RUTHFULLY YOURS

I want to tell you a story about how my city lost faith in itself. The end of May marks the five-year anniversary of the George Floyd riots. It is a dark memory to summon, nearly as dark as the five-year anniversary of nationwide Covid lockdowns in March, which are the riots’ immediate predicate and context. Many of the nation’s cities burned or experienced looting. Our national politics changed forever, for the worse. And half a decade on, Chicago still reels from the consequences in a way that few other metropolises do; we have arguably never recovered from the loss of confidence and shift in city politics the Floyd riots triggered. Your experience of them may be different — every state in the union witnessed at least some sort of civil unrest, after all — but this is mine.

The story begins elsewhere, of course. On May 25, Minneapolis man George Floyd died after being restrained during arrest by police officer Derek Chauvin. By May 26, viral videos of the arrest taken by onlookers were rocketing around social media, raising public outrage at the tactics used by Chauvin to restrain Floyd. On May 27, the powder keg exploded in Minneapolis: Protests swiftly turned into vandalism once night fell, then riots and fires, and finally unrestrained larceny. And the riots did not end. They continued for days, each time beginning as night fell, their purpose seemingly different from that of the initial spasm of civic rage: with method, intent, and mass looting.

Equally as alarming as the violence on the streets was the reaction of mainstream and social media to it all: Instead of deploring the civic breakdown, a good portion of the nation seemingly excused or even lionized it. We were told over and over again by print media and cable news that the protests were “mostly peaceful,” regardless of how much property destruction, arson, and looting was going on. (The trend reached its legendary apotheosis a few months later, when a CNN reporter did a live hit in Kenosha, Wis., in front of a burning store and declared the protest, with zero sense of irony, “mostly peaceful.”) The unceasingly celebratory din from the left on Twitter was even more appalling, as a nation of self-radicalized twentysomethings, restless from lockdown, convinced themselves that this was their moment for revolutionary racial justice and sloganeered about the need to “defund the police” while cheering for as much destruction as possible. (The snide cries of “Who cares about looting? Target has insurance, after all” still ring in my ears.)

And yet all of this, up through May 29, was happening primarily in Minneapolis. Throughout each of those days of escalation, I looked around at my own city and held my breath. There had already been protests here, as in other cities across America, but nothing resembling serious civil unrest. But we were heading into the weekend, and I knew what kind of trouble that idle time could bring. A major protest was already scheduled for Saturday afternoon. Revisiting my own Twitter/X account, I am painfully reminded of what I wrote the morning of May 30: “I’ve never dreaded a weekend quite so much as I’m dreading Sat and Sun here in Chicago. We’ve been remarkably cool and low-key (aside from one minor and quick protest in River North w/no arrests) thus far, but everyone’s worried things may break in the wrong direction today.”

Break they did. That afternoon, frustrated with lockdown and contemptuous of the excuses for mass gatherings the media world was suddenly evincing, I stole a trick from Mick Jagger and went down to the demonstration to get my fair share of abuse. I strolled east from where I live in the West Loop toward the heart of the city. As I crossed the Monroe Street Bridge over the Chicago River, the first thing I noticed was that the entire area was eerily empty of cars. (I later found out that Mayor Lori Lightfoot had instituted an emergency street-parking ban early that morning; anyone who failed to get the notice was presumably now hunting for his car in the tow lot underneath Wacker Drive.) I was even more surprised when I finally hit “the crowd,” which picked up in density the closer I got to Michigan Avenue (the so-called Magnificent Mile).

For it was a very multiracial mob that walked by and around me, chanting slogans, throwing bottles, and “tagging” store windows — many black people, yes, but also a significant portion of white, masked youths of both sexes. I specifically recall that nearly every African American was wearing a surgical mask, but “young activist” types instead wore full face-coverings: ski masks, balaclavas, and the like. I also remember that those were mostly the people throwing things.

