(Chicago) SubXNews Street Report | Sept 18, 2025
Thought it was Friday all day. Even said “happy Friday” in the morning. Turned out it was Thursday, so the plan was to take it easy — stick with the radio calls and what was happening on the street instead of the regular route and routine.
In the backdrop, Biden and UK Prime Minister Starmer signed a science and tech deal, House Republicans moved a two-month funding extension with added security after the Charlie Kirk shooting, and Senate Majority Leader John Thune warned Democrats with the September 30 shutdown deadline closing in.
Radio Rundown
The radio carried the early evening rundown. Walmart on Central and Sauk Trail at 3.11 a gallon, Exxon in Evanston at 3.23. Veterans I-355 southbound jammed from Roosevelt to Butterfield after a crash in the left lanes. Tri-State heavy from Irving Park to the Hinsdale Oasis with road work. Jane Adams slow west from Arlington Heights to Roselle. Reagan jammed in both directions. Lake Shore Drive moving, nothing unusual. Forecast calling for 58 inland, 74 at the lakefront, highs back up to 86 tomorrow with storms rolling in over the weekend.
Lake Shore Drive Chaos
Chaos hit Lake Shore Drive. A white dope head was in the middle of traffic, clutching a rosary and walking straight down the lanes. Cars stopped, horns blasted, fire trucks and ambulances rushed in. Helicopters were overhead, everyone else thinking something happened in the water — yet the problem was right there in the street. Scanner called it in as Ambulance 11 clearing the lakefront bike path with the same man on board.
Streeterville locals said this isn’t new — drunks, druggies, or protesters disrupt the lakefront all the time, never thinking about the people who actually live and work there. Then all of a sudden the network dropped — second day in a row at the same moment in time. Signals cut, phones dead, like interference was in play. The whole scene stood still until it was time to move on, no matter what the disruption was.
Michigan Avenue Reflections
Back online, going north on Michigan Avenue, the talk turned political. Said it straight — been Democrats our entire lives, forty years of voting, until 2024. Voted Republican for the first time, voted for Trump. It was more against what Kamala Harris represented than about liking everything Trump said. JD Vance’s rags-to-riches story helped and stood out against Trump starting with a rich privileged background.
Fifty-seven years old, kids grown, responsibilities shifting — maybe it’s a natural swing in life. That’s the pendulum. Same way teenagers rebel, parents hold the line, then empty nesters look back and reassess, politics works that way too. Decades pulled left, now the pendulum is swinging right, and maybe this is one of those inflection points in history when parties cross over.
Even Trump’s life carries this shadow. His older brother, Fred Trump Jr., died at 42 from a heart attack after years of alcoholism. That loss marked the family and shaped Donald Trump’s own path — he has spoken often about avoiding alcohol and cigarettes because of it.
JD Vance lived through the same destruction in a different place. A mother broken by OxyContin and heroin, grandparents stepping in to raise him, his own close brush with drugs before the military gave him a way out. Addiction framed his childhood just as it shaped Trump’s family, and both men came out the other side with a hard rejection of it.
From Rust Belt to Drug Belt
That’s the through-line: addiction, collapse, and survival. Vance turned it into a memoir and a political career, Trump turned it into discipline against alcohol, but whole communities never got the chance. In the Midwest, the Rust Belt morphed into the Drug Belt — factories replaced by fentanyl, neighborhoods held hostage to opioids and meth.
Chicago is not immune. The same pattern is here: downtown empty, tents in the parks, kids growing up in chaos, families breaking under addiction while leaders look the other way. Based on recent trends, drug use in Chicago has changed significantly — cannabis legalized and everywhere, fentanyl dominating the opioid market, meth use climbing, and public health officials pushing harm-reduction instead of cessation.
The drug supply itself is deadlier than ever. Fentanyl has almost entirely replaced heroin, driving nearly all opioid overdose deaths. As of 2020, fentanyl was tied to 86% of Chicago’s opioid deaths while heroin deaths declined. Now the supply comes laced with animal sedatives and other adulterants that don’t even respond to naloxone. Xylazine — “tranq” — is in the mix across the city, leaving wounds that don’t heal and overdoses that can’t be reversed.
In May 2024, a cluster of overdoses in Chicago was traced to medetomidine, another animal tranquilizer, mixed into opioids. Victims collapsed with slowed heart rates and no response to naloxone, proof that the street supply keeps getting deadlier and more unpredictable.
Vance turned his life into a redemption story, but whole neighborhoods didn’t. And that’s what’s coming if the destruction of drugs keeps being ignored and covered up — as opposed to Democrats that excuse dystopia as just another cycle to be managed, treated like a condition instead of corrected.
Our country needs new ideas that bring growth and renewal, not empty promises about restoring grievances of the past that can never fully come back.
Migrant Shelters and Park Squatters
On Irving Park, at the old American Islamic College building on Marine Drive, the contrast was clear. Americans living in tents on one side of the street, while the migrants were housed inside the shelter across from them. Some of those outside were visibly obese — a sharp contradiction to the city’s asylum narrative.
If food and security weren’t an issue back home, why claim protection here? Obesity is a disease, but it isn’t grounds for political refuge.
Billions in funding move through migrant programs, yet Chicago’s own homeless get nothing but neglect.
At Montrose Beach Harbor Park, the picture was even starker. Permanent-looking tents stood lined with bricks, tarps, and even private toilets — full setups more like encampments than temporary shelters.
Children’s shoes and baby supplies lay scattered across the grass. Families are clearly living there, in a park that never legalized camping.
Handicap parking signs had been ripped off the posts, left in plain sight while city cameras watched from overhead poles. It wasn’t kids messing around — it was deliberate, another marker of disorder in a place of safety.
Same place where a few weeks earlier there was a shooting.
From one of the tents came a woman’s voice, yelling not to film. That alone showed how the squatters treat public space like private territory. A public park turned into their camp, their rules.
No enforcement, no consequences.
This is the criminal class the government keeps creating — people living outside the law, protected by the same city hall that gives Brandon Johnson a 150-man security detail while families see services collapse.
Vandalism ignored, squatters emboldened, and working citizens left paying the cost.
Creating the Criminal Class
The pattern is clear. Imported white dopers programmed for disruption, obese migrants parked in shelters while Americans sleep in tents, squatters turning public parks into their own turf.
Three faces of the same system — chaos fed, disorder rewarded, accountability stripped away.
This isn’t compassion. It’s politics manufacturing an underclass to hide the theft of public services.
A mayor guarded by a 150-man detail while families get nothing but collapse. Cameras watch, cops stand by, leaders excuse it as cycles instead of correcting it. At the same time he says crime enforcement is a sickness and needs to be eradicated.
But the future doesn’t have to follow that script.
The pendulum is swinging, and history shows it doesn’t stop in the middle.
Forward means growth and renewal, not nostalgia or managed decline.
It means facing the destruction of drugs head-on, refusing to excuse criminality, and demanding accountability from leaders who hide behind security while the city burns.
The fight isn’t with each other on the street.
It’s with a government that rewards chaos and calls it progress.
The choice now is whether Chicago keeps sinking into this manufactured disorder — or whether people reclaim the city, demand services back, and force leaders to serve the public instead of themselves.
Whose City? Our City!
SubX.News® on-the-spot reporting
