It Could Happen Here - Mild Progress Defeats Pure Evil: The Chicago-Michigan Election Special

Episode Date: April 12, 2023

Mia talks with electoral analyst Ali about the recent elections in Chicago, Michigan, and beyond and their implications for policing, abortion, and the continued existence of what passes for democracy.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I need to come up with a better bit than coming to you live, but coming to you from now fallen, apparently on fire, destroyed Chicago. So say the many oracles, soothsayers, and cops who live in this city who are now absolutely convinced that the city is going to descend into crime and chaos, etc., etc., after the cop candidate got absolutely blown the fuck out in the last elections. And yeah, with me to talk about this election and a couple of other elections that happened on the same day that were 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 me, Mia. 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 aldermen were having meltdowns on election night yeah so i guess i guess we could start with with the stuff that happened in chicago which is that paul valis the the the the the butcher of the public education system uh and running dog of the cops uh the hero of J6 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 Mia says, Paul Vallis, Yes. 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,

um, about, uh, when all the results are done coming in at a couple of weeks, it'll be about 52% for Johnson and 48% for Valis. As Mia says, this lets a lot of people on the left no longer have to, uh, keep up the charade of,

Oh, Johnson's the best thing that has happened to us in sliced bread. For us, up the charade of oh johnson's the best thing that has happened to us in sliced bread if you are like more of a uh like democratic party loyal progressive voter this is a very very good thing in your eyes yeah and i think you know i think there's something very interesting and kind of fitting about this which is that yeah one of them you've talked about is that yeah like fred and johnson is the first like progressive tm mayor chargers had since like i mean literally since harold washington who was the first black mayor in the 80s and it's very interesting also because a bunch of

the reforms that harold washington did were specifically overturned by paul valis yeah like he's the guy who did a bunch of educational reforms that fucking sucked that destroyed uh harold washington's stuff it's no it's it's really wild how like um chicago politics is analogous to to go really out there for a second is analogous to the state of Hawaii in the sense that people never die. The same people are going to be on your ballot for 50 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. 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. the first progressive Chicago mayoral administration since Harold Washington. And Johnson won the same way as Harold Washington did. The backbone of Johnson's coalition, just as with Harold Washington's, was black voters. Johnson got about 80% of the black vote because in Chicago, elections are usually more about race than anything else but in addition to the black vote johnson won 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 2015, a actual turnout surge of millennial and Gen Z voters. The Chicago Board of Elections 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 45 had a turnout surge of, I think it was about 20%, whereas voters older than 60, 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. And I think it's also, you know, we talked about this in the episode we did about Paul Fallas, 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 nightmarish age bracket of turnout in the first round is sort of a miracle. But it got a lot better for him in this one, and that

genuinely seems to have... I don't know. 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 remains to be seen the extent to which this was about like the fact that valis 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. Daley was mayor of Chicago as recently as 2011.

That's true. But I, I don't know. Daley. Yeah. I mean, it's not like Chicago has good mayors, but I think he would have been. OK, 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 a pretty like yeah and you know that fucking sucks but he got clobbered 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 in Chicago where the Cubs stadium is, is right next to Boys Town, which is the fucking gay district. And if you go in and look at, well, I say it's the gay district. It's now

the rich gay part of Chicago because everyone else got priced out. Well, it kind of is. No, it's not. Market Park is the rich gay part of Chicago because everyone else got priced out well it kind of is no it's not market park is the rich gay part of Chicago that's true okay it's more of a rich gay part of Chicago than it was like 40 years ago like 30 years ago

yeah but like literally exactly split you can like see in the data exactly split down the line the gays voted for Brandon Johnson and all the people and all the Cubs fans voted for valis 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, which is a bunch of like stick figures and just like black and white labeled phallus voters running from a like steamroller,

a pink steamroller with a rainbow like wheel being driven by a bunch of gay people. And the steamroller is labeled boystown 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 this like this is this is the hair washing coalition like this is the coalition that if you if you're an elect electoralist 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 is sort of oh it's a goddamn miracle yeah

