You almost have to squint to believe it’s real, but in Chicago today, the mayor is defending the raiders, the arsonists, and the looters—by refusing to call them what they are. He calls them “young people who made a mistake.” He issues executive orders making ICE-free zones. He sues to stop National Guard troops from defending federal buildings. He calls their deployment “illegal, unconstitutional, dangerous, and wrong.”  

So which is it? Is he defending the people or the perpetrators? Because those sound like two very different things.  

This is the new civic logic of the progressive city. Step one: refuse to enforce the law. Step two: demonize those who do. Step three: play the victim. Step four: shield the lawbreakers. It’s a cynical choreography that turns justice upside down. In Chicago, when federal agents or Guard troops arrive to protect federal property, Mayor Brandon Johnson races to the microphones to call them invaders. He’s not saying, “Help us keep the peace.” He’s saying, “Don’t infringe on our turf.”  

By rejecting assistance from the federal government, Johnson is doing more than flexing his political independence. He’s sending a message that law enforcement itself is the enemy, and that public safety is secondary to ideological purity. And Chicago’s not alone. San Francisco, New York, Portland—different skylines, same story. The leadership refuses to enforce the law, refuses to accept help, and refuses to acknowledge that the victims of this lawlessness are ordinary, hard-working citizens who still believe in rules.

What’s most stunning is how completely moral categories have been reversed. In this world, a looter becomes a misunderstood activist. A vandal becomes a victim of circumstance. A mob destroying private property becomes a “peaceful protest.” Meanwhile, police officers and National Guardsmen trying to preserve order are labeled aggressors. A man smashing windows in a Walgreens is “expressing frustration.” A soldier standing guard over a federal building is “escalating tensions.”

And as stores close, as neighborhoods crumble, as crime rates soar, the same mayors wring their hands and ask why corporations and taxpayers are abandoning their cities. Walgreens, Walmart, and countless mom-and-pop shops aren’t “fleeing communities.” They’re escaping the predictable outcome of leadership that sides with the criminals over the citizens.

So what’s really going on? What’s the end game in this strange performance where the enforcers are the villains and the vandals the heroes?

Part of it is power. When the law collapses, government authority becomes a matter of emotion, not principle. That lets political leaders play savior, rebel, and victim all at once. If chaos reigns, they can position themselves as the only ones who “understand the pain” of the mob. That’s not law enforcement—it’s theater.  

Part of it is branding. When your base distrusts the police, you stay in power by performing hostility toward law enforcement. You’re not solving problems—you’re producing content for your own political survival. If that means letting your city burn a little, so be it. It’s all part of the narrative.  

Part of it is ideology. Progressive mayors no longer believe lawbreakers are responsible moral agents. They’re “products of inequity.” In that frame, arresting someone isn’t protecting society—it’s perpetuating oppression. Crime becomes re-labeled as protest, and protest becomes immune from consequence.  

But beneath the slogans and the self-righteousness, something darker is taking shape. When the rule of law is replaced by selective enforcement, what’s really being built is a new kind of order—one where authority is fluid, justice is negotiable, and guilt depends on your political value to the regime.  

We’re watching a social contract unravel in real time. Law enforcement is retreating, not because the officers have lost their courage, but because their leaders have stripped them of legitimacy. Federal agencies offer to assist and are told to stand down. National Guard troops are deployed to keep federal buildings safe and are met not with gratitude but with lawsuits. Governors who try to help are accused of “provocation.” The political class has become so intoxicated with its own narrative that it would rather lose control of its city than share credit for restoring order.   

The cost of this delusion isn’t theoretical. It’s the elderly woman afraid to walk to the corner store. It’s the immigrant family whose small business is looted for the third time. It’s the police officer told to stand still while chaos erupts around him. And it’s every law-abiding citizen who wonders when their leaders stopped believing that laws were worth defending in the first place.  

So what’s the end game? Maybe it’s the illusion of moral superiority. Maybe it’s raw political control. Maybe it’s just cowardice. But whatever it is, it isn’t leadership.  

Because leadership means protecting the innocent even when it’s politically inconvenient. It means standing with the people who follow the law, not the ones who defy it. And when mayors like Brandon Johnson refuse help, refuse enforcement, and refuse to draw the simplest moral lines, they are not defending their cities—they are disarming them.   

The ugly truth is that the so-called progressives aren’t merely failing to enforce the law. They are defending the lawbreakers as though that defense itself were an act of justice. But a city that refuses to defend its own citizens is not enlightened. It’s lost.  

And when mayors build moral monuments to chaos, when governors are vilified for trying to keep the peace, when criminality becomes a credential instead of a curse, we have to ask—how much more of this “compassion” can a civilization endure?  

Because when law is punished and lawlessness rewarded, the end game is not justice. The end game is collapse.

Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.

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