At least 18 Chicago police officers were injured Friday after a crowd of at least 1,000 left-wing rioters sought to topple a statue of Christopher Columbus.

The Chicago Tribune reports “At least 1,000 people swarmed the Christopher Columbus statue in Grant Park on Friday evening in an attempt to topple it after a march turned tense and chaotic when some people began throwing fireworks and cans at the police[.]”

Videos of the assault, which look like something out of a zombie movie, are everywhere on social media. You can see that the officers, who are not wearing protective riot gear, are outnumbered and pilloried with objects, including some very dangerous fireworks:

What had started as a protest march on Columbus Drive turned into this full-blown riot after someone “shouted that some Chicago police units, whom the [protesters] had been trying to separate the crowd from by using bike-wielding citizen ‘marshals,’ had left to protect the statue of the controversial historical figure.”

“Dozens of people in the crowd who were clad in all-black clothing rushed the nearby statue, surrounding the short stone wall that circled it,” per the Tribune. “Some began throwing objects, such as cans and fireworks, at the officers. A few people tried to climb over the wall and were met with officers smacking their batons at them.”

Eventually the police were overwhelmed by the “fireworks and other incendiary devices,” and a rope was lassoed around the statue. As the rioters screamed “Columbus was a murderer. Columbus was a thief,” the mob tried, and thankfully failed, to pull down the statue.

After 40 minutes, police reinforcements arrived and the howling mob was forced back with pepper spray and batons, but not before the statue “and the surrounding wall were sheathed in overlapping anti-police graffiti messages.”

Five people, identified only as “civilians,” were injured and “about a dozen people were arrested and face pending charges ranging from battery to a police officer to mob action[.]”

As though the Democrat-run city of Chicago does not have enough problems, just 24 hours earlier, on Thursday, two people were killed and 15 wounded in various shootings across the city.

The previous weekend, 60 people were shot, including ten who died. Four of those ten were children.

On July 10, shootings in Chicago were up 76 percent over the same weekend the previous year.

Over the 4th of July weekend, on just Saturday and Sunday, 70 were shot, 14 fatally in the Windy City.

Now that the corporate media and Democrat Party have embraced and encouraged the left-wing terrorists in Black Lives Matter and Antifa to riot, loot, and destroy, we are seeing lawlessness increasing, not just in the Democrat-run city of Chicago, but also in the Democrat-run cities of Portland, New York, Seattle, Milwaukee, and elsewhere.

Unfortunately, in these Democrat-run cities, the violence and mob-related chaos are going to get much worse for a very long time before they get better. This mob violence is just a fact of urban life now, a fact caused by idiotic voters who elect left-wing activists as opposed to city leaders and managers who believe in democracy and the rule of law.

The violence, despair, and blight that caused so much urban misery in the 60s and 70s for those who cannot afford private security, limousine services, and high-security buildings, have returned with a vengeance.

These are not protests; these are protesters.

What we are seeing across the country in countless Democrat-run cities are mobs of left-wing terrorists spreading lawlessness and misery, mobs who have been encouraged, protected, and emboldened by a corrupt media and local politicians who are no longer hiding their dangerous and extreme desire to assume even more power through chaos, violence, and ruin.   

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