shit never works people have been trying to do this for like 40 fucking years and it never works i mean people have been trying to do this for 40 plus years but it's also like this is really the first election that i can think of anywhere um since uh barack obama's re-election in 2012 where like this is the coalition that actually put someone in like an office that got a lot of national attention and that mattered. Um, 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. Um, but like in 2012, Barack Obama became the first person to be elected president of the United States with less than, uh, 40% 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 swung left in 2020. So this is a turnout and coalitional puzzle that most people fail to put together and that brandon johnson miraculously pulled off yeah and i 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 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 were a Johnson voter or a Valis voter or someone who stayed home, we can all come together in our hatred of that five 38 piece that was dropped on the morning of election day. Um, I, if you don't know what I'm talking about, you're lucky. And I'm not going to tell you. I will give you a very brief summary of it, which is that 538. No, we don't know. They did a racism. They did a racism. That's what I'll leave it at.

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 but hopefully um i hope 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 break 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 80 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, uh, 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 pay attention to. Which is wild, because, like, this happened, like, people fly in Bernie a lot, and it never matters, but it, like, it mattered here, which is sort of amazing. Absolutely. Like just a lot of this election was wild. Um, I think the other thing that really helped Johnson was that, um, 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 whiter than it was like 10, 15 years ago. But Chicago was a lot less white than it was in the 80s when Harold Washington was elected. And so like there was more of a ceiling on Paul Vallis's vote than Harold Washington's opponents

had, which meant that Vallis had to be able to appeal to not just white voters who reflexively 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, Vallis 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 wasn't like a huge win, but it was a win. But the problem is that turnout on the southwest side of Chicago, which is where 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 that like this is the kind of turnout that inspires the online jokes about how no one ever bothers to vote level bad turnout 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. Um, Valis also won Chinatown, which is something that got a fair amount of attention 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 Ajaan 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 Vallis 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 hardline 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 the most famous noodle shops there was a guy who was at january 6th like this is this is a like a a stereotypically unbelievably dog shit place

for johnson and yeah and i'm i will say this about the china chinatown and this is something like i mean you just you can know this is something like i've been tracking for a while i mean just by like walking through it is that chinatown during the pandemic and kind of after it was having a bit before has gotten just notably more fascist like oh yeah there's a lot of stuff there i mean the the the anti-homelessness stuff is really really really intense 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 gonna like go right like that's like that's that you know that that's the you can you can you

can find marks writing about this phenomenon like 1848 right like this this has been a thing since It's just the beginning of time. But I don't know. It's gotten legitimately kind of scary down there. Yeah. And a lot of it also, I think, was there's been a divergence between how the North Side Asian enclaves, like the Desi neighborhood and theietnamese neighborhood have responded to this kind of stuff um versus chinatown especially on the other uh big social uh change that happened during the pandemic which was the 2020 black lives matter protests yeah um 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 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-communist. There

was a state rep. I am probably going to butcher his name for which I apologize, but I'm pretty sure his name is pronounced Han Nguyen, who is Vietnamese himself. And he won the seat last year in 2022. And like, he's very progressive. So there has been this very sharp divergence in how the Asian neighborhoods in Chicago have responded to some of the social events of the last few years. Once again, my people, the great nation of China has fallen into 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 elections, something you should understand is that the capital M machine in Chicago is pretty much gone now. Um, and Brandon Johnson's win pretty much seals this. And it's not that the people are gone or that like the, you know, logistical, um,

operations of the machine are completely dead, but the machine has now lost two elections in a row. Um, because as much as Lori, as much as Lori Lightfoot as much as laurie lightfoot sucked and she sucked so much um she also was an anti-machine candidate um like she was like capital a anti-machine 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 two elections in a row mike madigan has now been like 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 40 years yes and he finally got uh indicted on some federal like charges of like i don't even remember what the charges were, but it was very like Al Capone ask 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. Like he just he didn't have an air ready to take control. And so it's not that like machine politics is gone from Chicago. It's more that instead of a machine, there are now going to be a bunch of smaller machines, which is going to make it easier for like normal everyday people to actually have some say in the political process, which is a good thing. Yeah. And like the Chicago machine fucking sucks ass. I mean, like we talked about sort of like I mean, Valis was a machine guy, which is a good thing. Yeah, and the Chicago machine fucking sucks ass. We talked about Valis was a machine guy, right?

