Ex-Chicago mayor rips current city leaders for focus on bathroom and locker room instead of crime, education
Emanuel said on Friday night that government has allowed the city to become too "permissive" on crime and has fixated on niche liberal issues like transgender bathroom policies rather than dealing with plummeting education standards.
"I don't want to hear another word about the locker room, I don't want to hear another word about the bathroom. You better start focusing on the classroom," Emanuel told the "Real Time" panel, featuring host Bill Maher and liberal pundit Fareed Zakaria.
Maher, who often shreds the excesses of the woke left on his program, wondered, "I read that the current mayor of Chicago has an approval rating of 6.6 percent…. What's going on in Chicago?"
"Round it up. 7," the ex-mayor and former U.S. ambassador to Japan joked, though he went into some serious criticism of the city's government. He began by noting his own mantra back when he ran the city, telling Maher, "Safe streets, strong schools, stable finances. Focus on those three things and your city's going to be fine."
Speaking generally, he noted, You also have the mayor of New York not doing well… Obviously other things here in Los Angeles not doing well, the mayor here. And then you've got mayors, like the mayor of San Francisco and other cities that are doing well."
Emanuel added, bringing it back to Chicago: "We've gone through five years where people became way too permissive as a culture – which is why everything is locked up at CVS and Walgreens, and that's a disaster."
Fox News Digital reached out to Mayor Johnson's office for comment.
The Chicago Police Department reported that motor vehicle theft, aggravated battery, theft and murder have all increased since 2022, something Maher has commented on during his show. He asked in 2023 why no one seems to be addressing Black-on-Black crime in the city.
"Why doesn't anybody talk about that? Why aren't there a hundred giant Black celebrities, who would have the respect of those people, saying, 'What are you doing to yourselves? Why are you killing each other?"
Back on Friday's show, Emanuel then torched the city's education standards, saying the government is fixated on woke policies rather than the grades of their students.
"We have the worst reading scores for eighth graders in 30 years, and nobody – not a governor, not a mayor, not a president, not a secretary of education is talking about it. We're all wrapped up."
Mocking woke policies and progressive gender language, he quipped, "Look, in seventh grade, if I had known that I could have said the word 'They' and got in the girls bathroom, I would have done it."
"We literally are a superpower, we're facing off against China with 1.4 billion people and two-thirds of our children can't read eighth grade level," he added.
Though Emanuel mentioned that no president has addressed this crisis, President Trump has railed against the low educational standards in America since coming into office, pointing to it as a reason to overhaul and even disband the U.S. Department of Education.
Zakaria responded to Emanuel by proclaiming,"This is a huge Democratic Party problem. If you look at Democratic cities, they are terribly run. They have incredibly high taxes, so it's impossible to build."
Trump said last month, "Look at the Department of Education. It's a big con job. So they ranked the top countries in the world. We're ranked No. 40, but we're ranked No. 1 in one department: cost per pupil. So, we spend more per pupil than any other country in the world, but we're ranked No. 40."
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Still, Cooper's opening message that he hears the worries of working families has given Democrats in North Carolina and beyond a sense that they can reclaim their place as the party that champions the middle class. They think it's a message that could help them pick up a Senate seat, and possibly more, in next year's midterm elections, which in recent years have typically favored the party out of power. 'I'm Roy Cooper. And I know that today, for too many Americans, the middle class feels like a distant dream,' the former governor said in a video announcing his candidacy. 'Meanwhile, the biggest corporations and the richest Americans have grabbed unimaginable wealth at your expense. It's time for that to change.' Cooper's plainspoken appeal may represent just the latest effort by Democrats to find their way back to power, but it has some thinking they've finally found their footing after last year's resounding losses. 'I think it would do us all a lot of good to take a close look at his example,' said Larry Grisolano, a Chicago-based Democratic media strategist and former adviser to President Barack Obama. Whatley, a former North Carolina GOP chairman and close Trump ally, used his Thursday announcement that he was entering the race to hail the president as the true champion of the middle class. He said Trump had already fulfilled promises to end taxes on tips and overtime and said Cooper was out of step with North Carolinians. 'Six months in, it's pretty clear to see, America is back,' Whatley said. 'A healthy, robust economy, safe kids and communities and a strong America. These are the North Carolina values that I will champion if elected.' 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He echoed the themes raised in the Senate Leadership Fund ad, which noted Cooper's vetoes in the Republican-led legislature of measures popular with conservatives, such as banning gender-affirming health care for minors and requiring county sheriffs to cooperate with federal immigration officials. 'Roy Cooper may pretend to be different than the radical extremists,' Whatley said. 'But he is all-in on their agenda.' Cooper first won the governorship in 2016, while Trump was carrying the state in his first White House bid. Four years later, they both carried the state again. Cooper, who grew up in a small town 60 miles (96.6 kilometers) east of Raleigh, has long declined requests that he seek federal office. He 'understands rural North Carolina,' veteran North Carolina strategist Thomas Mills said. 'And while he's not going to win it, he knows how to talk to those folks.' As with most Democrats, Cooper's winning coalition includes the state's largest cities and suburbs. 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Pat Dennis, president of American Bridge 21st Century, a group that conducts research for an initiative called the Working Class Project, said Cooper struck a tone that other Democrats should try to match. 'His focus on affordability and his outsider status really hits a lot of the notes these folks are interested in,' Dennis said. 'I do think it's a model, especially his focus on affordability.' 'We can attack Republicans all day long, but unless we have candidates who can really embody that message, we're not going to be able to take back power.'
