Top Democrat Shreds Party For Clinging to Far-Left Wokeness During Biden-Harris
Former Democratic Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel called out his own party for focusing on topics that have little relevance to the everyday concerns of regular Americans during an appearance on Bill Maher’s HBO show Friday.
“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 remarked while joining CNN host and author Fareed Zakaria on the panel.
Maher followed up by asking, “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,” Emanuel replied with a sarcastic grin. “Safe streets, strong schools, stable finances. Focus on those three things and your city’s going to be fine.”
The conversation shifted to other major cities as well. “You also have the mayor of New York not doing well… Obviously, other things here in Los Angeles are 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 observed, before steering back to Chicago’s troubles.
He didn’t hold back in his critique of how public safety and retail theft have spiraled out of control. “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.”
On education, he was equally blunt: “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.”
Emanuel also mocked the left’s fixation on gender identity policies, which he sees as a distraction from real issues. “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,” he joked.
He warned that the U.S. is falling behind on the world stage because of misplaced priorities: “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.”
Zakaria weighed in as well, agreeing that the focus on woke rhetoric hurt Democrats in recent elections. “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,” Zakaria noted.
Chicago’s problems don’t end there.
Back in 2017, ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration, his designated border chief and longtime immigration official Tom Homan made headlines with a bold vow aimed directly at the Windy City.
Speaking in Chicago — a city whose leadership openly opposed Trump’s immigration policies — Homan promised immigration enforcement actions would kick off immediately. “All that starts January 21st, and we’re going to start right here in Chicago, Illinois. If your Chicago mayor doesn’t want to help, he can step aside. But if he impedes us — if he knowingly harbors or conceals an illegal alien — I will prosecute him,” Homan warned, specifically calling out Chicago’s Democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson.
Homan also took aim at Illinois’ Democratic governor, JB Pritzker, in the same speech.
“Chicago is in trouble because your mayor sucks and your governor sucks. January 21st, you’re going to look for a lot of ICE agents in your city, looking for criminals and gang members,” Homan announced, signaling that deportation efforts would kick off the day after Trump’s swearing-in.
Later, during a Friday night appearance with Fox News host Jesse Watters, Homan elaborated on the Trump team’s aggressive approach to immigration enforcement. He said ICE would “finally” be able to fulfill its mission — removing millions of undocumented immigrants.
When Watters asked about rumors of a large-scale nationwide raid, Homan confirmed the plan. He pledged that deportations would indeed begin on the first day and emphasized that ICE would enforce the law “without apology.”