I want to open this interview bluntly. There’s a widespread sense on the Left elsewhere in the country that things are not going as well as might be hoped with the Brandon Johnson administration in Chicago. Most people outside Chicago that I’ve talked to have no clear sense of why, but I do know that comrades in New York City are now furiously researching that question now that Zohran is likely headed to Gracie Mansion. So to start out, what’s your general assessment of what’s going on and what’s happened so far?

That’s a really big question, but it’s obviously an important question for this moment. I kind of want to go backward a little bit in time and put us in the context of how we started and where we are. Part of that is a little over ten years ago — I, along with a group of other union leaders and community organizers, started an organization called United Working Families, which was intended to be an independent political organization that could contest for power.

This was 2014. This was before Bernie Sanders’s first campaign. Before the rise of a new socialist politics and an ability to really think about power on a bigger scale at that time. For a lot of us, we thought of the mayor’s office in Chicago as the most power that we could imagine. We were also not political operatives. We were union leaders who had led large-scale strikes and organized tens of thousands of workers, community organizers who had led campaigns against privatization, had done sit-ins and hunger strikes and militant action.

The orientation was not toward electoral politics as a solution, it was toward electoral politics as a tool. It’s also important to keep in mind that with victory, these things are not linear. And a snapshot can’t really tell the story of where we started, where we are, and where we’re headed. And so this kind of conversation can help us shed some light on that.

We’re a decade into this project. But I think of us as being maybe in the beginnings of the second phase. We don’t have all of the power we need to transform things. But because of having a movement mayor in the mayor’s office, and because of having elected officials like Alderwoman Taylor here and really dozens of others in city councils, in the US Congress and state legislatures, and the Cook County board, we have an ability to understand what power is, and that is what is going to help move us forward.

It’s been a hard two years. We’ve learned a lot in Chicago. I think about how power works. I think the Left in Chicago has opened up a new set of contradictions. And at least for me, I know I have learned an enormous amount about how power works and how change happens. It has opened up this whole other window into how I and the people around me think about what we need to do and what we need to build in order to enact the kind of transformation that we want to see.

At the time that Alex started United Working Families, I was in leadership at Black Youth Project 100, leading organizing work around policing, black youth-led organizing. And, you know, we had a sense that we needed to challenge and get rid of some of the decision-makers in our city, like Rahm Emanuel, like Anita Alvarez, who are participating in things like covering up police, murder, and all of that.

But I was on this whole other kind of side of movements that have evolved and shifted and come together in some ways. And really thinking about organizing from this very outsider lens of being the people who are very far away from where decisions that impacted our lives were being made and being the people who were protesting outside of that. I wasn’t thinking about party-building or winning elections, I was just thinking about how we get some of these people out of there and then see what happens and who we can make demands on.

It turns out we protested Rahm Emanuel so hard we got the person we’d been protesting as the head of the police board as our mayor instead, Lori Lightfoot. But we didn’t like her very much either. And that made me reconsider like maybe we could get behind a mayoral candidate eventually over time. So that’s a little bit of my journey. But yeah, I think the last two years were my entry point into committing to a left electoral project, and seeing that as a part of the legacy of black movements and organizing that I was a part of and feeling like, you know, we needed to align with the labor movement.

We needed to align with these other forces and movements that were coming together in Chicago in this moment. Not just to elect a mayor but to think about how we can actually take responsibility for changing the city in a different direction — away from the things we had aligned ourselves as being against, like police killings and corruption and privatization and school closures. It had been after a decade of organizing that I saw it becoming really clear. We were all on the same side against these things. And I think what it looks like to be on the same side for a different vision of the city and to know some people in positions of power who are responsible for making change — that opens up a whole new set of questions about how you actually do that. So it’s sharpened for me, like the question of party, you know? And I don’t mean that in the capital-p or ballot-line sense of, like, the Democratic Party. I mean: What is the alliance set of forces that are working together to try to take over the government and then use it to do something different?

And I think that’s still contested and an open question for us. I think it has, after the electoral wins, a lot of people talking about co-governance. And it’s like, no, some people have governing power and governing responsibility and other people don’t. I actually find the framework of inside/outside much more helpful. It has sharpened things about power, about coalition, who you need in it to be powerful and stable — like how hard or easy it is to be unified in coalition.

There’s been a lot of coalitional strain. There have been a lot of wins — a lot of wins when you’re thinking about the scale of the city and the number of decisions that people in power make all the time. But sometimes our ways of identifying the campaign goals are not enough, even when we check them all off. So I don’t know. We’ll get into more of that.

Brandon is not the magical Negro that’s going to fix what’s been wrong for 400 years, and you honestly can’t f*ck up a system that’s been f*cked up for decades and fix it in two years either. And so we haven’t given this black man any grace. And that includes Alderwoman Taylor. I have not — sorry. Now, y’all knew when I came here, I was just going to be honest. I hadn’t, ’cause there are some things that I’m like, “you could do this,” and it just doesn’t work like that.

It’s not enough to get somebody who is to the left or who believes in the liberation of all people in office. We gotta support him. We gotta get into those. And probably his biggest downfall is some of the people who’ve been working at the city of Chicago for twenty, thirty years — they don’t believe in people. They’re still running while Rahm and [Richard M.] Daley are nowhere to be found. They still run those same systems.

And so it’s going to take us a little longer to get some of that poison out of city council and out of government for us to see the type of city we all want to live in and be a part of.

Alderwoman, you put it rather bluntly in 2023 when you said, “We should not be on the fifth floor. And I’m speaking my whole heart, we were not ready because we haven’t been in government long enough to know how government really runs.” What have you all learned over the past couple years about how power functions in the city? And, Alderwoman, do you feel the same way?

Absolutely. I said what I said; I’m not changing what I said. You can see it. Look at some of the decisions he made. Why? I agree with the decisions he made. I might not always agree with how he gets to them. And so he’s doing the right thing. But who are you doing that with? Who are you having those conversations with? How are you bringing in the community to understand the things that we actually do in government. That’s the reason why we wanted a progressive mayor or a mayor that comes from the Left.

So I don’t back down from what I said. And so I still got a beef with them about it, ’cause I told them it’s always the black woman y’all want to listen to. But I digress.

I want to hear what Alex says, but I feel like it would be useful to hear you spell out, like, what are some of the consequences of having nineteen progressives in a fifty-person city council, and not that majority that you’re talking about?

We passed stupid sh*t like “the snap curfew.” Come on. We already got a curfew. We already spent millions of dollars on violence prevention. We’re putting money in schools, we’re putting the money in communities we’ve never put money in. And so that was dumb. And look at the vote. Look how it went. We keep doing stupid sh*t expecting different types of outcomes and it’s just not going to happen.

What I wanted us to do was get in those departments ’cause those are the people who make really, really bad decisions. I meet with the Department of Planning on a monthly basis ’cause they will f*ck up a development. And people being able to purchase land and just — oh, Jesus Christ — I can’t say how.

And let me say something. The new lady who is there, Commissioner [Ciere] Boatright, I adore her. She’s from the hundreds, she’s from the hood — she gets it. But she’s got so many people in that department who don’t get it and who are dead set against making sure we own the institutions in our community. They don’t do all that they can to make that happen. And so, I stand by what I said. I wish we would’ve gone out to those twenty-six seats because also you got people who just say no, because he’s a black man. Let’s make clear what’s happening in city council. These are the same motherf*ckers that sold the parking meters, and we wouldn’t be in debt if they hadn’t sold them.

