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: Green social housing moves forward while South Shore fights to stay housed, ICE Barbie visits Springfield, and Trump pretends he knows what a union is.

🔥 3 Headlines: ICE Barbie Stunts, Green Social Housing, Ellis Lakeview Fights Back

1. Kristi Noem, deeply unserious fascist, tours Springfield

Kristi Noem came to Springfield last week on the exact day REAL ID enforcement kicked in, a campaign-style stunt designed to terrify immigrant families and go viral. No coordination with the governor, no actual policy briefing—just a press conference engineered to stoke fear and go viral.

Weeks earlier Noem toured El Salvador’s mega-prison CECOT—home to thousands of men imprisoned without trial—filming herself in front of cages of detainees and calling them “terrorists.”

In Springfield, Noem doubled down —weaponizing the name of Emma Shafer, a young woman tragically killed by someone she knew, to argue against sanctuary laws. She hadn’t spoken to Emma’s family. In fact, while Noem stood in front of cameras claiming to speak for Emma, Emma’s parents were down the street—protesting her visit.

Why this matters: Noem deserves a whole dissertation, but I’m not sure if it’s one on the banality and desperation of evil, or maybe one on digital narrative warfare. Either way, her self interest is fully tied up in turning human rights violations into TikTok content.

As the Trump team is rolling out the infrastructure for mass detention and deportation. Noem is warming up the base by normalizing human rights violations, collapsing the distance between state violence and content. And she’s doing it while Illinois families are fighting for their lives. The right continues to road-test talking points, soft-launch internment-era laws, and groom the public for policies that would’ve been unthinkable five years ago.

We can’t stop at dunks. This is a dry run for something much worse.

2. Chicago Greenlights City-Owned Housing Developer

From WTTW: City Council just approved one of Brandon Johnson’s most consequential policies to date: the creation of a nonprofit, city-owned housing developer aimed at building “green social housing”—permanently affordable, mixed-income, and sustainable.

$135M from a $1.25B bond measure will fund a revolving loan system to help build 400 affordable units per year, without relying on federal tax credits or private equity. This model flips the typical funding script by mixing market-rate financing with deep affordability requirements, reinvesting returns into future housing.

Why this matters: City infrastructure that we control means everything as Trump’s team tries to rip housing supports out from under us. Here’s a thread from former Housing Commissioner Daniel Kay Hertz on why it matters.

Also: 18 aldermen voted no. Write their names down. Watch how they talk about “crime” next time someone proposes shelter near their ward.

3. Ellis Lakeview Tenants Sue Freddie Mac Over Retaliatory Evictions

From Block Club: Fifteen tenants at Ellis Lakeview Apartments in Kenwood have filed suit against Freddie Mac and Ansonia Property Management for retaliating against them after they launched a rent strike. They say they were threatened with eviction—based on inaccurate rent balances—and denied access to their own records.

TLDR: The last slumlord let the place rot, and the federal government (still the technical landlord) has to take meaningful action to fix it.

So these tenants are organizing to demand a collective bargaining contract with the next owner of the foreclosed building.

Why this matters: This is tenants using labor strategy to fight a collapsing housing system. It’s smart, it’s righteous, and it’s proactive and possible even while Trump tries to cut $33B from HUD and slash tenant protections.

🧠 1 Question: What Could Alder Ray Lopez Possibly Mean By This?

No matter how much I dislike his actions and his committment to being a local right wing content peddler, I can never fully hate fellow poster Ray Lopez, no how heinous or depressing his actions as an elected official may be.

But this week, Ald. Raymond Lopez went full Nextdoor warlock on Twitter, posting:

If there is context I’ve missed it. But I will not be looking deeper.

What does this mean? Does it matter? Why am I still thinking about it?

What? Let me know what you think I’m missing in the comments, through texting, or anonymous angry DMs.

🚩 2 Red Flags:

1. “How the Radical Right Captured the Culture”: Because It’s Basically Already AI

I am going to share Ana Marie Cox’s piece in the New Republic—“How the Radical Right Captured the Culture,” over and over again. Not just because it’s a good breakdown of the Trump-era sludge pipeline. But because it clearly communicates the most important premise of this ecosystem: they’re not winning because they don’t need good content, they’re winning because our current media systems reward BAD content.

She says more poetic literary things about how Trump is the perfect figurehead for this moment (he’s already an AI deepfake of himself). But I’m sharing it because — well, our current digital landscape requires extensive repetition for a message to standout. This piece hits at the message I think is most important right now: we don’t need a Left Joe Rogan!

2. Trump Trashes Obama Center While Still Owing Contractors From the ‘90s

Cheating a little on this one, since it’s more Chicago politics than a standalone existential or technological red flag.

But this week, during a meeting with new Canadian President Carney, Trump took some time to throw a random curveball and accuse the Obama Center of being a “disaster” built by “DEI” hires, a wild thing to say to and about THE CHICAGO BUILDING TRADES.

Beyond demonstrating that Trump is “ is thin-skinned and emotionally fragile” as CFL President Bob Reiter called him, it shows another crucial angle to the narrative frame as national money is weaponized against states and cities.

In Trumpworld, if the crew isn’t 100% white dudes in wraparound Oakleys screaming on Fox News about concrete curing temps, then it must be “woke” and failing. Trump is laying the groundwork—again—for a white nationalist infrastructure narrative. One where his people build “real America,” and anything else is suspect, corrupt, or “woke.”

And I’d be remiss not to mention what’s happening just blocks from the site:
while Trump rants about “woke construction,” organizers in South Shore are still fighting a decade-long battle to stop actual displacement. A proposed 26-story luxury hotel—backed by a developer tied to Obama himself—has reignited the fight for real protections, not just press releases.

That’s It for This Week.

Kristi Noem’s testing fascist messaging, Trump’s pretending he knows how to hang drywall, but Chicago’s building something real anyway against the odds.

📨 Forward this to a friend who still thinks “social housing” means Soviet cubes

🎙️ ICYMI —I spoke with Kat Abughazaleh about her campaign in IL-09 — look out for more interviews like this in the next few weeks.

💬 Reply with your hot takes, red flags, or any guesses however out there about what that tweet could mean…

PS — New developments with the CTA. More soon.

_{All typos are intentional 4D chess.}