ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY. Widows: Urban Blight and Hopeless Chicago.

Fans of British writer-director Steve McQueen’s long overdue follow-up to 12 Years a Slave have had half a decade to muse over the now acclaimed director’s short career beginning with the brutal and unsettling Hunger, followed by his second team-up with actor Michael Fassbinder in Shame. Given the high regard his previous trilogy has garnered, Widows is a rather conventional career pivot.

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The film’s finale, without spoilers, seems to suggest that this sense of nihilism and hopelessness is cowardly and must be destroyed and yet the system isn’t confronted by the end of the film. The best that can be done in the end is to honor the dead and try to build some semblance of friendship and justice beyond the horrors. The real bad guys get away in the end. The only real justice comes when you survive and your enemies don’t.

Maybe that’s honest in the sense that Chicago is a place where corruption, graft, and backroom deals reign supreme, but if the only way out of the quagmire is violence and the vain hope of some future after the turmoil, it goes a long way to show why the progressivism is so willing to push violent solutions in the aftermath of their losses.

When Hillary Clinton goes on live TV and says that there can be no civility when the policies she advocates are being denied by the party in power and when black bloc groups like Antifa are given unlimited reign to assault conservatives, we see this same progressive nihilism at work.

Chicago’s last Republican mayor left office in 1931.