Mild Progress Defeats Pure Evil: The Chicago-Michigan Election Special

And yeah, with me to talk about this election and a couple of other elections that happened on the same day that we're very funny and where the worst people in the world got absolutely destroyed. Is Ali who is one of my friends and is an election analyst. Yeah, welcome to the show. How are you doing. I'm doing well. Thank you for having Mimia. Nice to be nice to be here. Yeah, I'm very excited. Yeah, because this is just very funny. It's extremely funny. I personally was really

enjoying getting to read the Twitter tea leaves. You could tell kind of which Alderman were having meltdowns on election night. Yeah, so I guess I guess we could start with the stuff that happened in Chicago, which is that Paul Vallis the butcher of the public education system, running dog of

the cops, the hero of J six people. I was just kind of thwacked in an election by Brandon Johnson, the sort of progressive candidate who I'm very excited I no longer have to pretend that I like particularly much.

Yes now, as as Mia says, Paul Vallis, resident Dino from Palos Heights, a southwest suburb of Chicago, who conveniently bought an apartment in Chicago exactly a year before the election, which is how long you have to live in Chicago to be the mayor, lost the runoff to Brandon Johnson, a black progressive who was on the Cook County Board. About when all the results are done coming in in a couple of weeks, it will be about fifty two

percent for Johnson and forty eight percent for Vallis. As Mia says, this lets a lot of people on the left no longer have to keep up the charade of oh, Johnson's the best thing that has happened to us, and sliced bread if you are like more of a like Democratic Party loyal progressive voter. This is a very very good thing in your eyes. Yeah, and I think, you know, I think it's something very interesting and kind of fitting about this, which is that Yeah. And one of these

you've talked about is that. Yeah, like Brandon Johnson is the first like progressive TM mayor Trevor's had since like I mean blue to release its held Washington, who is first black mayor in the eighties. And it's very interesting also because a bunch of the reforms that Harold Washington did were specifically overturned by Paul Vallis. Yeah, Like he's the guy you did a bunch of educational reforms that fucking sucked, that destroyed I have Washington stuff. It's no,

it's it's really wild. How like Chicago politics is analogous to to go really out there for a second is analogous the state of Hawaii in the sense that people never die. The same people are going to be on your ballot for fifty years and you just kind of

have to suck it up and deal with it. But every so often someone good comes along, or at least someone better, and if you get them into office the first time, and if you get them to survive their first reelection campaign, then they get to be one of the people who's on the ballot forever and who never dies. And slowly but surely you can make Chicago politics less shitty. But yeah, as Mia said, this is going to be the first progressive Chicago mayoral administration since Harold Washington. And

Johnson won the same way as Harold Washington did. On Yeah, the backbone of Johnson's coalition, just as with Harold Washington's, was black voters. Johnson got about eighty percent of the black vote, because in Chicago elections are usually more about

race than anything else. But in addition to the black vote, Johnson one with progressives in white and non black communities of color, as well as LGBTQ voters and finally fulfilling the dreams of the here's how Bernie can still win people from twenty fifteen a actual turnout surge of millennial and Gen Z voters the Chicago Board of Election is I don't think that anyone would call them great, but they do produce some nice live statistics on election day

as the votes are tallied, and voters under forty five had a turnout surge of I think it was about twenty percent, whereas voters older than sixty, the raw number of their votes actually went down. And this likely does almost entirely account for Johnson's margin of victory, that he was able to turn out young voters and that old

people just like stayed home. Yeah, I think it's also you know, we talked about this in the episode we did about Paul Fallis, But one of the things about the initial election was that like the fact that Johnson made it out of the primaries at all with a genuinely night mirrorish like age like bracket of turnout in the first round is sort of a miracle, but you know, it got it got a lot better for him in this one, and that genuinely seems to have like I don't know, like I know a lot of people who

spent a lot of time like canvassing their asses off, and it actually seems to have worked. And I don't know, I mean, you know, it means to be seen the extent to which this was about, like the fact that Vallis is like probably would have been the worst mayor of Chicago in like we don't have to go, we don't have to go back that far Daily was mayor of Chicago as recently as twenty eleven. That's true, but I I don't know Da Daily. Yeah, I mean it's

not like Chicago has good mayors. But I think he would have been Okay, here's I think he would have been the most politically far right mayor Chicago has had in a long time. Oh yeah, Like he's just a Republican, like like a pretty like yeah, and you know that fucking sucks, but he got Clawbard. There's also there's a really funny result I want to talk about, which is that. Okay, so the part of Chicago, the neighborhood of in Chicago where the Cubs Stadium is is right next to Boystown,

which is the fucking gay district. And if if you if you go in and look at like, well I say, I say, it's the gat like a lot a lot of it's it's it's it's it's now the rich gay part of Chicago, because I know it's got priced out. Well it kind of is. No, it's not. Market Park is the rich gay part of Chicago. Brew Okay, it's more of a rich gay part of Chicago than it was like forty years ago years ago. Yeah, but like like literally exactly split. You can, like you can like

see in the data exactly split down the line. The gays voted for Brandy Johnson and all the people on all the Cubs fans voted for Vallace. It's so funny,

it is, it is extremely funny. And I will give a quick shout out here to the Chicago Urbanist Twitter account who made what I personally think is the funniest meme to have come out of the election um, which is a bunch of like uh stick figures and just like black and white labeled Vallis voters running from a like steam roller, a pink steamroller with a rainbow like wheel being driven by a bunch of gay people, and

the steamroller is labeled boys down. It's really good, like they I don't know, like like there there there is this sort of a like this is sort of like this is the coalition that well, I mean again, we talked about it like this, this is the hairwashing coalition, Like, this is the coalition that if you, if you're an elect electoral list, like you need to produce something that looks like this if you want to have any serious chance of winning and yes, yeah, and the fact that

it actually worked sort of, Oh, it's a goddamn miracle, and shit never works. People have been trying to do this for like forty fucking years and it never works. I mean, you have been trying to do this for forty plus years. But it's also like, this is really the first election that I can think of anywhere since Barack Obama's re election in twenty twelve, where like, this is the coalition that actually put someone in like an office that got a lot of national attention and that mattered.

That's not to say that it like literally hasn't happened anywhere else. I'm just saying I can't think of any off the top of my head. But like, in twenty twelve, Barack Obama became the first person to be elected president of the United States with less than forty percent of the white vote, a feat that has never since been repeated. Clinton got less than that and lost. Trump obviously won,

and Biden won because white voters left in twenty twenty. So, like, this is a turnout and coalitional puzzle that most people fail to put together and that Brandon Johnson miraculously pulled off. Yeah, and I think on the one hand, Okay, this is legitimately kind of because the result is not the thing that normally happens. It is legitimately an interesting question as to why this happened, and like a like a sort of like legitimately kind of difficult like political science question.

