If you thought former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was out of touch with her constituents, wait till you get load of the new guy.
In the same way that President Joe Biden makes former President Jimmy Carter’s single term in office look like a rousing four-year success story, so current Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson must have some city residents longing for the days of Lightfoot’s corona-related school closures and lockdowns (which she, of course, violated to get her hair done).
Lightfoot, however tyrannical her actions, seemed at least to know what she was doing. Johnson … not so much.
Case in point: Johnson on Thursday blamed the failure of his “Bring Chicago Home” plan on Trump voters.
Under the plan, which the state’s General Assembly refused to approve, real estate transfer taxes on properties valued at under $1 million would have been reduced slightly, from .75 percent to .6 percent, CBS News reported.
However, the tax rate on transactions of between $1 million and $1.5 million would have nearly tripled, to 2 percent, whereas transactions for more than $1.5 million would have quadrupled to 3 percent.
The purported plan for the increased revenue was to “fight homelessness,” according to CBS.
In what has become typical progressive rhetoric in the Trump era, the progressive mayor blamed Trump for his own failure to sell his progressive plan to his constituents, and seemed moreover to be setting up even more of a divide among the people he supposedly represents by setting the homeless and their advocates against Trump supporters as if there were no overlap between those two groups.
“Where we really have to organize,” he said, “are the communities who are most impacted.”
Do you think taxes should be lowered across the board?
One could be forgiven for thinking that Johnson meant those folks whose tax rates would be quadrupled as the “most impacted,” but that doesn’t appear to have been the case.
“Because it’s also not lost on me, I think there were 38,000 Republicans that showed up and voted for Donald Trump, or something like that, in Chicago,” he continued. “That might be something to look into.
“I’ll just say it: There’s a good chance that that played a part in this referendum,” he then said. “So the same people who want to see Donald Trump … be president again, those are the same voters who voted for him, are the same voters where you look at where there were more [votes against the referendum], they were concentrated there.”
You can watch Johnson’s comments for yourself here.
Apparently, Johnson lives in the same fictional version of Chicago that disgraced actor Jussie Smollett does — one in which supporters of former President Donald Trump roam the streets, beating up gay men, declaring the Windy City to be “MAGA Country” … and ruining expensive progressive government plans to take over anything in its path, apparently.
He made this claim in Chicago, mind you, in Cook County, Illinois — a county that voted for Biden over Trump in 2020 by more than 3-to-1, 74.22 percent to 24.01 percent.
As of Friday morning, the votes were still being counted, but “Bring Chicago Home” looked like it was going to wind up with something like 193,000 No votes versus maybe 167,000 or so Yes votes. (That’s extrapolated from the 87 percent of the total votes, all that has been counted so far, according to data from The New York Times.)
Even if Johnson is right, and 38,000 Trump voters came out to vote against the referendum — a highly dubious claim to begin with, and one for which Johnson has no real evidence — that means that 155,000 or so non-Trump-supporting Chicago residents still voted against what CBS described as “a marquee initiative of Mayor Brandon Johnson and his progressive allies on the City Council.”
And that doesn’t even take into account the fact that Johnson, to the degree that his claim has any validity, was actually complimenting the Trump voters in question, most of whom would be delighted to take credit for helping to crush this huge tax-and-spend effort.
“It’s certainly a pump to the brakes on the mayor’s agenda,” city Alderman Brendan Reilly, who opposed the plan in part because Chicago already spends $200 million annually on homelessness, told CBS. “It’s been aggressive against the business community here, and some say we have a hostile business environment in Chicago as a result.”
“There is also a bigger question looming — is this the first signal that voters are beginning to reverse course against the progressive wave of Democratic politics in Chicago that swept Mayor Johnson into office last year,” CBS asked in its report.
Regular readers of The Western Journal will remember that Lightfoot performed so poorly as mayor that she didn’t even qualify to compete in the runoff election last year, making her the first incumbent mayor of Chicago to fail to win re-election in four decades.
But if Johnson keeps up like this, he might end up making her look competent, if only by comparison.
