As PJ Media’s Rick Moran reported, the Chicago mayoral runoff on April 4 went the way of the teachers unions, which drove a massive turnout campaign for their anointed radical candidate:
The Chicago Teachers Union rode a massive turnout of its members and spent millions of dollars in union dues to win Chicago’s mayoral runoff.
Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson was a beneficiary of that union largesse. His name was on the ballot, along with former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paull Vallas. Johnson won by three points.
But no one doubts who is calling the shots in Chicago — the first major American city to be a wholly owned subsidiary of a teachers union.
The only quibble one might have with Rick’s article is that the State of Oregon has been a wholly owned subsidiary of the teachers unions and SEIU since the turn of the century, so Chicago may not be able to lay claim to first-in-the-nation status. His conclusion is, however, spot on: radical leftists defeated a moderate who wanted to rein in Chicago’s laughably awful violent crime and education failures.
One could go even further in what this portends for Chicago and other deep blue cities across America: they’ve devolved so far into cultish adherence to radical ideology that they have become modern-day Jonestowns.
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The Illinois-based blog Wirepoints summed it up:
Chicagoans cheered Mayor Lightfoot’s exit.
Gone was her toxic attitude. Her flippant dismissal of the city’s many crises. Her dismal record on crime. And her destruction of police morale.
She was an absolute failure by any measure. From the beginning, she was more interested in imposing a progressive vision and an “equity” agenda on Chicago than enacting the many reforms the city needed.
So Chicagoans kicked out Lightfoot. Change was possible.
But what Chicagoans voted for on April 4 was someone more extreme and exactly opposite of what the city needed.
To reduce Chicago’s nation-high homicide rate, Chicago needed a new mayor willing to take on Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’s unwillingness to prosecute dangerous criminals. A mayor willing to challenge Judge Tim Evans’ decarcerationist agenda. A mayor willing to jam shut the system’s revolving door for criminals.
Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson won’t do any of that. Instead, look for him to embrace the policies of Foxx and Evans. In his own words, he’s for defunding the police and defends looting as “an outbreak of incredible frustration and anguish” tied to “a failed racist system.”
The voters in Chicago, acting exactly like lemmings marching in lockstep off a cliff, collectively decided to increase the pace. Much like the victims of Jim Jones at the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project in Guyana in 1978, a clear majority of Chicago voters vehemently defended their victim ideology against all obvious self-interest, including survival.
Substitute Chicago for any large city in America, and the exact same phenomenon plays out everywhere. America’s large cities have essentially divided themselves into two classes: the productive class and the aggrieved class. The aggrieved class looks at everything through the lens of the lies they tell themselves for mutual comfort and support. The productive class is the enemy, the criminals are the victims. The aggrieved are parasites that want to kill their own host.
Parallels to Jonestown
Jonestown followed the well-worn template of cult formation, taking advantage of good intentions to eject non-believers and brainwash its adherents. At first, Jim Jones’ congregation did some favorable things, like creating a racially integrated church in 1950s Indiana. Later, when Jones moved the church to the Bay Area in California, he curried favor with politicians and gave generously to charity. Behind the scenes, however, Jones ruled with an iron fist, taking custody of the children in the congregation and marrying multiple women and fathering children with them, while devolving into drug abuse and insanity.
When they formed their agricultural commune in Guyana, the Peoples Temple descended deeper into their cult. It all came to a head in November 1978, when a California congressman visited the compound to follow up on reports that some of his constituents had been mistreated at the commune. He was killed as he attempted to board a small plane at a jungle airstrip, which led Jones to instigate the largest loss of U.S. civilian lives in a non-natural disaster to date. A total of 909 people died, about one third of them children, after ingesting cyanide-laced drinks as ordered by Jones.
Jones called it a revolutionary act.
To recap: a large swath of people, under the sway of an increasingly radical ideology and willing to ignore proof that the ideology didn’t make sense, willfully ignored the rational observation that their belief system caused direct risk to their souls and their very lives.
Are American Cities Lost?
When viewing the catastrophic homelessness in Portland, the out-of-control violent crime in St. Louis, the astonishing rates of shoplifting and property crimes in San Francisco, Philadelphia’s abject refusal to prosecute violent crimes, or the educational disasters of Baltimore, one often hears the hew and cry: Why do they continue to vote for this?
Many citizens cannot wrap their heads around why this keeps happening. They’ll say if it just gets bad enough, people will vote differently. Not true. If it gets bad, it will just get worse. That’s the paradox of cult behavior. People with basic sense will quietly leave, with the remaining population consolidating the crazy. It then develops into a negative feedback loop, one in which the aggrieved class reinforces its victimhood and accelerates the downward spiral, with no one there to stage an intervention.
This is the inevitable conclusion of a deeply narcissistic society that has forsaken rational thought.
The most significant horrors throughout history followed this exact blueprint. Cultish adherence to the prevailing ideology, which creeps in slowly, almost unnoticed until it takes over, allowed the average citizen to justify atrocities in their own minds, or at least look away to avoid moral discomfort. But it always starts with the elevation of an aggrieved class over increasingly absurd charges of disenfranchisement.
Letting America’s blue cities devolve into modern-day Jonestowns will have repercussions we can only imagine if we look at it through the lens of history.
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