On the other hand, most of the people attempting to answer it have just oh my fucking god, Like if I if I have to read another New York Times article writing about this that's like like just clearly cobbled together from three Wikipedia articles, like I'm gonna literally go insane. I think you, me and every other person in Chicago. Um, you know, no matter if you are a Johnson voter or a Vallis voter or someone who stayed home, we can all come together in our hatred of that thirty

eight piece that was strong on the morning of election day. Um, if you don't know what I'm talking about, you're lucky, and I'm not going to tell you. If you really well, I'll give you a very brief summary of it, which is a five three. Now they don't know they did. They did. They did a racism That's what I'll leave it at. They they did a racism, and they were very wrong. They basically did the four races, white, Black, Latino,

and leftist. Yeah, which is very funny. Um But hopefully, UM, I hopefully I'll take a stab at explaining what happened, and hopefully it's better than most people's explanation. But UM, I think part of it is that, um, as I mentioned earlier, historically Chicago elections have been about race, and like this was no um exception. This was much more of an ideological uh great, Like the ideological lines were

a lot clearer in this election than previous mayoral races. Um. But the foundation of Brandon Johnson's electoral victory was the eighty percent of the vote that he got in black majority neighborhoods. Black voters in Chicago selected the black candidate because they looked at the white guy and said, oh, we think you're going to be a massive dipshit. And beyond that, you have a couple of other things working

in Johnson's favor. So like one, when it comes to the youth vote, I cannot really believe I'm saying this because I when this was announced. It's not that I

thought it wouldn't help. It's just that I wasn't sure that it would help enough, but Johnson got a lot of national progressive figures to endorse him, including Bernie Sanders, and his campaign literally flew Bernie in for a rally on a college campus here in Chicago, And I think that genuinely did actually get a lot of young people to realize that there was an election that they should attention to, which is well, it was like like like this happened, Like people fly in Bertie a lot and

it never matters, but it like it mattered here, which is really amazing. Absolutely, like just a lot of this election was wild. I think the other thing that really helped Johnson was that a like, Chicago is a lot less white than it used to be, which is not something that usually gets said in this day and age, because Chicago is becoming white er then it was like

ten fifteen years ago. But Chicago was a lot less white than it was in the eighties when Harold Washington was elected, and so like there was more of a ceiling on Paul Vallie's vote than Harold Washington's opponents had, which meant that Valis had to be able to appeal to not just white voters who reflectively were against any black candidate, but he also had to make inroads in Hispanic Asian as well as Black communities and trying to

get the black conservative vote, and he didn't. Valas didn't do a terrible job here, but he just didn't do a job that was good enough. He actually probably won the Latino vote, it would It wasn't like a huge win,

but it was a win. But the problem is that turnout in on the Southwest Side of Chicago, which is where in the majority of Chicago's Mexican American residents live, was just super low, just like really really atrociously in the tank, like to the extent like this is the kind of turnout that inspires the online jokes about how no one ever bothers to vote level bad turnouts on the Southwest Side. So if Hispanic turnout had been on the same level as white and black turnout, the race

probably would have been a lot closer. Valas also won Chinatown, which is something that got a fairer amount of tension on social media. But Johnson was able to win the two other Asian ethnic enclaves in Chicago, which are the Vietnamese neighborhood in Uptown called Asian and Argyle, as well as the Desi neighborhood on the far North Side. And I don't think we can really say how Asian voters overall voted definitively because Asian voters in Chicago are pretty

well diffused through the city. But it's very clear that like Vallas did not get the runaway win with Asian voters that Eric Adams, for example did in New York City. Yeah, and I specifically want to talk about Argyle for a bit because the fact that Johnson won Argyle is fucking insane. Oh yeah, these are like like this is a community of Vietnam War refugees, Like these people are hard line anti communists. Like you go into these restaurants and they

all have Fox News on. So like, yeah, Johnson winning these voters is incredible. Yeah. I mean like one of one of the most famous noodle shops, there was a guy who was at January sixth, like this is this is a like a stereotypically unbelievably dogshit place for Johnson. And yeah, and I say this about the China Chinatown and this is something like I mean you could just you can know this something like I've been tracking for

a while. I mean just by like walking through it that Chinatown during the pandemic and kind of after it, I was having a bit before has gotten just notably more fascist, Like oh yeah, there's a lot of stuff there. I mean, the anti homelessness stuff is really really really intense.

They're they've been going really hard in the end. That's the thing that kind of makes sense, right like this this is a thing that you would kind of expect out of, Like yeah, of course small business owners are going to like go right, like that's like that's what that's you know, that that's that you can you can you you can find Mark's writing about phenomena in like eighteen forty eight, right like this this has been a thing since the beginning of time. But I don't know,

it's gotten. It's gotten legitimately kind of scary down there. Yeah, and like a lot of it also I think was um, you know, there's been a divergence between how the North Side Asian enclaves like the Dessey neighborhood and the Vietnamese neighborhood have responded to this kind of stuff u versus Chinatown, especially on the other big social change that happened during the pandemic, which was the twenty twenty Black Lives Matter

of protests. Yeah, I think from what I saw, like the reaction on the North Side among these Asian enclaves was pretty overall supportive of the protests, whereas down in Chinatown as well as in McKinley Park, which is a Hispanic majority neighborhood but has a pretty significant Asian population, those neighborhoods had this really really big like surge of anti black racism in response to the protests. Like there were quote unquote neighborhood watch groups that got formed, and

it was just it was bad. And you know, the Vietnamese voters on argyle even though they're very like you know, they have Fox News on, like I said, and they're really anti socialist, anti communists. There was a state Rep. I am probably going to butcher his name, from which I apologize, but I'm pretty sure his name is pronounced Hanwen, who is Vietnamese himself, and he won the seat last year in twenty twenty two, and like he's very progressive.

So there has been this very sharp divergence in how the like Asian neighborhoods in Chicago have responded to some of the social events of the last few years. Once again by people, they're the Great nation of China's foot social imperialism. I think the last thing that really should be talked about in the context of Johnson's electoral win, and when we come back we can talk about the

city council because that's also pretty interesting. Is that something that if you want to watch elections, especially if you want to watch Chicago election, something you should understand is that the the Capital M machine in Chicago is pretty much gone now and Brandon Johnson's win pretty much seals this. It's not that the people are gone or that like the you know, logistical operations of the machine are completely dead, but the machine has now lost two elections in a row.

