“This is about black labor versus white wealth. That’s what this battle is about,” Brandon Johnson framed the mayoral election as a race war at a debate with his opponent.

Johnson, a top official at Chicago’s radical teachers’ union, had plenty of money. As a Cook County Commissioner, Johnson was already earning $100,000 a year, another $100,000 from the Chicago Teachers Union, plus $25,000 for his work as a lobbyist. He’s also eligible for a $1.1 million pension for teaching for only four years. It wasn’t about wealth, it was about race.

Behind in the polls due to his pro-crime stance, Johnson made the campaign into a series of racist taunts, smears and accusations. Johnson charged his opponent with being “dismissive of a black man” and claimed that critics of his pro-crime policies were engaging in “yet another attack on a black man as an elected leader”. And racism paid off for Johnson.

While Paul Vallas, a sensible and far more qualified moderate, won the white and Latino vote, Johnson, a leftist racist bent on destroying whatever was left of Chicago, won the black vote.

Many Chicago pastors, seeing the bloody violence in the streets, had endorsed Vallas in the hope that he would stop the killing, but Al Sharpton and other racist radicals promoted Johnson. As did the CTU which had spent generations exploiting children and robbing taxpayers to make officials like Johnson so powerful and wealthy. Johnson was the CTU’s victory over Chicago.

Whenever Johnson was asked any hard questions, he pivoted right back to black supremacism.

“When black men tell you the truth, believe us,” he insisted, denying the impact of his economic policies. To defend the school closures that devastated a generation of children, Johnson claimed that,  “A lot of black people and brown people died. We wanted to make sure that black and brown people in particular did not continue to die.” In that, as in so much else, he failed.

After crawling into office on gutter racism, Johnson stayed there. He ran his campaign on a promise to go easy on criminals because they were victims of racism and he delivered.

When mobs of rioters looted stores, smashed cars and assaulted people, Mayor Johnson complained that harsh language was being used toward “children”. He claimed that “it is not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities”. More recently he described the armed rioters as taking part in “large gatherings”.

When the “children” and “youth” took to stealing cars, including armed carjacking, Johnson responded by suing car companies whom his administration blamed for making cars too easy for his criminal constituents to steal.

The racist mayor continued to justify the criminal behavior by suggesting that it was a black thing. “I’ve been a public school teacher, and sometimes you have a number of students who want to find spaces where they can cut up,” Johnson, who had only worked for four years as a social studies teacher, claimed.  “You have to Google that. It’s like black terminology.”

‘Cut up’ is actually English slang. Variations of it go as far back as Shakespeare and Dickens. If Johnson were actually qualified to teach anything, use Google or be any more than a racist union hack, he would know that. But it’s consistent with the racist mayor using race as a sword and shield, an attack and defense, a suggestion that anything people object to about him or the consequences of his pro-crime policies is a ‘black thing’ that they couldn’t understand.

However you translate it, Chicago is a disaster. Crime is up 39% as people are being cut up, cut down, shot and beaten by opportunity-starved youths, and a potential budget shortfall is approaching $1 billion. 42% of the city’s budget is going to pensions and interest on debt.

Much of that comes from Johnson’s own notoriously greedy Chicago Teachers Union. After their 2019 strike, senior teachers are expected to make six figures this year. CTU members will score $84,313 after five years which rises to almost $100,000 after ten years on the job of not teaching kids. CTU is not only destroying children: it’s also destroying the future of the city.

CTU abused its political power to rob the pensions of its own members with a ‘pension holiday’ and then imposed a special property tax to subsidize its pensions without having to go through the Property Tax Extension Limitation Law. Chicago property taxes have doubled in a decade, and CTU’s pensions are still more underfunded than ever to the tune of $13 billion.

Johnson ran for office on the CTU agenda of raising property taxes even more with $400 million in real estate taxes that he misleadingly described as a “mansion tax” on buildings over $1 million which in reality would have raised rents in most apartment buildings. But how do you tax people who aren’t there anymore? 80,000 people left Chicago in two years. By the time Johnson finishes running it into the ground, there’ll be even less separating Chicago from Detroit.

“I’ve been all over the city of Chicago. And everywhere I go, people are feeling the excitement, the energy has shifted in the city,” Johnson claimed. The energy is there. It’s the energy of Chicago topping the country in the number of carjackings. Those too are probably the fault of car companies rather than the “deprived” “youth” robbing elderly women at gunpoint.

During Brandon Johnson’s first three months in office, 41 more people were murdered and car thefts rose by 4,341. Johnson’s campaign pro-crime pledges to shut down a database of gang members and other law enforcement tools will make matters even worse. And, most importantly, Johnson’s goal for the police is to have their “demographic make-up” reflect the “demographics of the community”. When it comes to policies, for Johnson, race always trumps everything else.

Chicago has gone from one radical, incompetent and off-putting racist mayor to another. Brandon Johnson is even worse than Lori Lightfoot, but both of them graduated from the same school of running their campaigns and their administrations around racist dog whistles.

Chicago voters, those of them who were alive and conscious, knew what they were getting.

Brandon Johnson’s plan to fix education was to claim that standardized tests had their “roots in eugenics to prove the inferiority of black people.” His plan to fix crime was to denounce policing as a tool of “white supremacy” and blamed the BLM race riots on “a failed racist system.”

The failed racist system was that of his black predecessor. Now it’s his failed racist system.

Johnson ran on racism and, unlike a lot of politicians, he’s delivering on what he promised.

Other Parts of the Series:

Part I: Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot.

Part 2: LA’s Eric Garcetti.

Part 3: DC’s Muriel Bowser.

Part 4: KC’s Quinton Lucas.

Part 5: SF’s London Breed.

Part 6: Philly’s Jim Kenney.

Part 7: St. Louis’ Tishaura Jones.

Part 9: Seattle’s Jenny Durkan.

Part 10: Minneapolis’s Jacob Frey.

Part 11: Charlottesville’s Nikuyah Walker.

Part 12: Portland’s Ted Wheeler.

Part 13: Atlanta’s Keisha Lance Bottoms.

Part 14: NYC’s Bill de Blasio.

Part 15: Enfield’s Mondale Robinson

Part 16: Boston’s Michelle Wu