So you voted yes for the parking meters, but now you got a conscience. We can’t do bonds. We can’t ever do sh*t when it’s time for people who make under a certain amount. We got a class problem in this country, and we got a colorism problem in this country ’cause we think white is right.

And that’s no disrespect to my white counterparts in here, ’cause I know some of y’all are real allies. We think brown is all right. But everybody is not in coalition with us, but everybody will use us and pretend they are. So let’s call this what it is. We’re at a space where there is no hiding place for any of us. If you ain’t voting, if you ain’t part of the conversation, if you’re not talking about accountability, your a** is just a problem.

Alex, I take it you were on the opposite side of this debate from the alderwoman at the time.

I will stand up for Alderwoman Taylor to say she has been saying that for a long time. She was saying that in 2021. She was saying it in 2022. And she’s saying today. She’s not wrong. I disagree with her, but I can hold two contradictory things in my head. One is that we are not ready and one is that we have to take the chance when it comes. We had decades of administrations in the city of Chicago that were designed to prevent the people on this stage and the people who have been working together for a long time from accomplishing the changes that we’ve been trying to make. And I am not trying to sugarcoat it — it has been a challenging couple of years.

I think about one city council — and I might get the specifics of the policies that were passed in one city council meeting wrong. But I’m thinking back to ending the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers, to moving family leave, to moving all of these workers, you know, childcare workers — so we’ve had all of these things move in and of themselves under a Rahm or a Daley that would’ve required all of the strength of all of our organizations working for nine months together to pass one of them.

We stopped ShotSpotter. There are all of these different pieces that have come together. Have they come together in a perfect way? No. But I do think we’ve got to recognize the challenges that we face. We also have to recognize the successes that have happened — importantly and especially for a lot of us who have been organizing for a long time. But those successes in and of themselves do not create political transformation, so we have to continue pushing forward and fighting as we move forward.

In advance of Johnson taking office after his historic victory, how did the Left prepare for taking power? And given what you’ve learned from that experience, how should the Left in New York City and beyond think about taking power moving forward?

Oh Jesus, you can ask this sh*t. So prepare for everything. We knew that dim-witted motherf*cking dictator in DC was going to get in office, so we sat back and waited to see what he’s going to do. And we told everybody what he was going to do — so we should have had a plan for our immigrant communities. We should have had a plan for what was going to happen on every level of government, so that in schools and park districts, ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is not be able to come in and do some of the sh*t they are doing.

It’s less to do with the CPD [Chicago Police Department] and more to do with what our plan is. The CPD has proved this to us for years, and let me say this, the superintendent lives in my ward. We four blocks away from each other. We talk all the damn time. This is less to do with him but with remembering he works for a system — a system that was created because they wanted their free slaves. So the system that we created to free slaves, we expect to protect us when the real slave masters are after us.

We keep expecting a shift from people. That show us who they are and shows us their hand every time. And so we had these great plans. The problem was the implementation didn’t go as well ’cause I don’t think people realize — and I didn’t realize it until getting into government — that it’s dependent on somebody on the bottom, then they have secretaries, those secretaries have secretaries, and so on.

There is a deputy commissioner who has a bunch of secretaries and then above them, the commissioner. And so we don’t have the right size government, which is the biggest problem in Chicago. Everybody who’s working doesn’t need to be working. Some of these people have been sitting here twenty, thirty years and ain’t done sh*t for nobody. Why are you still here? I know some people that need this job, who would actually do it. Well, they just don’t.

So I think the plan was there. I think the question that we didn’t anticipate was the implementation, ’cause we didn’t know that system, and city hall is an evil f*cking building. The devil is there. I’m telling you. Go in that building. There is a different feel to that marble. Like every time I go there — I used to listen to church music but now I listen to gangster rap ’cause Jesus ain’t gonna cut it for that f*cking building. I’m just gonna keep it real. And they are so upset with Brandon bringing in different folks.

Remember this was Daley’s and Rahm’s — this was their game. These are all of their people. And so just ’cause you changed the top, cutting off the head, the body’s still wiggling. They’ve been wiggling sh*t for thirty, forty years. It’s time to cut the legs and arms off. It is enough sh*t. Take out the heart sh*t. Did they do heart transplants? We have to do something different. And so I don’t think he was right to have those transition teams. I think the part that we failed on, and I failed on, that’s taken us a little longer is to learn those systems, if that makes sense.

Oh yeah. There’s so much here that so many people I know who are really smart would argue with us about. I think the thing that you talked about, about “right-sizing government,” which is kind of uncomfortable language because it’s also the language of like the [Elon] Musks. And I think you speak to something that I resonate with as a campaigner who has led a lot of outside work, trying to generate support for some of the big, bold proposals that have been on the table in the last few years.

On some of our campaigns, the biggest pushback we get to some of our big ideas about investing in the public good, investing in communities, making the city work for us is people just don’t believe that the government will deliver. And I think in this time I have been confronted with the question of how we work together inside-outside to actually convince people that we need public good and resources, and also, how we have people on the inside with the ability to make it more true — that we can build things, deliver things, and have public goods, resources, systems, programs, clinics, and schools that work well.

And there are some exceptions of public institutions, maybe schools and libraries, that I think people do value in a particular type of way. So I just wanted to say that, with the transition plan and process, I sat on the public safety transition committee along with some cops — that was fun. It’s called —

Collaboration.

Well, okay. “Big tent.” Yes, big tent. So I think there is always tension and a balance to try to make something a reality. To govern and have the consent of people to do it, you need a big tent of different forces, not just your tiny leftist, major minority. We need a set of forces that reflect a majority of people and institutions that have to participate in making things possible. And I think that’s an important reality to accept. And there’s constant contestation of who belongs in that big tent, where we’re willing to take up battles that will alienate powerful or opposition forces, and where we’re willing to deprioritize that fight to have more collaboration.

And you know, I have a different vision of the world than most people who are police officers. Do I think in making a transition plan for the mayor of the city of Chicago there should be some people who know how the system of policing actually works? Yeah. I do think that process could have been better. And I think it involved so many people that wanted to feel like they had a seat at the table, that it ended up being more about generating that feeling for some people than developing a solid plan. Because in the three-day-long retreats, that cop and I didn’t come to a coherent strategy for public safety. We had a side group chat to organize, to get some things I care about in that document, but that didn’t produce a strategy.

I think a strategy to deliver is different than producing a kind of laundry-list document that might have contradictory things in it. I think that time could have been used better. I think my experience in the transition process wasn’t as sharp at being like: What are our big things that are going to deliver for a majority of people that we’re going to get a lot of people behind. So I don’t know. That’s one thing for New York: How do you do that?

I think there are some real differences in the coalitions that elected Johnson and elected Mamdani. And I think, you know, there are strengths and weaknesses in both ways. I think the Johnson election involved big unions, big coalitions, a massive slate of cross-endorsed elected officials. It meant that [Brandon was] on the hook for a lot of different people and stakeholders with a lot of different interests. From what I have seen, the Mamdani campaign is a little more nimble, and that has meant that the platform and agenda is actually big and bold; it’s kind of clear and coherent. It’s going to mean organizing a whole institutional set of actors behind it. But it might be hard in unique ways.

Yeah. Alex?

I do think the question of taking power is the real center of the question. How do we think about something like a transition plan as a political instrument. I think that in Chicago, there are lessons learned from prior experiments, largely in recent years in smaller cities, places like Jackson, Mississippi, places like St Louis and like Pittsburgh where you’ve had progressive coalitions that have some of the same elements. And in New York, I’m hopeful that November goes well. I’m hopeful that we’re in a position to be talking about transition — that there can be lessons learned from our experience in Chicago and that we can continue to learn lessons from, hopefully, success there.