Because as much as Lorie, as much as Lorie Lightfoot sucked, and she sucked so much, she also was an anti machine candidate, like she was like capital A anti when she ran. And Brandon Johnson is not anti machine in the way that Laurie was, but he definitely was not the candidate of like the machine. So like they lost to elections in a row. Mike Madigan has now been indicted and he's probably going to prison for a very

long time. You should explain who Mike Madigan is, because Okay, if you live in Illinois, like you know who Mike Madigan is. If you don't live in Illinois, Mike Madigan, for my entire life, for like the lives of people who are much older than me, has been like the most the single most powerful political figure in all of Illinois. Like he runs everything. Yeah, like he has like an iron grip over everything that has happened in this state

for like forty years. Yes, and he finally got indicted on some federal like charges of like I don't even remember what the charges war, but it was very like al Capona esque of like, yeah, we finally found something to nail you on, so we're going to And so he got indicted last year, and it is actually pretty impressive, Like how quickly his machine fell apart? Yeah, like he just he didn't have an air ready to take control. Um. And so it's not that like machine politics has gone

from Chicago. It's more that instead of a machine, there are now going to be a bunch of smaller machines um, which is going to make it easier for like normal everyday people to actually have some saying the political process,

which is a good thing. Yeah, and like the Choco machine fucking sucks as I mean, like we talked about sort of val Like I mean Valist was a machine guy, right, yes, absolutely, and you know, and he is like the thing about the the machine has two values, and it's corruption and neoliberalism. And honestly, like not even neoliberalism so much anymore. It's

mostly just corruption. Yeah, I mean they've kind of I would say, I think they've gotten less ideological over the last twenty years, like well, like I think the last like decade and a half. But they yeah, they really

they really fuck it. Like Chicago was like the political machine, and you know, like I mean like they're in large part responsible for the creation of Obama's career, and they've parleyed that into losing to like the least popular beyor in like a generation, and then losing again to Brandon like to somehow to Brandon Johnson. And it's I don't know if they've they've they failed spectacularly and I fuck them. They're awful, and I yeah, yes, absolutely they yeah. Fuck

these guys. They they've they've robbed, they've they've rubbed the working class for two fucking long. Yeah, no, fuck these guys, good riddens. Um, the world will be better when they're dead. Yeah, do you know what else the world would be better then? If you know? Okay, that that was that was That was not my That was not my best effort. I apologize. But the world's question mark. Maybe better place if you buy these products and services question mark. I don't know

if I'm legally allowed to say that. We'll see anyways, here's so bad and we are back. Yeah, we should talk about what Johnson actually wants to do. You well, do you want to get into that or do you want to talk about the city council first? I think they actually overlap pretty well. Um, so like we can, let's let's run through what Johnson says he wants to do, and we can then talk about how much of that

might happen. So Johnson, like we were talking about, is definitely going to be the most progressive mayor in Chicago's history in terms of what he can't paignt On. At least, this was a crime election, Like the dominant issue was crime, and Johnson did not say the words defund the police. In fact, he actually explicitly said that he would not

cut the police budget. But aside from like those literal words, he very much is in line with the progressive priorities of de emphasizing like using people with guns who go through like six weeks of training or whatever. So he wants to pass a bill called Treatment Not Trauma, which is replacing cops with mental health responders for nine one

one calls about mental health crises. He wants to pass another bill called the Piece Book Ordinance, which would expand restorative justice and violence intervention like projects and programs in the city. And he also wants to pass an ordinance to put significant restrictions on police department raids and like the police department's just actual ability to do raids altogether.

There is a very infamous contract here in Chicago called the Shop Spotter Contract, which is this dumb software that is supposed to be able to like tell police when a gun goes off, and like, as far as I can tell, doesn't and it's just like straight up doesn't work. So Johnson wants to get rid of that. He also wants to eliminate the gang database, which if you are

from Chicago you probably know what we're talking about. Is this very infamous list of about one hundred and twenty thousand people, ninety five percent of whom are either black or Latino. And they are on this list called the Gang Database, more or less because one day some random Chicago police officer decided to put them on the list. It's very dumb, it's very racist, it's very blatantly unconstitutional,

and hopefully Brandon Johnson is able to get rid of it. Yeah, and these and these are all things, like you knows, as much as we can talk about the extent to which like is, you know, as much as we can we can talk about the sort of the complicity of like mental health responders and the police system wherever the fuck, Like these things would all like make a lot of

people's lives better and making the police weaker. And you know, I mean one of the things about this election, right is that the people who are actually affected by crime vote for Johnson. The people who are not affected by crime at all all voted for Vallas, yep. And part of the reason for that is that, like, Okay, if you're in a place like in Chicago that has a bunch of crime, you were dealing with, like you're dealing with the crime you're dealing with a lot of people

getting shot, which is fucking shit. And then you're also dealing with the CPD, who are like function most of the time are functionally a cartel about every like we're kind of due for another set of like prosecution from the like roughly every like seven or eight years, there's a massive series of arrests by the FBI or like defense come in and like discover that there's like a giant there's a giant cartel operating out of the CPD.

We've talked about this discover and discovering air quotes because everyone knows, oh yeah, everyone knows. And then you know, the Chicago police in particular are very famous for the Code of Silence, which is that every single person, if a cop commits a crime, every single other cop will cover for them, going right up to the like the top of the ladder of the police chiefs and all

the way down to like l dipshit like like beat cop. Yeah, and you know, and so you know, like if you're a person who has to do with these people, oh, it sucks. It fucking sucks. And like Chicago is kind of um in many ways, not the ground zero, but like a ground zero for a phenomenon where you have

these poor neighborhoods of color. Who you know, the people who live in these neighborhoods, they are simultaneously over policed and under police because the police don't bother to show up half the time when like they're theoretically needed, right like someone gets shot, you call nine one one, and the cops don't bother showing up for hours if they bother showing up at all. And at the same time, when they do show up that you often cause more

problems than they solve. Like Chicago has really truly horrific clearance rates of violent crime. And this is mostly because CPD just insists on maintaining this really awful balance. You know, if you do believe in police, you want there to

be a pretty healthy balance between beat cops and detectives. Right, Well, this Chicago Police Department, there almost are no detectives left, Like it's almost all beat cops, and so there's not many resources that go into actually investigating crimes that can't be solved by someone just walking around or driving around in a patrol car. So these neighborhoods, like you know, you go down to the South Side or the West Side.

A lot of these A lot of the residents in these neighborhoods would tell you, because they're not leftists, right, so they would tell you that they want more police officers. But they don't want more beat cops necessarily, like they want more detectives, and they want officers who are actually going to be who care about them as people. Unfortunately, the Chicago Police Department is made up of fascists, so like, um,

you know, low chances on that front. But it's like that is the problem these neighborhoods are facing, is that like the police don't bother to care, and when they bother to show up, they often make things worse. Yeah, and I think, you know, but I think everything that's sort of important here right is like you get a lot of you know, like it's very easy for people to be like, oh hey, look, actually these people want

more police. But it's like, you know what when you look at what there was a study taken right before the election that was talking about voters like what their preferences on like what their sort of opinions on crime are. Oh yeah, yeah, I know what, Yeah we were talking about. I think it was like only eighteen percent of the people who said that crime was important to them one in war cops and almost everyone we part part of it was like they like one of the big concerns

was legal guns. And then the other big conservat was just like the fact that there's these places are really poor and there's no opportunities for people because it's like there's there there aren't economic opportunities. There are so many guns just on, you know, just lying around in these communities. And obviously that's a problem throughout the country, but it's

especially bad in low income neighborhoods in Chicago. Um. And the other thing was mental health, like you know, and that's one of the other things that Johnson wants to do is he wants to reopen the mental health clinics that got closed down by Ram or Ram Emmanuel, who is a previous mayor of Chicago, who is currently being inflicted upon the people of Japan as the US ambassador. And you know, um, they deserve it. This this, this is what you get for siding with the CIA, You

fucking fucking dipshits. Man. Like if the label Democratic Party didn't want to have to get have to deal with Rob Emanuel they shouldn't have taken all that CIA money. Um, but yeah, like Johnson wants to you know, reopen these health clinics. He wants to increase funding for public schools, which have very much not gotten the funding that they need in Chicago for the past several decades at this point,

he also want to expand public transportation in Chicago. Like there are a lot of proposals flying around for expanding the train lines and bus lines and bike rid There are also, as me and I were talking about before we started recording, there are a lot of lead pipes, like water pipes in Chicago. Yes, and and like Chicago is like supposed to be replacing them, it's proceeding very slowly.