Yes, absolutely. The thing about the machine has two values and it's corruption and neoliberalism. Honestly, not even neoliberalism so much anymore. It's mostly just corruption.

I think they've gotten less ideological over the last 20 years like well like i think like last like decade and a half but they yeah they they really they really fucked 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 parlayed that into losing to like the least popular mayor in like a generation and then losing again to brandon like to somehow to brandon johnson and it, I don't know. They've, they've, they failed spectacularly and fuck them. They're awful. And I, yeah. Yes.

No, absolutely. Yeah. Fuck these guys. They've, they've, they've, they've robbed the working class for too fucking long.

Yeah. No, fuck these guys. Good riddance. Um, the world will be better when they're dead. Yeah. Uh,

do you know what else the world would be better than if i 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 some ads. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, From the shadows. As part of Michael Duda Podcast Network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline Podcast.

And we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them

to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba.

He looked like a little angel. I mean, he look so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Cuba. Mr. González wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom.

At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian González story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we are back. Yeah, we should talk about what Johnson actually wants to do. 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 um so johnson like we were talking about is definitely going to be the most progressive mayor in chic Chicago's history in terms of what he campaigned on, at least. This was a crime election. 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 those literal words, the police budget um 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 to go through like six weeks of training or whatever um so he wants to pass um a bill called treatment not trauma which is replacing cops with mental health responders for 911 calls about mental health crises. He wants to pass another bill called the Peace Book

Ordinance, which would expand restorative justice and violence intervention 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 um there is a very infamous contract here in chicago called the shot spotter contract which is this dumb software that is supposed to be able to like tell police when a gun goes off um and like, as far as I can tell, doesn't. It 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

120,000 people, 95% 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 know, as, as, 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 make 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 valis 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 about every like we're kind of due for another set of like prosecutions for them like roughly every like seven or eight years there's a massive series of arrests by the fbi or like the feds come in and like discover that there's like a giant uh there's a massive series of arrests by the fbi or like the feds come in and like discover that there's like a giant uh there's a giant cartel operating out of the cpd we've talked about this discover and discover in air quotes because everyone knows oh yeah everyone knows and you know the the 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

uh going right up to the, like the top of the ladder of the police chiefs and all the way down to like L dip shit, like, like beat cop. Yeah. And you know, and so,

you know, like if you're a person who has to deal with these people and, Oh, it sucks. It fucking sucks. And like, it's awful. There's 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 9-1-1 and the cops don't bother to show up half the time when like they're theoretically needed, right? Like someone gets shot, you call 911 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, they 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, with 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, um, actually investigating crimes that can't be solved by someone just walking around or driving around in a patrol car. Um, 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 care about them as people. Unfortunately,

the Chicago police department is made up of fascists. like oh 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 i think the other thing 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 when you look at what there there was a study taken right before the election that was talking about voters uh like what their preferences on like what their sort of opinions on crime are oh yeah yeah i know what you're talking about i think it was like only 18 percent of the people

who said that crime was important to them wanted more cops and almost everyone we are part of it was like they like one of their big concerns was legal guns and then the other big concern was just like the fact that there's these places are really poor and there's no opportunity for people 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 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 Rahm or Rahm Emanuel, who is a previous mayor of Chicago, who is currently being inflicted

upon the people of Japan as the U.S. ambassador. And, you know, they deserve it. This is this is what you get for siding with the CIA. You fucking fucking dipshits man like if the liberal democratic party didn't want to have to get fucking have to deal with rob emmanuel they shouldn't have taken all that cia money um but yeah like johnson wants to you know reopen these mental 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 um he also wants 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 grid um there are also um as me and i were talking about before we started recording, there are a lot of lead pipes, like water pipes in Chicago.