I also do think that Asha raised an important question about what the context is and what brought us to this point. And it is important to recognize the differences in what that history and those coalitions are. It doesn’t mean that we’re not aiming at the similar things, but we are starting from different bases of power. The context of these campaigns is very different. The structure of elections in Chicago and New York City is very different. So all of those differences lay something out.

I will also say — and I’ve been struggling a little bit with how to say this — we’re also saddled with this kind of neoliberal brain. We have all lived in this system. So many of us have existed in nonprofit advocacy and service organizations. And our tendency, because we have been so far away from power for so long, is to say, “We’re gonna put out our laundry list. Here are the twenty things.” And again, that this is going to transform the city. Those twenty things can all be accomplished without creating any power and transformation, right? That’s not to say that they aren’t worthy goals — to raise wages, to create space to have new protections for renters, all of these different things. They are important and they help people, but they don’t inherently build power.

And so I think we have learned what the difference is between doing the checklist — because, in part, when you’re out of power, it’s easy to say, well, sh*t, we’re going to do this checklist. And then the revolution comes. But what we’re finding is that you have to be, at every step of that way, recontextualizing what that power is and understanding that the next step is going to look very different from the previous step.

Alderwoman, you made a really good point about what we might call the “deep state” of municipal government personnel processes, systems that are not designed to help a left-wing popular government accomplish its goals, but quite to the contrary. And it seems like in Chicago, a really important case study on that is schools. One, because this process that brings us to the Johnson administration, that brings you into office, is really the struggle of the Chicago Teachers Union.

That dates back seventeen years to the formation of CORE, the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, which then takes over the CTU and then leads CTU on strike. Then, parent and community organizers like yourself working in coalition with them, Johnson coming out of the CTU — he’s now the mayor. He then immediately meets stiff resistance from the school board, with a superintendent — CEO of Chicago Public Schools Pedro Martinez — fighting efforts to get a new contract for CTU that gets rid of a neoliberal teacher evaluation system.

So if you all could talk a little bit about how those sets of conflicts played out between the Johnson administration and the educational deep state. And how amid all of that, the CTU navigated the position of being in this sort of situation of co-governance after so many years of leading the popular left-wing opposition.

So one of the problems with the mayoral seat is you don’t know who to trust. I’ll just tell you I’ve known Brandon Johnson for fifteen years. I knew him when he had a hoodie slob on his sweater and he wore gym shoes. I knew him then. He was a person that would get on the bus with us and go down to Springfield and demand that legislators met with everyday parents. And what he would say to us is, they’re no better than you. They put their pants on one leg at a time. And so that was one of the reasons why I was like, he could do this.

But I told him to fight Pedro. Pedro didn’t do sh*t in the last administration. He did nothing during COVID. He spent all that COVID money. Nobody knows what it went to. Black students didn’t do any better. We had loads of families who didn’t have laptops, who didn’t have internet. So how are they gonna do remote learning? But I think that he sold the mayor a bill of goods and them bills was fake, as you see. They had their board — and I’m venting for a little minute — and I got up there and said, “Where the hell was I at when he was great?” ’Cause this is the same motherf*cker who mistreated our kids for all the years that he was there. So how was he great? This is the same person who has not been accountable to any of us. This is the same man that refused.

Now, I wasn’t the chair of the education committee in my first term. I was on the committee and he refused to come talk to city council about what was going on there. And so y’all trusted him. So I’m looking at Brandon a little funny, like, you know that cousin you got that sometimes don’t listen to what you say. But you gotta slap them upside their head and let them see for themselves that they made a f*cked-up decision.

That was Brandon at that time. I’m fifty years old. I get to say what the hell I want to say. Well, I’ve been doing that, but I’m a tourist and people understand that. But at any rate, this was him, I guess, trying to give opportunity to someone who sold him a bill of goods that he couldn’t make good on. And so, you can’t go from being $70 million in the hole to a billion dollars in the hole in twenty-two months. So stop that sh*t.

We’ve always been in trouble; we ain’t broke though. They spend $80,000 on flowers down on Michigan Avenue. Do the math. Those flowers pop up every year, don’t they? We got priorities for what we spend money on. And that’s the same thing with Chicago Public Schools. Think about this: schools that are north of Chicago Math and Science Academy get all the resources and most of the things they need. The schools outside them? The kids have to figure it out. When you closed schools in 2015, you got rid of the other black parent that was in these children’s lives. You killed the last stable institution we had in our community. So you gotta be very careful about who we put in these positions. He should have fired Pedro’s a** on his day off. But there again, y’all don’t listen to the black woman.

Alex, about this confrontation with the educational deep state and also specifically how CTU operated in this new environment of not being in opposition but having one of their own in on the fifth floor. . .

I think that, again, this speaks to the fact that you can take snapshots that look very different from day to day. But I do think some of the proof is in the result. And I totally agree, Alderwoman Taylor. I think about kind of like a metaphor of total war. And in a lot of ways that’s the situation that the Left and progressives who are in power find themselves in — it’s around every corner.

I don’t think we had the imagination, and maybe we didn’t listen to Jeanette and some others enough to say, there is not going to be a break. You don’t get to take off on Sunday. It is at every moment that these people are going to be trying to undermine you. Every misstep is going to be taken advantage of. They have the resources to do this.

I think there’s a better and deeper understanding. Sometimes you have to experience that to understand it. I do think the challenges of what has happened in the public schools we see now that we have Pedro Martinez out — I’m sorry for the children of Massachusetts, but he has moved on to a new job. The CTU has won a historic contract along with historic contracts for school support workers for SEIU Local 73, for others. And the leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union was reelected resoundingly a few months ago. So I do think we have to look at the whole picture of the situation. It’s very easy to look at any particular day and say, “Oh, things are looking very bad.” But if we look at the arc of where things are moving, we are moving in a way that allows us to continue building power and build those structures.

Asha?

Oh man, you just took me back to some really hard moments. Just to transition a little bit, in my first organizing training and now in many that I have since led, you get taught how to power map, and there’s a decision-maker and you focus on that decision-maker. You tune everything else out and you just go as hard as you can on that. And if you don’t understand all the ins and outs of every element of government and how every different stakeholder might be influencing this or that, or relating to one another, it’s helpful to get people really clear on who can meet your demand, and who can deliver the thing that your community needs and give you the concession that you want.

I think what has become clear to me in this phase of things is that’s a really, really, really oversimplified way for us to power map and we actually need more nuanced ways of doing that. So even in this scenario, right, the mayor has some decision-making power over education. The city council has some decision-making over that.

The city council has no say so over Chicago Public Schools. None. All we do is give them TIF [Chicago’s Tax Increment Financing] dollars to fix things. Daley did that where he took the power from the city council. So no, don’t put that on us.

Power is given and taken away from people you think have decision-making power over things, even when they have titles like chair of an education committee. Then you have the CEO of the school system that’s over the bureaucracy and that’s not an elected position. And then you have the school board, which is its whole own separate entity that previously was appointed by the mayor and now we have elected — the community wanted it to be elected. And the charter school people can also spend money to elect their people on there. So you have all of these different forces that are working together. And I think when you have your people in positions of power, you just become so much clearer on the fact that there’s more than two camps in any one thing.

Figuring out how to align the most forces behind the best version of the thing is very complex. And I think the teacher contract is one example: even when you’re getting hit in the media every single day, and it’s like looking really bad and messy, not letting up on what the big visionary end goal is until you actually get that and align the set of forces that you need behind it.

Even if the process to get there is quite difficult and, frankly, straining on a coalition that you might need to do other things. So I don’t know.

