Rise of Violent Crime: Democrats Have a Woke Rogue Prosecutor Problem

By John Kass

The story gripping America is violent crime.

It is the most important story out there now, and nurtured by woke rogue prosecutors in big cities across the country, many of them supported by leftist billionaire George Soros and other wealthy political donors like him.

From murders to mob action, to those videos of looters and smash-and-grabs in high-end retail outlets right before Christmas, from innocents, including bus drivers beaten to a pulp by street mobs, to politicians blaming the victims and the citizens avoiding the downtowns out of fear. It’s all of a piece.

The increase of violent crime is the number one issue in America. People might not talk about it publicly at work, lest they be accused of some social sin. But they do talk about it when they’re alone, in their cars, in their homes, at dinner with their families. You can see it in headlines across the nation, including this one just the other days from ABC News:

“It’s just crazy’: 12 Major Cities Hit All Time Homicide Records: ‘It’s worse than a war zone around here lately,’ a police official said.”

ABC quoted Robert Royce, retired chief of detectives for the New York Police Department, on one troublesome national statistic.

“Nobody’s getting arrested anymore,” Boyce said. “People are getting picked up for gun possession and they’re just let out over and over again.”

Cops don’t make as many arrests because they know from experience that woke rogue prosecutors won’t prosecute. And sometimes those charged with crimes are let out again, and pull the trigger and kill innocents. Often, media declines to connect the dots.

The Democrats don’t want to hear about rogue prosecutors, the lack of arrests and the lack of prosecutions, the violence that it breeds.  They don’t want to hear about repeat violent offenders terrorizing good people. All of this makes them rather uncomfortable.

They’d much rather gaslight you, and tell you violent crime is in your imagination, or blame it all on COVID and hope you’ll just forget that they were the ones who planted the seeds.

But America won’t forget who encouraged the defunding of police and the demonization of law enforcement officers, and who weaponized it all to whip up their voters for the last election cycle. Police officers, convinced they’d be thrown under the bus by their mayors, began retiring in droves, even as liberal Democratic mayors demonized their cops to appease the mobs, as the rogue prosecutors and judges emptied the jails and stopped prosecuting crimes like shoplifting, which nourishes this national spasm of smash-and-grabs that you see almost every night on the news.

Democrats opened the bottle. And now, as they fumble with the cork, they realize they can’t put their genies back inside.

It was the Democrats who run the big cities and elected the rogue prosecutors who turned their streets over to the BLM neo-Marxist mobs during those “mostly peaceful” George Floyd protests, where looting raged and businesses burned. Some still stubbornly insist that their policies have nothing to do with the rise in crime. Some of them spin and say that crime was higher in other years. Or, they just ignore it. Some tell you that you’re hallucinating.

Yet, as National Review editor Rich Lowry writes in Politico, Democrats ignore the violent crime spike at their peril. Elections are coming. And simply put, progressive Democrats pushed the defund law enforcement theme for political advantage, and elected their rogue prosecutors who promised to liberate criminals from the jails, and so-called “moderate” Democrats went along without a peep. And now they all wish to wash their hands of it.

You can see, hear and read about the debate almost everywhere.

But not so much in Chicago, ground zero for this kind of thing.

The Chicago papers aren’t all that interested in the phenomenon of woke prosecutors, though a prominent one has been elected and re-elected. Instead, they have the Jussie Smollett clown show to focus on. The havoc created by rogue prosecutors isn’t on their menu.

In Chicago, the Sun Times endorsed Rogue Prosecutor Zero—Cook County State’s Atty. Kim Foxx—even after she accepted millions in campaign contributions from Soros and after she mysteriously dropped 16 Grand Jury indictment counts against Smollett that he faked his hate crime.

 And at the other “paper”—that broadsheet I worked at for decades–the newsroom guild made it clear it would defame those  like me who’d dare link Soros and his cadre of rogue prosecutors to the growing sense of lawlessness in America. The message to younger journalists was clear. Now I see they’ve partnered up with a social justice warrior outfit to shape crime coverage.

Some of the local TV news stations still cover crime, and many use CWB Chicago as a tip sheet. CWB does an admirable job on its website and Twitter feed covering Chicago crime and the tragic comedy of the bond courts without fear. They provide an important public service.