So many fucking lead pipes. Yes. 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. Yeah.

And so it's very much one of these things where it's like you know if you replace the lead pipes crime will go down yeah um and i want to talk a little bit about the infrastructure stuff for a second because like i okay in the in the last three years chicago's public transit system has just been fucking imploding oh thereoding it's so bad there are reasons for this some of which I can talk about some of which I can't like partially it was partially it was the pandemic and like a bunch

of the people who were supposed to be running the system fucking died because you know they got forced to work during 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. The wait times are 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 in like 2015,

2019. Yeah. It's really, really bad. And it and it's it's it's atrocious yes the other factor that has to be talked about there is that like so the chicago public transit system is not free like most systems um like it is funded by rider fares like it's very yeah it costs a lot to get on oh comparatively it costs a lot to get on. Oh, comparatively, it costs a lot to get on the train or get on a bus. And one of the kind of like self-reinforcing cycles that has been playing out the last few years is 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 um and so what ends up happening is that a lot of of chicago's homeless residents especially in the colder winter months they end up on the trains especially the two lines that run 24 hours a day um and you know these are people who are really 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 um 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 health care or anything like that um and so it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle of now fares are down so there's less investment so more people abandon the system um 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's been happening instead is like you know increasing anti-homeless architecture like chicago train stations fucking suck ass because they're all designed so that's impossible to sit on anything oh my god there are like two benches in each station it sucks so many stations like it's so bad like it's just awful like one of the things that chicago has is they have these like you know it gets really really cold here in the winter so they have these like warming stations so that when it's like fucking negative 20 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, it, they, they, they have this really just like the, the, the hatred of homeless people is turned basically into a war against all

society waged by the city. And it's atrocious the good news is that brandon johnson wants to pass an ordinance called bring chicago home which would um put a tax on uh property transfers for like i think it's like homes that are worth over a million dollars um that and the money from that tax would go entirely to funding programs for the city's homeless residents all the way up to and 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. Um, and Johnson also on the housing front, um, 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. Um, Johnson very much is on like the pro development end of things. He wants to liberalize zoning laws and make it so that it's easier to build multi-family housing um in previously like single-family housing zoned areas um he does also want to pass just cause for eviction so like your landlord would not be able to throw you out just because yeah which is a good thing yeah chicago's landlords are really shit they're

terrible i i have across the board terrible yeah like i god like i have seen shit doing tenant organizing that is like like like like things that make me like have to control my reflex to vomit just remembering them like it's truly atrocious um but yeah uh the other thing and that something that will matter to you if you are living in chicago uh 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, which means that if you are a property owner in Chicago in the last couple of years, your property taxes went up by like 15 plus percent, which understandably made a lot of people mad. Because, you know, if your taxes go up by that much that fast you at least wanted to

be going to something good and under our previous well soon to be previous mayor lori lightfoot that absolutely was not happening yeah i was going to like cop over time or some shit like yes so johnson uh 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 uh which brings us to the city council and how much of a chance he has of getting this passed which is better than you might think if you are familiar with chicago politics um 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 50 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 22 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 Madigan's indictment. And we are going to see how this goes. Some of those black aldermen 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 um 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 yeah we should talk we should say a little bit about johnson's not like a some kind of like political like political outsider no he's been around he's kind of high he has like interesting relations with the old sort of like prepwinkle like uh labor machine um he he's definitely like johnson is definitely part of a machine um 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 in democratic politics here uh including the chicago teachers union which like you know valis' whole shtick during the runoff was that Johnson would be a stooge for the Teachers Union. And the Teachers Union really just like, 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. like a lot of the city council races where they wait in um so if you are a member of the chicago teachers union who does not approve of their leadership um buckle up because the next several years they are going they're almost certainly going balls to the wall of like well if we can

