It was a horrific week for crime in Chicago. It started on Monday with the deranged lunatic man with 72 arrests filling up a plastic bottle with gasoline — which is illegal, and why didn’t the gas station attendant stop him? — 20 minutes later, he poured it over a young woman riding the CTA and then set her on fire.
The work week ended with the Friday teen takeover in the Chicago loop, near the Christmas lighting festivities, which ended in the shooting of nine teenagers, one of them dead.
In addition to these notable crimes, 5 others were shot and killed, and 29 others were shot and wounded in Chicago, according to heyjackass.com, so far this week.
The man, Lawrence Reed, who set the woman on fire, should never have been on the streets. An activist moronic judge let him roam free after he had knocked a social worker unconscious inside the locked psychiatric wing of a hospital.
For those charges, Cook County Judge Teresa Molina-Gonzalez released him on electronic monitoring pending the trial, despite a warning by the prosecutor that:
“There is nothing here indicating that the defendant was provoked, this was a random act, your Honor, and electronic monitoring would be wholly insufficient. It could not protect the victim or the community from another vicious, random, and spontaneous attack.”
Reed has a 30-year criminal record: At least 72 arrests and 15 convictions, including several for arson.
This wasn’t even a close call. No Judge should have released someone like Reed back on the street.
As for the teen takeover, we’ve seen this scene before. These groups impede traffic, spill into the street, and make it dangerous for drivers and block pedestrians on the sidewalks. The massing of hundreds of teens always ends in violence of some sort. In this case, a mass shooting. The crowd should have been dispersed before things got out of hand.
In Minneapolis, the bombshell news is the investigation into the fraud by Somali immigrants who have been, allegedly, stealing taxpayer money and sending it back to the Somali terrorist group Al-Shabaab. From a FOX News report:
As it turned out, the Somali fraud rings sent money transfers from Minnesota to Somalia and, according to reports, approximately 40% of households in Somalia get remittances from abroad. Thorpe and Rufo state that in 2023, the Somali diaspora sent $1.7 billion to the country, which was higher than the Somali government’s budget that same year.
This Thanksgiving week, we reflect on the pilgrims who came to a foreign land seeking a place where they could worship freely and build a life under the principles of natural law – laws that respect free expression, property rights, and self-determination.
The pilgrims came with nothing. Of the 150 who sailed on the Mayflower in 1620, half were dead within the year. Survival meant everyone working together to hunt, grow food, build shelters, gather wood for fires to cook and stay warm, and tend to the younger and older members of the community.
There was no time for teen takeovers and no criminals with 72 arrests roaming around, setting young maidens on fire.
For most of the 400 years that immigrants have been coming to America, they weren’t greeted with rent subsidies, food stamps, welcoming centers, and asylum lawyers.
It’s a new American phenomenon that we tolerate street crime and public benefit scams that rip off the American taxpayer.
This Thanksgiving, be thankful you can walk into any grocery store in America and find abundance. The typical Thanksgiving meal will cost an average of $5.52 per person. That is a very small price to pay for a full meal, cooked in kitchens where, with a flip of a switch, the home lights up, and with a turn of a knob, natural gas flows to the oven and stove to cook the turkey and all the trimmings that someone drove to the grocery store and purchased.
For many, it would take months to produce on their own a turkey, potatoes, all the ingredients for stuffing, cranberry sauce, vegetables, and pie. And for many, they couldn’t produce such on their own in a lifetime.
It’s a similar discussion to Leonard Read’s I Pencil commentary about how capitalism produces a pencil that could not be produced otherwise.
We are a pampered, privileged country. Yes, people work hard. But the physical labor has been largely replaced by the ingenuity of inventors who made machines do the back-breaking work of sustaining life.
So here we sit in literally the land of plenty. A nation that is generous to those in need, both individually and through our tax dollars. Instead of gratitude, though, we have judges who won’t keep the criminally insane off the streets, parents who won’t control their children, and entire immigrant communities ripping us off.
For the record, I’m not singling out the crimes above, and I’m not naïve – criminals have existed since Cain and Abel. There are many more scams going on, including the corporate welfare type, which I have written about many times. The response to such should be immediate from both those in office who make and enforce public policy and voters who elect them.
In the case of the Somali fraud ring, which includes pretending their kids have autism so others can set up fake treatment centers and reap Medicaid payments, President Trump is taking immediate action. The AP reports:
In a Truth Social post late Friday, Trump said he would “immediately” strip Somali residents in Minnesota of Temporary Protected Status, a legal safeguard against deportation for immigrants from certain countries.
In contrast, the response to the attack on the woman on the CTA from Mayor Johnson is more money for mental health and violence interrupters. The response from Governor JB Pritzker is silence.
In the case of the teen takeover, Johnson simply said their plan, which was to put 700 more cops on the street, didn’t help.
Let’s face it, though, the root cause is a complete breakdown of family structure and a soft society that even affords these types of actions to take place. There’s a luxury in creating mayhem and knowing you can just go back home. And there’s no doubt that, if given the opportunity to settle 160 acres, most couldn’t survive.
So, who’s at fault? Voters should look in the mirror.