Johnson wants to speed that up. There's like just very genuinely a lot of research on the books directly linking lead poisoning to a lot of social problems. And so it's very much one of these things where it's like, you know, if you replaced the lead pipes, crime will go down. And I want to talk a little bit about the infrastructure stuff for second, because like I okay, in the in the last three years, Chicago's public transit system has just been fucking imploding. Oh, there are it's

so bad. There are. There are reasons for this, some of which I can talk about, some of which I can't. Like partially was depend partially letters the pandemic, and they like a bunch of the people who supposed to be running the system fucking died because you know, they got forced to work through the pandemic. But like you know,

you'll like trains just won't show up. There are buses that are basically unusable because it's it's like you're basically sitting there trying to roll double ones as to whether the bus will fucking show up at all. Um, the wait times you're enormous, Like it's a real shit show, and like it's it's substantively way worse than it was when I was in the city and like fifteen nineteen. Yeah, it's really really bad, and it's it's it's atrocious. Yes.

The other factor that's we talked about there is that like, so the Chicago public transit system is not free like most system, Like it is funded by rider fares. Like it's very Yeah, it costs a lot to get on. Comparatively, it costs a lot to get on the trainer ground on a bus and one of the kind of like self reinforcing cycles that has been playing out the last few years that Chicago also has a really bad homelessness problem, and this is directly linked to the fact that the

city just does not want to give people housing. Yeah, and so what ends up happening is that a lot of Chicago's homeless residents, especially in the colder winter months, they end up on the trains, especially the two lines

that run twenty four hours a day. And you know, these are people who are really you know, they're living in really really terrible conditions, like they don't have regular access to clean food and water, let alone like clean access to like like regular access to like hygienic facilities. And so ridership really plummeted on the lines where homeless people started to like just go on in order to

stay warm. And so you get the hit because rider fares are now down because people don't want to deal with being on the same train line as homeless people who you know, frankly just don't smell that good or

have mental health problems. And the city doesn't want to give these homeless people housing, let alone, like even like smaller things like like access to bathing facilities or healthcare or anything like that, and so it becomes a self reinforcement cycle of now fares are down, so there's less investment, so more people abandon the system. And it is this thing where like this will this would get solved if Chicago committed to giving homeless people housing, but that's just

not where the city has unfortunately been. Yeah, and I mean, you know, and what what's happening instead is like, you know, increasing anti homeless architecture. Like Chicago train stations fucking suck ass because they're all designs so that's impossible to sit on anything. There only two benches in each station. It sucks some of these stations, like it's so bad, like

it's just awful. Like one of the things that Chicago has they have these like you know, it gets really really cultural in the winter, so they have these like warming stations so that when it's like fucking negative twenty out, you can be in the warming things. But there's no they intentionally make it so there's no benches in them,

so you can't sit in them. Yeah, it sucks it like it's it's you know, it's they have this really just like the hatred of homeless people is turned basically into a war against all society waged by the city,

and yeah, it's atrocious. The good news is that Brendan Johnson wants to pass an ordinance called Bring Chicago Home, which would um put a tax on property transfers for like I think it's like homes that are worth over a million dollars that and the money from that tax would go entirely to funding programs for the city's homeless residents all the way up to an including permanent shelter

or like permanent housing solutions. So you know, you know, fingers crossed on that one because that, I think, along with the public safety measures, is really the thing that the city needs the most. And Johnson also on the housing front, he wants to liberalize zoning laws, which I know is a very big debate on the left at the moment about you know, how we go about approaching building more housing. Johnson very much is on like the

probe development end of things. He wants to liberalize zoning laws and make it so that it's easier to build multifamily housing and previously like single family housing zoned areas. He does also want to pass just cause for eviction, so like your landlord would not be able to throw you out just because, which is a good thing. Chicago's

lands are really shit. They're terrible, I see across the board. Terrible. Yeah, like I God, like I have seen shit doing Canada organizing that is like like like I think things that make me like have to control my reflex to vomit just remembering them. Truly atrocious. Um. But yeah. The other thing, and that that something that will matter to you if you are living in Chicago very much, is that Johnson

wants to cap property taxes. So um. One of the things that's been driving a lot of reactionary politics in Chicago is that property taxes here are linked to inflation, um, which means that if you are a property owner in Chicago, in the last couple of years, your property taxes went up by like fifteen plus percent, which understandably made a lot of people mad because you know, if you if your taxes go up by that much that fast, you at least wanted to be going to do do because something

good and under our previous well soon to be previous Mayor Lorie Lightfoot, that absolutely was not happening, yeah, over time or some shit like yes. So Johnson is he campaigned on decoupling property taxes from inflation so they would no longer just automatically go up, which would bring a lot of financial relief to a lot of Chicago families.

And also he would basically like wants to pass a lot of taxes focused on wealthier residents as well as big businesses to help fund some of the programs, which brings us to the City Council and how much of a chance he has a guned has passed, which is better than you might think if you are familiar with Chicago politics. Something that surprises people who don't live in the city is that Chicago is not run by progressives.

There has actually pretty much never been a progressive majority on the City Council and there isn't There will not be a progressive majority on the new one that comes in with Johnson. He is going to be presiding over a minority government. In parliamentary terms, which I think we should use more often because I'm a nerd and I find it fun. But basically, there are fifty members of

the Chicago City Council. They're called aldermen because we insist on having a city council that is the size of a state legislature here, and about twenty two of them are going to be aligned with Johnson more or less, so he's going to be three votes short on a lot of things. At least from the beginning. He is going to be negotiating with the black political establishment here in Chicago, which is one of the smaller machines that is left in the aftermath of Madigans and ointment. And

we are going to see how this goes. Some of those black alderman are friendlier to Johnson from the get go, partially because of ideology and partially because a lot of them just like personally know him and like him. Some of them are very against him for similar reasons, like they either ideologically don't line up or they just dislike him on a personal basis. Like we should talk, we should say a little bit about Johnson's not like some

kind of like political political outsider. No, He's been around. He's kind of kind He has like interesting relations with the old sort of like prep Winkle, like labor machine. Yeah, he's definitely like Johnson is definitely part of a machine. His relationship with like the old machine was very bad.

