Thirty-five years ago, I rolled into Chicago to tackle what was at the time, a seemingly insurmountable challenge: turning around the hemorrhaging ratings and revenue of WLS Radio, which had once been as iconic to the Windy City as the lions in front of the Chicago Art Institute.
The task before us was daunting, but the excitement of living in one of the most incredible cities in the world more than offset my concerns. Back then, Chicago had everything: a spectacular lakefront skyline, hundreds of restaurants, NFL football (“da Bears!”) and two—TWO—professional baseball teams. Museums galore and non-stop concerts made Chicago the cultural mecca of the Midwest. Crime and gang activity paled in comparison with places like New York City or L.A., and even the homeless people were polite and non-threatening.
Sadly, all that is a thing of the past…evoking the opening credits of the immortal 1939 MGM film: “Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered…a civilization gone with the wind.” After decades of Democratic Party rule—led first by the Daley family and later such sadly inept mayors as Rahm Emanuel, Lori Lightfoot and the current Brandon Johnson—Chicago has descended into the equivalent of the ninth circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno.
Smash and grab looting and assaults are commonplace as rampaging gangs of hooligans roam the city unimpeded by any semblance of police control. (Chicago police superintendent Larry Snelling just this week abandoned his department’s “scarecrow policing”…the practice of just parking police cruisers on medians with their lights flashing, which ran up gobs of officer overtime but had minimal impact on the crime rate.) There were over 600 murders in the city in 2023 and over 2,400 shootings, including many young children. The Illinois Public Policy Institute reports that violent carjackings have more than doubled in the past five years; one Chicago neighborhood posted a carjacking for every 250 residents.
With all this and much more as a backdrop, you’d think Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson would be focused 1000% on ways to repair his city’s battered image which makes it the last place in which families—or businesses—would want to live and operate. (Unless he hasn’t noticed the dozens of former storefronts in the Loop area and on Michigan Avenue which have been boarded up.)
You’d think that, but you’d be wrong.
This week Mayor Johnson puffed up his chest and strode into the Chicago City Council chambers, strongarming the spineless aldermen into passing a resolution calling for—wait for it—a cease fire in the Israel/Hamas war. The Chicago Sun-Times newspaper reports the resolution, demanded by pro-Hamas hotheads screaming in the council chambers, was in danger of failing until Johnson directed two aldermen opposed to it to “take a walk” rather than oppose him. They left the chamber, and the mayor then personally broke the tie to ram through the resolution. To quote Sean Connery in The Untouchables: “That’s the Chicago way.”
Call me crazy but with over 3,000 of his city’s residents either in graves or sporting extra bellybuttons after being shot in the past year, I’d have thought Hizzoner would have been wiser to press for a resolution calling for a cease fire in Chicago!
50th Ward Alderman Debra Silverstein was shouted down as she complained the final version of the resolution made no mention of the bloody Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians on October 7th including murders, rapes, and kidnappings. She also admonished the mayor for backing what she called this “lopsided” resolution. All this fell on deaf ears, as the mayor cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of his idiotic and meaningless waste of Chicago taxpayers’ money.
Chicago’s Jewish United Fund condemned the strongarm tactics at City Hall, declaring its members were “appalled by the way Mayor Johnson handled the Israel-Hamas ceasefire resolution and cast the tie-breaking vote.” They added that “the proceedings around this resolution have fanned the flames of antisemitism at a time when Jews in Chicago are already facing unprecedented levels of hate.”
Rampant crime. Public schools controlled by iron-fisted teachers unions. Boarded up storefronts. Carjackings. And a radical mayor acting as puppetmaster to a city council focused more on supporting Hamas than protecting decent citizens. Not a promising stop for tourists hoping to find what once was the most livable city in America.
What a stark testimonial to the failed policies of the Democratic Party, which will hold its 2024 National Convention in Chicago this coming August using the ironically accurate theme: Our Future Is Created Here.
Where “Welcome to Chicago” signs once greeted visitors, a more apt posting would now read “Going Out Of Business.”
Tom Tradup is Vice President/News & Talk Programming of the Salem Radio Network. He can be reached at ttradup@srnradio.com