Can you Smollett too?
Something is rotten in the 40th Ward. There is a stench emanating from the office of Alderman Andre Vasquez, and it isn’t the usual reeking brain rot caused by corruption of aldermanic brain matter induced by his terminal Democratic Socialism (aka brain death).
The case of the bigoted rat
No, gentle reader. It is the literal smell of a dead rat — Rattus norvegicus (Norwegian Rat in the vernacular). And get this — this was no Biggie Rat, it was a card-carrying Bigot Rat. Well, not a card actually, even worse! That dirty dead rat was carrying an anti-immigrant note between its stiff little rigor mortised front paws.
Well, all right, not exactly. Let’s say it was accompanied by a crude note denouncing immigrants. The anomalous incident has energized the Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) Outrage Machine, which is as we speak spinning into overdrive — sparking headlines, mass histrionic outrage that would put Mao’s Red Guard goon squads to shame, and no small amount of political theater.
That’s some rat, eh, to send a big strong tough guy like the fearless AlderV into a full-blown linear panic reminiscent of the stereotypical elephant in the Saturday morning kiddie cartoons, frightened to death’s door by a teeny weeny mousey.
At least those were live mice. This rat is dead. Expired. It has ceased to exist. Morte en español. Such a profile in courage from the defender of the proles. ¿Dónde está tu machismo? I guess that was a casualty of the toxic masculinity purge required as a condition of DSA membership. Maybe he should see Mayor 6.6’s panic attack team at Northwestern.
It would be understandable if he was startled had the culprit deployed one of those giant inflatable rats the unions use to chastise scabs. But a run-of-the-mill dead Chicago alley rat? We’ll bet Vasquez has seen hundreds of them as he heeled his Ward. (He does spend some time in his ward, doesn’t he? Or is he too busy camera hogging and grandstanding downtown to stain his designer Hokas with the rat droppings that cover his raggedy ward, neglected by Streets and San due to his lack of constituent advocacy, such mundane prosaics being beneath the dignity and majesty of a crusading Socialista?)
Yes, Vasquez, a self-described Democratic Socialist and one of the Chicago City Council’s most “progressive” members, exclaims that he was ratted out, but surprisingly not in the time-honored, customary aldermanic fashion by some two-legged rat wearing a wire. Vasquez claims someone deposited a real live (correction, dead) rodent at his office door on the 5600 Block of North Western Avenue and taped a handwritten note to the entrance. The message, scrawled in angry capital letters, demanded that “illegals” be expelled from the ward, comparing immigrants to vermin. It added, “Support ICE! Their work will get illegals out of our country and lower taxes.”
(Hmm, that doesn’t exactly sound like the authentic prose that would naturally flow from the poison pen of a MAGA troglodyte, does it? But it does kind of sound like what a college indoctrinated wokester would turn in if asked to turn in a facsimile thereof.)
Somehow, according to the Tribune, it is known that both rat and bite were “left at about 7:30 pm” Sunday night. They called out the hero, who arrived thereafter, encountering the rat, the note, and Chicago Police. It is unclear whether the police deployed tiny yellow “crime scene” tape around the rodent body, or whether it is being investigated as a rodenticide pending forensic reports from a veterinary autopsy.
Media lovefest: Roll ‘em
The symbolism wasn’t subtle. A rat on the doorstep of an alderman who proudly defends Chicago’s sanctuary city status, with a note vilifying immigrants, is the kind of incident that makes national news in today’s climate. (which perhaps foreshadows the shape of things to come.) Local TV stations jumped on it. Community activists denounced it. And Vasquez himself wasted no time pointing to the ugliness of the language and the fear such incidents stir among undocumented residents, basking in the comforting warmth of the adoring cameras’ klieg lights.
One can anticipate that radical left-wing outlets like MSNBC will take a break from speaking ill of the dead martyr Charlie Kirk to pick up the story. We might expect a national cable appearance for the aggrieved Alderman, a poster child for alleged MAGA bigotry (hmmm…isn’t starting to remind you of something that happened in the not-too-distant past?)
Although we certainly empathize with the post-traumatic stress this will doubtlessly cause the alderman and his staff, we can’t help but ponder the fact that it may indeed be a blessing in a rat disguise — what better way for a relatively obscure DSA rank and file Alderman aspiring to higher office (perhaps even to oppose a badly wounded-politically speaking, of course — mayor, who may find his high office too heavy a cross to bear for another term, perhaps making way for a young, ambitious Latinx savior to come pick up the precariously dimming torch of progressivism and socialism) to gain a VERY high progressive profile, certainly locally and perhaps nationally?
CPD to the rescue?