But he is definitely part of a machine that is tied up in like the institutional labor unions that have a lot of sway and democratic politics here, including the Chicago Teachers Union, which, like you know, Vallas's whole stick during the runoff was that Johnson would be a stooge for the teachers Union, and the teachers Union really just like the teacher This is actually kind of funny because like the Teachers Union really just swept the board here, not just with Johnson, but with like a lot of

the city council races where they weighed in. So if you are a member of the Chicago Teachers Union who does not approve of their leadership, buckle up, because the next several years they are going they are almost certainly going balls to the wall of like, well, if we can get a may or, we can get a lot of other people too. Yeah, and we should mention here Vitch. So a lot of the other unions in Chicago, like, yeah,

they arrange a to shit. The Chicago Teachers Union got taken over by this group called Corps, who are like a sort of rank and file like left e Like I think, I think a good way to understand core is that like with the caveat that, like teachers in Chicago really don't make that much money in the grand scheme of things, so like income wise, this is not line up. But these people are very much like kind

of resistance liberals on steroids. Um, Like they're not going to be like frontliners in a socialist revolution anytime soon, but like they are definitely on the far left of the Democratic Party coalition. Yeah, well and we should like they're not like like they are they are like I don't know, I have complicated feelings on them from that sort of anarchist respective. They're like they're they're as good of a thing of like union people as like you

currently have. Again we've talked about this could change with and you very quickly. But yeah, they've they've been responsible for pushing a lot of things that are very good. Yes, and they've they've they've turned a union into like I mean, well it's okay, so like I want thing to talk about. Like they actually do go on strike, which is the thing that a lot of unions don't. Like, they go on strike. They do they do political things that are usually pretty good. Um, and they are an actual sort

of like they're an actual class space for things getting better. Yes, they are. The Chicago Teachers Union is definitely like a net good force in city politics. UM and something that also like CTU gets a lot of negative attention even on a national level. And so something that surprises people who don't live in Chicago, if they know about the Teachers Union at all, is that the CTU is actually very popular among the city's residents. Most like, people love

the Chicago Teachers Union. Like when the teachers last went on strike, the public was over overwhelmingly on their side, which is why they won. UM and CTU also like they're twenty nineteen strike against Glory Life foot was very much like the inspiration that touched off a lot of the teacher strikes that happened in red states over the next several months. UM like they very much kind of

led the way in some in some areas. Like so they are like like Mia, I have complicated feelings about the CTU, but overall they're a good thing for city politics,

and like they make Chicago a more progressive place. Yeah, and this is the true for like a while to like like to the extent that when like I think like a back in twenty twelve, and Core was like like back back when Core sort of first taken over and was first doing their strikes, Like even the CTU people were surprised about the extent to which like when they went out, like the streets turned into a party, Like people actually really do like them, Like I mean

the cops don't, but like fuck them like people, so the cops don't like them. And to see to use credit, most Chicago teachers dislike the cops. Yeah, they've they've been they've been trying to get cops out of schools, which is good because yes, cops in schools are especially in Chicago,

it's really bad. The last thing I think we should mention about the City Council before we move on to some of the other elections we need to talk about is one of the things that gets criticized about the left as an electoral force in places like New York or Los Angeles, especially those two places, is that's very dominated by white people. And I do want to provide the context for those of you who are not from

the Chicago area, like that's not true in Chicago. The progressive movement and the left, like the leftist movement on the electoral level in Chicago is very much driven by people of color. And you saw this in the City Council election results. Almost every single seat that progressives flipped on the City Council was in a black or brown ward, and even the two wards, like the two white majority wards where they flip seats, the new aldermen or Alder

women in both cases are people of color. So like, this is just like context for those of you who are not from Chicago. This is not a case of like white leftists gone wild. Like this very much is a rainbow coalition, not just in the sense that Brandon Johnson won the election off of rainbow coalition, but in the sense of the electoral left in Chicago is very very much a rainbow coalition and has been very effective

because of that. Yeah, and it's very funny too, because you see people like those sort of right wingers in Chicago like constantly screaming about like Lake Front liberals, and you look at like the actual base of like the policy shit, it's like, okay, this is this is same

dot was actually happening here? Yes, the honest like the thing about like race in its relationship with progressive politics of Chicago is that the most progressive neighborhoods Chicago, based on their voting patterns, are almost always the most racially integrated. And that's not to say that like all of the

racially integrated neighborhoods are progressive, because that's not true. There are some pretty integrated neighborhoods on the Southwest Side that are like very conservative because a bunch of cops live there. But most of the racially integrated neighborhoods of Chicago are also the most progressive neighborhoods. And that like really just flies in the face of the whole like white Lakefront liberal narrative and is something to pay more attention to. Okay, again,

you cannot be emphasized enough. Brandon john in the progressive candidate is black. He's running against a white guy. There was a very large attempt to paint like Brandon Johnson

is like an out of touch like white liberal. It's like, which is very yeah, I think like they just have I don't know, I mean, it was just the sort of like ideological bankruptcy of like like the sort of like capitalist establishment is like they have nothing right, like they're there, like the only thing they have left is like calling a black guy white, and it's just like, shut the funk up, like we believes the shit anymore. Like and on that note, it might be time for

some ads. Yeah we are, we are back from our ads. I hope you have enjoyed the destruction of the entire world. Yeah, okay, so they were. We have talked about Chicago for a long time because you're both from Chicago. It's very funny and it's very interesting. But oh, actually, okay, I'm realizing this. There's one more thing I do. The two more things I do specifically want to mention about Brandon Johnson that

I forgot earlier. One is that he you know, it's genuinely unclear to me whether this is a real ideological belief he has or whether this is the thing that you said to not get called ninety semi because it was electorally expedient. But he released a really really shitty statement on like what got divestment and sanctions of Israel. Yeah, like her personally, Yeah, it was terrible. It was really terrible.

Like but like, based on what I saw from the aftermath of that, I'm inclined to believe that this was more something he was told to say. And the reason for that is because the reaction that got with the crowd he was in front of it was like he was speaking with a Jewish organization. Like the the action was very like okay, dude, but that's not what we asked you about. Um. Like it was a response to a question about like, oh, you know, how do you

handle anti semitism? Um. And I think there are just unfortunately a lot of really dipshit consultants in the Democratic Party who hear the words anti Semitism and think you have to talk about Israel, which is really truly and ironically anti semitic of them to think um, Like, yeah, I think he was probably told to say that, I'm not going to go out on a limit. I guess what his actual beliefs on Israel and House Dine are, But I'm pretty confident that that was his consultants being dumb. Yeah.

But like I like the but the actual consequences, like he was equitting, like he was equitting by Nti Semitism. He like, go, you should try to go find the clip somewhere because it's genuinely bizarre and shit. And this is this is the part of the episode or what to remind people that, like when when when these kinds of people get into power, idiots not as good as

people think, it's going to be like another thing. He very like he almost immediately like right after he got elected, started trying to convince Biden to have the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which would be a fucking shit show. Yeah, this is me from the future here. Two days after we recorded this, the Democratic Party announced that the twenty twenty four Democratic National Convention will indeed be held in Chicago.

So yeah, it's gonna suck. That effort predates him, like that's already been in the worst we like, he definitely immediately came out and said like, yes, I'm in support of this, yeah, which is like some people who don't

understand why. Okay, So, like the thing that happens when when when national convention comes to your city is that your city is occupied by the cops and then like wherever the convention is happening basically turned into a war zone because anyone who comes out and trying to protest them just gets like the ship beaten out of them. Yes, and there's also usually a lot of anti homeless policies

they get rolled in advance. We actually we would this is it's it's it's not as bad as the stuff we talked about with Lula in terms of the World Cup.