Asha was getting into going from a place where the Left had an outside strategy when Rahm Emanuel was in power. There was so much work that we were all watching all over the country that was happening here in terms of organizing against Emanuel, demonizing him, effectively polarizing against him.

But everything seems like it gets a lot more complicated once you need to have, not just an outside strategy, but an inside-outside strategy. How did you even think about beginning to adapt to that reality?

We just knew what we had gotten before was sh*tty. Right now I feel like the good, the bad, the ugly — Daley was ugly. Rahm was bad. Lori was bad. Johnson is good. Johnson needs help. We’re trying to change systems, so it’s like, would we have been better off pushing from the outside? No. Especially with what’s going on with DC. I’m glad who we got in power. I do. But you know, for me, it’s like a favorite sitcom. Everything is going right. You know, you hear the music. You know, in the scary movie, somebody about to get killed. That’s how I’ve been feeling in this moment. Like, it was too much going, right? Like him getting in.

You saw generationally, you saw the Rainbow Coalition. It mirrored what Harold Washington did. It was an amazing thing to see all of these electeds from different levels of government, all of these organizations that never really got to talk to each other, or worked on different issues, get together and say, we are going to get somebody in office like this. But you knew it was just too f*cking good to be true.

Now we got the county, we got the city, and we got the governor all working together, all being on the stage. And now DC is f*cked up. So it’s like my favorite Stevie Wonder song, “Rocket of Love.” He says, “You took me riding in your rocket. You gave me a spark. And halfway to heaven, you dropped my a**.” So we got dropped because of what happened at the DC level. But it’s ’cause we were organized the wrong people and you don’t really wanto to have that conversation with me. But I’m going to work hard every day and I feel a lot better that we get to run the narrative ’cause we are always on the defense.

We’re kind of on the offense now and I feel like we’re in a space to say, this is what really happens in government. We are at the family reunion, we are at the Fourth of July, and we are on Juneteenth talking about what government is. We talk about what’s going on in government, but that ain’t really what happens. And so now we get to have this clarity and social media bless this little heart. It’s a catch-22 ’cause you can find really good information but you can also get really good a**holes who pull people’s attention and give a false narrative account of what’s going on.

And so I think we’re all struggling. We’ve all got some burnout still from the election. I don’t know about y’all, but I’m still a little burnt out. But I’m grateful that Chicago is the city it is. And that we’re taking care of each other despite what’s going on in DC. Like, I’m a little less worried now if there was a Rahm ’cause — say what you want to say about Republicans, you can be called Democrat but you’re really a Republican. Wow. It’s a lot of Republicans that play Democrats ’cause they know we vote Democrat. We just go down the line and hit “Democrat.” Don’t get me started. But I am at the place now where I take a little breath. I know what’s going to happen ’cause we’ve already said it. We’ve already tried to get the story about what he was going to do and he’s doing it. And so now we should have been planning — and we should still be planning — how we take care of each other.

Alex, how have you seen this learning process of going from being on the outside to having to be simultaneously inside and outside for labor unions and for socialist organizations like DSA [Democratic Socialists of America]?

“Challenging” is too simple a way to talk about it. It’s a constantly evolving dynamic too, and I think that we still don’t understand effectively what coordination looks like from the outside in a large-scale way. I do think in a moment of real national crisis, in a moment of rising authoritarianism, we have some opportunities and a necessity to figure that out in a way that doesn’t have to be oppositional. I think that right now, these last couple of months, while we should have been more prepared, there are some real opportunities to figure out how to move forward together. I think that this is going to be the constant tension and contradiction that we have to manage and deal with.

We’ve gotta, hopefully, get used to managing that tension in a long-term way and figuring out how that leads to, again, growth — and structural growth and advancement too.

As the Chicago left is figuring out this inside-outside situation, your political enemies are finding themselves in the unusual situation of just playing the outside game, but they are definitely beginning to play that game hard.

So I wanted to ask: What does the organized opposition to Johnson and to the Left in power more broadly look like? How are real estate, finance, the Democratic establishment, the charter school industry, Zionists, how are they all coming together to try to put an end to this really incredible left-wing political project in Chicago?

Using our playbook against us. So think about this: we put a law in to stop them from just closing public schools. So now state law says you have to do all of these things before you can close the school. The charter f*cking schools used this so they could keep their charter contracts. I know we gotta push it in writing there — say this is just for public schools, not for charter schools. They’re using the things that we did well. So they’re organizing. Have y’all ever seen a city council meeting? Have y’all seen the UniverSoul Circus? They got a set of motherf*ckers that come down there that look like me talking about “Go red. Go red.” Where? Not the f*ck here. Not in this Democratic state, you not.

I feel like, and one of my mentors asked me when I first ran for office, what’s your exit plan? I’m like, exit plan? What the f*ck is he talking about? I ain’t even know it yet. He said justice is not going to come fast enough. You’re going to have the answer. People are not always going to listen. You might not get to see yourself win what you’re fighting for. And that’s hurtful. That’s hard. And that’s a reality. Like, Brandon got in office, we didn’t even get to celebrate the win ’cause DC changed on us and some of that sh*t is our fault.

Okay. Don’t answer, don’t say nothing. But some of it is on us ’cause we were organizing the wrong f*cking people. We should have been organizing poor white people, Asian folks and Latino folks. We were too busy organizing Latino folks and black folks who already decided, we know what’s on the f*cking other side; we don’t want it. And so that’s some ownership about that. We don’t take ownership for sh*t we do wrong. They are pushing the narrative. Make no mistake about it, Harold Washington was killed by the stress of what he was being asked to do.

Brandon might not die on us, but I’m sure his a** is stressed out because he’s been asked to ignore the people who for decades have been ignored. And that’s not what this administration is doing. And that’s not what happened at city hall, which is why they are fighting so hard.

But I want y’all to pay attention to one of the things that I said when I was knocking doors. Look at what I was doing before I wanted to be an elected official. I spent twenty-three years on a local school council. I went on a hunger strike. Like, if you look in my bag right now, I got some goodies in there ’cause I’m eating all the time. So going on a hunger strike was about showing young black people that people in their community cared about them.

Do not let the rhetoric make you feel like this man is not doing his job. I did it. I’m talking to black people. We’ve gotta have grace for each other. We don’t give each other grace and we need to. And as much as he has gotten on my nerves — only because I want him to fix it — that’s me being transparent with you. That’s me just pouring my heart out. Take a strong look before you decide, if he decides to run again, to not vote that man back into office, because he said everything that he was going to do and for the most part he stuck to it.

See, sometimes I think we forget that politics and government are two f*cking different things. And so what I say I’m going to do when I’m at the door is give you and the world rainbows and sunshine. When I get into office, I don’t realize that there are twenty-six f*cking people who might vote against the interest of what I’m trying to do. And so us really figuring out how to look at this different — looking at the people we vote in and knowing that those f*cking Congress people think about this. They’ve been elected officials in Congress since before I was born, and I’m fifty f*cking years old. Why the f*ck are they still there? Why do y’all keep voting for their a**?

Same thing for them crooked-a** judges. Come on, don’t play eeny, meeny, miny, moe for who looks black or has a familiar name. No, think about this. That last election, who got some mailers from a judge? They usually have these conversations in the community where they bring you out to tell you what they are doing. They did none of that on the South Side. The f*cking judges disrespect us and take advantage of our vote and we let them. Y’all keep electing these motherf*ckers. And so we gotta get back to teaching people about government.

Asha, who are the enemies of this political project and how are they organizing to destroy it?

