Everyone's flailing favorite fool, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson - probably fresh off another vacation in a fragile flower quiet room - who has absolutely nothing else going on in that formerly fair city to concern himself with and obviously nothing but excess money to blow, has taken the occasion of the Juneteenth federal holiday for a declaration of his own.

Chicago is America's third largest city with a 28.5% black population. They've lost over 120K in 10 years. It's not just white flight from that hellhole.

And with a city budget already $500+M in the hole, Hizzonor is going to spend a cool half a million studying how to give even more away.

Reparations, anyone?

The city on Monday issued a formal apology to Black Chicagoans for the harm that slavery, Jim Crow laws and present-day policies have had on them and their descendants.

The acknowledgement is included in Executive Order 2024-1, signed by Mayor Brandon Johnson, creating a “Reparations Task Force to develop a Black Reparations Agenda” that will ultimately offer recommendations on remedies to the polices that have harmed African Americans in Chicago for generations. He previously earmarked $500,000 in the city budget to study the issues.

“Today’s Executive Order is not just a public declaration; it is a pledge to shape the future of our city by confronting the legacy of inequity that has plagued Chicago for far too long,” Johnson, the city’s fourth Black mayor, said in a statement. “We are continuing to build on the bedrock of my administration to move forward in reconciliation through targeted investments aimed at rectifying decades of deliberate disinvestment in Black neighborhoods and communities.

The order apologizes, codifies that “the legacy of chattel slavery and Jim Crow are incompatible” with present-day values and establishes a timetable and goals for the task force in looking at generational inequities in housing, health, education, policing policies and more.

Ignore that gunfire over there. The mayor's talking here about throwing more money in the street.

He's all about "settin' the tone" and reminding everyone - when it's convenient - that he's a black man.

“As a Black man, and as the leader of a major U.S. city, I have a responsibility to set the tone”

Meanwhile: pic.twitter.com/vRwT6iT87C

— Douglas Ritz (@douglasritz) June 17, 2024

The article the mayor links to has reparations advocates who offer helpful suggestions about what they believe would make things better. 

...As Juneteenth celebrations become more mainstream, one question remains in the hearts and minds of many Black descendants of chattel slavery, both nationwide and in Chicago: When will Black residents receive reparations?

“Where is our modern-day 40 acres and mule?” Michelle Rashad, a Chicago Lawn resident, asked rhetorically. Rashad is also the executive director of Imagine Englewood if.., a nonprofit organization that’s dedicated to creating safe and empowering spaces for young people in Englewood. 

For Rashad, reparations for Black residents would include free education at any level, free healthcare, and programming to support Black home and land ownership. 

“So if I want to get my master’s, I’m gonna get my doctorate, all of that should be paid for like the next 100 years,” she said. “Black folks should have free health insurance, but if not all of it, at least making sure that we have we were able to access free mental health services. I also feel like Black folks should have easier access to land and property. There should be a shortcut for us considering we were once property. We should be able to own property.”

Certainly, there is a lot of food for discussion in that piece because there's certainly a laundry list of different forms people imagine reparations could take.

Johnson's task force will be charged with rooting into Chicago's history and working from there (Lori Lightfoot, the previous mayor, actually had her own reparations group started, but they only met twice and were never heard from again.).

...According to the mayor’s office, the task force will conduct a study and analysis of policies that have affected Black Chicagoans from slavery to the present day. Based on this analysis, the task force will recommend remedies to racial inequities caused by such policies.

...In his executive order, Johnson said the country and city “perpetuated, condoned, profited and benefited” from the system of chattel slavery. He then noted several Jim Crow-era policies from 1877 to 1963 that legalized and perpetuated racial segregation and discrimination.

These policies -- including housing discrimination, redlining and highway construction -- led to "disparities in life expectancy, unemployment, homeownership rates, home value, incarceration, and more," Johnson's office states.

There is a fair amount of cynicism about this play coming from Johnson right now, as you might well imagine, and not just from pasty-faced Republicans either.

Many of the obvious problems with Johnson's reparations ploy stem from the absolute disaster that IS Chicago and the fact that the Democratic black mayor is claiming to have been so disadvantaged by virtue of his race in that same city.

Never mind that the mayor before him was also black and a Democrat.

In fact, as far as the mayoral party in power goes, you have to go all the way back to a portly fellow named William Hale Thompson to find anyone who had an "R" after their name. His last year as mayor of Chicago - the last Republican mayor - was 1931.

Now, I'm no math major - I only play one here at HotAir - but my cheap little solar calculator says that was 93 years ago.

Every single thing for basically the last 100 years that Brandon Johnson is now whining about for votes, and to distract from the ghastly incompetence he's evinced so far, has been cruelly and repeatedly dealt to the people of Chicago by Democrats, and Democrats alone.

So... are we to then infer Democrats can sometimes be systemic racists when left alone to their own devices for extended periods in power?

Who knew?

I kid, I kid.

We all knew.

There's also the pesky little problem of history - what "slaves" in Illinois? But that never stopped anyone from race-grifting.

Reparations for what? Blacks migrated to Chicago during the Great Migration between 1920-1960. Illinois was never a slave state anyway. https://t.co/QU5sA8UEmU

— Milo™ (@chasbottom) June 17, 2024

This reparations gambit is nothing more than a cheap dollar-waving trick at the black community in Chicago which is absolutely incensed by Johnson's migrant/sanctuary city policies and, by extension, those of the Biden administration.

Outraged community members have been alternately seething and blowing up public forums for over a year now.

Chicago is an absolute disaster:

"How dare this mayor and city council have the guts to give migrants $51 million dollars. I demand you to have the same passion and urgency to pass a city of Chicago reparations order."pic.twitter.com/dxxwl1Ut1B

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) May 31, 2023

And the mayor keeps ducking the incoming, ably assisted by his department heads.

For example - Johnson's got the Chicago Police Department running in circles and gussying up stats - "we only count bullet holes in bodies between the hours of..." - to paper over what a hellhole the place is. But there are still a few people left who know what the score really is.

The Chicago Police Department stops counting weekend shooting victims after 11:59 p.m. on Sundays.

Good thing because 21 people have been shot since midnight today, including two mass shootings, and that would have really messed up their weekend tally.

— CWBChicago (@CWBChicago) June 17, 2024

One suggestion I saw was that the Democratic Machine, which has run Chicago for almost a century, owed reparations to everyone for what they've done to the city. But that's way too easy because it totally lets Chicago voters off the hook.

I'm not sure what the problem in that city is - Stockholm Syndrome or simply a bad case of everyone bound and determined to make sure they get theirs that keeps it in this perpetual state of chaos. But especially now with the illegals thrown in the mix and the seething resentment of the minority communities, it's descending into a feral sort of Thunder Dome. Blundering Brandon dangling race-hate money for something his own party is primarily responsible for is like Auntie Emnity laughing from the top of the cage at the fighters below, and sprinkling coin.

And it's not even summer yet.