Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot attempted to defend her racist interview policy on Wednesday, explaining why she would only give interviews to “journalists of color” and exclude white journalists on the occasion of her two-year anniversary in office.
BLACK LIVES MURDER EACH OTHER
For comparison, since Jan. 1 through May 10, at least 210 people have been killed in Chicago, most of them by gun violence. The majority of the victims are young black men, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Chicago city administration rocked by crisis following school reopenings, ongoing police violence
The Democratic Party administration of Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is facing a deepening political crisis, with a wave of resignations and departures among her deputies and other city leaders, including the top three figures at Chicago Public Schools (CPS).
On Tuesday morning, a spokeswoman told reporters that Lightfoot would be granting one-on-one interviews “only to Black or Brown journalists.” This move is calculated to shore up support among the identity politics-obsessed upper-middle class constituency of the Democratic Party. By shifting focus to the identities of the journalists making inquiries, Lightfoot is transparently attempting to avoid answering questions about the many scandals besetting her administration, the recent wave of resignations and the release of thousands of leaked emails by city officials.
Lightfoot’s previous role under former mayor Rahm Emanuel was to improve the image of Chicago police following the murder of Laquan McDonald. During her tenure, however, police violence continues, illustrated in the recent murder of 13-year-old Adam Toledo. Social anger is growing.
But police murder is not the only crime the Lightfoot administration must answer for. The vicious campaign to reopen Chicago Public Schools in January and February, at a critically dangerous point in the pandemic, centrally featured Lightfoot and Chicago Public Schools CEO Janice Jackson in national and local media.
Lightfoot, backed by the Biden administration, threatened to “take action” if Chicago’s roughly 25,000 teachers and staff did not agree to return to buildings beginning in early February. In executing this plan, Lightfoot relied on the critical assistance of the Chicago Teachers Union in blocking a strike or other coordinated action.
Departures and resignations from city leadership
Earlier this month, Lightfoot announced her appointment of John O’Malley as Deputy Mayor for Public Safety. O’Malley is a member of the Chicago Police Board and is a former high-level official with the US Marshal Service in Chicago. During his time on the Police Board, O’Malley sided with officers accused of misconduct, including those involved in the coverup of the murder of Laquan McDonald.
The last deputy mayor for public safety, Susan Lee, resigned after a failed bid to include social workers in the city’s emergency responses to mental health and domestic calls. This approach was criticized by city council members Ray Lopez and Maria Hadden in the summer months of 2020 amid the ongoing anti-police violence protests.
During that same period, Lightfoot awarded $281.5 million in pandemic relief funding to the Chicago Police Department for payroll purposes. This amounted to 70 percent of the $403 million in discretionary funding the city received from the federal government. It is about one-third of the city’s annual police payroll costs of about $862 million.
Sydney Roberts, chief administrator of the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) resigned on May 5. Roberts was essentially pushed out by Lightfoot, who stated publicly that she was “extraordinarily unhappy with the way that they’ve (COPA) handled a number of things—not the least of which was taking over 18 months to move forward on an investigation regarding Anjanette Young.” Anjanette Young is a social worker who had her door broken down by Chicago police in a no-knock raid. Young was forced to stand naked in her living room as police ransacked her apartment.
Cook County State Attorney Kim Foxx’s deputy was forced out of the State’s Attorney’s office in the wake of the police murder of Adam Toledo in late March.
Other resignations and departures from city government include Lightfoot’s press secretary Jordan Troy, Lightfoot’s in-house labor negotiator Mike Frisch, Chief Risk Officer Tamika Puckett, Deputy Communications Director Lauren Huffman, Deputy Press Secretary Pat Mullane, Chief Engagement Officer Juan Carlos Linares, Chief Operating Officer Anne Sheahan and Chief Procurement Officer Shannon Andrews, according to the Sun Times. Chief of Staff Maurice Classen is also expected to depart the city government. The Chicago Law Department’s top attorney and personal friend of the mayor, Mark Flessner, resigned in late 2020 over the city’s mishandling of Anjanette Young’s case.
Some of the most significant of these many departures from city leadership this year are the three top CPS officials who have announced their exit from the district at the end of the school year: CEO Janice Jackson and her deputies, Chief Education Officer Latanya McDade and Chief Operating Officer Arne Rivera.