So I think just to connect this back to the last piece around how our organizing in this current political terrain looks different, we come into this political moment after so many years of using whoever was mayor as shorthand for describing everything about the system that was wrong. And it is really different when you now have one of your own people in there and sometimes it feels kind of the same ’cause if people are using that same playbook you’re pointing at, well, he’s the mayor now. He’s on the hook for everything.

And I think it’s super, super important that we peel back the curtain to say, yeah, we may have replaced who’s in the mayor’s office, but we haven’t gotten rid of all of the money to interests and harmful industries that spend money to shape the way that things are for people in the city making it harder, more expensive for most of us in order for them to profit. So we all know Rahm Emanuel’s name — the man who closed schools and public clinics, the man who covered up police murders. But who knows who Michael Sacks is? That’s the billionaire who’s ideologically committed to the project of neoliberalism, aka stealing public resources for himself and his friends and the industries he’s accountable to.

But Michael Sacks is just one example of billionaires that have, for a long, long time, spent money to shape our political system, to shape the candidates that are elected to office, that shape what their policy agendas are about, and that convene other people from other sectors that have an aligned set of interests around how they want our city, our state, and our country to function for their own profit and gain.

So if we think about that opposition coalition, and I think right now they are very aligned because it’s much easier, as we have all experienced, to be aligned and in coalition when you are out of power than it is when you are inside or feel like you have a little bit of power. But it’s the real estate industry that spent money to defeat our Bring Chicago Home proposal that doesn’t want affordable housing, that doesn’t want rent control, that wants it to be too expensive to live so they can profit from that. It’s the real estate industry players, the finance industry, the Democratic Party establishment types that are ideologically committed to a status quo — along with the media institutions that they are all tied up with, the charter school industry, and the Walmart-funded entities that push that policy agenda. And then the new kids on the block in that political coalition locally are the pro-Israel, Zionist forces that we’re starting to see spend money.

They are sending mailers, they are sending text messages, everything newsworthy that’s happening in city council. They’re sending negative messages about every single city council person that is in the progressive caucus to voters in all of their wards. Fearmongering, spreading misinformation, literally lying. You talk about civic education, it’s like civic miseducation of voters just to drive misinformation, to drive down favorability. And every single one, it’s like this progressive alderperson and the mayor. They’re making you less safe in this way and people are being berated with this information every single time something moves through city council with text messages, mailers, and other types of ads. And that’s not even to speak about how they’re tied up with and able to influence media in that type of way.

I want to add one anecdotal thing because I think the media question is really important. During the Chicago Teachers Union’s recent leadership election, the opposition to the core slate, their presidential candidate, got a prime-time interview on Fox 32 News in Chicago. I was a union officer for over a decade. I have paid as much attention to this as anybody in this country over the last twenty years. I have never seen a candidate for internal union office be interviewed on prime-time local news.

These kind of things happen on a weekly basis here in Chicago. Whether it’s from the corporate media, whether it’s from other people who are able to drive that message. So, just like we talk about the media normalizing Trump, normalizing the far right, the media in Chicago has played a huge role in normalizing all of the opposition, even to the point of asking leading questions because their presidential candidate was not able to really answer them. It was a really remarkable moment that I just wanted to point out.

And I just want to highlight one thing that Alderwoman Taylor said in case it wasn’t clear for people outside of Chicago about what we’re seeing in city council meetings in the city of Chicago. The chambers of our city council meetings are full of black Trump supporters.

Wait, really?

Yes. So that’s what she was talking about. That is not to say that black people in the city of Chicago are going for Trump. Some people are. I’ve knocked on their doors. I’ve had those debates. My neighbor, who I love, their voter profile is a person who is disaffected, who will talk sh*t with me in my kitchen about the Democratic Party. And I’m like, yeah, that’s the whole thing. And I think we need better people at every level, not just at the alderman level to be able to deliver an alternative. But the black Trump supporters that we’re seeing in city council, that’s not necessarily the profile I’m talking about there. It is to say, though, that there are resources going into painting a picture of who the opposition to our leftist movement is and who our movement does and doesn’t represent. I think there is enormous manipulation of elevating black people in that way. But there are some really bizarre things going on in terms of what our opposition looks like and how it’s trying to play up certain dynamics. So I just didn’t want that detail to get missed.

One case I’d like to explore in some depth is one that you just mentioned a few minutes back, which was the Bring Chicago Home ballot referendum in March 2024. It would’ve helped house tens of thousands of homeless people in the city by dedicating a small transfer tax on property sales over $1 million.

Real estate interests poured a ton of money into this fearmongering campaign, warning of rent hikes, and the referendum, sadly, was defeated. Why did it fail and what were the consequences of that failure for the new administration and the larger project?

That was a really hard loss and a really hard campaign. I led the field and organizing components of the Bring Chicago Home referendum, which was a proposal coming from community organizations and people with lived experience of homelessness to create a permanent revenue stream for affordable housing and wraparound services, specifically for Chicago’s homeless population. And the solution to create that revenue stream was to restructure what’s called the real estate transfer tax.

So basically anytime a property is sold, there is an existing tax and this would’ve made that tax structure progressive. It would’ve increased that tax for any property sold for over a million dollars and decreased it for anyone else. So it’s a little tiny tax cut for the regular home seller and an increase on commercial property sales and multimillion-dollar property sales. This was one of the first big, consolidated efforts of that opposition coalition that I was talking about really, really trying to prove their strength against us.

Not only did the real estate industry — which at the same time we were running this campaign was being sued for price fixing — not want to pay their fair share, but it was seen by a broader set of actors as a way to stick it to the progressive coalition to be like, you can’t deliver on your promises.

So there was a ton of misinformation. There were ads run making people think it would make their property taxes go up. This is a totally different tax. There was a lot of misinformation, particularly that played up anti-migrant sentiment, saying that this was a new tax that was going to go toward sheltering migrants, really playing up black-brown tensions. It was a multimillion-dollar media campaign.

I believe the real estate industry would’ve spent whatever they had to in order to defeat our proposal, despite a really massive organizing push. This was just one year after we knocked half a million doors and ran this beautiful massive field program for Brandon Johnson. And somehow, they convinced me, after a year, that we have to do it one more time. We knocked almost that many doors. We contacted more than a million people via phone and text and had a coalition of more than a hundred organizations doing the organizing work.

But the headwind of misinformation and media was just too strong. And I think to that point of the strength of being out of power, our opposition in that context had the strength of everyone’s built up, mistrust in government to deliver anything — mistrust to spend money, any historic promise that someone in the mayor’s seat has made before and not delivered on.

I want to say that it was a learning moment, and I do think that there was one year after the election where Alderwoman Taylor and a lot of leftists and progressives were reelected after the mayor was elected, and we had an opportunity to kind of count our forces in a challenging environment. We saw where we were with Chicago voters, and that in and of itself has real value. I do think we’ve got to learn the lesson of actually saying in the clearest language and creating policy proposals that are in the clearest language of what we want to accomplish. I also want to say that around that same time was when the city council passed a billion-dollar bond issuance that is largely going to development and is going to be in a position to create a gigantic amount of affordable housing.

Green social housing.

Yeah. Including green social housing. So once we’re in those positions where we don’t have the power to just make things happen, we can still make a relative balance of what is there. I’m forty-five years old and have been doing this work for twenty-five years, and I have lost way more than I have won over my lifetime. And so I want us to understand that there are steps forward and backward, but I don’t want us to relearn these lessons of tactics and strategy when we have to be learning lessons of creating a vision that people can come to. And I think that’s true in a lot of different ways.