This was a pretty rough-looking scene to my eyes — and I’d already been through at least one mini-riot before in the city, four years earlier when Donald Trump had to cancel a rally at the University of Illinois Chicago after Democratic protesters began hurling objects at queuing attendees. But I felt safe enough in my anonymity. These people weren’t paying much attention to me, after all; they were busy “fighting the power.” Still, I left as hastily as I could, for I had already seen how the Minneapolis situation had degenerated into a carnival of chaos as the sun began to set.

I chose an excellent moment to depart. By the time I arrived back home, rioters were overturning police cars at the intersection of Dearborn and Hubbard. I briefly considered returning downtown to see the spectacle and then realized I had no desire to be attacked, gassed, or — given the nature of Chicago — shot. Six other people were that night, and one died.

Every single storefront on the Magnificent Mile had its windows shattered, and many were looted. Viral videos of “protesters” looting Prada bags and designer shoes were impossible to avoid that night. The mayor declared a citywide curfew between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. (It had little effect on people already out burning and looting, but it at least gave the police pretext to remove anyone from anywhere for any reason.) In a flash, Chicago had gone from Covid lockdown to actual don’t-leave-your-house lockdown.

That night, upon the announcement that SpaceX had just launched two men into low earth orbit, I declared them the luckiest men in America — because they had chosen the perfect moment to leave the planet.

The next morning, I awoke at dawn and decided to survey the damage myself, taking the same route as the afternoon before. Chicago is obviously always quieter early on a Sunday than during rush hour, but it was a peculiar feeling to walk through an unnaturally silenced city that morning — none of the typical early-morning joggers or dog-walkers, barely a car, just a preternatural urban stillness. The only clue that a riot had taken place a few blocks away the night before was that very quiet.

As I walked on Monroe Street again toward the Loop, I began to understand why. Something I had never seen before hovered into view: the bridge over the Chicago River itself. I could see it from blocks away for the simple reason that it had been raised. As I drew closer (and here angry pedestrians were beginning to congregate, peppering police officers with questions), I looked along the river to the north and south and my jaw dropped: All except one of the bridges — which control access to the Loop from the north and west, and which normally lift only on rarely scheduled occasions to allow large boats to pass through to Lake Michigan — had been raised and locked in an upright position. To cross the one that remained open required passing through security checkpoints manned by the state National Guard — the first time Chicago had called upon it since the madness of 1968. Lake Shore Drive’s northbound lanes had been barricaded. Chicago Transit Authority train service was suspended.

In other words, the city had been almost entirely locked out of the Loop — access was available only via the highway (and those exits were closed the next day). The reason was obvious: to prevent further damage to Chicago’s economic and tourist heart. I never got to see the full extent of the wreckage there, but it was more than adequately conveyed by the extreme act of severing physical access to downtown to keep out ravening hordes of looters and rioters. It was an image from an urban dystopia worthy of the mind of John Carpenter, but instead brought to life in my own town before my very eyes.

The raising of the lift bridges may have saved the downtown, but it doomed the rest of us. With the Loop closed, looters turned their energies on the rest of the city, my own neighborhood included. May 31 remains the most nightmarish day of an entire annus horribilis for Chicago, as “activists” stepped back and opportunistic criminals — given civic cover by a national media narrative — took over instead. That night the city witnessed the outbreak of massive and sometimes coordinated looting sprees in nearly every neighborhood in Chicago save the far North Side. I watched from the 28th-floor windows of my apartment as small fires burned in the distance to the west. Much closer, looters gathered outside my local Target. Closing early and throwing up protective wooden boarding had availed it not a whit: Masked men with crowbars were now professionally peeling the slats away and shattering the glass to get in. The police never showed up.

The next morning, I walked through a different neighborhood from the one I had the day before. It was equally quiet — and yet this was a Monday. Most of my local stores — including every pharmacy and grocery store within walking distance — had been looted overnight and were now closed. Horrifyingly, the looting was still going on, in plain sight. I strolled my son by Target, expecting to find it abandoned after the prior night’s ransacking. I was wrong. Instead, I rounded the corner to find several men carrying large boxes out of the store and loading them into a U-Haul trailer attached to an SUV. Though they were completely indifferent to our presence, I got us the hell out of there. Again: The police were nowhere to be seen.

