It was a beautiful summer weekend in Chicago. The city’s premiere summer music event — “Lollapalooza” — went off without a hitch, despite soaring temps and oppressive humidity.
There were the usual block parties, church socials, neighborhood bake sales…
And 11 people were gunned down in the streets, with 63 more wounded.
But because this explosion of blood wasn’t committed by one or two crazed white supremacists or racists, you probably didn’t even hear about it. That’s because the shootings in Chicago — a city that votes 70% Democratic, is run by Democrats from top to bottom — couldn’t be blamed on Donald Trump, Republicans, or conservatives.
Does it really matter that much whether one crazy man with a gun shoots up a Walmart or vicious gang-bangers spray gunfire in densely populated neighborhoods?
Why, yes. Yes, it does.
Those angry loner white boys with guns, this time in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, have again erupted on the body politic.
And those with eyes to see are reminded that the American culture is ill.
But what of the mass shootings in Chicago, the 55 people shot over the weekend, with seven hit near a park and then eight more not far away?
You might think these are “mass shootings” too, but, in political/media terms, they’re not treated as such. The victims, and in all likelihood the shooters, are black. And Democratic politicians find no political advantage in weaponizing the victims of everyday street violence in a Democratic town. So Chicago’s dead are stepped over by national media and national Democrats on the way to 2020. (Emphasis mine)
Weaponizing the dead of el Paso & Dayton. But Chicago? With 55 shot over the weekend and two "mass shootings?" No. Democrats find no advantage in transforming the dead of Chicago into political weapons. My column. https://t.co/pLn4XZv35I
— John Kass (@John_Kass) August 7, 2019
It’s not a “mass shooting” if 30 people are shot in three hours, as happened on Sunday in Chicago? If you can’t pin it on Trump, those 11 dead and 63 wounded human beings simply don’t exist.
Babies shot in Chicago? Poor people terrorized daily? Cops and paramedics pushed to the breaking point?
They’re largely forgotten. In political terms it’s all about those white boys with their guns.
Democrats wrap them around Trump’s neck, focusing on a key voter block, suburban white women with those “Hate Has No Home Here” signs. For two years, the left and media have shrieked unproven allegations about Trump and collusion with Russia. Now that has faded, Democrats adeptly find themselves on comfortable, familiar ground: race.
That’s what it’s really about, isn’t it? Headlines today speak of Hispanics feeling like they’re “being hunted” because they’re now “targeted.” The El Paso shooter is called a “white supremacist” while the media is largely silent about the politics of the Dayton shooter because he has expressed left-wing sympathies. Can’t make it about race, so it never happened.
Has it ever been said better?
Years ago, before Trump was elected president, there were white boys with guns too, slaughtering innocents. And those of us who made the culture argument back then, rather than advocate ripping the Second Amendment out of the Bill of Rights, were denounced, predictably, as know-nothing conservatives.
There had already been tens of millions of legal abortions serving as grim building blocks of an American death cult. And there were increasingly violent video games that fed the isolation, growing nihilism and misogyny in those sad, angry, mentally disturbed boys who nonetheless pass their background checks, buy their guns and make the news.
Now? They are lost in public schools that teach them about their toxic masculinity, they are loners, they are armed, in a culture that turns its face away from God.
Democrats also seem to forget just two short summers ago when it was a left-wing loner with a gun who tried to murder his perceived political opponents:
Because it was also a crazy white madman who stalked those Republican Congressmen as they played baseball in a park in 2017 and tried to massacre them all with a rifle. He was a Sanders supporter and the cry went up wherever we talk politics, in the common square and in newsrooms, that blaming the left for the insane actions of an insane man would be unthinkable.
The shooter in Dayton was, reportedly, of the political left and a supporter of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, but you don’t hear much of that, do you?
All of this comes back to 11 dead, 63 wounded in one weekend in a major, supposedly civilized American city, run by Democrats, where blood is routinely spilled in buckets by mostly black murderers killing mostly black victims that we can’t talk about because the perpetrators aren’t white nationalist supporters of Trump.
Got that? Now go back to sleep.
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