For example, if there hadn’t been such a sharp division created around migrants, in part created because of the mayor and leaders and city council’s insistence that they would not go back on the commitment that was made to ensure that there was housing and services for every single person, a commitment that most large cities in the US went back on. There’s a lot of different things that we could say would’ve changed the specific votes in this referendum. But I want to take the lesson of charting something forward that allows us to think again about the power we have and the power we need.

Alderwoman?

The question failed because we refused to solicit a community that said put the sanctuary city question on the ballot. That’s why I failed. Let’s be honest. And we were on opposite sides of this ’cause when you think of referendums, there is nothing legally there to hold you to that referendum question. But what I explained to the organizers was what we should have been doing at the same time we were talking about the tax was talk about what it means to be a sanctuary city. We did not have that conversation and black Chicago felt ignored.

Now, I’m one of these people, and I’m gonna say it ’cause who’s gonna whoop my a**? Latino people ain’t done sh*t to me. White supremacy has, that’s what’s f*cking up my life. That’s what’s getting on my nerves. That’s what’s making my insurance go up. That’s what’s f*cking me over. Not Latino people. And we still don’t remember America f*cked over their countries. That’s why they’re here in the first place.

See, we will have the sidebar conversations and pretend and want it to look all pretty. Nothing about none of this sh*t is pretty. So the referendum failed because a lot of folks wanted that question to be on the ballot. And it wasn’t. So they said, f*ck y’all’s question, that’s what happened. If you look at the numbers, you look at how it was voted on in certain communities, the same people who said they wanted it felt ignored. And so they ignored the question or said no.

That’s how we lost and that’s a lesson for us: listen to each other. And make sure that we’re listening to black Chicago ’cause too often we don’t. And while black people have our own sh*t that we can talk about later on in the back, you still need us to vote for y’all. Y’all still need us to come out and be part of those conversations. I tell the people all the time, the Black Caucus has twenty votes in the city of Chicago. Say what the f*ck you wanna say about it but y’all gotta come to us and have that conversation. This was the exact same thing. And while it hurt to have to tell people in coalition, I told you so. I told y’all this was going to happen. I said this. Did we not have this conversation?

We should have been talking about what it means to actually be a sanctuary city because I don’t think people understand what it ultimately means. So black folks felt disrespected and they voted no.

I want to get deeper into this and set a little context for the listeners at home. The arrival of a huge number of migrants to Chicago, including many sent by far-right Texas governor Greg Abbott, posed a major challenge for the Left project here and for the Johnson administration. It generated anxieties and anger among black Chicagoans, who felt that the newer arrivals were being taken care of while their neighborhoods had been neglected for decades.

How did the politics of mass migration play out in Chicago, and in particular, how did it reflect or surface tensions between black and Latino communities?

I represent a ward where it’s about 15 percent Latino. So I have a percentage of Latino folks in my community, where I door knock, who actually vote for me. So the problem with my community was we didn’t have a say over the shelters. That’s number one. Y’all keep blaming everything on Brandon — no, the f*ck it wasn’t. Lori Lightfoot told Governor Abbott of Texas to kiss her a**. Does anybody remember that? And he was like, kiss these migrants — let me bust them up here. And Brandon paid for it. She did not.

Brandon did not start this fight, but he had to finish it. I wanna know for y’all who call yourselves Christians and say y’all love the Lord, but you say you would throw a man in the street. You would see a woman with a baby sleeping in a police station, breastfeeding her baby. You would see people hungry and in the streets but will still say that y’all Christians. Amen. Amen. Bullsh*t. You have never seen God. So the God you claim you love, who you pray to, “Oh, Father God.” But you mistreat people who are walking in and out of the streets every day. Go to hell. Go straight to hell.

I was conflicted. And I wasn’t conflicted because I didn’t want these people to be taken care of. I was conflicted because I know how hard I’ve been fighting to make sure that people in my community get there.

The median income in my community is $25,000. And they are now selling a home that’s two homes, $964,000. Who the f*ck is that for? I’m going to say something that I heard an economist say: when we all stand together and realize who the real enemy is, the game is over. The game is over ’cause if they can’t say to me, “Asha ain’t good for you, ’cause her hair’s straight and I got locks. No. Asha is good for me ’cause she got a good heart. She’s going to do what she’s supposed to do. She’s going to fight with me and hold my hand.”

Latinos have been made the face of immigration. They are not the only people that have migrated or immigrated. And we imports are coming from an import ’cause you motherf*ckers brought us here without asking. And I don’t know if this is the place I really wanna be. It just looks cosmetically better. But it ain’t no better. We’ve made Latinos the face of immigration, not realizing a lot of folks that they actually put in shelters, they identify as Afro-Latino. They were folks from Africa, they were Haitians. I have a large population, a nice population, of Nigerians and Ghanaians that live in my ward. We made a lot of mistakes in this.

Thank you, Alderwoman. There are some of the moments you were talking about — we had these conversations, like literally on the phone late at night, and I think that’s really beautiful and I’m so happy to be represented by you. I live in that community that you’re talking about. I live one block from that first migrant shelter — literally my block, my neighbors. That was our community where that first shelter was opened up in a former school. And that happened before Brandon was elected.

Now, I do think that it escalated once he was in office, and it escalated Republican Texas governor Abbott’s political stunt of sending new arrivals to the city of Chicago because we had elected a progressive mayor. It was an attempt to divide constituencies that had supported him and create a genuine political challenge.

There is no acceptable way to receive tens of thousands of people coming with medical needs and injuries and with literal wet clothes as the only things on their backs. Having gone through who knows what to get into this country, being sent to a place that they don’t know, there is no adequate way to actually receive people who’ve been through that. Nothing, nothing, nothing is enough. And you know, if you’re saying, hey, we’re gonna take responsibility for sheltering people, the companies that can staff a refugee camp in a city in the Midwest are horrible companies that have only done horrible things.

That’s not to excuse the sh*ttiness of all of it, but it is just to say that it was intentional and that it was a political move that was made. F*cking with people’s lives — that was intentional. And you know, the mayor’s first city council meeting was at the very same time. But it was every neighborhood I drive through, you have people literally sleeping on the floor of and outside of every police station in the city of Chicago, thousands of people getting off a bus every day. Children and babies sleeping in police stations. Who’s ever slept in a police station? It’s not a good situation.

So it was very much a crisis and that’s what was going on in his very first city council meeting. And one of the first big decisions that he made was to pass $52 million in emergency spending to shelter people because it was an emergency. And the opposition really played it up to send a message to black Chicagoans in particular that said, hey, this coalition isn’t actually for you. They’re only concerned with this other set of people that quote-unquote just got here. And, you know, that did play up real tensions for communities that have been disinvested in for years and for whom our movement was running on a promise for.

That is a real structural tension that they intentionally fanned the flames of. And just on a governance level, it meant that all of our people that we sent inside went into government in a state of emergency. Just think about you in your life and how you manage things in an emergency.

Alex?

I don’t have a ton to add. I do think that it’s important to remember that we don’t give the Biden administration a pass. There were thousands of Ukrainian refugees who were brought to the United States in an organized way, brought to the Chicago area, given resources. And I know that the mayor and everybody was going to the federal government for resources and not getting enough for what was happening. That’s true. It was a political act. It was Governor Abbott on the far right using some of the people who had really been through hell as political pawns. At the same time, I don’t want to give the Democrats in power in the federal government a pass for not actually doing what they should have done, which is adequately fund the city’s response.

I want to get into to cops and crime, and then close with a question about looking forward and where things may be heading. The Chicago left in so many ways has built its power over the years through the struggle against police brutality, including the movement that exploded in the wake of the 2014 police murder of Laquan McDonald.

