The headline really speaks for itself in this case, does it not dear readers? In this morning’s Carnival of Fools I wrote about the Chicago Teachers Union’s obscene celebration of the life of Assata Shakur, a radical Sixties terrorist who robbed banks, was a cop-killer, and then fled to Cuba after being broken out of jail by her radical confreres. If all of this seems like an eerie echo of the recent Paul Thomas Anderson film One Battle After Another currently bombing — joke intended — in theaters, then realize that both the film and its literary ur-text (Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 Vineland, very much his weakest novel prior to the 21st century), were inspired quite literally by the story of Assata Shakur and Angela Davis, her west coast doppleganger.

But the CTU, devoted as it is to beautiful dreams of violent Communist revolution, recognizes Shakur for the liberationist revolutionary she is. (Who cares about the lives of pigs, anyway? She was fighting the power!) I mentioned in the Carnival that the CTU relates to Chicago as a tick relates to its human victim, not only sucking blood but giving back dangerous diseases in the exchange. And right after I filed the Carnival, the CTU’s bought-and-sold, hand-molded Mayor Brandon Johnson — like Lyme Disease in human form — went out there to triple down:

Assata Shakur is an important person in the Black Liberation movement who has repeatedly claimed her innocence, and that she was tried by an all white jury at a particular time in which it was nearly impossible for black people to receive a fair trial.

That’s right, folks — we’ll just never know whether Shakur was a terrorist murderer, because she denied it despite being convicted in a court of law! Everybody knows a black bank-robbing Marxist cop-killer can’t get a fair trial in New Jersey from a bunch of white people — here comes the story of the Hurricane, all over again.

There’s not much to add; Johnson’s racist blather discredits itself. I just want you to know what we’re up against here in the Windy City. Brandon Johnson is as reliable an idiot as has ever existed in a position of civic responsibility in my lifetime, to point where I could make money predicting his next malfunction. I could have warned you he would say something this amazingly dumb in advance: not just a bad take, but an angle so unexpectedly stupid that everyone is forced to step back and whistle through their teeth in amazement.

That’s who he is. That’s Brandon Johnson for you. Pray for my city.