Democrats have accumulated a truly repulsive vortex of rich, largely white, Big Labor allies, all of whom have served to trash the interests of the working classes and repel voters. None have been as bad for them as the teachers' unions, which still seek to shut down public schools on phony COVID concerns and allow kids to founder. They're so toxic for Democrats that we're now seeing stirrings of some kind of fightback against them in Democrat circles.

If Democrats are smart, they will go full PATCO on these greedy, venal, psychopaths, in the same way the great Ronald Reagan set the tone for his presidency by firing an entire union of rogue airline traffic controllers, inadvertently sending a message to the world. The time for it is growing very short now that the Chicago teachers' union is overreaching at the expense of kids yet again, refusing to return to the classroom, yet again, and this time against the established promise of the city's political leaders. Kira Davis, in an opinion piece for the Daily Mail, explains what's going on:

[Jesse] Sharkey is the current President of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and the lead cheerleader for unnecessarily shutting out Chicago's 350,000 public school students, even as parents and the Mayor of Chicago beg them to return to school.

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) cancelled classes for the third-straight day on Friday, as the vast majority of staff refuses to report to work.

Happy New Year! 

This leftist ass made this decision even as parents were made to go through an incredible rigamarole of COVID tests just to be able to send their kids back to school. Obviously, they did it -- K.T. at Ace of Spades has an important post (written in the local vernacular there, which involves cuss words) about the wringer the parents were put through yet didn't protest about because they wanted schools to open so badly:

Those teachers also said "We're not coming into work." after putting kids and parents through this ordeal of COVID testing. From the Chicago Tribune, December 29:

[Click here to see photo of piled up mail with test kits waiting to be collected by the postal service]

Chicago Public Schools said it has extended the deadline to Thursday for parents to return the district's at-home COVID-19 test kits after photos circulated online Tuesday of drop-off boxes overflowing with packages.

"We are encouraged by the number of families who have submitted test kits so far. We are working with all partners to ensure a timely pick up of test kits at FedEx and libraries," a CPS spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday that noted the district has added a drop-off location at the Garfield Ridge branch of the Chicago Public Library and will accept completed test kits at some libraries until 5 p.m. Thursday.

CPS also urged families to pursue testing on their own this week amid a city surge in COVID-19 cases.

Some parents have filed a suit attempting to end the teacher strike.

Would you trust a bunch of people who act like this to educate your kids?

The site notes that Joe Biden has showered the district with COVID relief funds, to the tune of $1.8 billion. It's also installed expensive air filtration systems demanded by teachers' unions as the condition for their returning to class. Somehow, nothing is ever good enough for these union thugs who simply don't want to work and demand to be accommodated all the time.

Davis, who wrote the opinion piece for the Mail, notes that Chicago gets $27,000 from the feds for every enrolled pupil, which is a lot of moolah for nothing, a veritable ivy league semester actually. What do the parents and kids get for this cash? Just a Zoom class now, and probably not as good as a free one as those offered on, say, Coursera, W3, or the Khan Academy.

It's revolting and now we see things like this going down:

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot: "Enough is enough. We are standing firm. And we are going to fight to get our kids back in in-person learning. Period. Full stop." pic.twitter.com/qFo1qmAMEk

— Corey A. DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey) January 6, 2022

Obviously, Lightfoot is hearing from voters. That's the first stirrings of a PATCO moment that is long overdue on the blue side of the aisle. One of them is going to have to flat out repudiate, if not destroy these teachers' unions, or else the unions will take them down like parasites on a host.

It runs roughly parallel to San Francisco Mayor London Breed's call to clean up the Tenderloin hellhole district, where drug dealers and criminals are running rampant based on a white prosecutor who refuses to prosecute criminals, and the whole city is suffering. She's beyond gaslighting now and knows she has to do something about the godawful conditions that are not only taking her city down but probably her political career as well. 

It also runs roughly parallel to the election of Eric Adams in New York City, following the hellhole reign of the city's worst mayor ever, Bill de Blasio, another white leftist. 

It's very significant that all three of these blue city mayors are black, and the hideousness they are trying to stop is the masterwork of rich white socialists. 

Davis thinks the racial angle is significant, too:

According to the district's own numbers, only 10% of Chicago Public School students are white.

61% of public school students are on the free lunch program, which is the metric state and federal entities use to determine poverty rates among students.

How could only 10% of the public schools be made up of white students? Chicago itself has a much larger white population. Where are all their kids? Not in public school.

The majority of white parents seem to have options and people who have options very rarely voluntarily choose public schools in the Windy City.

You can see why in the case of Chicago.

With the resurgence of COVID, fueled by the Omicron variant, the union has seized this new excuse to make exorbitant demands, and hold the children, mostly minority children, hostage to do it.

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, 'systemic racism' is defined as: 'policies and practices that exist throughout a whole society or organization, and that result in and support a continued unfair advantage to some people and unfair or harmful treatment of others based on race.'

So it's almost all black and Mexican kids who are getting trashed over by white leftists on the altar of racial equity. The black kids are sacrificial victims. The white leftists are the beneficiaries. The black mayors are starting to call bee ess. 

As clear as that sounds, it's hard to imagine that these mayors, being so steeped in leftism themselves, are willing to go the full Reagan and declare war on these miscreant white leftists who want to shut down schools and leave black kids with nothing. They aren't that brave -- none have come out and changed their parties to Republican, yet. But something seems to be happening, premised on recognizing the reality that white leftists don't recognize -- that the Democrat party is too unioned up to win elections now. That the Democrat party is bleeding voters. That people vote with their feet -- whether in full-blown moves to other states, as much of the black population of San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Boston have done, or else simply fled the school districts, as the white parents of Chicago have done, leaving the black parents and kids holding the bag. 

What's needed now is that PATCO moment, when these mayors recognize that they are in a life and death struggle with teachers' unions (and Sorosian prosecutors) who have taken over their party, and they take action to destroy these parasites on the host. If things get bad enough, they will do it. Right now, we are seeing signs of it in Lightfoot's response and in the acts of the other black mayors of these deep blue cities.

A party can only recover once it tacks to the center after a disgusting binge to the fringe. We know that happened with the elections of Bill Clinton in the U.S. and Tony Blair in the U.K.

Are we perhaps seeing another repeat of this pattern in the blue city mayors? It's worth watching. If one of them gets up enough courage to stop these runaway unions, the future is theirs.   

Image: Levan Ramishvili, via Flickr // public domain