The damage to my neighborhood was minor compared with that of the Loop, or of other neighborhoods west and south of me, though it did take weeks to get staple businesses back up and running. The damage to Chicago’s civic fabric ran far deeper than that, tracking with national trends yet bearing its own peculiarities.

For it must be emphasized that the Floyd riots were more than just a civic disturbance of a few days; they were more, even, than a disaster for my town. They marked the full corpse-flower bloom of wokeness in American society. This would deform our national culture for years — but especially Chicago politics, built as they forever have been on racial grievance in a historically polarized city. What few properly grasp is that this crisis was mostly confined to the city’s elites, not necessarily its voters. The Floyd riots were an enormous crisis for Chicago’s working families — who had to worry for weeks afterward about being able to buy food and fill prescriptions in the wake of a citywide ransacking — but a transient one.

Meanwhile, Chicago’s political class completely lost confidence in itself. The hollowing out of the Daley-era “machine” and the discrediting of its heirs — particularly Mayor Rahm Emanuel — had already left Chicago’s traditional business- and labor-oriented Democratic politics vulnerable to progressive takeover from within. With the Floyd riots, the structure essentially collapsed, allowing the city’s governance to be overrun by the same class of activist radicals who have forever agitated here and were most excited by violent unrest. Their moment of opportunity had arrived, and they capitalized in all respects and at every level of city government.

These trends affected nearly every blue city in America, but Chicago handled them worse than almost any other outside of basket cases like San Francisco and Los Angeles. Mayor Lightfoot — already unpopular and lacking a real political constituency within the city — was immediately attacked for prioritizing protection of the Loop over (predominantly black) South Side and West Side neighborhoods. However sincere her denials — and to be fair, those very same neighborhoods were the origins of many of the looters — matters were not helped when photographs emerged of cops lazing around Congressman Bobby Rush’s burglarized South Side office eating popcorn during the early morning hours on the day of the heaviest looting. Lightfoot’s mayoralty, only a year old at that point, never recovered from its tailspin.

Three years later, Lightfoot failed to make it out of the first round of voting in her reelection campaign. The rot soon grew evident: Chicago replaced her with an even more radical pick in Brandon Johnson, one of the city’s most vocal advocates of disorder. A former Chicago Teachers Union lobbyist (the CTU literally funded his entire campaign), Johnson first came to prominence during the Floyd riots as a Black Lives Matter activist. He condemned not the rioting, which he considered justified, but rather the police arrests of “children” involved in it. His solution to criminal violence was to defund the police.

In 2023 he ran for mayor on a variation of that theme, as the candidate of the extreme woke left, and defeated moderate Democrat Paul Vallas in the narrowest mayoral race in city history. Since then he has — as promised — gone to war with the police, funneled city funds to the union that elected him, and overseen a ballooning murder rate. Most damning of all, the public lawlessness seen during the Floyd riots has reprised itself over and over again in Chicago during Johnson’s first two years in office in the form of “youth gatherings” — the favored euphemism — that materialize on warm weekend nights to mob the Loop and occasionally engage in casual low-level violence.

Each time it happens, Johnson speaks out–in defense of the “kids,” who he claims are only misunderstood and whom the city government owes more “opportunities.” The public has reacted accordingly: the mayor currently sports a historically poor 6 percent approval rating, but two years yet remain in his term. Given the downward spiral of Chicago Democratic politics, there is no assurance whatsoever that a better option will take his place in 2027.

The Floyd riots left no visible scars on Chicago. We are outwardly as beautiful a city as we ever were, an architectural marvel of the Midwest. The scars that linger are deep within, discernible not in the way our police lost control of the streets those nights but in the way our political elites lost control of the city in its aftermath. Few places have seen as poor a recovery from those hateful days in May than Chicago, for the simple reason that our Democratic leaders gave up on themselves, ceding the floor to a new generation of activists who were formed in the crucible of the riots — in the worst possible ways.