Mayor Johnson, since taking office, has had conflicts in all sorts of directions around questions of policing, there have been conflicts with some local black politicians over his opposition to the ShotSpotter gunshot identification system. And also over his recent mayoral veto of an ordinance that would’ve allowed police to declare emergency youth curfews at locations of their choosing.

Meanwhile, Johnson anchored some on the Left by signing a new contract with the police that included major raises without major reforms. Crime is way down and yet it seems as though Johnson has been unable to capitalize on that politically. So there’s a lot going on here. Asha, let’s start with you. How would you assess this balancing act that the mayor is confronted with on crime and policing?

I spent a lot of the last two years thinking about this question. A lot of my organizing life has been on public safety. How do we invest in public safety beyond policing? How do we think about what makes us safe beyond just like how we respond to instances of violence? How do we make sure people have the things that they need so that those instances of violence and harm or whatever it is are fewer?

And yeah, that was my issue. That was the basis on which I was going to support Mayor Johnson in the first place and bring my community with him. We had put a question on the ballot around whether people in the ward I live in, which Alderwoman Taylor represents, asking people if they wanted the city to invest in a non-police mental health crisis response: Would you rather have a mental health professional respond to mental health crises instead of cops? Do you want the city to invest in public mental health centers?

We knocked on a ton of doors in this majority-black ward. Ninety-plus percent of people said yes. We did that because we wanted it to be a major issue in the mayoral race. We had just won that when Brandon Johnson had announced his mayoral run. Like, as we were in the midst of that door knocking, I hosted a house party with all the people that had knocked doors, and we had Brandon Johnson in my living room. It was really, really packed and he ended up sitting on like a stool. It was really awkward. Anyway, we were asking him questions about the police budget and it was a room full of young people and older people who had been a part of this black movement around policing.

We asked him what he would do about the police budget. We asked him to pledge to make Treatment Not Trauma — which was the name of the mental health proposal — a top issue in his campaign. He said yes. And, you know, there were people who had spent every month in police board meetings with Lori Lightfoot snatching the microphone from people who were telling their stories of losing loved ones to police violence and had spent time protesting Rahm Emanuel after emails getting leaked showing that he intentionally covered up the murder of a black teenager who’d been shot sixteen times in the back — to have somebody who’s in my living room talking to us about defunding police and how we’re going to build a non-police mental health crisis response system, that was the basis on which I got involved and backed Mayor Johnson.

And there are people in this room who are a part of different fights. We’ve gotten two clinics reopened. There’s a pilot for a non-police mental health crisis response system called CARE. We are fighting in this budget to see if we can make that citywide so that there is a clinic that serves people in every ward in the city of Chicago for free — a publicly run mental health clinic. Forty percent of 9-1-1 calls in the city of Chicago are for mental health crises. I don’t think cops should be responding to those and a lot of cops don’t think they should be responding to them either.

So that is one really important issue where we have seen movement. We also need to see more youth jobs and in particular investment in a youth job summer program called the Peace Book. We’ve seen investment in that but we need to see more. I felt proud of our mayor with the curfew veto. It’s the first time a mayor has used their veto power in twenty years. It was a proposal for a snap curfew, where the cops could say, with thirty minutes’ notice, there’s a curfew. If you’re concerned with violence, maybe let’s think about why young people are not okay. That is my question. If we’re thinking about the problem of violence, what is the thing that leads to that in the first place?

I disagreed on the Fraternal Order of Police contract — I wouldn’t have given them a historic raise without negotiating some reforms in the process and locked us into spending millions and millions more dollars on the police. Hundreds of millions of dollars go toward vacant police officer positions every year. They have not increased the ranks of the police department despite having the largest budget for recruitment of any city department in seven years. They cannot get people to become cops. That’s not what people want to do. At the same time, good kids who are running this incredible peer peacekeeping youth violence prevention program, they’re turning hundreds of young people away because they only have funding for a pilot. So why are we giving the cops this slush fund for jobs they can’t fill when young people are knocking on the door of a community organization saying, we want to do violence prevention work? Let’s invest in that.

So that is one proposal that’s on the table now that folks are organizing around and that we know we need to continue to push for. That’s another example of what it looks like to continue to push. And yeah, I think that the fearmongering and the amount of money that has gone into anti-defund messaging has gotten to people in our coalition. We’ve argued around it and I just want t remind folks they spend a lot of money on that in races that we still won. I’ve knocked on a lot of doors talking about this and I believe this is a very commonsense solution. Let’s invest in what works. Let’s invest in what actually helps people have the things that they need to be all right so that we’re not having a conversation about how we respond to violence at all.

Thank you. Alderwoman?

Cities kind of tell you, through their budgets, what they believe and what they stand for. And I hate to say it, but over 40 percent of the city’s budget goes to policing. And I don’t know about y’all, but I don’t feel safe. If something is happening to me, my first thought is to not call 9-1-1 — especially if it has something to do with mental health.

Because literally my first month in office, they killed a young man whose family was calling to say he was having a mental breakdown and he locked himself in the house. And [the police’s] only response after being there, what ten or fifteen minutes, was to go in and kill him. And the family was devastated. I struggle with the whole system of policing because I know what it does in my community. If I call the police or one of my white counterparts calls the police, we know whose word they’re gonna take.

That makes it dangerous for people who look like me. And I’m an older woman. So we gotta start with a conversation about what safety looks like in different communities, because it’s different. What works in Woodlawn does not work in New City. What works in Washington Park doesn’t work in back of the Yards. We gotta start having conversations about what safety looks like and what actually makes us safe. Nobody’s ever said that.

Think about this: I have a ward that’s adjacent to the Obama Presidential Center. I don’t have a Chuck E. Cheese, I don’t have a bowling alley, I don’t have a skating ring. I have nothing for young people to do. So they run downtown because they have that. And let me say this: this curfew is not about safety. It’s about protecting the interests of downtown. People who are f*cking visitors, go visit somewhere else. If you’re worried about what young people are doing downtown, don’t come here. Bye. That tourism ain’t really bringing us that motherf*cking money anyway, so go. Bye. See you. This is about them protecting what they love and it’s the beautiful downtown.

You notice after the riots, nobody’s crying. You ain’t heard a peep, have you? Because the insurance checks came and they decided whether they wanted to make a little more money or if they’re gonna leave. And so let’s talk about what this really is about. It ain’t about keeping anybody safe.

Let me tell you about my father. Let me just be honest, he wanted a son. So he would have my mother and my sister dress up in these little dresses and he would take us downtown to get a muffin and to see the Sox or the Cubs play because he loved Andre Dawson. That was his thing. And so downtown always made me uncomfortable because I didn’t see enough people that looked like me, and it was a reminder of what I didn’t have. It was not a place where I wanted to be.

If you went down 43rd, 63rd, 79th, 55th, all those institutions served us. And we had loads of things to do in our own community. The park district was more welcoming. You could be a young person jump roping — when was the last time you saw a kid outside playing jump rope or Hula-Hooping or playing hopscotch? You don’t because we’ve forgotten those lessons of what it’s about to be a young person. I should be able to sit on my porch, do whatever it is I wanna do, sing, do whatever without being a target. And that’s just not the type of system that we have.

So this thing around ShotSpotters, my problem with it? It is the worst data ever. It didn’t do what it was supposed to do. And so just imagine every time a truck backfires, here comes the police. And it’s like you wasted all of this police money to come for a backfire on expressway. It just didn’t work. And so crime is down because we’re investing in those young people and their families.