But it's a similar kind of thing that you get with these kinds of candidates where they do these sort of like giants, they do these sort of like mega project developmentalism shit because they want the status that comes from it, and the result is stuff that sucks and that you know, nominally like like at least in theory, like contradicts the rest of his platform, right like this this is going to be a thing that brings a

lot of cops into the fucking city. He's in theory supposed to be trying to have policing done by like people who are cops. Um, that's gonna suck if it works. Yeah. So and that is that is your reminder for if you do live in Chicago like me and I, that just because Brandon Johnson got elected does not mean that you could to sit home. Um, Like if you are involved or invested in Chicago progressive politics, Um, just because you have a progressive mayor doesn't mean you get to

sit back and relax. You have to do a lot of work to hold these people's feet to the fire. Yeah, like you're like, you're you're gonna end up fighting these people and it's gonna suck, and you're gonna have to do it. Like if if if you if you believe in the things that you think that you claim to believe to you when are not sort of just acting out of like you know, either you're not just purely

acting out a sort of candidate loyalty. You were you were going to have to fight people that you helped get elected, and you're gonna have to prepare for that. Start the five stages of grief. Now, okay, moving moving moving on from that ship, moving on, we need to

talk about Wisconsin. Um. The other big election that happened on Tuesday night was an election that flipped the Supreme Court of the State of Wisconsin from a conservative majority and not just like lowercase C conservative, but like batch and saying Christian nationalists conservative, from a majority of those people to a liberal majority that is hopefully going to

make life better for the people of Wisconsin. So, for those of you who are not paying attention to this, which is likely even more than the people who are not paying attention to Chicago because state Supreme Court races. Most people if you tell them about those, react with that's a thing. Yeah, and I mean to be fair. To be fair, this is probably the most nationally prominent like states board election of my lifetime. That means that maybe four people knew about it instead of one. Yes.

So on Tuesday night, Janet Protoswitz, who was the Democratic aligned candidate, beat the Republican aligned candidate Daniel Kelly, who was himself a former member of the Wisconsin Supreme Court by eleven points, which is a really big deal because Wisconsin voted for Joe Biden buy zero point six points. So this is very much like landslide level territory for wiscon for Wisconsin Democrats, it was very much a perfect storm.

Like the areas of the state that have been trending towards Republicans experienced massive reversion back towards proto saywits and the areas of the state that have historically been a Republican also really shifted left. And the reason this happened, the single reason it happened, is because of the Dobs ruling that overturned Rov. Wade and brought American gender dynamics.

Backed by a solid seventy five years, Protz successfully turned the campaign into a referendum on abortion rights, which is why she won by the margin she did. There was huge turnout in Madison, Milwaukee and college campuses. There were multiple college campuses, I think where there were more votes cast in this state Supreme Court election then there were

in the mid terms last November. So this really was like every single thing that possibly could have gone right electorally for the Democrats in Wisconsin did obviously with very very like grim background context of the overturning of Row, but a good sign for the future of the abortion rights movement that you know, people voters did not forget about dabs after the midterms, like this is still an active force in national politics that is pushing people to

the left. M yeah, And I want to specifically talk about this for a little bit too, because like I think the media has kind of has really I think fallen down on the fucking job here, which is that like these poms like because there's like all all people in the fucking media class are either like themselves, are like hardline anti abortion gools, or the people who this doesn't affect and you know, so they just stopped giving a shit after like a couple of months because it's

like whatever, who cares. But like, this is a if you are living under this, like this is this is like you can't fucking ignore this, no, like it is it is a it is an immense engine of death and human suffering that you know, it's it's it's this is the US, right, we live under enormal Like we live under a lot of immense sort of engines of

death and human suffering. But this is this is a kind of engine that just sweeps through I mean, it sweeps across the sort of what you think of as like the quote unquote like like traditional sort of uh like I don't know, you know, like classizes in the right thing, but like you know, it's this is the thing that kind of sweeps across the the urban world divide in a lot of ways, Like it sweeps a quite a lot of quite across a lot of the

certain normal political divisions. Because the Republicans have been like their their their line on abortion has been hijacked by I want to say, hijack right. This is what this

is what, this is what these people always wanted. But it's it's been it's being set by a bunch of just deranged Christian nationalists whose opinion reflect maybe towards like thirty percent of the country backs not even that, Like the like the ruling of the judge down in Texas on I'm going to mess up how to pronounce this, and I apologize, but um, if a pristone which is an abortion like a pill that, among other things, can

induce abortions. Uh, there was like a Republican judge down in northern Texas who attempted, who like attempted to overturn the FDA's approval of the drug. The FDA proved this drug in the nineties. Um, and and his ruling very much was insane, like on top of just like the

superficial insanity of trying to do this. His reasoning was that, you know, this man wrote a ruling saying that the Constitution guarantees fetal personhood, which is a which you know would a result in a complete and total ban on abortion nationwide under all circumstances. And that's a viewpoint that is shared by less than ten percent of Americans. So like it's just you know, the Republican Party has gone

off the cliff after they went off the cliff here. Yeah, And you know, I don't know, I think this whole I think there's a lot of ways in which this entire sort of election, the election dynamics if this, are really grim because the Democrats, to the people who let the shit fucking happen, right like, for years and years and years and years, they just you know, they used abortion as an electoral thing and then did fucking thing to actually make sure that abortion would be that you know,

would be saving and they finally lost it. And now it's like, you know, it's the thing that's like like, it's it's it's it's the electoral issue that's coming to bail them out of their like electoral woes, and that fucking sucks in a lot of ways. But it also means, I don't know, like it's it's it's it's beating some

of the worst people in the fucking world. If we want to actually make sure that people have the ability to have safe abortions on demand, we are going to have to do a lot of fighting that is not

just showing up to these elections. Yes, absolutely, um, but it is yeah, like like Amia said, it is really just like heinous that so many of the Democratic Party big wigs who presided over the fifty years of Republicans saying they were going to be going to do this and not taking Republicans seriously, are never going to be sold accountable for this. Yeah, and I don't think I need to be you needs to be put it out

with this too. Was like the Republicans the entire time, We're in every single way they possibly could like outlawing abortion without literally outlawing it, and people just stood there like the party which is just just like we don't give a shit, Like we're not We're not going to like actually like fight this except for occasionally to run a losing candidate, right, Like I don't know, Yeah, no, it's it's insane, And like there are there are people in

the Democratic Party who were trying to raise the alarm. Those people were generally ignored. Um. But the you know, now that abortion rights are gone on a national level, um, we are seeing this electoral backlash and it is having the impact of like, you know, Republicans have been unable to effectively make the national conversation about inflation, or about crime, or about trans athletes, which is also a losing shoe

for them, but God knows they keep trying. They have been unable to make the national conversation about those topics because voters are now looking at them like, but you're the freaks that took our abortion rights away? What's wrong

with you? And in terms of Wisconsin, pro to say, which being on the Wisconsin Supreme Court is almost certainly she doesn't take office until August, which is a really weird amount of time for her to have to wait, Like, I don't know why Wisconsin is like that, but it is.