At the news conference announcing her departure, Jackson stated she was “both proud and humbled and also a little bit tired if I’m being honest.” She said leading CPS “was and still is my dream job—but then you wake up.” Jackson, who has been in the position for the past three-and-a-half years, having been appointed in 2017 by Rahm Emanuel, chose not to renew her contract with CPS.
Reports indicate that Jackson has accepted a fellowship at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. McDade would have been next in line for the CEO position in Chicago after Jackson’s departure. She is instead to become superintendent of Prince William County Public Schools, the second-largest school district in Virginia.
Jackson’s recent predecessors have all left under the cloud of scandal, including multi-million-dollar corruption schemes and rank mismanagement. Former mayor Rahm Emanuel appointed four CPS CEOs in his two terms in office. Jean Claude Brizard left immediately following the 2012 Chicago Teachers Strike, just before the city began a brutal process of shuttering scores of public schools in 2012–2013. That initiative would be led by Emanuel’s next appointee, Barbara Byrd Bennett. In 2015, she resigned and was later sentenced to more than seven years in federal prison for a $20 million dollar bribery scheme involving vendors to the city. Following her departure, Forrest Claypool, an old hand in the Illinois Democratic Party, led the district, only to resign amid an ethics scandal. The district is still under federal oversight for its routine violation of the rules governing the treatment of special education students.
The Chicago Teachers Union issued a statement on the CPS departures underscoring the close working relationship between district and union officials. The statement offers the officials “the best in their future endeavors, and look[s] forward to a collegial and collaborative relationship with their successors as we continue our work toward creating the schools our students deserve.” The CTU letter also blamed Lightfoot for Jackson’s departure: “We are hopeful the mayor can improve on her ability to work collaboratively and cohesively with others, in particular her own staff and appointees in CPS.”
While Lightfoot’s leadership style is frequently cited, including her tendency to publicly criticize and blame subordinates, her vulgar and petty personal characteristics are not the essential matter in these departures. Jackson is not the only school superintendent to recently announce plans to leave her position. Superintendents of New York City, Los Angeles, Houston and Broward County, Florida public schools are all also leaving their posts.
The CPS leaders who are departing carried out a vicious campaign, led by Lightfoot and the Biden administration, to force open Chicago schools in January and February, the first district in 2021 and the second in the US to reopen, during a particularly deadly phase of the pandemic.
What accountability will they face for the massive social crime in which they participated? They bear no small share of responsibility for the consequences of their district’s policies: the illnesses, deaths, misery and stresses they created. None of these officials have made public statements accounting for their role and are instead fleeing the scene of the crime.
The city leaders, against enormous opposition from teachers, CPS parents and the wider community, forced the reopening of schools, victimizing teachers who spoke out about the dangers of in-person learning, forcing teachers onto unpaid leave and later clawing back unpaid leave agreements, and demanding all grades return to classrooms by mid-April. The district further pressured families to return to in-person learning by refusing to invest in improved remote learning after the vast majority of CPS students opted to continue to learn online.
None of this could have been accomplished without the collaboration of the CTU, which permitted Lightfoot and Jackson to divide the teaching workforce and isolate teachers from the rest of the working class. The CTU drove teachers back into buildings in “phases,” in violation of the most basic principle of “an injury to one is an injury to all.”
In a meeting on Superbowl Sunday, ahead of a one-day vote on the reopening agreement, CTU leaders told teachers they could not gain any more in bargaining, and that a strike would also not be successful, as teachers could scab by logging on from home. Thus, union leaders argued, there was no real choice other than to accept the agreement, which was promoted with a massive lie: that reopening schools could be done safely.
The reopening agreement between CPS and CTU was the most damning exposure of the reactionary character of pseudo-left “social justice unionism,” pushed through by CTU’s Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators faction composed of members of the now-defunct International Socialist Organization (ISO), the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and other pseudo-left groups. The CTU has been the archetype for unions promoting middle-class identity politics as a cover for their betrayals for more than a decade.
Palestinian Deaths Since May 10: 232, Chicago Homicides This Year: 210
(CNS News) -- Since the violence erupted in Israel on May 10, a reported 232 Palestinians and 10 Israelis have been killed, a total of 242 victims. These people were killed primarily by airstrikes (bombing) and rocket attacks. It's essentially a war zone there.
