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What To Know This Week: Authoritarian creep disguised as supporting the teens, progressive taxes, and why the left still can’t coordinate better than a Signal chat full of Palantir freaks.

🔥 3 Headlines: Curfew Power Grab, Revenue Fights, A Lawsuit That Should Be Louder

1. The Curfew Bill Is a Trojan Horse for Policing Power

From WBEZ and Block Club: The latest “curfew” proposal in City Hall—sponsored by Ald. Brian Hopkins, backed by downtown alderfolks, isn’t about kids. It’s about expanding police authority, pure and simple. The ordinance would let CPD declare curfews anytime, anywhere, with no public notice, no oversight, and no standard of evidence.

Hopkins and co. claim it’s a tool to stop “teen takeovers” downtown. But in practice, it would let the city preemptively criminalize any gathering in any neighborhood under the banner of disruption. It’s a legal loophole designed to turn public space into a police-controlled zone, as Unraveled Press pointed out.

Why does this matter? Because this is how authoritarianism creeps in. Not through declarations, but through policy. Through normalized “safety measures” that end up targeting Black and Brown youth, queer kids, and anyone who makes the wrong person uncomfortable in public.

Right now, the Johnson administration hasn’t endorsed it—but they haven’t condemned it either. Why not?

2. Progressive Revenue Gets Framed as Fantasy

Let’s be blunt: the city needs money. A coalition of progressive orgs (including CTU, ICIRR, People’s Lobby, and more) dropped a detailed, bold, and deeply sensible set of revenue proposals: digital ad taxes, billionaire wealth taxes, GILTI loophole closures, and a surcharge on private equity carried interest. Combined? Over $7B.

Mayor Brandon Johnson went to Springfield today with a laundry list of "reasonable asks" that already feel half-defeated. If we don’t make the case emotionally—and call these demands what they are, the floor as the federal government is being gutted—we’re ceding the narrative before the first vote is cast. This is a major loss when our Governor is setting the stage for a national run based primarily on his ability to govern as a ‘resister”.

If we don’t shape the emotional terrain around these demands—if we don’t call this the bare minimum—we will lose, again, before negotiations even start.

3. Quiet Lawsuit: Chicago Sues Trump Over Federal Worker Firings

While all eyes were on revenue drama, the city quietly joined a federal lawsuit against Trump’s administration over mass firings of federal workers. It’s easy to miss—but it’s one of the few direct legal challenges Johnson has made to Trump’s authoritarian creep.

The lesson? Our government’s capacity to function is being gutted from the inside, and every time Chicago takes a stand on federal overreach, it matters—even if it’s quiet. We need 10x more of this, and louder.

🧠 1 Big Question: Why Can’t the Left Coordinate Like Tech Bros on Signal?

I sent this piece on tech bro right wing group chats to many people, then I read the scathing take on it from Max Read and Garbage Day. In the process of talking this article through with many Chicago organizers (btw, we DON’T really have a conversational focused group chat, beyond calls to action, that’s progressive, that’s cross-movement, unless I’m sharing how uncool I am without knowing it rn), and doing lots of dunking on the right, I came to some fairly obvious conclusions.

Yes, group chats aren’t new. We have them. We've had them. That’s not the issue.

The issue is that most movement group chats are either ghost towns or pure logistics hubs. They’re built for turnout, not discourse. When I asked around, national organizers said the same thing: there’s no real space where line development happens. No space where people argue about framing, experiment in good faith, or hash out real political differences without posturing.

It’s not a tech problem. It’s a power problem. There’s no shared incentive to coordinate messaging if there’s no shared material base or line to defend. What the right has—through fear, funders, or fascism—is alignment. We have vibes, and right now, vibes don’t scale, especially not with another group chat.

This isn’t a call to start another Signal thread. I’m not doing that, and you shouldn’t either. What we actually need is vulnerability, not virality—a way to talk honestly about collapse, coordination, and what clarity could look like before we lose more ground.

What kind of structure do you think it would take to get better, wider-spread line development in Chicago?

Let me know in the comments, through texting, or anonymous angry DMs.

🚩 2 Red Flags: Collapse Clubs and Campaign Ghosts

1. “All of His Guns Will Do Nothing for Him”: The Lefty Prepper Surge

From The Guardian: More liberals are prepping—but not with bunkers and bullets. With dry goods, trauma kits, solar panels, and deep community ties. The right-wing prepper fantasy is isolation. The left’s version? Mutual ruggedization.

The quote that haunts: “The first time this guy in his MAGA hat falls down the stairs and breaks his leg and it gets gangrenous and neither he nor anyone in his family are doctors, he’s done.”

What does this mean for Chicago? We need our own ruggedization plan. Not just for climate. For authoritarian collapse. For infrastructure failure. For when the grid goes.

2. Kamala HQ Wasn’t Enough—And Neither Is Our Digital Strategy

From Rachel Karten’s interview with Rob Flaherty: Kamala HQ had viral heat. It broke through. But it didn’t win votes. The real lesson? You can’t meme your way out of culture decay.We need offline actions that generate online narrative oxygen. We need candidates who do shit that lives online because it was worth doing, not because it was engineered for trend cycles.

This isn’t a failure of digital. It’s a failure of ownership. Strategy without agency is noise. And the left keeps training brilliant digital staffers to execute without ever giving them command.

That’s It for This Week.

Authoritarian creep is outpacing our city budgets, our digital strategies, and sometimes our guts. But Chicago isn’t done yet. We’ve still got time, traction, and each other—if we move.

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_{All typos are intentional 4D chess.}