Welcome to Chicago 312: 3 Headlines. 1 Big Question. 2 Red Flags. Every Wednesday. Subscribe here.

What To Know This Week: Though it’s not really the Chicago news per say this week, my focus right now is on how the Trump administration’s Big Bad Budget Bill just cleared the Senate and is barreling through the House.

The bill will detonate education, healthcare, housing, and public transit funding across the country— including:

• $6.9 billion in federal education funding, including Title I-C, Title II-A, Title III-A, and 21st Century Learning Centers

• $800 billion from Medicaid over 10 years

• Affordable housing, food assistance, and clean energy programs

• Federal enforcement capacity in labor, environmental, and civil rights agencies

It locks in Trump-era tax cuts for the rich and sets up state legislatures to do the dirty work through austerity. And yet? Most Democrats are treating it like business as usual rather than an existential threat. This includes Chuck Schumer, whose major contribution was changing the name from “The Big Beautiful Budget Bill” to something embarrassing while doing absolutely nothing to stop it. If you want to dive deep on how this will hit Illinois, check out this piece in the Sun Times, or follow along with CNN. Call your rep.

Let’s get into everything else.

3 Headlines: Cryptic Texts, School Closings, Safety Net Hospitals

1. PAC Texts, Fake Outrage, and the Soft Launch of a Backlash

The Triibe: Texts funded by a shadowy political action committee are slamming Brandon Johnson and progressive alders over their vote to block a youth curfew. It’s classic fear-mongering. It’s also really bad font, if anyone else is tracking that.

Why It Matters: This is a soft launch for the deep cut anti-left backlash groups will try to create for 2027. It's targeting working-class parents and positioning progressives as out of touch with "community concerns.” “Common sense curfew to stop dangerous and violent teen takeovers” has been stuck in my head for an hour because it’s so incredibly poorly written that it makes me spiral to a point where it’s like “Wait, maybe it’s so bad that it’s good? Am I missing something?” But it’s not, it’s just weird. It’s also super ugly, so… there’s that.

2. “Beyond Closure” On Wounds That Never Healed

From Block Club: A new documentary screening in Bronzeville and Englewood reopens the still-bleeding wound of the 2013 school closings. The emotional toll on families and neighborhoods hasn’t faded. And it wasn’t just about the buildings. It was about the message: you don’t matter enough to protect.

Why It Matters: These closures were justified with the same logic as today’s federal budget cuts—"efficiency," "right-sizing," "fiscal reality." But what communities experience is dispossession. And the trauma compounds when the same leaders who closed your school show up a decade later asking you to trust their new "equity plan."

3. How The Tax Bill Breaks the Safety Net In Illinois Hospitals

From Block Club: The Trump budget will wreck safety-net hospitals like those serving RP, South Shore, and Little Village. Danny Davis and local health leaders say the math doesn’t lie: without federal support, these hospitals can’t survive. Meanwhile, the bill locks in massive tax cuts for the rich, ensuring state budgets are squeezed harder every year. In a big win for octogenarians and rare W for Davis himself, Danny Davis’ press conference on this was one of the few I’ve seen specifically address how profoundly destructive this bill will be for the hospital system, and includes the quote: “Let me tell you, if all you do is cut, cut, cut, all that you get is blood, blood, blood, and the blood of the American people will be on the hands of those who held the knife.“

Why It Matters: Again, I can’t emphasize how existentially threatening this bill is: it means clinics closing in your neighborhood, transit routes being slashed, and a fundamental threat to the already messed up healthcare system in our country.

Equally important, though it didn’t make it to this particular press conference: GOP Budget Bill Would Make ICE “Largest Federal Law Enforcement Agency in the History of the Nation.”

And, as the Senate debated whether or not to burn down what’s left of the social safety net, Trump was in Florida making campaign content at a new migrant detention camp—built in a swamp, literally, in the Everglades, what happens when you let the worst people alive make policy and merch. It’s badly built, grotesque, and shows, viscerally, appallingly, that the government shouldn’t and can’t keep people housed, keep clinics open, do basic infrastructure—but can build concentration camps in a week. How do you respond to merch for a death camp.

Call your rep.