For comparison, since Jan. 1 through May 10, at least 210 people have been killed in Chicago, most of them by gun violence. The majority of the victims are young black men, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Including the 210 people killed in Chicago, at least 1,187 have been shot since Jan. 1, reported the Chicago Sun-Times.
In the year 2020, there were 774 murders in Chicago. Also, there were 3,237 shootings (which was up from 2,120 in 2019), reported The Sun-Times. (Emphasis added.)
For comparison, 27 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in 2020, according to Al Jazeera, and three Israelis were killed reportedly by Palestinians.
Illinois Democrats race bait Abraham Lincoln—again
Chicago mayor targets monuments to Civil War, American Revolution
As tragedies go, few match the poetic dimensions of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, Good Friday, 1865. Coming just five days after General Robert E. Lee surrendered Confederate armies to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, and four years and three days after the attack on Fort Sumter opened the conflict, Lincoln’s killing was, symbolically, the last act in the carnage of the Civil War that had taken the lives of some 700,000 Americans, made 4 million slaves “henceforth and forever free,” and secured for the United States “a new birth of freedom.”
Walt Whitman captured in verse the mood of grief at the moment of triumph in his poem “O Captain! My Captain!,” which begins,
O Captain! My Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’ d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
More than 7 million people—over one-third of the population of the northern states—observed Lincoln’s funeral train along its 1,654-mile rail journey from Washington D.C. to Springfield, Illinois. Men, women and children—people who knew firsthand the suffering and loss of America’s bloodiest war—lined the track, often waiting for hours in the elements. “He was crucified for us!” an elderly African American was quoted as saying at the train’s passing in York, Pennsylvania, during a steady rain. The old man was right. Booth, the assassin, was a white supremacist who murdered Lincoln in vengeance for the freeing of the slaves.
The train retraced backward the route Lincoln had taken in February 1861, when he left Illinois for his March 4 inauguration in Washington D.C. Seven of the 13 southern states that would form the Confederacy had by then already seceded to form a slave republic, and the US stood on the brink of war. Lincoln had been forced to disguise himself to pass through Maryland lest he fall into the hands of pro-slavery mobs. But in the return through Baltimore, thousands paid their respects. “The world only discovered him a hero after he had fallen a martyr,” Marx observed.
Chicago was the funeral train’s last stop before Lincoln’s entombment at Springfield. The Chicago Tribune estimated that four-fifths of the city’s population turned out, among them “native and foreign born, white and black, old and young, male and female.” The New York Times thought that so many had come to Chicago from “neighboring cities and towns, swelling the masses which everywhere throng the streets” including “large delegations from Waukegan, Kenosha, Milwaukee and other towns in Wisconsin,” that there must have been 250,000 present that day to say goodbye. But Lincoln had already bid farewell to his home state four years earlier when, on February 11, 1861, he had departed Springfield:
My friends, no one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington.
Killed at the moment of victory and at the height of his popularity—and before the brutal capitalism of the Gilded Age laid its grip on the American republic—it is little wonder that Lincoln has been, alongside Washington, the most memorialized president. It is less surprising that Chicago, on “behalf of Illinois’ noblest son … surpassed all others in the proofs of her devotion in death as in life,” as the Tribune put it.
It is true that much of the official mythologizing long sought to turn Lincoln into a harmless icon of capitalist self-improvement. Curiously, those most taken in by this legend have always been America’s cynical and embittered middle-class radicals. But such efforts have never gained much ground in breaking Lincoln’s hold on the sentiments of the working class, nor in washing away the memory of his leadership of America’s second revolution. This has been nowhere truer than in Chicago, and especially among generations of black workers. In February 1913, a half century after the Emancipation Proclamation, some 135,000 African Americans turned out in Chicago on Lincoln’s birthday.
But now Chicago’s Democratic mayor, Lori Lightfoot, is aiming to remove five statues of the Great Emancipator. She has appointed a committee tasked with the “review” of 41 public monuments and works of art, culled from a list of hundreds in the city. Among them are those to Lincoln, as well as monuments to founding fathers George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, and to Grant, who rose in the course of the Civil War from a tannery in Galena, Illinois, to the command of all Union armies.
