Free Republic

Now that the election is over, Democrats are trying to shift gears from pandemic theater to reopening the economy. But they're finding their own propaganda is difficult to reverse. The reopening of the nation started up almost immediately after the 2020 election. Vaccines “miraculously” became available. The CDC and WHO started changing their recommendations. Politicians who were adamantly opposed to reopening in any form were suddenly calling for businesses and schools to open. The COVID-19 pandemic had played its role in removing President Trump from office, so now they need to reverse course and try to fix the economic mess...

Chicago’s teacher’s union voted on Sunday to defy Chicago Public Schools administration and refuse to return to in-person teaching even though pupils are due back in classrooms on February 1st. Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has been locked in a power struggle with the union for some time, with teachers and union brass insisting that it is not safe for teachers to return to classrooms, even though Chicago’s private schools have been in-person for months. At one point, the Chicago Teachers Union, or CTU, suggested that any plan to return to in-classroom teaching would be both racist and sexist. As the...

Unable to convince his deputies to clamp down on disorder while in power, Donald Trump now leaves a city occupied to cheers in honor of his successor (and his successor's army).WASHINGTON — For six months, President Donald Trump pushed for a harsher crackdown on the riots raging across the United States, facing constant pushback from officials worried that would further inflame the chaos and lead to needless death. As Joe Biden takes the oath of office and Trump exits Washington, the outgoing president’s dream is finally realized — ironically, too late to change a thing.Over the past week, somewhere between...

SCC explains the decision to shut down their website: Well, this was certainly a long time coming. Fifteen years, over 22,000 posts, almost two million comments and God knows how many attempts to silence us. But it might finally be over…at least this version of it. Over the weekend, we received information from a contact at Google that internal chat/e-mails led them to believe that certain precautions we had taken over the years had been breached by Google. We had gotten similar warnings from others in the past, and we dealt with or ignored them as the situation warranted. But...

Eight people were shot Monday in Chicago, including a 44-year-old man who was shot inside a vehicle in Chatham on the South Side. About 11:15 p.m., he was sitting in his parked car with another person when he was shot in the shoulder and twice in the back, Chicago police said. A man was wounded in a shooting in Woodlawn on the South Side. He was on the street about 6:45 p.m. in the 6100 block of South Rhodes Avenue when someone opened fire, striking him in the shoulder, police said. Minutes prior, a 19-year-old man and a 17-year-old boy...

...on Tuesday morning, when he went to sign in to the district platform, he was locked out. The same thing happened to other teachers who refused to go back as Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) carried out the first part of her school reopening plan, despite fierce resistance from the Chicago Teachers Union. The school district is requiring all teachers in the tier that started offering in-person instruction on Monday to teach from their schools... ...It started disciplinary procedures early in the week on more than 140 employees for not reporting to schools in person and has withheld pay and...

A Grand Crossing man stole a towing company’s truck and then called 911 himself because he was upset that the truck’s driver dared to pull a gun on him, prosecutors said. Elliott Scott, 22, is charged with aggravated possession of a stolen motor vehicle, misdemeanor theft, and driving on a suspended or revoked license. “Mr. Scott called 911?” a befuddled Judge Charles Beach asked prosecutors after hearing their allegations. “Yeah,” Scott interjected. “Right.” Scott’s defense attorney quickly advised him, “it’s not best to talk about the charges” in court.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Thursday that she wants to reopen bars and restaurants “as soon as possible.” Indoor dining has been banned since October in the state and new cases of the coronavirus, deaths, and positivity rates are on the decline, Block Club Chicago reported: All of those metrics remain significantly higher than they were in the summer, when indoor drinking and dining was allowed. For example, Chicago is seeing an average of 13 COVID-19 deaths per day as of Thursday, compared to two or three deaths per day in the summer.

CHICAGO — Most Chicago cops don’t talk to reporters. They don’t trust politicians. And they certainly have a lot of opinions. It’s why for the past 15 years the “Second City Cop” police blog has been must-read for many Chicagoans who want to have a better understanding about crime and justice in their city. It’s also why the blog has bene a thorn in the side of police brass for years and there have been various attempts to identify the operator. When the chronicle of cop life disappeared from public view on the internet a few days ago some took...

Illinois lawmakers on Wednesday used the final hours of the general assembly’s lame duck session to pass a sweeping and controversial criminal justice reform bill that would eliminate cash bail, make it easier to ban officers from working at police departments across the state and allow for anonymous complaints against cops.