Well, anyway, the Chicago Police Department, the one that Alderman Vasquez, the Mayor, and all good Democratic Socialists and progressives label as a threat to public safety, and labor ceaselessly and furiously to defund and disband, has nonetheless opened an investigation (admirably serving and protecting as always even those citizens who frequently slander them with the defamatory acronym “ACAB” — perhaps during the manhunt that stands for “All Cops Aren’t Bastards — there are many good ones, you know).
As of this writing, no suspects have been identified.
Surveillance cameras cover nearly every stretch of arterial streets like Western Avenue. According to news reports, which includes the alderman's office. CPD has promised to scour the footage. Additional security was ordered for the alderman’s office. Vasquez, in a statement, called the incident “unacceptable” and said it “targets and endangers immigrant communities in the ward.”
So far, so predictable. A grotesque prop, an anonymous note, a press release, and a news cycle of condemnation.
But one cannot help but recall another high-profile Chicago saga — an alleged hate crime that collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. Yes, it’s the case of our old friend Jussie Smollett.
Déjà vu all over again
It was January 2019 when Smollett, then a star on the Fox show Empire, told police that he had been attacked near his Streeterville apartment by two men shouting racist and homophobic slurs as he innocently headed out into the winter’s night to pick up a footlong (a Subway sandwich). Jussie's "attackers" allegedly wore red MAGA hats and shouted “This is MAGA country!” while dousing him with bleach and looping a rope around his neck. Smollett said he had merely gone out for a late-night Subway sandwich.
The media, eager to highlight a hate crime narrative, ran with the story. Politicians rushed to issue solemn condemnations.
Yet the police were skeptical. Perhaps the somewhat counterfactual declaration that deep blue Chicago was “MAGA country” struck a dissonant note. As investigators dug deeper, the tale began to fray. Surveillance video showed Smollett interacting with two theater kid brothers he knew. Phone records and receipts suggested he had orchestrated the incident himself, paying the sibling pair to stage the attack. It was no hate crime-it was an exorbitant, dangerously racially and politically divisive publicity stunt — the kind of thing that can spark deadly riots that cause multibillion-dollar, irreversible devastation of the kind that left the West and South Sides “disinvested” “food deserts for over half a century and counting.
All this was perpetrated by Smollett, prosecutors argued, just to boost his C-list celebrity profile, a sadly tawdry motive.
Smollett was indicted on multiple counts of disorderly conduct and filing false reports. Kim Foxx, (a creature of Boss Toni Preckwinkle), who was cosplaying as Cook County State’s Attorney at the time, dropped all charges at the behest of FOJ (Friend of Jussie) and Primus inter Pares in the Progressive Goddess Pantheon Michele Obama, a miscarriage of justice so egregious that a special prosecutor was later appointed who would ultimately convict Smollett of lying to police, though he continues to appeal and protest his innocence, like a chronic disease that just won’t go away.
(Parenthetically, if you had any doubts about who has been running this town lately, that sordid tale tells you everything you need to know — it certainly isn’t any of the so-called “oppressors” with white privilege cards).
The episode exposed the eagerness of certain media outlets and political actors to seize on a narrative before the facts were established. It also revealed how the Cook County justice system bends with the prevailing political winds, which have been definitively out of the progressive left of late, depending on who is accused and whose political protection they enjoy. Clout hasn’t disappeared, but its pigmentation has.
Tom Wolfe, author of the definitive novel on race pandering, Bonfire of the Vanities, would relish this tawdry tale.
Now, to be clear: No one is accusing Alderman Vasquez of placing the rat outside his own office. Far be it from this satirist to make such a serious allegation. But when you hear a story this bizarre — a freshly dead rodent, a handwritten screed affixed neatly to the office door — you have to ask the same questions skeptics asked of Smollett. Who, exactly, would go to such lengths?
Cui bono?
That’s “who benefits” for those of you sans law degree, and it’s the first question investigators ask when seeking perpetrators of unsolved crimes: “Who had the motive and the means?”
In this case, the means (one dead rat — abundant in our vermin-infested metropolis — one sheet of paper, and one writing instrument) are almost universally accessible.
So motive is the preferred deductive reasoning vector.
Let’s think this through, dear Watson. If you are some Fox News–watching suburbanite from Naperville with a chip on your shoulder about Chicago immigration politics, do you even know who Andre Vasquez is? Alderman Vasquez is a back-bench alderman, not a household name. Few people outside his ward could pick him out of a lineup. Why risk arrest, public shame, and possible hate crime charges to target him, such an inconsequential non-entity, of all people?
