Welcome to Chicago 312, your weekly hit of Chicago politics: 3 Headlines. 1 Big Question. 2 Red Flags. Every Week. Subscribe here.

What To Know This Week: Cops want pop-up curfew powers, the feds are coming for MBJ over hiring equity, and the DNC is throwing money at anyone who promises to send them a Liberal Joe Rogan instead of doing literally anything else.

If this hits, share it. If it misses, tell me why. And if you’re reading this during City Council … good luck.

3 Headlines: Curfew Creep, MBJ vs. DOJ, the Enbridge Great Lakes Pipeline

1. Snap Curfew Chaos: Give Cops the Keys to the City

This week’s biggest story is about surveillance and unchecked power. A City Council vote looms today on a proposal that would give the police superintendent the power to declare curfews anytime, anywhere—no legislation, no community input.Block Club’s Melody Mercado has the full story. Hopkins is framing it as a necessary tool to combat “teen takeovers.” But the new draft of the ordinance removes oversight from the deputy mayor for community safety and gives CPD the final say on who gets to be in public space. The same department that already over-polices Black youth on the CTA now wants permanent curfew powers they can trigger whenever they feel like it.

Meanwhile, The TRiiBE’s deeply important piece, “There Are No Places For Us To Just Be Free,” should be required reading before anyone opens their mouth about teens in Chicago.

Why it matters: Let’s be clear: this isn’t about safety. It’s about control. It’s about punishing Black and Brown teens for being visible. And it’s about expanding discretionary police power at a moment when the city should be investing in youth infrastructure, not criminalizing it.

UPDATE: Minutes ago — Seventeen alderpeople blocked the vote using a parliamentary maneuver—an unusually large coalition for 2025’s City Council. Nobody was letting this slide, especially because the version of the ordinance advanced this week got rid of the original oversight requirement, giving Supt. Larry Snelling near-total discretion to declare a curfew with just 30 minutes’ notice. Even Ald. Jason Ervin, a co-sponsor, flipped and joined Progressive Caucus members in pushing back.

CPD claims this is about stopping future violence. But the data doesn’t hold up: since March, when two street gatherings led to shootings, no curfew-related violence has occurred—while April marked the city’s lowest murder count since 1962. The ordinance would let police criminalize any group of 20+ people they think might cause harm. That’s not strategy. That’s suspicion as policy. More from WTTW.

PS — Happy birthday to Alder Andre Vasquez who drove so much of this

AND check out this opinion piece from Good Kids Mad City.

2. MBJ to DOJ: Investigate Trump, Not Me

Mayor Johnson responded to the DOJ’s civil rights investigation of his hiring practices with full defiance, saying: if the feds care so much about diversity, maybe look at Trump’s administration.

It wasn’t just a dunk. It was a defense of a governing philosophy: that hiring Black staff in a city like Chicago isn’t just legal—it’s necessary. Johnson has staffed his administration with Black, Brown, and working-class leaders from the communities most impacted by the last 40 years of austerity.

WTTW’s Heather Cherone has a good writeup. Axios and Fran Spielman at the Sun-Times offer deeper context.

Why it matters: This probe is a message (duh). A federally sanctioned intimidation campaign against the most progressive big-city mayor in the country, coordinated by the party currently threatening to end democracy. But Johnson pushed back, saying Trump is “aligned with the ultra-rich,” and has assembled a “country club” administration dominated by whites at the expense of “marginalized” groups (sorry these are Fran Spielman’s quotation marks not mine). Great to see.

3. The Under the Radar Pipeline Fight

Fossil fuel billionaires are quietly expanding a pipeline that threatens drinking water for millions. The Chicago Tribune published an alarming (and under-covered) piece about Trump’s ties to Enbridge’s Great Lakes Line 5 pipeline—a massive environmental and Indigenous sovereignty threat.

Why it matters: The Midwest isn’t just flyover—it's extraction ground zero. And with Trump surging nationally, we’re going to see more fossil fuel giveaways.

1 Question: What’s a local issue no one’s covering that you can’t stop thinking about?

We need distribution. We need volume. And we need people who know the city well enough to say, “This story matters,” and get 50,000 people to care.

So tell me: what’s the thing nobody’s covering—but should be?

Let me know what you think I’m missing or send your scathing take by hitting reply.

2 Red Flags: We’re All the Left Joe Rogan

1. "Joe Rogan for the Left" Is a Cry for Help

The New York Times ran a truly cursed piece this week about Democrats trying to build “a Joe Rogan for the Left.” The headline should’ve just said: “We still have no idea how media works.”

If that sounds familiar, I wrote about this before, and wouldn’t shut up about it (or variations on how the right is doing this better) online this week.

Here's the real issue. The Right doesn't just go viral. It builds machines. Interlocking layers of ideology, platforms, training, mentorship, audience development, and funding. They don’t wait for creators to prove themselves; they hand them the mic, build them a studio, and fund them to learn out loud in front of millions.

This Convergence article from Rynn Reed at Creator Congress is the best comprehensive breakdown of this issue that I’ve read: if we want to compete, we need an actual ecosystem that nurtures, aligns, amplifies, and—crucially—lets people be compelling.

2. Theo Von Sees the Light?

I had never heard of Theo Von until last month, when someone mentioned his name and immediately followed it up with, “Who is this? I’ beetleve never heard of him.” Since then, it’s been like saying Beetlejuice—he’s everywhere. Not just on my feed, but in real life. Casual conversations. Group chats. It’s like the algorithm cast a spell.

So when “Theo Von breaks ranks on Palestine” was in today’s Garbage Day, I wasn’t even surprised.

He posted a video to X where he broke down crying over the violence in Gaza—and called it what it is: a genocide. The replies were a cesspool of Verifieds demanding he mention October 7th. But Von didn’t walk it back.

As Ayesha A. Siddiqi put it: “Outclassed a lot of other podcasters who consider themselves more progressive and cultured than him. What do their sensibilities ultimately amount to when they fall short of even peers like this?”

Why it matters: Like Ryan pointed out in Garbage Day, the manosphere is not a monolith. Von’s shift shows there’s real emotional fissures inside these platforms—and we need to know how to speak to those contradictions.

Also:

That’s It This Week.

Sorry, wait — I still can’t let the Left Joe Rogan thing go —

Whenever someone says this nationally, or in Chicago, what they’re actually craving isn’t a voice—they’re craving influence, narrative control, emotional resonance, a way to win people over. The Right didn’t get there by accident. They built a machine. They funded it, trained it, aligned it, and made it scalable.

The Left’s problem isn’t a lack of personality. It’s a refusal to build infrastructure that lets real people be persuasive on purpose. Anyway!

Coming soon:
💬 Q+A Drop: Nick Uniejewski I talked with Nick Uniejewski, 6th District challenger to Sara Feigenholtz, organizer, and someone worth hearing. Tell me who else to talk with and I will bother them and their team on every social media platform.

🌟 We’re almost at 500 readers. That means this thing is growing—and it’s because you’re sharing it. It means a lot, especially because the people who read it are GREAT and know way more than I do about Chicago politics, organizing, and Maria Pappas, for better or worse. Thank you.

💌 Forward this to someone who knows way too much about Abraham Lincoln's gloves (this was on every local Chicago area station this morning why)

PS— Happy birthday to Alder Andre Vasquez who helped make the parliamentary procedure intrigue* what it was today with the curfew. Genuinely cool and exciting move.

_{All typos are intentional 4D chess.}