by John Kass

May 14, 2023

Chicago made steel once. And business, both small and big business. It was a town for traders, men who took risks and didn’t care what others thought of them.

Chicago was once the hog butcher to the world, the place where cattle and grain fortunes could be made. 

It is not the same town now. The public schools raise the children, many of whom lag grades behind standard reading comprehension levels. And in mathematics they lag farther behind already substandard national averages.  The standards will be lowered again, lest the Chicago Teachers’ Union members develop hurt feelings.

The CTU elected Brandon Johnson as mayor even though Johnson advocated defunding the police during this latest violent crime wave. The left wing public employees unions, the CTU and the Service Employees International Union now run the show. They control the city’s politics with their iron progressive fists.

And Chicago’s kids are set up for failure–crime, violence and prison.

But Chicago did raise four young men who allegedly murdered 24 year old Chicago Police officer Aréanah Preston. She was gunned down outside her Southside home as the four teenagers were on a robbery spree targeting women. 

You might say Chicago and those four teens– with serious and violent criminal records who should have been locked up and kept behind jail bars– gave Preston’s mom a Mother’s Day she will never forget. The killers left a hole that can never be filled. They took everything from that mom.

If only they’d been locked up on other numerous charges for other numerous violent acts, they had been charged with,  Officer Preston would be alive. And her family would not be weeping on Mother’s Day. But Democrat Party politics in Chicago is all about protecting the feelings of the predators, not the lives of victims.

It was the thugs who pulled the trigger. They are alleged to have committed the crime. But her death was a direct result of the permissive politics that promotes the wanton lawlessness that leftist billionaire George Soros has wanted in urban areas when he began running hard left no-prosecution prosecutors across the country. It is this wanton lawlessness that I’ve been trying to warn you about for years.

It is cruel to say, but Officer Preston’s murder is more than cruel. They gunned her down because she was in the way of their work. They had jobs to do. And that job tore the city’s guts out.

Their work? It wasn’t about flipping burgers, stocking shelves, or working exhausted in a warehouse, getting up early to get to work, but it was work. It was about roving the streets of Chicago with guns. Pointing them in people’s faces, and taking what they wanted by force. Like the Outfit animals of years ago, they’d sleep late and then take what they wanted from their own people by force.

Who trained them? Who encouraged them to grow wild and feral and murderous?

You could say the Chicago Democratic Party trained them. The Democratic Party nationally broke Black families apart by replacing fathers with government welfare checks. And recently, as Soros prosecutors took hold here and in other jurisdictions,  mass shoplifting without serious punishment was not only allowed but encouraged by Cook County State’s Atty. Kim Foxx and others.

And the predators understood what the politicians had given them: license to hunt.

No sanctions is an invitation to the violent to grab what they want. It allowed for extensive unrest in the Loop without meaningful sanctions during the Black Lives Matter riots. And when teenagers and young men ended up killing innocent children, an odd thing happened: They were excused by the Chief Judge of the Cook County Court. Judge Tim Evans has explained that the brains of the killers weren’t developed enough to determine right from wrong. He gave them an excuse for murder.

I’ve known Tim for years. He’s always been a nice fellow, but also a complete weakling. He caved to the hard leftist politics of Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, who became the powerful chairman of the Cook County Democrats once tbe feds began taking out the Irish, Boss Toni has been protected and endorsed by her media champions including the Chicago Tribune. It was the Tribune and its Marxist guild that controlled the newsroom that sought to destroy my reputation, seeking to falselyand maliciously portray me as a religious bigot for daring to warn you about Soros-backed Foxx.

Speaking about another case, of an 8-year-old girl shot to death by a 16-year old street gang member in a gang fight in Little Village, Evans trotted out the usual progressive claptrap.

“They don’t have the pre-frontal cortex that is developed, and the pre-frontal cortex of the brain, does not, itself fully developed until you’re closer to the age of 25 years of age,” said Evans at a luncheon at the Union League. “This kid is 16. There’s no way that he would have the prefrontal cortex already developed. So, while I can’t talk about that particular case, I’m just talking about the typical 16- year-old, he doesn’t have that part of the brain developed that makes it possible for him to distinguish between the right thing to do and the wrong thing to do.” 

