more interested in protecting the rights of protesters than protecting citizens and businesses. Sadly the line between rioters and protesters in 2020 is blurry and that sentiment was expressed by a Black Lives Matter organizer who said last week in front of a Chicago Police station about looting, “That is reparations.”
Yesterday a march on the South Side evolved in a violent confrontation downtown between protesters and the police. Cops were attacked with mace, one police officer was repeatedly struck with a skateboard.
Many accounts of this latest round of looting mentioned that the criminals seemed emboldened. Of course they are.
Chicago has other serious problems. Its municipal pension programs are the worst-funded of any major city. Detroit’s fall was hastened by enacting a commuter and municipal income tax in 1963. Chicago doesn’t have either of those but it has its pension bomb. So does Cook County and the rest of Illinois. Lightfoot, to be fair, didn’t create the Chicago pension crisis. It was Boss Daley’s son, Richard M., another long-serving mayor, who bears most of the responsibility for that disaster.
Welcome to Detroit.
If there is a way out for Chicago, here it is. State law needs to be changed so municipalities and government agencies can declare bankruptcy. This move will in the short-term be painful as pensioners will receive a “haircut” and vendors will end up with ten-cents on the dollar or so for money owed to them. And the federal government needs to allow states to do the same.
Yep, just like Detroit.
I’m not gleeful about such a move. I have friends and relatives who are collecting those pensions. And as a man of the private-sector I don’t like seeing businesses getting short-changed. As a property owner living just five miles from the city limits I might get caught up in the financial tsunami too.
But the money wasn’t there for pensions in Chicago before COVID-19 and the riots. There’s less of it now.
I was born in Chicago and I’ve lived one-third of my life there. This story is tragic.
Agitators in Chicago complain of “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.” Perhaps. But then again perhaps not. Lightfoot, Foxx, as well as the Cook County president, Toni Preckwinkle, are African-American women. Chicago’s new police chief is a black man, he succeeded another African-American male. The chief judge of the Cook County Circuit Court is a black man too.
Another way to cushion Chicago’s fall is its citizens to vote, regardless of party-affiliation, for leaders who are results-oriented and not ideologues.
Capt Jake Cutter:Monsewer, you haven’t got the sense of a jack rabbit. Letting hot horses drink. Keep ’em away from the water till they’ve cooled out. Don’t you know anything about horses?
Paul Regret: I know enough about horses. When I want one I call a groom. When I’m done, I call a groom to take him and the groom says “Yes, sir, Mr Regret.” That’s all I wanna know about horses.
The Comancheros 1961
Wednesday I was reading an excerpt of William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech when he was the Democrat nominee for President in 1896 when my grandfather (Dad’s Dad) was a 16 year teen in Sicily. The speech concerned the big issue of the daysound, money a Gold standard vs Bi-metalism that is a gold AND silver standard.
The speech is of course famous for his big finish:
If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.
Now in an age unlike today where everyone knew basic scripture this was a big deal, but today a good half of the country wouldn’t have any idea what he was talking about and the whole issue of “sound money” in a age when we print it on whims (something that would have shocked both parties in his age) is even more comical. Of course given today’s educational system the very idea that an American High School Student let alone a college student who have even heard of Bryan, a man who any student pre-1962 would have known, is an iffy proposition at best.
But there is an earlier line from that speech that jumped out at me that gets almost no play today that I want to touch on. (emphasis mine)
You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard. I tell you that the great cities rest upon these broad and fertile prairies.Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.
“There was no reason to leave before,” said a born-and-bred Upper West Side mom, who asked for anonymity. “Now, I’m done. I can leave tomorrow and never look back. If I never came back to this block, that would be fine.”
The six-months-pregnant mother of a toddler daughter just put her apartment of a decade near the Lucerne up for sale.
“I have definitely seen more crime, drugs and harassment in one week than in my whole experience growing up here,” she said. “I don’t want to see a child get hurt or raped, before they realize maybe it was a mistake to put [hundreds of] drug addicts and sex offenders near schools in the most dense residential population in the city.”
They’ve literally killed the cities. This is going to be the most transformative shift in 100 years.
This means we get to see if Bryan prediction of cities springing up again is right. In fact NYC is in many ways a shadow of its former self as suggested by this amazing video of a fellow touring the now comparatively empty sites:
There is no doubt that either NYC will correct this situation or other cites will rise because these people are going to live somewhere but Stacy McCain asks the key question concerning all these folks now fleeing for the safety of their families :
Thousands of families are now fleeing New York City, but the question must be asked: Who elected Bill De Blasio as mayor?
Probably a lot of those Upper West Side moms voted for De Blasio, because it was the trendy “progressive” thing to do at the time. Didn’t it occur to any of them to wonder what the consequences might be?
Nope they’ve been raised in Evan Sayet’s safe Kindergarten of Eden and they have no more idea how the real world works then Paul Regret knew how to water a horse. Their live has been so safe and comfortable that they had no idea how to deal when the reality of their voting record came knocking at their door.
So now they are fleeing and at least one Governor of a nearby state says come on down but does not include the required warning that I’ll helpfully add
but just remind them that if they vote in the way that turned their states into pits NH will become one.
So come on in but don’t bring your voting record with you
The other thing that might happen is that the migrants from high tax states might bring their political attitudes with them, moving to new, low-tax states for the economic opportunity but then supporting the same policies that ruined the states they left. This seems quite plausible, alas, and I’ve heard Coloradans lament that the flow of Californians to their state involved a lot of people doing just that. (I suppose that migrants from lower-benefits states to higher-benefits states might support change the other way, but people who live on the dole seem to have pretty similar voting patterns regardless of location, which is why the dole is so popular with certain politicians).
Surprise surprise Colorado went from purple to practically blue & Denver is becoming a pit.
If I were one of those conservative billionaires (hello, Koch brothers! hi, Sheldon Adelson!) who are always donating tens of millions to support Republican candidates, I think I might try spending some of the money on something more useful: A sort of welcome wagon for blue state migrants to red states. Something that would explain to them why the place they’re moving to is doing better than the place they left, and suggesting that they might not want to vote for the same policies that are driving their old home states into bankruptcy.
Of course that will be their kids problem to figure out where to flee to if their parents turn their new homes into a pit. Let’s hope those parents love their kids enough to keep this from happening.
fyi I’ll be talking about this piece at 3 PM EST on the DaTechguy off DaRadio Livestream podcast
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