Ex-Chicago mayor rips current city leaders for focus on bathroom and locker room instead of crime, education

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Former Democratic Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel ripped the Chicago city leadership on "Real Time with Bill Maher" this week.

Emanuel said on Friday night that government has allowed the city to become too "permissive" on crime and has fixated on niche liberal issues like transgender bathroom policies rather than dealing with plummeting education standards.

"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 told the "Real Time" panel, featuring host Bill Maher and liberal pundit Fareed Zakaria.

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Maher, who often shreds the excesses of the woke left on his program, wondered, "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," the ex-mayor and former U.S. ambassador to Japan joked, though he went into some serious criticism of the city's government. He began by noting his own mantra back when he ran the city, telling Maher, "Safe streets, strong schools, stable finances. Focus on those three things and your city's going to be fine."

Speaking generally, he noted, You also have the mayor of New York not doing well… Obviously other things here in Los Angeles 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 added, bringing it back to Chicago: "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."

Fox News Digital reached out to Mayor Johnson's office for comment. 

The Chicago Police Department reported that motor vehicle theft, aggravated battery, theft and murder have all increased since 2022, something Maher has commented on during his show. He asked in 2023 why no one seems to be addressing Black-on-Black crime in the city.

"Why doesn't anybody talk about that? Why aren't there a hundred giant Black celebrities, who would have the respect of those people, saying, 'What are you doing to yourselves? Why are you killing each other?"

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Back on Friday's show, Emanuel then torched the city's education standards, saying the government is fixated on woke policies rather than the grades of their students.

"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."

Mocking woke policies and progressive gender language, he quipped, "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."

"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," he added.

Though Emanuel mentioned that no president has addressed this crisis, President Trump has railed against the low educational standards in America since coming into office, pointing to it as a reason to overhaul and even disband the U.S. Department of Education.

Zakaria responded to Emanuel by proclaiming,"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." 

Trump said last month, "Look at the Department of Education. It's a big con job. So they ranked the top countries in the world. We're ranked No. 40, but we're ranked No. 1 in one department: cost per pupil. So, we spend more per pupil than any other country in the world, but we're ranked No. 40."