I will say this, and I’ll end with this: when I first got into office, for the first few Fourth of July’s, I would always get a call that somebody got killed. And so every time somebody gets killed in your ward, you get a call from the police. No matter how it happens, no matter where it happens, you get a call. That has dwindled down. But that has dwindled down because you have communities who are now working with and talking to the police — but also thinking about ways to hold each other accountable outside of calling the police. So seeing young people argue, I get right in there and I’ll be like, “I’ll whoop everybody’s a** out here. Go the f*ck home and find something safe to do. And this ain’t it.” And I know we are scared of these kids but that’s a whole other segment. We’ve forgotten they could use an a** whooping. That’s what I said. We should just go downtown with some bells and just start whooping a**. Everybody will go home and ain’t nobody will be dead and everybody will be okay. They’ll live to see another day. I said it.

There is something that I kind of appreciate in a mayor’s office that is not able to capitalize on less children dying year to year. You know, we’ve increased youth jobs, we’ve increased these investments, we’ve made these small changes. It’s not enough. Nobody says it’s enough. But I do think, as you said, it is a balancing act that has to be engaged with in a clear way.

People forget that we had the Democratic National Convention in the city of Chicago a little over a year after Brandon came into office and everybody said, “This is going to be a disaster. This is going to be a disaster.” Now, did the police over-police some of those protests? Absolutely. Have they been doing that? Some of the story is that, no, not nearly as much happened as would’ve happened under almost any other leadership. So part of it is that the absence of things is much harder to talk about than the presence of things. That’s not to give anybody a pass on anything, but it’s to say, we’ve gotta just look at the whole picture and understand what that balancing act is and understand how we can actually move that in a clearer way forward.

Just one addition here because a part of your question was about the mayor clashing with some moderate and conservative black older people. And that’s not speaking to the few black aldermen who are both in the Black Caucus and the Progressive Caucus because it’s not as much overlap as I would like to see. We have elected a lot of progressives in white and Latino parts of the city to our city council and we have a smaller bench representing the south and west sides who come from progressive movements. And we have less organization even in other black parts of the city. That’s something that I’m deeply committed to building.

When we think about a broader progressive coalition, being able to say that we have elected black leftists from our movement, and that we have a really organized base in the communities hardest hit by disinvestment is one way to put it. We’ve got to have a base in those places if we’re going to be successful on our issues or else our coalitions are just too weak. So I do think that’s something important to be said and there’s a lot of that work being done by myself and others in this room.

Recently Mayor Johnson has been very outspoken, pushing back against the Trump administration’s authoritarian agenda, and that seems to have resonated broadly across the city. Is that something that he and the broader left project in the city can build upon to win back the majority coalition that put him into office in the first place?

I think Alderwoman Taylor said this really well early on in this conversation, and I’m going to just paraphrase it and put it differently. But we are in a different position. We are two years in, things are being learned and things are shifting in a different direction. Obviously the threat — and not just the threat of Trump, but the reality of Trump — is something that we have to grapple with. I remember saying to some friends of mine who were big critics of the mayor, who would you rather have as mayor right now on January 21, 2025? Is there another mayor in the United States that you would rather have? They couldn’t answer. They couldn’t give me an answer to that question.

So I think it’s not a question of taking advantage of that. It’s about figuring out in a deeper way what needs to be done to move governance in the city at the same time as being crystal clear about the dangers that we’re facing and what the city needs to do, not just to protect our people — because there is a lot that the mayor and the city cannot do, we have already seen that — but to put us in a position to build power through this really difficult time with Trump as that foil in DC.

Alderwoman?

He could turn it around if we did a lot more collaboration. For me, there is an expectation that we would bring in people who normally never get to sit at the table. He’s done some of that. I want to see more of that and I want to see us agree to disagree as well. I’ve gotten to the place where I can disagree with something he’s doing or saying and I don’t always have to call him on it. He knows my face says everything, my mouth say a whole lot. But I also, as you all know getting into government, it’s not enough to get good people in politics. You got to get behind them.

I think people do amazing work and this is what I, Alderwoman Taylor, have seen. People are around me, they’re with me and my team. When we are running knocking doors trying to get in the office, I get in and y’all just drop my a**. I don’t have that anymore. And so sometimes I’m human. I’m conflicted. I’m a person. I think people forget I’m an everyday person with kids that get on my nerves. I got a grand turtle and a grand dog and some fish. I’m a nana. Like, I am a normal everyday person. I still DoorDash sh*t. My sh*t’s like everybody else.

And so being able to have support and in our ears when we’re making that — and also just ’cause we got that seat, y’all stop being in the other people’s a**. Y’all have been silent on these motherf*ckers who vote against your interests. Why? Because y’all think Brandon is going to be there forever. He says twenty years. I give him, sh*t, two more terms. Hell, I know I’m leaving at the next term. Let me make that sh*t clear. I’m out because this is stressful. Listen, I have to wake up one morning and remind myself “you are somebody.” Like, there’s so much sh*t I can’t even have a normal relationship. I can’t be soft. I have men that say to me: “You are dictating.” No, my father and mother were together and my mother was the breadwinner. But you never knew that at my house because what my daddy said went. So I can’t be soft.

But that also comes with paying the cost of standing up and saying what other people won’t say. There are a lot of people who won’t support me. There are a lot of people who drag me on social media. That’s when y’all need to be like, no, that ain’t how it goes. That’s not what she said. That’s not what we are doing here. And so we need you all. We get into office, we can’t do this without you. We need y’all at city council with us.

And I told my community that when I ran, I’m taking you to city hall with me. So it’s not Alderwoman Taylor coming outta her a** making a decision. I’m on the phone. Look, I got two rules. “Good morning” is after ten o’clock and unless you dead on fire, don’t call me at 10 pm — that’s ’cause people will talk me to death and talk all day long. But I need that humbling ’cause this job ain’t f*cking humble. There are spaces I could walk in and they will give the world and I didn’t even ask for it. That’s what elected officials go through. And I want y’all to hear this. That conversation we have about passing envelopes, that sh*t happens and we all got a price. I ain’t special. My price comes with buying out my whole community — all fifty thousand of us. And if you ain’t gonna do that, get the f*ck out.

Brandon didn’t get here with just us and our small coalition people had. I tell people all the time, it does not matter how much money and mailing you sit out. If those people don’t get off their a** and go to that voting booth and vote, none of that matters. And so we cannot make a country that we are proud of. When I go out of town now, they be like “you from America.” I’m hesitating ’cause people hate us so much because of what our government does. And so please understand that your silence is violence.

You know, without getting into field math, I saw a video of Brad Lander repeating a quote that was from Greg Casar initially, like the struggle within the Democratic Party right now is not between the center and the Left, it’s between fighters and folders, and I disagree — I do think that it is a fight between the center and the Left. It is easy for the center to sound like, we’re the reasonable compromise people, and not, we’re the people who are gonna sell you out. And so, I really resonated with the second half of that framework and I think Brandon Johnson and any political leader’s success in this moment is going to be rooted in their clarity in how they’re going to show up when so much of what so many of our communities rely on is at stake.

I think that that means fighting and being willing to speak out even when it means personal risk. For political leaders, I think it means fighting in terms of figuring out how we’re going to deliver, how we’re going to create revenue, how we’re going to protect the things that are at stake in real ways to use whatever power the government has to actually deliver to take care of people.

And then it means even when sh*t does get bad and people do feel the impact of this big billionaire bill, that we have political leaders who are on their side willing to stand up. And so I think Brandon Johnson and any political leader’s success in this moment is going to be reliant on showing people that they’re willing to fight for them.