1 Big Question: Sarah McBride Stan

There’s been a lot of fury at Rep. Sarah McBride this year — but not just from the vitriolic, death threat-happy right wing. I’m really only interested in the critiques from other trans people. Parker Molloy, in particular, has dragged her: calling her boilerplate, evasive, pivoting from anti-trans attacks to economic talking points, and, more damningly, someone who implicitly silences real trans resistance while giving liberals an excuse to feel like they’ve done something.

And those critiques hit. Rep. McBride is funded by AIPAC. She represents Delaware, the nation’s favorite money-laundering tax haven. She went on Ezra Klein’s podcast to say she doesn’t want to talk about transphobia because she wants to focus on kitchen-table issues. Her strategy is to emphasize bipartisan competence, to rise above the hate, and to build power in the long game.

And yet. Ari Drennen reported McBride and Sen. Tammy Baldwin fought like hell to get a Medicaid ban on gender-affirming care stripped from the Trump budget. Her centrist relationship building strategy is reflected in this TikTok, which I liked because I’m a nerd and because it probably helped her build the relationships she needed to actually get things done. But also because I’m a nerd, sorry.

Still: compare her ability to make these political choices to Rep. Rashida Tlaib: censured, dragged, called every slur in the book—for refusing to stay silent about genocide.

A new national survey of trans adults confirmed the top reason people detransition isn’t regret—it’s transphobia. From denial of care to insurance rejections, clinic closures to forced silence, to the individual pressures of transphobia. DUH!!! But I digress. And I still remember walking into Rayburn in the Obama era and watching actual Senators snicker at a group of trans and gender-fluid organizers. I think the climate McBride is operating in is even worse. If it were me, I’d spiral by day two and start saying I want to go home in every press interview like John Fetterman.

I’m focused on this not to backseat quarterback what’s happening in Congress, or to defend a politician because they have always been very kind to me personally (an extremely common logical fallacy that makes my teeth hurt), but because I want to better understand what’s happening.

When the center is melting down and conceding everything while attacking the only Democrat who has won anything recently, staying silent while the margins are crushed—what actually works?

What’s the difference between standing your ground and working behind the scenes?

Between not using your leverage and focusing on your locus of control?

Who gets to choose which? What are the limits?

If the only way out of our current fascist disaster might be so many acting unexpectedly or taking risks — what actually matters? How do we actually incentivize those risks for people in power, not because we are deferential, but so that they actually do it?

And also — how fucked would trans people be today if it weren’t for Rep. Sarah McBride?

Call your rep.

2 Red Flags Stressing Me Out Today: Opportunity Zones and Rehashing Real Estate

1. “Opportunity” is Usually a Threat

From Boondoggle: New reporting shows how the language of "opportunity zones," a federal development policy that is supposedly about business development, is used to greenlight displacement, tax shelters, and land grabs. I’ll be honest: I never really understood Opportunity Zones, and when I lived in Bronzeville, there was a big push around them. Anecdotally, I met many who have struggled to access any of the benefits as people actually living there, but that’s often true of programs like this. I appreciated this breakdown: when you hear "opportunity zone," think: tax breaks for people who already have portfolios, not protection for people living on the block. I won’t pretend I understand the ends and outs but this got me closer, and shows how so many policies that sound hopeful never seem to benefit the people it claims to.(beyond, you know, the flagrant tax breaks + gutting of the safety happening now, in real time, federally).

2. The Return of Real Estate Exceptionalism

Block Club: Alders on the Northwest Side are trying to dismantle the anti-gentrification pilot zone by claiming it "punishes longtime homeowners." Let’s be clear: what they mean is that restrictions on flipping properties or speculative investment might slightly slow the pace of asset inflation. If you’re like “huh” me too.

TLDR: The true punishment is displacement—which is exactly what these zones are designed to prevent. But instead of working to strengthen protections for renters and expand affordability tools for multi-generational homeowners, these alders are trying to claim In their world, regulating profit is oppression, and rent hikes are just the market doing its job. I hate their world, and it’s also not true: "equity" means "the value of your condo" instead of your neighbors not getting displaced mid-lease, and they know that because it benefits them. This attempt to roll back what was a substantial win for progressive housing wastes time and energy and it’s also just blatant pandering to a group that is also part of who others hope will flip to the right…

That’s It This Week.

I’ll be back in your inbox soon, probably crying about Medicaid spreadsheets. Maybe next week I’ll actually write about what’s happening in Chicago. Call your rep.

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_{All typos are intentional 4D chess.}