Fox staged it. The TRiiBE reports that a controversial TV segment at the heart of the most-tapped link in Friday’s Chicago Public Square was phonily presented as a spontaneous encounter in Naperville with two Black men critical of new Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson …
■ … when, in fact, they’d been invited by Fox to drive from Chicago to the ’burbs …
■ … and they had ties to Johnson’s defeated opponent, Paul Vallas, and the correspondent on the story who invited them has a history as a Republican staffer.
■ Anti-Trump Republican lawyer George Conway mocked Fox for correcting a separate fake report: “We have no idea why the lies we incessantly repeated were made up, says the network that paid over three-quarters of a billion dollars for incessantly repeating lies.”
Not just Chicago’s problem. The appearance of a 400-teenager “flash mob” prompted a south suburban village to cancel the final day of its Armed Forces Weekend Carnival.
Your City Council (not) at work. Block Club Chicago: As Chicago struggled with the migrant crisis, the council’s immigration committee didn’t meet for more than a year.
■ A Tribune editorial: With a new mayor and a new council, the time’s right for Chicago campaign reform.
… but state lawmakers have been busy. Now entering overtime, the General Assembly—with a larger-than-ever Democratic supermajority—is sending Gov. Pritzker a bumper crop of reforms …
■ … including a bill that would make Illinois the first state to grant Arab Americans status separate from white in the collection of public demographic data …
■ … and measures that would give victims of social media deepfakes and doxing the right to sue—a thing that gives the American Civil Liberties Union the chills (May 16 link).
‘If Ambassador Emanuel wants to use his position … to influence Japan, we will take immediate action to make him go back to his country.’ Chicago’s former mayor, now U.S. ambassador to Japan, has stirred opposition in the Japanese Parliament with his embrace of LGBTQ rights.
■ He’s getting some of the credit for brokering a $150 million quantum computing research deal between the Universities of Chicago and Tokyo.
■ Russia’s put at least nine Illinoisans—including ex-President Barack Obama and Attorney General Kwame Raoul—on a list of almost 500 Americans not welcome there.
Student journalists raising heck. The DePaul University newspaper, The DePaulia, fearlessly shines a harsh light on the record of the university’s president—who left the University of Indianapolis in the red.
■ The report comes as DePaul faces a historic budget crisis of its own (April link).
‘Florida is openly hostile toward African Americans.’ An NAACP advisory suggests Black Americans and others of conscience consider carefully the consequences of traveling to a state governed by Ron DeSantis.
■ A Democratic prosecutor suspended by DeSantis compares him to a dictator.
■ PolitiFact: Disney walked away from a record tax benefit when it canceled plans for a $1 billion Orlando headquarters.
■ USA Today columnist Rex Huppke: “Welcome to the box you built, Republicans. Good luck finding a way out.”
Target malpractice. Popular Information rips into major news outlets for falsely reporting that Target expects to suffer an additional $500 million in losses due to a surge in “organized retail crime.”
■ Video caught a group of 18 men trying to break into a downtown Chicago post office.
TikTokers vs. Montana. Users are mounting a wave of legal challenges to the state’s groundbreaking ban on the app.
■ Facebook’s been fined a record $1.3 billion for sending European user data to the U.S.
■ Beware a new wave of fraud-friendly web domains, including .zip and .mov.
■ The Wall Street Journal: Now-dead sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein tried to blackmail Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates over a years-earlier affair with a Russian bridge player.
‘F--k you, you piece of s--t!’ A Boston University commencement address by the president and CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery didn’t go well.
■ Columnist Michael Rosenbaum offers “the speech that every new college graduate needs to hear, but they won’t, because the international educational conspiracy has canceled me once again.”
Why Chicago Public Square has come your way daily for close to 6 1/2 years. Because people including Lawrence Perlman, Gregory Dudzienski, Sherry Nordstrom, Marcie Dosemagen, Jan Menaker Brock, Rick Hutt, Heather Foote, Bill Oakes, Joanne Rosenbush, Kevin Lampe, Bernard Schoenburg, Sandra Slater, Timothy Mennel, Suzanne Vestuto, Michael Soriano, Andrea Agrimonti, Doreen Rice, Ken Hildreth, Rosemary Caruk, Michael Weiland, Ann Keating, Jim Holmes, Dale Epton, Ian Morrison, Mark Wukas and Brent Brotine have stepped up to help cover the cost of preparing and distributing it.
■ You can join their ranks for any amount you choose here—but if you’d rather do so by check, write to support@chicagopublicsquare.com for a mailing address.
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