get a mayor we can get a lot of other people too yeah and we should mention here vetch so a lot of the other unions in chicago like are kind of eh yeah they range from eh to shit uh the chicago teachers union got taken over by this group called core who are like a sort of rank and file like left e like i 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 does 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're they're like i don't know i i have complicated feelings on them from the sort of anarchist perspective. They're as good of a thing of union people as you currently have. Again, we've talked about this. This could change within NU

very quickly, but they've been responsible for pushing a lot of things that are very good. They've turned the union into like i mean well it's okay so like one thing to talk about like they actually do go on strike which is the thing that a lot of unions fucking 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 sort of class base 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 um 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 uh among the city's residents. Like 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.

And CTU also like their 2019 strike against story life, but was very much like the inspiration that touched off a lot of the teacher strikes that happened in red states uh over the next several months um like they very much kind of led the way in some uh 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 has been true for like a while too like like to the extent that when like i think in like back in 2012 when core was like like back when core sort of first taking 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, fuck these people. The cops don't like them, and to CTU's credit, most Chicago teachers dislike the cops. Yeah, they've been trying to get cops out of schools, which is good because cops in schools are terrible. Especially in Chicago, it's really bad. to some of the other elections we need to talk about is, um, 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, uh, is that it's very dominated by white people. Um, 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. Um, the progressive movement and the left, like the leftist movement on an electoral level in Chicago is very much driven by people of color. Uh, 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. 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 alderwomen in both cases are people of color um 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 you see people like the sort of right-wingers in chicago like constantly screaming about like lakefront liberals and you look at like the actual base of like left policy shit it's like okay like this is this is this is simply not what's actually happening here yes the the honest like the thing about, like, race and its relationship with progressive politics in Chicago is that the most progressive neighborhoods in 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. of the racially integrated neighborhoods are progressive because that's not true um there are some pretty integrated neighborhoods on the southwest side that are like very conservative

because a bunch of cops live there um 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 um and is is something to pay more attention to okay again it cannot be emphasized enough brandon johnson the progressive candidate is black he's running against a white guy there was a very large attempt to paint like brandon johnson as like an out of touch like white liberal it was like yeah that was which is very weird 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 the sort of like capitalist establishment is like they have nothing right yeah they're like the only thing they have left is like calling a black guy white

and it's just like shut the fuck up like nobody believes this shit anymore like and on that note it might be time for some ads yeah Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

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He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

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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 a thing that he said to not get called anti-Semite because it was electorally expedient. he released a really really shitty statement on like boycott divestment sanctions of israel oh yeah like i personally oh yeah it was terrible it was really terrible 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 it got with the crowd he was in front of was like he was speaking with a Jewish organization.

Like the reaction was very like, OK, dude, but that's not what we asked you about. Like it was a response to a question about like, oh, you know, how do you handle anti-Semitism? 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. Like, yeah, I think he was probably told to say that um i'm not going to go out on a limb and i guess what his actual beliefs on israel palestine are um but i'm pretty confident that that was his consultants being dumb yeah but i but like i like the but the actual consequences like he was equitting BDS and anti-Semitism. He – like, you should try to go find the clip somewhere because it's genuinely bizarre and shit. And this is the part of the episode where I want to remind people that, like, when these kinds of people get into power, it is 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 mia from the future here uh two days after we recorded this the democratic party announced that the 2024 Democratic National Convention will indeed be held in Chicago. So, yeah, it's going to suck. That effort predates him. Like, that's already been in the works. Like, he definitely immediately came out and said, like, yes, I'm in support of this. Yeah, which is like some people don't understand why. Okay, so, like, the thing that happens when a national convention comes to your city is that your city is occupied by the cops. And then, like, wherever the convention is happening basically turns into a war zone because anyone who comes out to try to protest them just gets, like, the shit beaten out of them.