Even in the unlikely event you had heard of him in passing on the 10 p.m. news, what are the odds you would be motivated to hop in your SUV on a school night, risk a trip into the scary city, kill a rat, darken the alderman’s door with the Rattus norvegicus carcass, and affix your sign to the official alderman portal like some kind of suburban MAGA Martin Luther? Better to just catch Sunday Night Football like every other red-blooded suburban MAGA white male.
And how does this culprit profile benefit? A few conservative chortles on the midnight death ride down I-90, hoping not to be human sacrifice for a drive-by gang initiation? All of this while risking a stint in County Jail with some Latin Kings and Two-Sixers who are unlikely in the extreme to share your bemusement over this little white boy prank?
The scenario also fails to game out for the other possible perp profiles that reflect the “Trinity” demographic makeup of the City that Twerks:
1. The 33 percent who are either:
a) Lakefront liberals “not from here originally” sporting a BLM sign in their gargantuan brownstone front windows, or
b) Fourth-generation Trumper city workers from Edison Park or Mt. Greenwood, unlikely to jeopardize their already uncertain pensions.
2. The 33 percent who are Latino manufacturing or service workers who would hardly curry favor anonymously with ICE via la rata muerta.
3. The Black Democrat.
Risk greatly exceeds reward for all of the above.
So who in the wide world of Chicagoland political sports dunnit?
Certainly, the incident has provided Vasquez with a platform. He has been featured across Chicago media denouncing hatred, rallying the immigrant community, and presenting himself as a defender of the marginalized. In politics, martyrdom — real or perceived — can be valuable currency.
He has achieved the treasured progressive status of victim, and a victim of racism, the highest order of beatification in the progressive secular sainthood quest.
Let’s be fair. Whoever placed the rat and note committed a vile act. If it was meant as a threat, it should be taken seriously.
But if it was a stunt, it should be taken equally seriously, if not more so, because it fans the flames of partisan hate that killed Charlie Kirk.
Either way, it deserves the highest priority, thorough investigation commensurate with what the law enforcement and criminal justice communities refer to as a “heater” case, one which commands a high media profile for the usual and customary, less-than-Pulitzer Prize-winning aspirations of a clickbait frenzied fourth estate.
We Contrarians insist upon, nay demand, equal treatment under the law for our treasured LatinX fellow citizens (especially right honorable elected leaders) as our treasured Black media star Jussie Smollett merited. His case was investigated with extraordinary thoroughness: Detectives combed through hours of footage, tracked receipts, interviewed witnesses, and assembled a timeline so airtight it collapsed his story. Could they help it that in their understandable zeal to apprehend the real culprit, it turned out to be the self-declared victim? I think not.
Should not Alderman Vasquez’s rat patrol receive the same attention? Shouldn’t CPD dedicate similar resources, and shouldn’t the aggrieved alderman demand nothing less than the full truth?
If this is indeed a hate crime, should not the heinous perpetrator be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law like the loathsome racist he is?
On the other hand, should this turn out to be a Jussiesque stunt, a dangerous political provocation in the highly charged aftermath of the Kirk assassination, shouldn’t the culprit be subject to equally zealous prosecution and merciless conviction and sentencing, to the absolute fullest extent of the law, right up to and including any applicable provisions of the Federal code?
The Contrarian view is that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Let’s get to the bottom of this.
In case you wonder how unpleasant things can be at the bottom of sewers, just ask any rat.
The politics of distraction
Consider this: what could be more welcome to Mayor 6% than a racially charged distraction that could rally the Latino vote to his side as he makes his inevitable camera-hogging, solidarity-symbolizing appearance with the alleged victim? Such a massive distraction would tie into BJ’s effort to position his doomed reelection campaign as a run against Trump (sure to be absent from the ballot) with his new big buddy, Jelly Belly Pritzker.
That rat sure is a convenient magnet for those Brown ballots BJ needs so badly, where he polls even worse than his unprecedentedly bad overall numbers, lower than the Bears’ defense ratings after the Debacle in Detroit.
Dats a good liddle rat!
One wonders if that darn rat is just playing dead. He could come in very handy down the campaign trail and earn himself beaucoup cheese from the DNC. He may end up going on the stump with AOC and the Bern!
Far be it from us to engage in speculative conspiracy theorizing, but then again, cui bono? Could political stunting be a team sport in this town?
The city council under Mayor 6.6 spends more time passing resolutions of symbolic outrage about US foreign policy such as alleged Israeli genocide (which, last time I checked, was not under aldermanic jurisdiction), in between fleecing long suffering taxpayers of budget busting trial lawyer boodle for representing drug dealers and other various and sordid thuggish criminals (a hefty portion of which ends up in their…ahem… “campaign funds”) instead of fixing budgets or balancing the books. (As Mayor 6.6 famously declaimed: “You put a Black man in charge of a city and all of a sudden everybody wants to be an accountant.”)
