City Steam in Hartford, Connecticut, was one of the best gigs on the stand-up comedy circuit. The food was amazing -- and free to comedians. The three-weekend shows held in the basement venue "rocked."
The gig was located in downtown Hartford, which wasn't a good neighborhood when I started working there in 1996. It got worse over the decades.
City Steam has recently been shuttered. The commie response to COVID closed the place down. When they re-opened, the venue could no longer afford all the delicious food on their menu, which had been reduced to hamburgers and hotdogs because too few people returned. Why didn't the club survive? Probably because Hartford fell to the communists, and -- as in most Democrat-run toilet cities -- the COVID responses and the subsequent George Floyd crime wave scared away the people who supported their downtown. Folks decided instead to stay in the suburbs, where they are less likely to have a gun pointed at their forehead while their wallet is "relocated."
But not everyone could leave. The peaceful people who live in and near Downtown Hartford, especially to the north, not only don't have the luxury to vacate but are also tired of seeing young black men die.
FACT-O-RAMA! Hartford had 40 murders in 2022 and 36 in 2023, which may not seem like a lot but it equates to roughly 2,456 murders a year in New York City. The Big Apple hasn't seen redrum like that since the early 1990s.
Archbishop Dexter Burke saw woke politicians gut his city with Marxist nonsense. He also saw two men get murdered near his church one night. He decided to do something.
Burke decided to help form a legally armed "self-defense brigade" to patrol the streets of Hartford's northern neighborhood. It consists of about 40 legally armed citizens who carry guns, wear body cameras, and have drone support in the air.
The self-defense brigade is a liberal Marxist's nightmare. Ordinary Americans -- in this case, black folks -- have had enough crime and violence and have decided they need to protect themselves. It is their American right to do so, but Democrats hate people who stand up for themselves.
“The Democratic machine in Hartford is either unwilling or unable, incapable of doing it, and people are paying their tax dollars, and they’re not really getting any kind of service,” Cornel Lewis, a founder of the self-defense brigade, related to Fox News. “So we want the people to understand, number one, self-defense is not a dirty word.”
As expected, the leftoids -- who pretend to care about black people -- lost their marbles.
Hartford's Democrat cuck mayor, Arunan Arulampalam, dutifully attacked the brigade.
“Our community has seen so much pain and trauma, and what we need is for those who love this city to do the hard work of healing that pain, not walk around our streets with guns trying to take the law into their own hands,” Arulampalam detailed in a response to Fox News.
So the Democrat Party in Hartford is getting black folks slaughtered in mind-boggling numbers, but black people should take it and "heal"? Sign me up to the self-defense brigade.
The mayor of nearby New Haven -- home to Jonny Benson's famous comedy show and, once again, now defunct gig The Sci-Fi Cafe -- also hates the idea of black folks defending themselves.
"It’s a bad idea, and it’s not welcome and there’s a number of reasons for that," New Haven's bootlicking mayor, Justin Elicker, told WTNH News 8. "We need fewer guns on our street, not more."
Black people are waking up nationwide and refusing to tolerate the bloodbaths taking place in their neighborhoods every weekend, and Democrats are opposing them.
That might help explain the record numbers of black voters flocking to President Trump.
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