A long-running blog about Chicago policing is no longer visible to the public, and many people want to know what’s going on. We know this is true because our inboxes started filling with questions about Second City Cop’s status when their site became restricted Sunday. So, what did happen? Did we mention that we have absolutely no idea? The possibilities range from innocuous to whatever the opposite of innocuous is. Most basically, somebody might have screwed up, clicked the wrong settings option, and sent their whole site private. If that’s not it, we turn to the assumption that the site...

Can anyone access Second City Cop? I had the site bookmarked, and now when I try to access it Google asks me to sign in with my account, which has never happened before. I know they had posted some articles over the weekend critical of the official media take on the Capitol Hill incident, and I'm afraid they might have been taken down or had access restricted because of it.

Jason Nightengale was a 32-year-old Illinois man who went on a random shooting rampage in Chicago and Evanston on January 10, randomly wounding and murdering multiple people in an IHOP, convenience store, street, and apartment. Altogether seven people were shot, at least five fatally. According to Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown, who spoke in a news conference, Nightengale shot and killed an apartment security guard, a man sitting in a garage, and a man in a convenience store. He also shot a teenager in a car, a woman in an IHOP restaurant, and other people during the shooting spree. The...

This is good to have for when the Communist Democrats try to tell us that the protest were peaceful, there were no riots, and absolutely no violence.

A woman who was held hostage during a shooting spree Saturday that stretched from Chicago to Evanston, Ill., reportedly died early Sunday, potentially bringing the death toll from the rampage to five – including the suspect – according to reports. At least two other people, and possibly a third, were critically wounded, reports said. The shooting of a 15-year-old girl was still being investigated, according to police. "But for the brave conduct of Evanston police officers, many more people would have been injured," Chicago police Supt. David Brown told the Chicago Sun-Times.

The professional fallout came quickly Thursday for a few Chicagoans who attended the “Stop the Steal” rally in the nation’s capital that later devolved into chaos and violence. A city real estate agent was publicly fired after she posted to social media about attending the event. After workers at a tattoo shop posted about attending the rally, the shop was savaged on social media and was hit with graffiti accusing the store of employing “Nazis.” A Vietnamese restaurant, whose owners reportedly also attended the rally, was overwhelmed with negative online reviews.

Macy’s is closing its flagship store in Water Tower Place, creating a huge vacancy on the Magnificent Mile during an already challenging time for retail landlords. The 170,000-square-foot store in the North Michigan Avenue vertical mall will close after a clearance sale that starts this month and will run for 8 to 12 weeks, Macy’s said Tuesday. “After careful consideration, Macy’s has decided to close our Water Tower Place location,” Macy’s said in a statement. “This closure is part of the company’s strategy to right-size its store fleet, announced in early 2020. The decision to close a store is always...

Lockdowns are merely forced gatherings.. Author and statistician William M. Briggs argues that lockdowns don’t work because they force people to gather in fewer places like supermarkets and therefore spread viruses faster than if people were allowed to spread out. Writing for LockdownSkeptics.org, Briggs states, “A lockdown will spread this bug faster than allowing people to remain at liberty.” The author notes that a lockdown is not the same as a quarantine. Under lockdown, people only have a limited selection of venues at which they are allowed to gather, meaning those locations are busier and therefore make a virus more...

A suburban Chicago man chased down his stolen car with 2 teens inside, then shot them both, one fatally, after a struggle Sgt. Chris Covelli said detectives Sunday were still trying to find out how the 35-year-old Round Lake Beach man — who had reported his 2012 Chevrolet sedan stolen from his Fairfield Road home Dec. 30 — spotted the car in Volo in the middle of the night. It wasn’t immediately clear whether he located it by coincidence, if he had a tracking system onboard or if he’d left some type of electronics in the car he could trace....

It’s easy to see why the American Left loved Sami al-Arian. Leftists hate Israel, too. Longtime FrontPage readers will remember Sami Al-Arian, the former University of South Florida professor who for years was a darling of the Leftist intelligentsia. IPT News reported Monday that he has resurfaced, but that the stalwart old Jew-hater hasn’t changed: while he has reined in his rhetoric a bit and speaks in a more civilized manner, he is still calling for Israel’s destruction, which would result in the murder of millions of Jews. Back in 1991, during a speech in Chicago, al-Arian screamed: “The Quran...