This is a TERRIBLE article. Stop trying to rehabilitate Lightfoot. She was always awful and Chicago’s grassroots community, including queer people, tried to warn you. She is a god awful mayor who oversaw the most extreme police violence against protesters here in my lifetime.
https://twitter.com/pinknews/status/1631609109630836736
She raised the bridges downtown to trap and gas people. The Chicago Freedom School had cops trying to force their way in to arrest wounded teenagers and the city threatened to shut them down for offering shelter to battered protesters. Teenagers. Who were gassed and bleeding.
You can read about that incident in my upcoming book with @prisonculture, Let This Radicalize You. You’ll also hear about the time Lightfoot signed off on a demolition that left an entire neighborhood enveloped in toxic smoke, as though they had been bombed early in the pandemic.
There were people who acted heroically in the face of those acts of violence, working together to care for and protect as many people as possible. They were protecting people from violence Lightfoot unleashed. Trying to rehabilitate her now is a slap in the face to this city.
Remember when she shut down CPS food distribution, the day after the first rebellion here? We organized to force her to restore the meals by finding every active city phone number and email her people were still using and jamming them with the demand. We made her feed those kids.
She was trying to leverage collective punishment to stem the rebellions. By withholding food from children. It’s an anti-insurgency approach I talk about here. (The part about the policy paper on moving beyond good governance). truthout.org/audio/the-deat…
Also, her treatment of our teachers and students has been abhorrent. Despite monied efforts to vilify CTU, our teachers are among the good guys in this town, and that’s why they fought Lightfoot. It’s not actually a good thing when a mayor is at war with teachers all the time.
Remember Anjanette Young? A Black woman who the police terrorized because they raided the wrong house (while Young was naked)? Remember how Lightfoot lied about knowing about the botched raid? Bc that article’s author seems not to remember.
Remember how Lightfoot’s staff was constantly quitting bc she was terrible to people and made bad, petty decisions all the time? Or how she abandoned every progressive campaign promise (like I said she would)?
https://twitter.com/royalpratt/status/1630926118281793537
She made BIZARRE decisions that no one could make sense of. (The Census Cowboy, Chicagwa, etc)
https://twitter.com/pizza4justice/status/1630934963695636481
She is now blaming the fact that she is Chicago’s first one term mayor in 40 years on the fact that she’s a Black lesbian. She won all 50 wards when she was elected. People celebrated themselves for electing a Black lesbian — and then learned identity isn’t governance.
I remember people around the country getting excited that Chicago had elected a Black lesbian mayor. How historic, they said! People like me, who warned she would be awful, were treated terribly. The Black youth and queer folks who tried to warn you were treated terribly.
When an incumbent can’t even place second, her legacy is not “complicated.” Lightfoot is an incompetent bully who said she was disappointed with the press when they caught her lying and blamed all criticism on racism. A nightmare.
I remember the early days of the pandemic, when I was desperately trying to warn people about COVID and Lightfoot declared that people needed to go about their lives — and accused the CDC of fearmongering. That moment cost us so much.
Y’all will not rewrite this story on us now. We had to live it. I hated Rahm Emanuel with my whole heart, but Lightfoot was worse. Her chronic dishonesty was downright Trumpian and she never found a problem she couldn’t make worse.
The real story of the Lightfoot administration is how we survived her. Tell that fucking story and give credit to all the good people who waged battles against her for the sake of what was right — like @LVEJO, the #NoCopAcademy folks, teachers & people fighting police brutality.
Forgot to mention this:
https://twitter.com/RossanaFor33/status/1631645407116775425?s=20
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