But once she is in office, Wisconsin should have restored abortion access, I would say almost immediately, basically, like as soon as someone can file a lawsuit over it, because right now, abortion is currently illegal in Wisconsin under a law from eighteen forty nine that the only exception to the law is to save the life of the mother, which, like, I think people who are not personally impacted by the possibility of pregnancy or the possibility of childbirth, I think

really don't emotionally internalize what the language around some of these exceptions means. And it's like, if you are hearing the words like the only exception is life of the mother, that's really terrifying because it means like, if you're going to be permanently injured as someone who's pregnant, but you're not literally going to die, abortion is not an option

for you. If the fetus that you are carrying, you know, whether you wanted an abortion or not, if that fetus has some kind of fatal defect, that is going to mean that your baby dies within hours or days after being born, and it is going to be in pain the whole time. Abortion is not an option for you. If you are pregnant because of sexual violence or because

of incest, abortion is not an option for you. And it's it's like, you know, I am a cisgender man, so like I can't personally understand, but like I can

only guess how terrifying of a reality that is. And the you know, the only good news out of this is that once pret to say Witz is in office, that law is probably going to go away as quickly as possible, which is a much needed victory for the people of Wisconsin, and hopefully is you know, carries the momentum forward for like post twenty twenty four, hopefully we have democratic trifecta again that can legislate abortion rights nationally and take it out of the ability, take away the

ability for courts to strike it down. There are some other ramifications for the state of Wisconsin that should also be mentioned. For those of you who live in Wisconsin. If I say the words public sector union law, you know what I'm talking about, the very infamous law that was passed by Scott Walker back in twenty ten, twenty eleven.

I think that really restricted the collective bargaining rights of public sector unions and like this sparked a recall campaign against Walker, which failed and proto Sait has said on record she said it in a campaign appearance, because this race really just discarded all pretensions of like judicial impartiality. But she said in a campaign appearance that she wanted to get rid of that law. So that law is

probably going away, or hopefully we'll be going away. Wisconsin also has very cherrymandard state legislative maps that are almost certainly going to be struck down. The same thing with its congressional maps, which means that Democrats can probably count on two more seats in the House post twenty twenty four, and also on a basic like do we live in

a democracy or not? Level in twenty twenty, when the Trump campaign was filing all of its really idiotic lawsuits alleging voter fraud, the Supreme Court of Wisconsin was the court that came the closest to taking those allegations seriously. They voted by one vote to dismiss the case because one of the conservatives broke ranks and he has been hounded by the far right in Wisconsin ever since. Wisconsin was one vote away from just throwing out the popular

election results. Like the popular vote results, so they're proto state which winning is literally an insurance policy for continuing to have the state of Wisconsin be a democracy. Yeah, which is good, Like I don't know that having a state that is effectively ruled by dictatorship that was about to attempt to install like a dictators president, um is good, Like I don't know. This is my my my lib take on this is in fact not good when I think a bunch of people are ruled by just an

open dictatorship. So, which is essentially what Wisconsin you know, has been barring Tony Evers's wins as a governor in twenty eighteen and twenty twenty two, like until he was in office, like Scott Walker presided over a single party dictatorship in Wisconsin. Um, and so like you know, but just part of also why proto state which was able to invite the margins that she did, because you know,

Wisconsin is a swing state. It is reliably going to be close to fifty fifty, but especially on social issues, it has a liberal majority, and a lot of people paid attention to this race and they saw correctly the opportunity to dismantle the dictatorship that effectively has had control

of Wisconsin for the last decade plus. Yeah, and I mean, you know, the other thing, like part of what we're what's happening here is that if conservatives are actually allowed to do uncontested rule in a place that's even like kind of not just like a one like conservative district, the results that they, like, the actual policies they put

in place are fucking horrifying. Yeah, it's bad, obviously bad, but like you get, I mean, you get you get stuff like what happened in to see in the last week, where they know, the state legislature expelled Democratic lawmakers for like engaging in the mildest of protests against like an open kerry bill and you know, just in a real

cherry on top moment. The Tennessee State legislature only expelled the black legislators who protested, and the white legislator who joined them survived her expulsion vote because you know, we don't want to be you know, like the days of the Republican Party not wanting to be two on the

nose about the racism are long gone. Um. But yes, so, But overall, good things happened in Wisconsin on Tuesday, and some of the really terrible things that were put into law in that state in the last decade are hopefully about to go away. Yeah, there were some other places, mostly in the Midwest because once again the coastal regions of the country led us down. But there were some other places where liberals or progressives did well on Tuesday.

Saint Louis, Missouri, has had a progressive city council, and there was a very strong kind of law and order challenge to that progressive majority based in the city's white majority. Wards and after Tuesday night, it's pretty clear that progressives will continue to have a majority on the city council. In Kansas City, on the other end of the state of Missouri, we are probably going to get the most

progressive city council that the city has ever had. There the main left wing group got all of its candidates through to the general election which is on June twentieth, and the main like right wing tough on crime group seems like it's going to be capped at winning two seats. So you know, once again, the Midwest is the engine

of American progressivism and the West coast can suck it. Yeah, there is one more piece of good news, which is that in Illinois there was a set of far right groups that ran a bunch of school board candidates on the like anti critical race theory, anti queer, anti trans platforms, and actually I'll just say the names of the groups because people should know. These groups are Awake Illinois, Moms

for Liberty, and the seventeen seventy six Project. Basically, these groups are you know, if you went to the South in the nineteen seventies, you had the Clan and then you had the White Citizens Council, which was the supposedly more respectable face of white nationalism in the South in the sixties and seventies, and groups like Moms for Liberty and Awake Illinois are kind of the equivalent to groups like the Proud Boys and very you know, fittingly with

the analogy here, these groups are primarily run and staffed by conservative women, just like white citizens councils were down south about fifty years ago, and thankfully these candidates almost all went down in Flames. I think there is a school board election in me and ice hometown, which is very notoriously conservative for people in the area, and even

in that in our hometown, they've lost. And like these losses extended into Downstay, Illinois too, And like there's a small city called Quincy in western Illinois where it's like, this is a a place that votes Republican routinely by like thirty points, like a sixty five percent majority, and the far right school board candidates lost in Quincy, Illinois. Um, so thankfully people saw through the bullshit and we're like, actually, you people are weirdos and we're not going to hand

you power. Yeah. Another thing it was very funny is Carbondale, which is like a very y like this is like like this is this is this is a Carbondale as a southern Illinois ass town is like not quite as far south technically speaking, because you can go in Illinois, but like it's close. Yeah, unliked their first transperson to serve in a city council anywhere in Illinois. So like they're they're getting cloverted fucking Carbondale like they had a

really just destroyed. And I'm very happy about this because I you know, a lot of kids are going to grow up in schools that are way less shitty than they were. Like even when I was there were like, God help the generation before us. It was just like survived that like would have killed like me and most of the people like I know, like yeah, yeah, no, the schools that me and I grew up in were not a great place to be queerer trans on any variety. But I mean this is also going to help because

of I have. I still don't know what the Biden administration was thinking about this, but like the new like rule that they're rolling out around trans participation in K through twelve sports through the Department of Education. Um, this got a lot of attention on Twitter in the last couple of days because I'm going to be as charitable as I can here to all of the people involved.