And out of this fetid left wing ooze, in a corrupt city and county with no educational or behavioral standards, Chicago raised those four four young men who are alleged to have killed Officer Preston.

The four charged in Preston’s murder are Trevell Breeland 19, Joseph Brooks 19, Jakwon Buchanan 18, and 16 year old Jaylen Frazier, who has been charged as an adult.

Preston’s mother Dianne Mhoon was congratulated by the Chicago media for her compassion.

 “As I said in that courtroom today, the people I really felt sorry for was those boys,” she said. “I felt sorry for them because nobody obviously didn’t pour into them. Nobody told them that they were loved. Nobody told them that you could do anything like I constantly preach to my daughters.”

But when Mhoon was asked what justice would look like for her daughter, she responded, “Justice to me is … a life sentence.”

Aréanah Preston’s family did everything that a close knit loving family is expected to do. They told their children of the many possibilities in life, not the reasons for failure. They were involved with their kids. Preston was days away from graduating with a Masters Degree in criminal justice from Loyola University Chicago. 

But no matter how hard her parents worked to encourage her, political Chicago was encouraging her alleged killers.

Have you heard about the four furies? That’s what I call them. Their names are Toni, Kim, Lori and Tim. We must never forget Tim.

Four is the same number of the horsemen of the Apocalypse, but I prefer the four Furies of Chicago.

It was the departing Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who in a panic caved to the Black Lives Matter rioters back in 2020, Lightfoot took the coward’s way out and turned over the city to BLM violence. 

She was also afraid of Boss Toni Preckwinkle, President of The Cook County Board and Chairman of The Cook County Democratic Party. Lightfoot had trounced Preckwinkle in the mayoral election but by then Lightfoot had completely panicked and lost what remained of her nerve. Boss Toni had selected her protégé to be the chief prosecutor in Cook County and Kim did not betray the faith that Preckwinkle and leftist billionaire George Soros placed in her. And Lightfoot endorsed Foxx for re-election, a move that was widely interpreted as the political signal for the middle class–white, brown and black, to “get the bleep out of Chicago.”

These four furies created the young men who murdered Aréanah Preston. They don’t want the credit but they should have it. It was Tim Evans who gave them the idiotic left-wing defense they’ll use in court–that they are too young to know right from wrong in the murder of Preston. And Kim Foxx and Toni Preckwinkle have for years been about clearing the Cook County Jail of prisoners. They seem to loathe law enforcement, siding with the thugs at every turn. They are the chief proponents and defenders of the SAFE-T Act that is opposed by 100 of Illinois’ 102 county prosecutors, both Republicans and Democrats. 

And for years these teenage thugs grew up in a county where there were no serious consequences for violence, no guardrails to guide them away from aberrant behavior. Even Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart played the fool for Kim and his boss, Boss Toni. He emphasized pizza parties and tomato gardens at 26th and Cal. If Boss Toni ever wanted salt-and-pepper bobble heads of political weakness, she could model them after Judge Evans and Tom Dart.

The lead Democrats of Chicago created this mess and don’t want their fingerprints anywhere near it. They don’t want to wear the jacket. They are protected by broken and corrupt legacy media, the same group that protected Brandon Johnson.

But I know what they did and what they didn’t do. I just can’t let the political actors walk away from Preston before her scheduled May 17 funeral. As the pipes play and the good people weep, political Chicago does not want you to think of what they did not do.

What they did not do was help create any respect for the law. Instead they did everything to undermine that respect. They obeyed the Soros playbook and deconstructed law and order that led to anarchy and chaos. What happened was politically inevitable.

Can anyone be surprised that a promising young police officer was cut down before her 25th birthday by feral youth who used guns to satisfy their appetites for cash? 

No. No one should be surprised. All the signs were there.

These are the predators.

And who is their prey?

We are their prey. And we know it. 

-30-

Kass note: Please understand that I’m in therapy at Shirley Ryan Ability Labs three times a week, though I skipped my Friday therapy sessions to write this column. I just had to write it, though I’m really not fully recovered from the stroke and quadruple bypass issues.  But I’ve got great therapists and I’m trying. My appetite is up. And I’m walking better every day. On Saturday I even made it to Soldier Field to see the beloved Chicago Fire win their second game in a row. God is great. Life is good. Betty and the boys and I want to thank you all for your love and support in this difficult time. Love to all. Peace.