“Chicago’s mayoral election should stand as a warning to anyone who cares about the future of America’s cities,” argues Bloomberg’s Matthew Yglesias, “not so much because of the result but because of the choice it presented. Both candidates were beholden to unions” — the teachers union for runoff winner Brandon Johnson, the police union for loser Paul Vallas. Yet “supporters of both candidates” argued “not that their guy would be able to put his best ideas into practice, but that he wouldn’t be able to implement his worst ones. Then they made the opposite case for their opponent.” Bottom line: “America’s cities would be better off if their mayors were as skeptical of the public-sector unions that support them as they are of the ones that don’t.”
“Brandon Johnson’s victory in last week’s Chicago mayoral race is a reminder that no matter how bad things get, they can always get worse,” warns The Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley. Chicago’s “high crime and taxes are driving away businesses”; “a net 175,000 people left Cook County between 2020 and 2022.” Johnson won by only about 20,000 votes. “How many of the city’s expats would have voted for moderate reformer Paul Vallas?” The “enormous problem for Chicago and other big cities: Left-wing policies are driving away the types of voters and businesses needed for a course correction.” That trend will be hard to reverse, as remote work “has made workers and businesses more mobile, shrinking . . . the political base for reformers.”
Consider “the cases of Dylan Mulvaney and Riley Gaines,” fumes Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill. “Mulvaney is a 26-year-old man who labours under the delusion that he’s a girl.” “Gaines is a woman” who “excels in swimming.” “Mulvaney made the news for securing a sweet sponsorship deal with Nike Women”; Gaines, for “a speech at San Francisco State University last Thursday on why women’s sports should be ringfenced from blokes” that occasioned “vile misogynistic insults.” But “the problem isn’t Dylan Mulvaney himself.” It’s “the chattering classes, the White House and big businesses” all “falling at his feet.” “If women aren’t real, what’s the need for women’s rights? It’s a short step from treating womanhood as a joke to treating women as jokes.”
“Rather than go through any sort of committee process,” state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal hopes his bill to end New York’s long ban on televising state court proceedings can be passed “as part of the state budget,” grumbles the Empire Center’s Cam Macdonald. Yet the “bill has no fiscal implications, meaning there’s no reason for including it in the opaque process under which the governor, Assembly speaker, and Senate majority leader negotiate the state budget.” Past similar bills have died in committee since 2011. “Cameras in courtrooms is a matter worth debate. But that debate should not be restricted to two women and a man in a room.”
“The professional relationship between billionaire Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, and independent journalist Matt Taibbi hit a serious and possibly irreparable snag late last week following Musk’s quixotic decision to suppress links to Substack,” notes Reason’s Robbie Soave. Substack “is a preferred platform for many independent journalists, such as Taibbi,” who’s one of the journos Musk invited to research and write The Twitter Files, which “revealed a high level of coordination between major tech companies, government agencies, and political figures” to censor social-media content. Musk’s gripe is with “Substack Notes, a new feature that is said to mimic Twitter in several ways.” Taibbi’s dropping Twitter and sticking with Substack; Musk then “called Taibbi an ‘employee’ of Substack — which is false — and unfollowed his former ally.” Sigh: “Musk’s treatment of Substack is a self-sabotaging betrayal of his principles — one that Taibbi has rightly declined to ignore.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board