Chicago’s Monuments Project Committee was announced in August of 2020 following the nationwide protests in response to the police murder of George Floyd. It was part and parcel of a concerted effort, directed by the Democratic Party, to reorient these mass, multi-racial demonstrations against police violence and social inequality in a racialist direction. City officials and school boards in Washington D.C., Boston and San Francisco formed commissions and announced “studies” that would propose to “redress” objectionable art and place names. As Lightfoot’s office described it, the Monuments Project would be “a racial healing and historical reckoning.”
This “historical reckoning” is aimed at the American Revolution and Civil War, and Lincoln is the central target.
In Boston, a famous statue that metaphorically depicts Lincoln freeing the slaves has already been removed, based on the claim that the symbol of the kneeling slave—the central iconographic image of the abolitionist movement—is degrading. The original version, which sits in Lincoln Park in Washington D.C., has also been targeted for removal.
According to the racialists, such imagery denies the slaves their “agency in freeing themselves.” Yet they also insist that slavery in the American South was equivalent to the Holocaust, in the telling of New York Times staff writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, and that it exercised an “innermost control over the bodies of [the] enslaved work force,” as Matthew Desmond put it in the 1619 Project. How this system of “sheer brutality” was overcome by the slaves themselves, and why it happened only during the Civil War after 250 years of American slavery, was evidently not discussed in the removal of Boston’s monument. Racial mythmaking is as unencumbered by logic as it is history.
As was the case in Boston, in Chicago the Monuments Project is attempting to fob off the campaign to remove Lincoln as a “public discussion.” This is a lie. The committee will host a handful of meetings closed to just 20 participants before it makes a final decision. Far from being any kind of democratic initiative, the decision to remove the artwork sits solely with the mayor and her committee. Lightfoot’s lieutenant, Christine Carrino, has since announced that because the “Chicago Monuments Project advisory committee is not a ‘public body’” disclosure rules do not apply to it. Deliberations are secret, in other words.
In the mayor’s star chamber the statues to Lincoln and the others face charges of whether or not they promote “narratives of white supremacy,” have “connections to racist acts, slavery and genocide,” or are not sufficiently inclusive of “other stories.” Sitting in judgment is a 30-member committee, selected by Lightfoot, that includes not a single historian of the Civil War or the American Revolution.
Many of the statues are works of genuine artistic achievement. The Standing Lincoln sculpture (also known as Lincoln: The Man ) is the centerpiece of Chicago’s Lincoln Park and is, according to the Lincoln Park Conservancy, “considered the most important sculpture of Abraham Lincoln from the nineteenth century,” designed by “Irish sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907) who became one of the foremost sculptors of his time.” The other targeted Lincoln statues include Seated Lincoln (1908), also by Saint-Gaudens and famed architect Stanford White, Lincoln Rail Splitter (1905) by Charles Mulligan, Young Lincoln (1951) by Charles Keck, and Lincoln (1956) by Lloyd Ostendorf and Avard Fairbanks.
Two monuments to Washington make the list. One of these, called the “Robert Morris-George Washington-Haym Salomon Monument,” quotes on its base from a speech Washington gave to a synagogue in Rhode Island in 1790. It begins: “The government of United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance. …” An accompanying bronze plaque states: “Symbol of American tolerance and unity and of the cooperation of people of all races and creeds in the building of the United States.” One assumes that the irony of removing such a monument is lost on Lightfoot’s committee.
Historical ironies abound. Lincoln would surely not recognize today’s Republican Party as his own. The attempted fascist coup of January 6, and the Republicans’ refusal to recognize the outcome of the election, finds a parallel instead in the actions of the southern Democrats in 1860, who made war “rather than let the nation survive” in response to his own election, as Lincoln put it in his Second Inaugural.
But Lincoln would recognize something of today’s Democratic Party. In his own time, he tangled with the period’s foremost Democrat, Stephen A. Douglas—whose statue in Chicago is not on Lightfoot’s list—in their famous series of debates in small Illinois towns in 1858 and going forward to the election of 1860, in which Douglas stood for a Democratic Party that had been split, North and South.