Yes, and there's also usually a lot of anti-homeless policies that get rolled out in advance. policies they get rolled out 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 they do these sort of like giant 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 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 that's going to suck if it works.

Yeah. 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 get to sit home. Um, like if you are involved or invested in Chicago progressive politics, um, just because you have a progressive mayor, it 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 and 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 you if you believe in the things that you think that you claim to believe to and are not sort of just acting out of like you know either you're not just purely acting on a sort of candidate loyalty you are you are 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 shit moving on we need to talk about wisconsin um the other big election that happened on tuesday night uh 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 batshit insane christian nationalist conservative uh from a majority of those people to a liberal majority that is hopefully going to make life better for the people of wisconsin um 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 um most people if you tell them about those react with that's a thing

um yeah and i mean to be to be fair to be fair this is probably the most nationally prominent like state Supreme Court election of my lifetime that means that maybe four people know about it instead of uh one yes so on tuesday night uh janet protisawitz uh 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 11 points which is a really big deal because wisconsin voted for joe biden by 0.6 points um so this is very much like landslide level territory 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 Protosiewicz. And the areas of the state that have historically been Republican also really shifted left. And the reason this happened, the single reason it happened, is because of the Dobbs ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and brought American gender dynamics back by a solid 75 years. Protisiewicz 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 um i think where there were more votes cast uh in this state supreme court election than there were in the midterms last november um so this really was like every single thing that possibly uh could have gone right electorally for the democrats in wisconsin did obviously with very very like grim background context of the overturning of Roe, but a good sign for the future of the abortion rights movement that, you know, people, voters did not forget about Dobbs after the midterms.

Like this is still an active force in national politics that is pushing people to the left. Yeah. And I want to specifically talk about this for a little bit too, because like, 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 people are just like because it's like all the people in the fucking media class are either like themselves are like hardline anti-abortion ghouls or they're people who this doesn't doesn't affect. So they just stop giving a shit after a couple of months because it's like, eh, whatever. Who cares?

This is a... If you are living under this, you can't fucking ignore this. No. It is an immense engine of death and human suffering that it's... This's, it's,

I mean, this is the U S right. We live under enormous, 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, it, it sweeps across the sort of what you think of as like the quote unquote like traditional sort of like I don't know like classifies the right thing but like you know it's something that like kind of sweeps across the urban world divide in a lot of ways like it sweeps across a lot

of the sort of normal political divisions because the Republicans have been like their line on abortion has been hijacked by, I want to say hijacked, right? This is what these people always wanted, but it's being set by a bunch of just deranged Christian nationalists whose opinion reflect maybe to, like, 30% of the country max. Not even that. The ruling of the judge down in Texas on, I'm going to mess up how to pronounce this and I apologize, but Mifepristone, which is a pill that, among other things,

can induce abortions. There was a Republican judge down in northern texas who attempted who like attempted to overturn the fda's approval of the drug the fda approved this drug in the 90s um 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 result in a complete and total ban on abortion nationwide under all circumstances. And that's a viewpoint that is shared by less than 10% 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,

I, I think this whole, I think there's a lot of ways in which this entire sort of election, the election dynamics of this are really grim because the Democrats are the people who let this 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 nothing to actually make sure that abortion would be, that, you know, would be safe. be that you know would be saved 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 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 no like like amia said it is really just like heinous that so many of the democratic party bigwigs who presided over the 50 years of Republicans saying they were going to do this and not taking Republicans seriously are never going to be held accountable for this. Yeah, and the other thing I need to put it out with this too was the Republicans the entire time

