Chicago 312: Words Are Killing Ken Griffin

Chicago 312 is a set of weekly field notes on Chicago politics, written for people who live here. Here’s what happened this week:

3 Headlines

1. Walgreens Wants You To Feel Bad For Walgreens

Block Club: Another Walgreens is closing on the South Side, a Chatham store at 86th and Cottage Grove. Ald. William Hall (6th), Ald. Desmon Yancy (5th), and Ald. Lamont Robinson (4th) marched into the store Monday with signs reading "End Corporate Abandonment." That's at least seven South Side closures since 2025, including the area's only specialty pharmacy at 71st St., which is closing May 19. Alder Robinson is drafting a "big box ordinance" that would force Walgreens, Walmart, and Target to repay TIF money and other city subsidies if they pull out of a community. Walgreens cited theft and "violent incidents."

Why It Matters: Walgreens closures of this kind are happening nationwide because the economics of standalone retail pharmacy are broken — but "crime" is the version that gets good PR for Walgreens, even if it’s not true.

Robinson's ordinance is the only response that takes the actual situation seriously: if you took TIF money to be in this neighborhood, and you're not going to be in this neighborhood anymore, you give the money back.

2. Trump's DOJ Is Coming For Trans Kids in 35 Illinois Districts

Capitol News Illinois: Trump's DOJ is investigating 35 Illinois school districts plus Chicago's largest charter network for teaching "gender ideology" and letting trans kids use bathrooms or play sports. The list is incoherent — rural districts with tiny enrollment alongside one of Illinois's largest, and as the Illinois ACLU's Ed Yohnka pointed out, it’s obvious that this is federalism party is doing a federalism crackdown to terrorize school districts with trans inclusive policies. One superintendent is publicly guessing on Facebook that the DOJ may have just cross-referenced School Violence Prevention Program grant data, because nobody will tell him why his district is on the list.

Why It Matters: This is about making it expensive and exhausting to keep trans kids enrolled and trans teachers in the building, so that school boards start preemptively rolling back gender-inclusive policies.

3. Your ComEd bill is going up so Microsoft and Meta can train AI

Politico: 28 of 38 states with data center tax incentives moved this year to roll them back. But in Illinois, Pritzker called for a two-year pause on data center tax breaks, citing electricity bills hitting actual residents. With under two months left in the session, the proposal isn't moving. The General Assembly is letting it die quietly under industry lobbying.

Why It Matters: If you've been wondering what people mean when they say "AI is being financed by the public," this is what they mean: residential ratepayers — who can't deduct a utility bill — subsidize the AI build-out so a few publicly-traded companies can hit Q3. This is not a good deal for any state, and the 28 states that are slowing the process down are showing that it doesn’t have to be this way.

1 Big Question

Quick context, because not everyone has had to think about this guy in a while: Ken Griffin is a billionaire who runs Citadel, the hedge fund, once the largest individual donor in Illinois politics for fifteen years.

He spent tens of millions of dollars to kill the Fair Tax in 2020, which is the only reason every Illinois resident still pays the same flat income tax rate as Ken Griffin. He moved Citadel from Chicago to Miami in 2022 while doing a long press tour about how dangerous Chicago had become.

This week, on CNBC, he accused NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani of putting him "in harm's way,” after Mamdani made a campaign video about a pied-à-terre tax that mentioned where Griffin owns property. Griffin invoked the Brian Thompson assassination, threatened a $6 billion New York investment, and called the whole thing "really poor taste."

What actually threatens Ken Griffin isn’t Mamdani, or Chicago crime stats, or a campaign video. He spent over $50 million fighting progressive revenue in Illinois in 2020, and a permanent flat income tax is what the rest of us got out of it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ We’ll see what other kinds of arguments he makes in New York, and how much they land, 6 years after the same arguments in Illinois…

2 Red Flags

🚨 The Tribune Just Gave Chicago Flips Red The Front Page

Tribune: Chicago Flips Red — a small pro-Trump group that runs Cook County Board public comment as content for right-wing platforms — got the Tribune's Sunday front page and all of page two. Their actual political footprint: zero races flipped, a federal lawsuit against CTU , and a CTU motion seeking a 1,000-foot order of protection.

Why It Matters: A handful of people show up to public comment, the right-wing internet shares them widely enough that the dynamic itself starts to feel like news. But the group hasn't really grown at all during this time -- it’s just the shadow infrastructure that powers them and puts them in the national spotlight.

🚨 CPS Has a Sanctuary Policy. Teachers Are the Ones Funding It.

Borderless: Borderless profiled CPS teachers who are running sanctuary teams, ICE watch shifts, and emergency funds for detained families almost entirely off the clock.

Why It Matters: The day-to-day work — knowing what to do when ICE pulls up, when a parent disappears, when a kid needs a ride and a meal — is unpaid teacher labor stacked on top of full courseloads. CPS has a sanctuary policy and CTU has sanctuary contract language, but both of these real wins doesn’t pays anyone to do the work. So it falls on individual teachers, who are already underpaid, and who are now closing the structural gap with their own time.

One more thing: Amisha Patel — who ran Grassroots Collaborative for over a decade and built the labor-community coalition behind the Chicago minimum wage hike, hundreds of millions in TIF clawback, and the election of this mayor — died April 24 at home, at 50, after nine years with cancer. Her last piece, in Truthout, is a long-arc strategy memo you should read.

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Finally, a new network of acoustic monitors on rooftops is now listening for the 150 to 200 million birds that fly through Chicago every spring and fall. Less majestic, but slightly related, here’s the pigeon that lives on the staircase of my apartment building: