Chicago is a city where you can get carjacked at a stoplight, where armed robberies happen on the L train in broad daylight, where illegal migrants are sleeping in police stations and airports, and where the city budget has a hole in it big enough to drive a stolen Kia through. There are roughly fourteen hundred urgent crises that need the mayor’s attention on any given Tuesday. So naturally, Mayor Brandon Johnson spent his Wednesday connecting the Cheesecake Factory to slavery.

Yes, you read that correctly. The mayor of America’s third-largest city — a metropolis currently auditioning for the role of “next Detroit” — stood up this week and declared that the restaurant industry has “vestiges in slavery.” Not the prison system. Not historical land ownership. The restaurant industry. Applebee’s. Denny’s. The place where you get unlimited breadsticks. According to Brandon Johnson, your local IHOP is basically a plantation, and the Grand Slam breakfast is a monument to racial injustice.

The comments came on April 16th while Johnson was pushing — you guessed it — reparations. Because when your city is bleeding residents, bleeding tax revenue, and bleeding actual human beings on the south and west sides every single weekend, the obvious priority is to figure out how much money to hand out based on events that happened 160 years ago. That’s leadership, folks. That’s the Brandon Johnson experience.

Let’s break down what life actually looks like in Brandon Johnson’s Chicago right now, because context matters when a mayor decides to go full critical race theory on the breadstick industry. In 2025, Chicago recorded over 600 homicides. Carjackings, while down slightly from their pandemic-era insanity, are still happening at rates that would make most cities declare a state of emergency. The migrant crisis — which Johnson first called a “blessing” before it became a political anchor around his neck — has cost the city over $400 million and counting. Schools are struggling. The CTA is a rolling crime scene. Businesses are leaving.

And this man is worried about whether your server at Red Lobster is perpetuating systemic racism by bringing you cheddar biscuits.

Here’s what Johnson actually said, in case you think we’re exaggerating: he claimed the restaurant industry has deep ties to slavery and that this history needs to be acknowledged as part of the reparations conversation. He didn’t elaborate on what that means, practically speaking. Are we supposed to tip differently? Should Cracker Barrel change its name? Is Gordon Ramsay going to have to issue a formal apology? Nobody knows, because Johnson didn’t think that far ahead. He never does.

This is a man who has been in over his head since the day he took office. Brandon Johnson was a former teachers’ union organizer who somehow talked his way into running a city of 2.7 million people, and every single day since has been a masterclass in what happens when ideology replaces competence. He doesn’t solve problems. He reframes them. Crime isn’t a policing issue — it’s a “disinvestment” issue. The budget crisis isn’t a spending issue — it’s a “revenue” issue. And now the restaurant industry isn’t just a place where people eat — it’s a “vestige of slavery.”

Meanwhile, actual restaurants in Chicago are closing. Not because of slavery. Because of crime, because of taxes, because of regulations, and because the city’s leadership is more interested in symbolic gestures than keeping the lights on. Restaurant owners in neighborhoods like Lawndale and Englewood — predominantly Black neighborhoods, by the way — would probably love it if the mayor spent less time connecting their businesses to historical atrocities and more time making sure their customers don’t get mugged walking to the front door.

But that’s not how Brandon Johnson operates. He’s a man who has never met a problem he couldn’t turn into a lecture. Every issue, every crisis, every question at a press conference gets filtered through the same ideological lens until it comes out the other side as a TED Talk about systemic racism. The migrants overwhelming your neighborhood? That’s actually about America’s history of exclusion. The budget shortfall threatening city services? That’s actually about decades of racist economic policy. Your waitress brought you the wrong order? That’s actually about the restaurant industry’s ties to slavery.

We’re not making light of actual history here. Slavery was an abomination, and its effects rippled through generations. Every serious person acknowledges that. But when you’re the mayor of a city where children are getting shot on their way to school, and your response is to hold a press conference about how Olive Garden is problematic, you have lost the plot entirely. You’re not fighting injustice. You’re performing for an audience that doesn’t include the people who actually need help.

The residents of Chicago — of all races — don’t need their mayor to explain the historical connection between TGI Fridays and the antebellum South. They need streetlights that work, cops that show up, schools that teach, and a city government that can balance a checkbook. They need potholes filled, not grievances catalogued.

But that’s not what they have. What they have is Brandon Johnson, a man who looked at a city in crisis and decided the most pressing issue was whether the hostess stand at Chili’s carries the weight of America’s original sin.

Chicago, you deserve better. You deserve a mayor who wakes up in the morning thinking about how to stop the bleeding — the literal and financial kind — instead of one who wakes up thinking about how to connect every problem to a graduate seminar on race in America.

But hey, at least the breadsticks are still free. For now. Give Johnson another term and he’ll probably tax those too — for reparations, of course.