Dan Proft

If you see anything other than "kids making silly decisions" in downtown Chicago this week then you are a kid demonizer and don't have Chicago values.

You're not going to find a better discussion of the difference between "violence interrupters" as the Left uses that term and true agents of community redemption as explained by @BobWoodson. A masterclasd from a profound intellect. @MorningAnswer morninganswerchicago.com/bob-woodson-ch…

@JJAKQ_euchre And how hyperbolic that adjective is.

@DanProft Regular listeners to your show know who that "great man" is.

Speaker Johnson's comments about Sheridan Gorman's murder and Illinois remind me of the words once offered by a great man, "Illinois isn't broken. It's fixed."

Illuminating conversation with @wynton_hall on who needs to win the arms race, regulation/regulatory capture, the dangers of censorship on steroids as compared to what we saw during COVID with social media, military applications, economic creative destruction and much more...

@ChicagoEggspay @elizgrisanz @StephenNevel @John_Kass I don't know who you are and you clearly don't know me and never did. More importantly, show us all the way rather than boring us with your petulance. I defer to your implied superiority. Happy to sit back and prepare to be wowed.

@DanProft @elizgrisanz @StephenNevel @John_Kass Nice to see you haven't changed one bit in the 20+ years I've known you.

I hope you’re listening to @DanProft on Chicago’s Morning Answer. He’s been on fire. Don’t be a chumbolone. Listen to the man podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/chi…

@ChicagoEggspay @elizgrisanz @StephenNevel @John_Kass Not my answer. Nominee is not an office. And thank you for making it clear I'm wasting my time with the effort for an informed discussion with you which comes as no surprise but at least others can see I tried. Go get 'em, tiger. Be sure to report back.

@elizgrisanz @StephenNevel @John_Kass @DanProft So is your answer Darren Bailey in the 2022 Republican Primary?

First, I don't get or not get candidates elected. Such hubris. Nor does any campaign manager or consultant show singularly win or lose. These are team efforts regardless of outcome. To think otherwise is to be a dullard. Second, in the last three cycles, I've only taken on one race--governor. I helped Ives in '18, Bailey in '22 and Dabrowski in '26. I played no part with Rauner in the '18 general nor will I Bailey in '26. Ironically, I helped Bailey win his first race in '18 where the primary was the general. Sorry to present a complicated picture that doesn't fit with your narrative even as one might survey the landscape to find one GOP swide outlier (Rauner in '14) to win in two generations while legislative Republicans languished in the minority and super minority despite my lack of control of those races as well. No feckless leg leader, no nonexistent GOP state party chairman, no embarrassment of an office holder (George Ryan, Hastert, Walsh, Schock, Kinzinger) bears any culpability--and certainly GOP voters don't as well--only me. Okay. As I told the Trib editorial page editor last week, I can carry the weight. You need a convenient scapegoat to avoid the drudgery of critical thought? I'm your Huckleberry. Say and do what you will. But you better start working on your cover story for this November and beyond. Godspeed.

@elizgrisanz @StephenNevel @John_Kass @DanProft Will either one of you tell me the last politician he/you got elected? I'm not calling him unintelligent. I'm asking that one question. During primaries sides are taken. That's how it works. Now the main goal should be getting Pritzker out of office.

@ChicagoEggspay @elizgrisanz @StephenNevel @John_Kass You mean like you just did? Your ignorance is only surpassed by your hypocrisy. But, please, keep it up while you pretend to be advancing some passive aggressive stick-it-to-Proft flag. I'll check back with you in November.

@elizgrisanz @StephenNevel @John_Kass @DanProft Ha. I actually do and the first step is to not alienate half of the people that you hope will vote for your candidate.

To the purposefully misleading talking point from the Neo-Marxists that most illegal immigrants are otherwise law-abiding, pose no threat: A small percentage of a big number can be a big problem.

@ShovBarbara Posted.

@DanProft where is the Woodson article please.

After my daughter Katie was killed, I spoke out because I believed what happened to her was not just a tragedy, but a warning. I said that if nothing changed, it would happen again. Now another family is living that same nightmare. This is not rare or random. It is the result of policies that ignore accountability and allow preventable harm. Read my op-ed from today on @FoxNews: foxnews.com/opinion/my-dau…

Alderhuman Maria Hadden assures Rogers Park residents that there is no reason for general concern after Sheridan Gorman's murder but when you're out, say, enjoying yourself on the beach, please be careful not to startle the local illegal aliens with outstanding arrest warrants and itchy trigger fingers.