Lincoln’s struggle against Douglas followed a pattern. Lincoln wanted to talk about slavery. Douglas wanted to talk about race. Lincoln wished to mobilize the electorate against the further expansion of slavery, a system of extreme labor exploitation that denied the most fundamental right to self-ownership and offended the founding American principle of equality. Douglas, in turn, sought to obscure slavery through the promotion of the idea of permanent racial differences.
When Douglas said, for example, that Lincoln wanted to end slavery so that he could “amalgamate” the races and take a black wife, Lincoln understood Douglas’ method as an appeal to racism. But Lincoln nonetheless insisted, of the hypothetical black woman, that “in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others.”
One-hundred-and-sixty-three years later, a black woman is mayor of Chicago and heads up its Democratic Party, an outcome made possible by the Civil War—and one which Douglas in his most fevered rhetoric never could have imagined. But in a more fundamental sense Lightfoot is Douglas’ direct political descendant.
Like Douglas in the 1850s, Lightfoot does not want any discussion of labor exploitation. The mayor has just sent tens of thousands of workers—teachers and staff—back into unsafe classrooms in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, which scientists warn is on the verge of its deadliest explosion yet. There are 500,000 Chicagoans who live below the official poverty line, and, according to one food charity, the city is experiencing its “biggest hunger crisis ever,” with 800,000 people not having enough to eat. Meanwhile, some $60 billion in wealth is hoarded by Illinois billionaires, a group headlined by Lightfoot’s Chicago allies Sam Zell and the Pritzker family. Naturally enough, just as Douglas did before her, Lightfoot wants to talk about race, not class. This is the real aim of her Monuments Project.
The Democratic Party oversees conditions of explosive inequality in cities across the country. That they once again target Abraham Lincoln reflects the degree to which the entire ruling class lives in mortal fear of a third American revolution. No other figure in American history is so synonymous with the struggle for equality, and the use of revolutionary means to achieve it, as Lincoln.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot Defends Excluding White Journalists: ‘Systemic Racism’ in Media
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot attempted to defend her racist interview policy on Wednesday, explaining why she would only give interviews to “journalists of color” and exclude white journalists on the occasion of her two-year anniversary in office.
In a letter to news organizations, and in a series of tweets, Lightfoot claimed there was a racial “imbalance” in the news media, especially in the City Hall press corps, and that she wanted to use her position to force journalism to become more diverse.
I ran to break up the status quo that was failing so many. That isn’t just in City Hall.
It’s a shame that in 2021, the City Hall press corps is overwhelmingly White in a city where more than half of the city identifies as Black, Latino, AAPI or Native American.
— Mayor Lori Lightfoot (@chicagosmayor) May 19, 2021
Diversity and inclusion is imperative across all institutions including media. In order to progress we must change.
— Mayor Lori Lightfoot (@chicagosmayor) May 19, 2021
This is exactly why I’m being intentional about prioritizing media requests from POC reporters on the occasion of the two-year anniversary of my inauguration as mayor of this great city.
— Mayor Lori Lightfoot (@chicagosmayor) May 19, 2021
This is an imbalance that needs to change. Chicago is a world-class city. Our local media should reflect the multiple cultures that comprise it.
— Mayor Lori Lightfoot (@chicagosmayor) May 19, 2021
We must be intentional about doing better. I believed that when running for office. I stand on this belief now. It’s time for the newsrooms to do better and build teams that reflect the make-up of our city.
— Mayor Lori Lightfoot (@chicagosmayor) May 19, 2021
In her letter, reported by CBS Chicago affiliate WTTW, Lightfoot cited the county’s “historic reckoning around systemic racism” and suggested that the media in Chicago suffered from “institutionalized racism.” She complained that as the city’s first black, female, and lesbian mayor, the journalists assigned to cover her were “practically all white,” adding: “I find this unacceptable.”
CBS Chicago asked: “In Chicago there is a crime crisis, an unemployment and now a worker crisis, among other issues. The three arguably most powerful politicians in Chicago — Lightfoot, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and State’s Attorney Kim Foxx — are all African American woman. One is openly gay. So is this the time for a diversity lecture?”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new e-book, We Told You So!: The First 100 Days of Joe Biden’s Radical Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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