But there was a panic on in progressive s goals on social media and especially queer and trans circles, because the Washington Post decided to frame this rule in like the most like hyperbolic way possible. And this is not me saying that the rule is good, because the rule could definitely still be bad. But the Biden administration is essentially, from what I can tell, trying to include trans kids

in Title nine protections. The proposed wording of their rule is not great and definitely needs to be improved, But the outcome here can be good in the sense that it would ban blanket prohibitions on trans kids in K through twelve sports, and it would require exceptions to like it would require like any exceptions to pretty much be like, you know, you have to prove that there is a danger to like fair competition here, which is the standard that Title nine uses for sports for cisgender men and

cisgender boys and cisgender girls. So like can be good. Will you know, if you are invested in this, the public comment period on that rule is about to open, It's definitely a place where you should speak up and say, like, hey, the wording of this is a little shit, Like, let's be clearer here that the presumption should be that trans kids should be allowed to participate in on teams that

align with the gender they identify as. Um and thankfully, because a lot of these dipshit school board candidates lost, hopefully some of these school boards will be taking the right side of history here. Yeah, go go go. Yeah. Okay, So I'm slightly more angry about this than than you are, because I I don't know. I think I think there's a pretty glaring hole in this that let's transphobs just be like well, obviously like yeah, and I guess yeah. I think the fourteine is vague and it should be

made a lot less vague. I think it's bad. I don't know. I I think I think the backlash to the backlash about that went too far off. Now there's a bunch of people insisting that this is in fact a really good rule, and like no, like if if, if it's if it's If it's executed as is, it is going to let a lot of people do a lot of friend phobic shit. Yes, um, as is it is bad. If they change the wording of it, it can be better. Yeah, So I'd go yell at Biden

until he makes it less shit. Absolutely, Yet you have to do this. Yeah, if you see him, if you see him walking down the street, yell at him. If you see him in a restaurant, yell at him. Yes, yeah, very very genuinely like a It's always a good idea to yell at the Biden administration about anything, um, but be especially go yell at him about this. This can be done multiple ways. You can reach out to your congressional representatives and tell them that you want the rule

are already made better. You can go there should be soon a direct like form you can fill out on the Department of Education website where you can provide your own personal opinion on the rule. But basically go yell at the fine administration and tell them to insert language into the rule that makes very clear that the legal presumption that must be overcome should be that trans kids get to compete on the teams of the gender they

identify with. Yeah. So yeah, having now yelled about that for a bit, Yeah, we should, I think start wrapping up the last sort of bits of electoral news. Yes, okay, so the last thing I think we should talk about is probably Denver, Denver for those of you who do not know me and I, which is probably almost I would hope almost everyone who listens to I will die on the hill that Denver is a West Coast city.

It is not physically on the ocean, but the vibes rancid, and like the rest of the West Coast, Denver let us down. On Tuesday night, the mayor's election is going to runoff between two candidates who both have pretty awful platforms on homelessness, and there is one that is worse. So if you are looking for the candidates to hold your nose and vote for, right now you know see

how it goes. But right now I would say that is Mike Johnson, not because he has anything good to say he's he doesn't, but because his opponent, Kelly bro says that she would have homeless people arrested if they refuse to leave camps in public parks. So she just fucking blows and she should be, you know, never be

allowed anywhere in your power. The other bit of Denver news I think we should talk about is there was a housing referendum where the proposal was to turn an old golf course is not currently being used into a housing development that would have I think twenty five percent affordable units, and it would part of it would also

be turned into a park. And truly, what I thought was the dumbest thing that happened on Tuesday night, the proposal lost, and the Denver branch of DSA was campaigning against this housing development on the premise that building more housing is bad if someone profits off of it. And I definitely understand that profit. Listen, like, profiting off of housing is bad. We also need more housing, and Denver

especially desperately needs more housing. And somehow we got this incredibly stupid coalition of nimbies and like green space environmentalists and the Denver DSA that all came together to stop at the housing development. And Mia, I'm I'm sure you probably think a little differently about this than I do. But I saw this and I was like, what the hell, man? I mean? Okay, so here's what I know very little

about this. My take is, if you have the opportunity to destroy a golf course and you vote no, you are like, as long as you're not literally building a prison camp like reactionary dougs the bourgeoisie, destroy every golf course always a good you know, That's actually that's pretty good. That's that's a pretty good line. I should start saying it to more people. Destroy every golf course you can.

But yeah, now this it was I think the most frustrating thing that I saw happen on Tuesday night, and I think it is one of those questions that the left is going to have to deal with in the next couple of years. Is like, all right, we have a lot of cities that desperately need a lot more housing. So how do we get it done, if you, you know, without just turning it over to the real estate lobby, because obviously that would also be really shitty. Um, but

the answer cannot be don't build more housing. Yeah, I mean, the thing I will say about this also is that another answer is, like, you know, we've covered this on the show to like the other part of this, if if you don't want a city that's just like absolutely horrific, you need to have a strong tennis movement, and you need to need to have a tennis movement that's willing to move beyond things like rank control and move towards

like actively like fighting disease buildings from like from developers. And that's a that's the thing that's happening that there are places where people are doing this. It can be done. Yeah, so yeah, like that, I don't know, Like I feel like, I don't know. I'm not going to go into my entire thing on the sort of NEWBIB debate other than saying that, like, increasing the power of tenants will give you a bet, will we'll give you the best options? Yes,

very very much. Tenant unions are good. Um, yelling at the Biden administration is good. Destroying golf courses is good, and abortion rights are good. Yeah, and go fight for these things and things that aren't elections, because every once in a while, an election will give you a result which is the worst person on earth has been replaced by a slightly better person. And you know, I do like to not be ruled by the worst person on earth. But the the the ideal political situation is the one

we're not. We're like people cease to rule over us. So, yes, you got you gotta do the non electoral work alongside the electoral work. You can't just be relying on elections to make things better. You've got to be pushing for it all the time. Yeah, well, I say, yeah, I am much softer on electoral work. Oh yeah, Mia would rather Mia would rather than everyone doing electoral work start

doing better things with their time and her eyes. Yeah, but if if you are going to be a person who does electoral stuff like it doesn't it doesn't matter what electoral victories you win if you are just not doing anything that isn't electoral, because the actual sort of plow, the actual composition of political power in the city, and the sort of the city's class composition, the balance of forces between sort of like yeah, I mean things like

between unions and employers, right like directly between workers and between the employers. There are lots and lots and lots of things that are very very important even if you are an electoral list, that are mostly decided outside of almost almost entirely decided outside the ballot box. And if you don't take that into account and you try to just run like the most well engineered political campaign, you're

gonna end up like two you're going to get sixteen Democrats. Democrats. Yeah, yeah, Now everything that Mida just said, and yeah, yeah, I hope you've enjoyed the longest amount of time I will ever be caught talking about an election that doesn't involve a coupe. Yeah, this make it happen to here. Yeah, thanks, thanks again for having me. Yeah, thanks for coming on and all of you go happen to someone. It could

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