Yes, the go-to move for the modern identity politician, blessed with rank and coveted minority privileges is playing yet another race card from the apparently inexhaustible deck. Each of those precious cards functions as a “get out of accountability” free pass that always seems to work with the terminally gullible Chicago electorate.
Each incident of alleged bigotry becomes a chance to posture, to virtue-signal, to demand solidarity, and silence dissent.
Meanwhile, Chicago sinks irretrievably deeper and deeper into fiscal ruin, crime continues to plague neighborhoods, and ordinary citizens worry about whether they will be the next victims of carjackings, robberies, fatal shootings, or even fatal head stompings (!!!) of senior citizens (like the one last week at the once prosperous intersection of 95th and Hasted).
But sure, let’s focus on the dead rat, not the dead people, because we don’t need any help here — crime is down!
Andre Vasquez has built his brand on progressive slogans and Democratic Socialist rhetoric. For him, this incident provides more fuel for his civic arson. He can paint critics of the city’s sanctuary policies as haters — rat killers to boot, hanging around with bigoted rodents! He can link the opposition to immigration with vermin imagery and cement his place as the defender of the “Latinx community.” Convenient, isn’t it?
Perhaps he can even repurpose the rat for a “Free Palestine” protest outside the door of a local synagogue! Waste not want not in the never-ending war against the eternal Zionist.
Not justice Jussie style — justice Contrarian-style, starring Superintendent Snelling and State’s Attorney Burke
Whoever is responsible for this travesty seems to have miscalculated about one big change since Smollett’s stunt blew up in poor Jussie’s face like an M-80 on Mexican Independence Day.
There’s a new sheriff in town
Well, actually a new dynamic duo come to rescue our Gotham by the lake.
We have a real Police Superintendent, who emphatically does not suffer fools gladly, regardless of race, color, creed, or national origin, and who has put together a talented command team similarly indisposed to humor such identity polticking criminality, who will hand off the alleged culprit to a real, professional State’s Attorney who is a dramatic upgrade from her Soros-funded, Boss Toni Preckwinkle puppet predecessor, who thought her job was to work for the criminals rather than their victims, the ever diminishing ranks of The Sovereign People of the once great State of Illinois.
And remember, when asked about 50 percent of Illinoisans saying they want to leave the state, Governor J.B. Pritzker responded:
“If people want to leave, get up and move”, and he didn’t mean exercise like Goddess Michelle’s infamous “Let’s Move” campaign. Unlike her, he can’t lead by example without triggering a temblor.
Why did he say that? Because all Democrats care about is power. According to their ruthless calculus, only evil (defined as not voting for Democrats) conservatives will move, locking in a perpetual blue death grip on Illinois. They’ll replace the diaspora with immigrants to keep their Congressional apportionment stable. But then they have it keep that Latinx vote in the blue line. Gee, that’s another reason why that little dead rat is such a BIG asset to the party. Maybe they’ll change the party name to the Demorats in his honor. I’m assuming of course it’s a "he." Knowing the Demorats, the rat’s pronouns are probably they/them.
Unlike the case of Jussie Smollett, Goddess Michelle isn’t likely to provide divine intervention should mighty Victor Victim Vasquez fall from grace and descend to diminished Vanquished Vazquez stature. He’ll have to resort to making political points by lamenting the price of the eggs plastering his ferret face should this little rodent blow up in it like it swallowed an M-80 on Mexican Independence Day (which was just the day after the rat’s apparition-esque appearance…hmmmm).
The truth shall set you free alderman, right?
In the end, we return to that ancient verity: the truth shall set you free. Alderman Vasquez says his community is under attack. (What, is there a dead rat a every door in the Ward?) Okey-Dokey. Then let us see the evidence. Let’s follow it wherever it leads, and let’s hold the culprit accountable — he, she, they, or them.
But don’t ask us to suspend disbelief. We’ve seen this movie before, starring Jussie Smollett, and it didn’t end well. Chicagoans deserve transparency, not theatrics. If Vasquez truly wants justice, he should welcome the same scrutiny Smollett faced and offer full cooperation from his office.
We want to see the security video footage.
We want to hear the 911 call to the police (if there was one). If not, we want to know how the police just happened to drop by and discover a dead rat on a Sunday evening.
Until we get all the evidence, we can only note that in the 40th Ward, the smell of rat lingers — and not just the one left at the office door.
Who knows, at the end of the proverbial day, there may be another dead rat (at least politically speaking), this one of the two-legged variety, to paraphrase Holly Golightly in the classic movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which the Alder may have plenty of time to watch in the near future.