were in every single way they possibly could outlawing abortion without literally outlawing it. And people just stood that like the Democratic Party was just like, oh, 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 issue 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? Um, and in terms of Wisconsin, um, pro to say, which being on the Wisconsin Supreme Court is almost certainly, uh, she doesn't take office until august which is a really weird amount of time uh for her to have to wait like i don't know why wisconsin is like that but it is um but once she is in office um wisconsin should have restored abortion access i would say almost immediately um 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 1849 that the only exception to the law is to save the life of the mother, which 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 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 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. 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 um and the you know the only good news out of this is that once Protasewicz 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. hopefully we have a 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 2010, 2011, I think, that really restricted the collective bargaining rights of public sector unions and like this sparked a recall campaign against walker which failed um and protis awitz has uh said on record she said it in a campaign appearance um because this race really just discarded all pretensions of like judicial impartiality yeah um but she said in a campaign appearance that she wanted to get rid of that law um so that law is probably going away or hopefully will be going away um wisconsin also has very gerrymandered uh state legislative maps that are almost certainly going to be struck down um same thing with this congressional maps, which means that Democrats can probably count on two more seats in the house, uh, post 2024. Um, and also on a basic,

like, do we live in a democracy or not level? Um, in 2020, 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 um wisconsin was one vote away from just throwing out the popular election results i like the popular vote results so they're you know protis awitz 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 having a state that is effectively ruled by a dictatorship that was about to attempt to install like a dictator's president

is good like i don't know this is my my lib take on this is it is in fact not good when a bunch of people are ruled by just an open dictatorship so which is essentially what wisconsin you know has been um barring tony evers's wins wins as governor in 2018 and 2022, like until he was in office, like Scott Walker presided over a single party dictatorship in Wisconsin. And so like, you know, which is part of also why Proto-Savage was able to win by the margins that she did, because, you know, Wisconsin is a swing state.

It is reliably going to be close to 50-50. 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 if conservatives are actually allowed to do uncontested rule in in a place that's even like kind of not just like a 100 like conservative district i the results that they like the actual policies they put in place are fucking horrifying yeah it's bad it's like obviously bad but like you get i mean you get you get stuff like what happened in tennessee in the last week where they the the state legislature expelled democratic lawmakers um for like engaging in the mildest of protests against like an open carry 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 uh survived her expulsion vote um because you know we don't want to be like the days of the republican party not wanting to be too on the nose about the racism are long gone yeah um but yes so but overall good things happened in wisconsin on tuesday um 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 the Midwest, because once again, the coastal regions of the country let us down. But there were some other places where liberals or progressives did well on Tuesday. St. 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. Uh,

there, the main left-wing group, uh, got all of its candidates through to the general election, which is on June 20th. And the main like right-wing tough on crime group seems like it's going to be capped at winning two seats. Um, 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 um 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 um and actually i'll just say the names of the groups because people should know um these groups are awake illinois moms for liberty and the 1776 project um basically these groups are you know if you went to the south in the 1970s 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 60s and 70s.

And groups like Moms for Liberty and Awake Illinois are kind of the equivalent to groups like the Proud Boys. are kind of the equivalent to groups like the proud boys um and very you know fittingly with the analogy here um these groups are primarily uh run and staffed by conservative women just like white citizens councils were down south about 50 years ago um and thankfully these candidates almost all went down in flames um i think there is a a school board election in me and i's hometown which is very notoriously conservative for people in the area and even in that yeah in our hometown they've lost um and like these losses extended into downstate 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 30 points

like a 65 majority and these far-right school board candidates lost in quincy illinois um so thankfully people saw through the bullshit and were like actually you people are weirdos and we're not going to hand you power yeah another thing that was very funny is carbondale which is like a very like this is like like this is this is this is a carbondale is a southern illinois ass town it is like not quite as far south tactically speaking as you can go in illinois but, like... It's close. Yeah, I elected their first trans person to serve on a city council anywhere in Illinois.

