Chicago F.O.P. hops on the Bailey/Trump train.
The F.O.P.'s endorsement of 1/6 coup supporter Bailey shows they are unqualified to represent the city's cops.
“The attempted extermination of the Jews of World War II doesn’t even compare on a shadow of the life that has been lost with abortion.” — Darren Bailey
Here’s the latest on the right-wing gang that pretends to be a union and goes by the name of Lodge #7 of the Fraternal Order of Police. Yesterday the F.O.P. endorsed none other than assault-weapon-toting, abortion-banning, MAGA 1/6 insurrectionist-supporting, Darren Bailey who’s running for governor in Illinois.
Bailey, who has already been endorsed by Donald Trump, doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of defeating J.B. Pritzker, the incumbent. Instead, he’s using the millions of campaign dollars handed to him by right-wing billionaire Richard Uihlein, for his racist dog-whistle, law-and-order campaign which is more an attack on Chicago’s Black women political leaders, Mayor Lori Lightfoot and State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, than it is on Pritzker. He refers to the three of them as the “Three Musketeers of Crime”.
Bailey's endorsement by the state’s two largest police unions reveals the racist and sexist underbelly of policing in Chicago and Illinois. It says more about the Chicago F.O.P., which poses as a union and its fascist-minded President John Catanzara, and who they actually do and don’t represent than anything else.
I find it hard to believe, for example, that the 54% of Chicago cops who are Black and Latino would actually vote for a white supremacist Trumpy, like Darren Bailey. I also can’t imagine that the women who make up a quarter of the police force, support Bailey’s anti-abortion extremism. Remember, Bailey has compared a woman’s right to an abortion with the Jewish Holocaust and still defends that comparison.
On top of all that, while both Bailey and Catanzara pose as cop advocates, they each supported the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6th, killing 5 police officers and injuring 140 more.
Never mind that Darren Bailey is the epitome of an anti-union politician in Illinois with a zero percent Illinois AFL-CIO rating.
Also, most police unions and organizations stand opposed to the legalization of assault weapons while Bailey often poses for his campaign ads proudly holding one. He even raffled off a Smith & Wesson AR-15 — nearly identical to the type used in the Highland Park parade massacre — as part of a 2019 campaign fundraising event.
So if the F.O.P.’s endorsement of Bailey isn’t really about winning the election, what is its purpose? Answer: It’s all about using the election for MAGA movement base-building and propagandizing against police reform while using their anti-crime demagoguery to open the door to Republicans trying to get a foothold in Chicago.