What’s Really Behind Chicago’s Awful Shooting Spree?

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, September 14, 2016:  

The numbers truly are awful: for the year through September 8, nearly 3,000 Chicagoans have been shot – an average of one shooting victim every two hours. Of those, 516 have died of their wounds. That’s up nearly 50 percent over the same period a year ago, which was also up from the year before.

Just this past weekend eight people were shot to death, with another 33 wounded in Chicago. The reports came in so fast that Chicago’s CBS affiliate couldn’t keep up. It reported that the last shooting took place at 2:15am on Monday morning, but then had to modify the article before going online with it when another shooting took place at 4:30am.

Unbelievably, one of the shootings took place during a vigil for a man shot to death the day before: a minivan containing two thugs opened fire, killing one of those standing outside as part of the vigil. Of course, the van sped away, no one’s talking, and the police investigators are stymied.

Heather Mac Donald tried to explain the shootings, using a term that she borrowed from Sam Dotson, the chief of the St. Louis Police Department: the “Ferguson Effect.” Dotson used the term to describe the deliberate “relaxing” of policing following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. Beat officers were increasingly reluctant to do anything proactive about crime for fear that their careers would be jeopardized by second-guessing by the anti-police media, anti-police politicians, and anti-police black revolutionaries.

Mac Donald’s background, education, training, and experience are impressive: She is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a graduate of Yale, studied at Cambridge University, and graduated from Stanford University Law School. She’s written five books, including Are Cops Racist?,The Illegal-Alien Crime Wave, The Immigration Solution, and her latest, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe.

If anyone would understand the attack on police – who they are, what they believe, what they intend – it surely would appear to be Ms. Mac Donald. In May 2015 she wrote in The Wall Street Journal that, thanks to the “Ferguson Effect,” “cops are disengaging from discretionary enforcement activity,” which has led, predictably, to “the criminal element feeling empowered.”

On Sunday Mac Donald expanded on that theme, claiming that “Chicago officers have cut back drastically on proactive policing under the onslaught of criticism from the Black Lives Matter movement and its political and media enablers.” As a result, wrote Mac Donald, “criminals are back in control and black lives are being lost at a rate not seen for decades.”

In a lengthy speech to students at Hillsdale College in April, she refuted the lies and calumny being used by BLM to promote their agenda: that the police are the greatest threat to the lives of young black men because of their racist attitudes. In a word, she proved BLM were liars.

So far, so good. They lied. Everyone today, it seems, lies. But she never closed the loop: Why does BLM lie? What is their motivation? She left the audience with this:

I don’t know what will end the current frenzy against the police. What I do know is that we are playing with fire, and if it keeps spreading, it will be hard to put out.

If she had taken the time to do just a little more homework, she would not only know why BLM is playing with fire, she would know what to do about it. Founded by Marxist revolutionaries in 2013, BLM is closely affiliated with a vicious hard-left communist revolutionary outfit called the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO). This is a Marxist-Leninist gaggle of revolutionaries that calls for the overthrow of capitalism to be replaced by a communist dictatorship. The BLM is informed by the FRSO’s view of America as an inherently and irredeemably racist nation where “white privilege” is ubiquitous and that “national oppression [of blacks] is at the heart of [the nation’s] economic, political, and ideological traditions, and the oppression of the African American people in particular has been central to the U.S. class struggle.”

The FRSO calls for “a social system where … wealth is not in the hands of a few billionaires, but is controlled by the people.” Of course, the FRSO intends that, following the destruction of capitalism, it will represent “the people” in setting up the new dictatorship.

To get there, however, local police must be replaced by federal police, and the best way to do that is to create distrust among the citizenry over local police, leaving the way open for a federal, national “gestapo” in charge of keeping the peace and removing recalcitrants and other anti-communists in the process.

In developing an antidote, one must first perform a correct and complete diagnosis of the sickness. For one thing, Ms. Mac Donald, “we” are not playing with fire. BLM is. “We” are the targets, not the instigators. The local police must be discredited, disheartened, and rendered ineffectual, paving the way for the siren call of national police to do what local police cannot.

Until enough well-meaning individuals answer the question “why?,” the fire of totalitarianism will “keep spreading,” making it increasingly “hard to put out.”

Sources:

The Wall Street Journal: The Black Body Count Rises as Chicago Police Step Back, by Heather Mac Donald

Chicago.cbslocal.com: 8 Killed, 33 Wounded In Weekend Shootings Across Chicago

The Danger of the “Black Lives Matter” Movement – Heather Mac Donald’s speech at Hillsdale College, April 2016

Bio of Heather Mac Donald

The Ferguson Effect

1. Cleon Skousen’s Communist Attack on Police

The New American: Obama Chooses Six Cities to Test Federal Police Scheme

Background on Black Lives Matter

Background on the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) 

The Wall Street Journal: The New Nationwide Crime Wave, by Heather Mac Donald