21/10/2025
The Mayor of Chicago just called for a general strike. And if you understand what that means, you know, this could change everything. At the No Kings rally this weekend, Mayor Brandon Johnson stood before tens of thousands and said what few American politicians have dared to say in decades.
“Democracy will live on because of this generation,” he proclaimed. “Are you ready to take it to the courts and to the streets?”
It wasn’t a soundbite. It was a summons.
Johnson called on Americans across backgrounds to unite, framing the fight against President Trump’s tyranny, the ultra-wealthy, and corporate greed as one and the same. His voice joined a growing roar that began with the 7-million-strong No Kings protest, a movement that, for the first time in a generation, made people ask:
Could a general strike in America actually happen?
The last time the country saw anything close to one was the Great Strike Wave of 1946, when five million workers across industries walked out, demanding an end to wartime austerity and fair wages. Washington responded not with reform but repression: the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, a law still on the books that crippled unions’ ability to organize political strikes.
But here’s the thing: Taft-Hartley binds labor unions, not the people themselves.
And that’s who Johnson was talking to.
Grassroots activists, delivery drivers, nurses, coders, teachers, the ones who actually make this country function, are realizing that a general strike doesn’t start in the halls of power. It starts with a shared refusal to keep feeding a system that treats billionaires as untouchable and working families as expendable.
“We are going to make them pay their fair share in taxes to fund our schools, to fund jobs, to fund healthcare, to fund transportation.”
And the crowd roared because they believed him.
In a political landscape where Democrats bicker and centrists triangulate, Brandon Johnson’s words landed like a thunderclap. Not because he’s radical, but because he’s honest. He said what millions already feel: that voting isn’t enough when the machinery of government serves only those at the top.
The No Kings protests proved something else, too, people are ready. Ready to march, ready to strike, ready to build an economy that serves the many, not the few.
If Chicago becomes the epicenter of a new labor awakening, historians may look back on this weekend as the moment the tide turned, when ordinary Americans remembered their collective power and decided to use it.