So, like, they're getting clobbered in fucking Carbondale. Like, they had a really... They got fucking 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 or like god help the generation before us was just like survived shit that like would have killed like me and most of the people i know like yeah yeah no the schools that me and i grew up in were not a great place to be queer or trans yeah any variety um 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 12 sports through the Department of Education. 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. Um,

but there was, um, a panic, uh, on, uh, in progressive circles 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 IX protections. include trans kids in title nine protections um the proposed wording of their rule is not great and definitely needs to be improved um but the outcome here can be good uh in the sense that it would ban uh blanket prohibitions on trans kids in k-12 sports and it would require exceptions 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 um 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 clear 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 uh hopefully some of these school boards will be taking the right side of history here yeah go go go okay so i i'm slightly more angry about this than you are because I don't know. I think there's a pretty glaring hole in this that lets transphobes just be like, well, obviously. Oh, yeah.

And I, yeah, I think. The wording is vague and it should be made a lot less vague. I think it's bad. I don't know. I think the backlash to the backlash about that went too far. Now there's a bunch of people insisting that this is in fact a really good rule. And like, no. Like if it's executed as is, it is going to let a lot of people do a lot of French phobic shit.

Yes. As is, it is bad if they change the wording of it. It can be better. Yeah. So go yell at Biden until he makes it less shit uh absolutely in whatever capacity 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 uh yes yeah very very genuinely like a it's always a good idea to yell at the Biden administration about anything. But be especially go yell at them about this. This can be done

multiple ways. You can reach out to your congressional representatives and tell them that you want the rule wording 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 Biden administration and tell them to insert language into the rule that makes it 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 uh yeah having now yelled about that for a bit uh 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 um denver uh for uh those of you who do not know me and i which is probably almost i would hope almost everyone who listens to this um i will die on the hill that denver a West Coast city. Is 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 a 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 candidate to hold your nose and vote for uh 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 his opponent, Kelly Brough, says that she would have homeless people arrested if they refused to leave camps in public parks. So she just fucking blows and she shouldn't 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

that is not currently being used into a housing development that would have um i think 25 percent affordable units uh and it would part of it would also be turned into a park. And in 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. Listen, like profiting off of 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 um and somehow we got this incredibly stupid coalition of nIMBYs and like green space environmentalists and the Denver DSA that all came together to stop the housing development. And Mia, 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, OK, so here's why I know very little about this. My take is that 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 dogs, the bourgeoisie destroy every golf course. Always a good...

You know, that's actually... That's a pretty good line. I should start saying it to more people. Destroy every golf course you can um but yeah no 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 uh yeah i mean the thing i will say about this also is that another answer is uh like you know we've covered this on the show too like the other part of this 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 you need to have a tennis movement that's willing to move beyond things like rank control and move towards like actively like fighting to seize buildings from like from developers and that's that's the thing that's happening like there are places where people are doing this it can be done uh 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 NIMBY YIMBY debate other than saying that, like, increasing the power of tenants will give you a bet. We'll give you the best options.

Yes, very, very much. Tenant unions are good. Yelling at the Biden administration is good. Destroying golf courses is good. And abortion rights are good. 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 i do like to not be ruled by the worst person on earth but the the the the ideal political situation is the one where we're not

like people cease to rule over us so yes no you gotta you gotta do the non-electoral work alongside the electoral work um you can't just be relying on elections to make things better you gotta be pushing for it all the time yeah well i say yeah i i am much softer on electoral oh yeah no no mia would rather mia would rather than everyone doing electoral work start doing uh 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 the actual composition of political power in the city and the sort of the the the city's class composition

the balance of forces between sort of like you know the balance of forces between unions and employers, directly between workers and between employers. There are lots and lots and lots of things that are very, very important, even if you are an electoralist, that are mostly decided outside of, almost entirely decided outside of the ballot box. And if you don't take that into account, and you try to just run the most well-engineered political campaign uh you're gonna end up like the 2016 democrats democrats yeah yeah no everything that mia 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 coup um yeah this is what happened here uh yeah thanks thanks again for having me

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