As RedState previously reported, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) - a member of the infamous Congressional "Squad" of radical AOC-led leftists, has weighed in on the closures of several Boston Walgreens locations that have taken place over the last year, with the race card of course being prominently featured in her rant.

For those who missed it, here's what she said in a floor speech on Tuesday:

.@Walgreens' closures of pharmacies in Roxbury, Mattapan & Hyde Park are not arbitrary or innocent.

They are disruptive, life-threatening acts of racial & economic discrimination.

As a multi-billion-dollar corporation, they must stop divesting from Black & brown communities. pic.twitter.com/iSvhFWw8Bl

— Ayanna Pressley (@AyannaPressley) January 31, 2024

Using emotionally loaded words like "abandoning" without evidence, Pressley also declared, "This closure is a part of a larger trend of abandoning low-income communities like the previous closures in Mattapan and Hyde Park — both in the Massachusetts 7th."

The problem with these claims, as my colleague Mike Miller so eloquently noted, is that they leave out one crucially important piece of information: The closures are happening in high-crime parts of Beantown, where retail theft is rampant and leaves stores facing tough choices, like locking items behind glass doors, limiting aisles that are available for shopping, or shutting down altogether:

Perhaps if members of the community didn't rob those Walgreens stores blind — likely stealing some of the products you mentioned, included — the locations wouldn't have been closed. That said, of course, compassion is warranted for law-abiding members of the community who are inconvenienced or worse by unchecked crime. 

"Unchecked crime" that goes unchecked thanks to woke, soft-on-crime elected "leaders" like Ayanna Pressley and the other Democrats at the city and state levels in deep blue Massachusetts like Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey who have expressed similar sentiments about the closures.

READ: Fed-up Minneapolis Woman Gives Interview That Every Riot Apologist in the Mainstream Media Should Watch

To further put an exclamation mark on the point, a former regional loss prevention supervisor for Walgreens in the Pittsburgh area weighed in on the Twitter machine in response to Pressley's baseless allegations about Walgreens deliberately "abandoning" certain locations due to race:

Nope! I spent eight years as a loss prevention supervisor for many Walgreens stores. You don’t get to blame it on race. If a store was closed, it’s quite simply, because whoever lived in the area stole too damn much merchandise. And now they can live without a Walgreens. https://t.co/ovefW5smap

— Even More Pissed Off Patriot (@POdPatriot) February 1, 2024

Unfortunately, it's innocent members of the community like the elderly, sick, and disabled who pay the price when lawlessness is allowed to prevail in retail establishments and in the streets, which we've seen happen in countless Democrat-run cities across the country like San Francisco, Detroit, and Chicago where businesses big and small are fleeing for greener pastures.

To reiterate a point I've made before on this issue, Democrat politicians who are using Walgreens as a scapegoat for their failed policies are also using the popular drugstore chain's decisions to close non-profitable stores as a way to manipulate their core constituencies into thinking they are being run over by rich white CEOs who are supposedly putting people over profit. 

But instead of blaming Walgreens for closures in crime-ridden areas, residents and other community leaders should wake up and take it up with the elected officials who they put into office in the first place, and let them know they will no longer accept the city’s (and state’s) woke approach to (not) combating crime. 

And then they need to turn around and put people in office who have the backbone to do what needs to be done to fight back against the crime issues rather than coddle the offenders.  

Until they do, people can expect the deterioration of iconic American cities like Boston and San Francisco to continue. Yes, there are many bad-faith political actors in powerful positions in Massachusetts, but at some point the people who keep putting them in positions of power need to own up to the damage they've done in continuing to elect them in the first place.

In other words, if you are a resident of the Bay State and you keep pulling that lever for Democrats and expecting a different result, then you are part of the problem, not businesses that sometimes have no choice but to cut their losses and move on.

Flashback: Boston Police Union Rips 'Squad' Member Ayanna Pressley For Her Support of Violent Antifa Activists