CWB has reported on the more than 50 cases of repeat violent criminals who’ve been re-arrested for trying to kill or shooting others, then put back out on the streets through liberal bail policy, only to attack other victims while they await trial.

Though you don’t see the rogue prosecutor angle discussed all that much in Chicago’s op-ed pages or in other corporate legacy media outlets, the public cares about it. They live it. They see it. They’re afraid of it. They don’t want to go shopping and find themselves in the middle of a smash-and-grab mob.

I talk and write about it. WIND-AM radio host Dan Proft talks about it. CWB reports on it, as do a few others.

 Robert Milan, the former First Deputy Cook County State’s Attorney addressed all this with WGN radio’s Jeff Carlin and me on a recent episode of our podcast, The Chicago Way ™. I hope you’ll click on the link to listen for yourselves.

“Let’s deal with it directly,” Milan said, of the new philosophy that focuses on getting as many people as possible out of jail and  the prison system,

“The problem is that doesn’t correlate with what’s going on the streets of Chicago, or other major cities across the country,” Milan said. ” This philosophy being pushed is blind to what’s happening on the street. It makes absolutely no sense. So here we are, in an absolute crisis in the city of Chicago with the crime—total crisis–and at the same time, we’ve got elected officials and philosophies that let a lot of these guys out.”

What does all this say to victims of violence? Most of whom are Black and brown racial minorities  ignored by Social Justice Warrior prosecutors, judges and journalists who cling to woke ideology and turn a blind eye to the suffering caused by this ideology. What of them?

“The victims in this county are the most mistreated people that exist,” Milan said. “Ignored. All the attention is about ‘let’s get the bad guy out of jail, let’s get the bad guy out of prison, let’s empty the jails.’ What about the poor people getting car jacked and shot? The law-abiding citizens on the South and West side who are ignored? They can’t sit on a porch with a friend, or they’ll get shot, they can’t sit in a car, or they’ll get shot, they can’t play basketball in the park cause they’re gonna get shot. To me that’s the bigger problem.

“The message is: there is no protection. That there’s nobody looking out for the victims,” Milan said.

Most thoughtful Americans want a criminal justice system that allows reasonable bail. It is the law. But most Americans don’t want violent repeat offenders let out on low, or no bail, or on electronic “home” monitoring that is a joke.

Though much of legacy corporate media avoids the issue on op-ed pages, City Journal hasn’t let it go. Neither have conservative outlets like the Washington Times, The Federalist, National Review and the Heritage foundation, which has a series on “Rogue Prosecutors,” including a piece on Cook County State’s Atty. Kim Foxx:

“The Rogue Prosecutor Whose Policies Are Wreaking Havoc in Chicago.” You might want to take a look.

NBC news is by no means a conservative outlet, but even it is doing stories on rogue prosecutors, including  the poster-boy, San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. He is facing a recall election and a revolt among assistant prosecutors in his office for his soft handling of crime that has turned the streets of San Francisco into a medieval snake-pit.

There’s a Chicago angle on Chesa Boudin. But corporate, legacy media in Chicago doesn’t seem  all that interested. It could be because of the Soros element. Yet in many ways, he’s the perfect rogue prosecutor of 2021 America.

When Boudin was a baby in 1981, his parents, David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin—members of the violent radical neo-Marxist group the Weather Underground–left him with a babysitter. They drove the getaway car after an armed robbery of a Brinks truck in New York. A Brinks guard and two police officers were killed in the crime.

Their child, Chesa was left in Chicago to be raised by Weather Underground leaders William Ayers and Bernardin Dohrn.

It was Ayers who hosted that political coming about party for young politician Barack Obama in Chicago years ago.

You’d think Chicago media would pick this one up. Isn’t there a Chicago angle? Of course there is. But they don’t pick it up.

Gilbert spent decades in prison for his crimes. But he was recently granted parole in one of the last cynical and official acts of disgraced former NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

 Chesa Boudin served as a translator for Venezuelan leftist dictator Hugo Chavez, and as a law clerk, and then, flush with Soros’ political money he became a prosecutor, though he’d never been a prosecutor before.

In Chicago now, media won’t bother itself with Boudin or other rogue prosecutors like Foxx. Instead, media will busy itself dissecting the end of the Smollett trial and Smollett’s testimony.

