Chicago Mayor Displays the Woke Playbook

When Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson recently announced consideration of a city-owned grocery store to feed residents trapped in a “food desert,” he may have revealed more than intended. The faux-Marxist ideology dismantling America from soup to nuts seeks to deconstruct all things decent or orderly, to install (inflict?) a perverse utopian vision that is inevitably dystopian. Chicago displays this process: destroy safety, law and order, and food supplies, then use failed government to “save” the people, totalitarian style. It is a vicious cycle, spiraling down the drain.

Authoritarian regimes in Russia and China have demonstrated what happens when an omnipotent state government seeks to control an economy: it fails, and people die in famine. Chicago has vilified its police forces, condoned shoplifting and anarchy, jettisoned fiscal solvency, and driven profit-seeking businesses out of the city. Racism and the failures of capitalism are then trotted out to take the blame. As with all things woke, the opposite is the case.

Catering to the Woke Mob

Mayor Johnson revealed his fantastical disconnect from reality in announcing this hair-brained folly:

"All Chicagoans deserve to live near convenient, affordable, healthy grocery options. … Historic disinvestment has led to inequitable access to food retail across Chicago, and these existing inequities have been exacerbated as at least six grocery stores closed on the South and West sides over the past two years."

Do Chicagoans “deserve” this type of political leadership? Once again, the social justice neo-Marxist cult invokes tiresome tropes of oppression rather than accountability for the seeds of destruction they have sown. Street riots have destroyed businesses nationwide, fueled by falsehoods about racism and capitalism. Now those who do the destroying blame “the system” or “historic disinvestment.” Really? Whole Foods, Walmart, and the other stores referenced were historically invested: it has been the rising crime, vandalism, theft, and risk to human health that has led many businesses to pull the plug. This is “Social Justice Disinvestment,” not white supremacy.

When Mayor Johnson claims “... we will address those challenges reasonably and responsibly, and not on the backs of workers and working families,” the opposite is true. It is the backs of workers and working families that are already bearing these burdens as a direct consequence of absurd, anarchic Chicago Democrat policies that reward criminals and punish those who follow the rules. Stories abound of store workers being shot to death by shoplifters; the gun violence is then exploited to deprive law-abiding citizens of the inalienable and ancient right of self-defense.

Victimizing the Law-Abiding

Some $94.5 billion in stolen merchandise in 2021 must be paid for in price increases (inflation) by law-abiding citizens. This figure is sharply up from 2019’s estimated $61.7 billion, and $50.6 billion in 2018. The Chicago Police Department reports thefts are up 25% over last year, and robberies 11%. It is stores, but also workers and working families trying to lawfully purchase products, who are being robbed. To attribute recent grocery store closures to “historic disinvestment” is to gaslight the crime wave fomented by current woke racist hatred. Stealing is a “right,” so theft is presented as virtuous social justice activism: individual moral responsibility is passe. The mayor’s bogus equity claims only fuel yet more of the same.

This is the ideology against which Aldous Huxley cautioned:

“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”

What will Mayor Johnson’s new Soviet-style grocery store rescue look like? Will all food be free, and just skip the cashier part? Why risk life and limb when the money for free stuff can be siphoned off the backs of those who work and follow the rules? Will the government enforce the criminal laws in its own stores that it has abandoned for private businesses? Will technocrats comprehend profit margins better than private enterprises? The very proposal is laughable and failed out the gate: Chicago is deeply in the red and just keeps digging deeper.

If it Ain’t Broke, Break It!

Creating chaos and destroying everything from individual rights to currencies to economic growth to children’s minds, the common theme of this toxic, deadly cult of hate is to destroy and then rebuild. Only, these are not people who have ever built anything. The foxes in the chicken coop have eaten all the chickens, and now are taking over the chicken yard to spread their contagion.

Chicago will worsen, just as Vermont, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Portland, and other “woke” communities will implode on their own putrid malarkey. Climate warriors, meanwhile, preach that all humanity must be compressed into urban living. This is colonization of the worst kind, increasingly resembling vast Mad Max gulags rather than an orderly society. Transporting food into cities is less environmentally efficient than living in balance with rural resources. As with all things woke, the (intended) outcome is to destroy.

Woke Genocide on the Horizon

Stalin killed tens of millions of people by targeting peasant farmers as bourgeois “kulaks”. Mao took China into a “Great Leap Forward” – in genocide of some fifty million Chinese – to “create a better society.” The barbarians are at the gate, and Mayor Johnson has thrown open the doors of security and protection to usher in more chaos and hate. How many people will starve in Chicago, and across the nation, because of such failed leadership?