Here in the sanctuary city of L.A., it’s political theater as usual.
Last week, Mayor Karen Bass complained on camera about the sweeping immigration enforcement raid in the city’s MacArthur Park by ICE officers and the Border Patrol. She stormed over to the park with a gaggle of friendly media and confronted the immigration officials – after they had made the dangerous park safe for her, of course.
Calling ICE’s action to clear MS-13 gang members out of the park “a political stunt,” Bass demanded the agents leave. She later told the media the sweep was “un-American.”
For those who don’t know,
MacArthur Park used to be a peaceful green oasis in the city where you could take your kids for a picnic on a Sunday afternoon. But in recent years it’s been virtually captured by homeless people, drug addicts and violent gangs.
Hopefully it should be a safer park now that ICE and President Donald Trump are cleaning up the immigration mess that Joe Biden left us.
The sad thing is, Mayor Bass’ grandstanding and angry rhetoric is not unique among Democrats.
The top Democrat in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, has compared ICE to the Gestapo and says its agents should not be able to wear masks while they are arresting illegal immigrants. Some Democrats think it’d be cool to shoot ICE agents.
Instead of wasting everyone’s time putting on stunts and saying stupid things about ICE, I have a better idea for Democrats like Bass, Jeffries and influential Black leaders like Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and LeBron James. They should be leading a national crusade to solve the ongoing national tragedy in the Black community that my Pittsburgh friend Bill Steigerwald calls “The American Slaughter.”
Steigerwald (clips.substack.com), is an ex-journalist and book author who has been studying America’s annual homicide statistics. This year the good news is that so far homicides in our top-30 most murderous cities are down an average of about 21% from 2024. It’s true even in Chicago, where the predictable gang shooting sprees on July 4th weekends are faithfully covered each year like baseball scores by the national media.
The July 4th weekend toll this year was “only” 11 dead and 42 wounded — less than half of Chicago’s 2024 numbers. And as of July 1, total homicides are 100 behind last year’s pace.
For decades Barack Obama’s home turf of Chicago has been a notorious killing field for young Black men. Steigerwald’s back-of-the-envelope estimate is that at least 300 men and boys have been murdered in Chicago every year since 1995 – a total of nearly 10,000 victims.
Terrible as it is, Chicago’s annual death toll makes up only a fraction of a national slaughter of young Black men that has been happening for decades.
Based on Steigerwald’s figuring, at least 5,000 young Black males have been murdered each year across the USA since 1995.
For the math-impaired, that adds up to the shocking and tragic total of 150,000 dead young Black men – killed almost exclusively by other young Black men, senselessly, and usually with handguns.
One hundred and fifty thousand homicides is a figure almost impossible to believe – or ignore.
Steigerwald says that “reducing this perpetual urban slaughter should have been the chief concern of Black leaders and the legacy news media for decades.”
But he says Black leaders didn’t want to talk about the slaughter and the national media – which still hasn’t discovered its scope – didn’t want to ask them what they were going to do about it.
Steigerwald says don’t expect any “Black leaders, movie stars, politicians or important media figures” to “jump in front of the cameras and declare a national crisis or call for a national crusade to slow the mass killing of their sons.
“They’ll do what they’ve always done — call for more gun control or blame poverty or racism or slavery or bad cops or food stamp cuts.”
Meanwhile, failed leaders like Bass will continue to rant about how ICE’s enforcement is hurting her wrecked sanctuary city while real crime and the bloody American Slaughter goes on and on.
Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation.