But here’s the thing: Smollett didn’t testify about that mob that beat that bus driver downtown on Michigan Avenue the other night, or the recurring smash and grab violence that is destroying the Christmas shopping experience here and in cities across the country.

 All that violence in Chicago happened as Smollett testified on charges he faked his hate crime. As I’ve said, Smollett is a little clown, a distraction, a shiny fluttering bird helping Chicago media avoid the important issue.

Though much of media avoided the video of the CTA bus driver’s beating early on, I saw it in a tweet from Paul Vallas. He was disgusted, as was I and many others who saw it. And I retweeted it. You can see it here by clicking on this link. Note the excited screams of the mob:

Lightfoot of course blamed Chicago retailers for the violent smash and grabs. She didn’t blame Kim Foxx  who has been encouraging the smash and grabs by refusing to prosecute those who steal $1,000 or less. Thieves know what they can get away with under Foxx. So they push harder.

Lightfoot endorsed Foxx for re-election. And Lightfoot would never accept any responsibility or blame. So she blamed retailers for not doing enough to stop those smash-and-grabs.  And here she blames the victims.

“We still have retailers that won’t institute plans like having security officers in their stores, making sure that they’ve got cameras that are actually operational, locking up their merchandise at night, chaining high-end bags. These purses can be something that is attracting a lot of organized retail theft units,” Lightfoot said.

Don’t the retailers pay taxes for police protection, mayor? Aren’t you in charge of maintaining public safety, mayor?

If retailers hired security guard muscle, and there were the inevitable conflicts, Lightfoot would be the  first to throw those retailers under the bus. By comments such as these, she makes herself a ridiculous figure. The city just waits for her to go.

Are the purses responsible, Lori? You’re a lunatic now. But you’re not the only Democrat spinning like a mad dervish on the crime issue. U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was insisting that smash-and-grabs are mere figments of our imaginations.

Even Joe Biden’s absurd spinner, Jen Psaki, couldn’t agree with Lightfoot and AOC.

“We don’t agree,” Psaki said bluntly.

No one agrees with the idiocy.

Wasn’t it just days ago that suspected mass murderer Darrell Brooks was put on an absurdly low and dangerous bond for trying to drive his car over his wife, then was released so he could allegedly drive his SUV through a Christmas parade crowd in Waukesha and kill six people, including an 8-year-old boy?

Corporate legacy media wasn’t interested in Brooks’ motives, his politics or his nasty social media postings.  But they sure did comb through every stray fiber of Kyle Rittenhouse’s life hoping to find a racial angle, didn’t they? They didn’t find one.

The media ignored Brooks’ past hateful postings, and woke liberal pundits quickly found other subjects to focus on in order to avoid Brooks and Waukesha. CNN did famously blame the SUV for the deaths. Cars don’t kill on their own. Drivers of cars smashing through crowds crushing children and grandmothers kill. And in Waukesha, one such driver did.

And still, comments were unearthed that were made in 2007 by woke Milwaukee prosecutor John Chisholm in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on his permissive liberal approach to crime.

Back then Chisholm was keenly aware that his policy could get someone killed, but he insisted that a stray killing or two wouldn’t defer him from his criminal justice reforms.

“Is there going to be an individual I divert, or I put into treatment program, who’s going to go out and kill somebody? You bet. Guaranteed. It’s guaranteed to happen. It does not invalidate the overall approach.”

It continues in Wisconsin, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Seattle, Portland, wherever the Democratic left controls politics, it continues. And the politics is often protected by willing media that gaslights the public.

The casualties of the woke prosecutors increase. And all these victims, the dead and the damaged, the businesses destroyed, the lives ruined, all become “collateral damage.” These are victims of ideology. And those who survive don’t hold news conferences to tell you they’ve survived. They’re gone. They vote with their feet. They leave.

What follows is an endless supply of spin, explanations, distractions and excuses. Media outlets desperate to avoid it all have at least a few shiny objects like Smollett. They chase him as he tries to flutter from branch to branch, like some shiny bright-winged bird.

But there are other Americans who can’t spin and play the game. They can’t change the subject from rogue prosecutors. They can’t Tweet or argue or tell you that you’re hallucinating. They can’t blame victims or the purses. They can’t play the race card. And they don’t rely on woke newsrooms to protect them.

They are the dead.

And they have no politics now.

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(Copyright 2021 John Kass)

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JK

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