Per our @MorningAnswer discussion on @BobWoodson's most excellent piece on the rise and fall of Jesse Jackson, Sr...and the parallels to Illinois' loss of civic sensibility across race, partisanship writ large, here it is: Jesse Jackson, the Prophet Who Became a Politician At a memorial service for the Rev. Jesse Jackson, his son Jesse Jr. praised his “consistent prophetic voice.” There is truth to that. The Jesse Jackson I remember began his career as a prophetic voice to the nation. The tragedy is that he didn’t always remain faithful to that calling. I met Jesse Jackson in the late 1960s. In those years, he spoke clearly about the crisis facing black America. He understood that the struggle before black youth wasn’t merely economic but moral. In an August 1978 essay for Ebony, he observed that if the rising generation of black youth hoped to “close the gap and catch up” in income and education, their priority should be discipline: “Morally weak people not only inhibit their own personal growth, but finally contribute to the politics of decadence. . . . A generation of people lacking the moral and physical stamina necessary to fight a protracted civilizational crisis is dangerous to itself, its neighbors and to future generations.” This was the true spirit of the civil-rights movement: moral uprising, not mere political maneuvering. Jackson anticipated the objections of readers who would rather remain fixated on racism: “While I know that the victimizer may be responsible for the victim being down, the victim must be responsible for getting up.” Those were not the words of a partisan politician. They were the words of a moral reformer. At his best, Jackson confronted not only injustice from without, but the moral failures within our own communities. He spoke of responsibility and self-determination and challenged wounded people not to surrender to victimhood. Many of us respected him for that. I certainly did. After he entered the partisan machinery, his prophetic voice gradually gave way to the language of grievance, compromise and self-preservation. He no longer spoke primarily as a reformer, but as a performer on the political stage—a power broker. His focus strayed from rebuilding the moral and social foundations of struggling communities toward mobilizing their resentments. That decline wasn’t merely the problem of Jesse Jackson. It reflected a broader shift in America itself. The early civil-rights movement was grounded in discipline, sacrifice and character. Its strongest leaders spoke not only about the sins of segregation but also about the responsibilities of freedom, understanding that justice without moral renewal would leave communities politically visible but internally broken. It was therefore telling that in 2008, when Sen. Barack Obama challenged young men to be responsible fathers, Jackson accused him of “speaking down to black people”—even though Jackson had delivered the same message to Mr. Obama’s generation in Ebony 30 years earlier. Like Jackson, Mr. Obama eventually chose the safety of racial grievance over the harder work of moral challenge. Instead of seeking to inspire struggling communities to rise above destructive behaviors, both men came to see that political power could be gained by keeping wounds open. When leaders become dependent on outrage, solutions become threats to their power. Chicago, the adopted hometown of both Jackson and Mr. Obama, proves the point. Jackson rose in a political culture of entrenched corruption, where moral accountability was too often weakened by ethnic loyalty and party interest. Rather than resist this culture, Jackson and other civil-rights veterans were absorbed by it. Repeatedly, when elected black officials were disgraced by corruption, betrayal of the public trust, or sexual misconduct—even in cases involving minors—the response was silence, along with a troubling indifference to young black female victims who were ignored. In at least two such cases, these officials were re-elected. When wrongdoing wears a black face, too many who speak loudly of justice fall quiet. We often demand equity when it comes to the distribution of resources yet resist equality when it comes to moral responsibility and character. We have wanted moral leniency for “our side” while demanding accountability from others. Yet communities can’t be rebuilt on double standards. The poor suffer most when leaders are excused in the name of race, party or history. Before Jesse Jackson became absorbed in partisan politics, he did speak for the least of these. And when he drifted from that witness, I challenged him, as did many quietly frustrated veterans of the civil-rights movement. I debated him publicly and held him not to my words, but to his own. Did you mean it when you said the victimizer may knock you down, but the victim must get up? If so, when did you change your mind, and why? His later rhetoric stood in plain tension with the moral force of his earlier views. Social movements begin to decline when they trade moral authority for political access. Low-income Americans know the difference between genuine leadership and political performance because they are the ones left to live with the consequences when leaders abandon principle for power. The next phase of progress won’t come through confrontational slogans or deeper partisan alliances. It will come when the people demand leaders who refuse to be seduced by power, who speak honestly about both injustice and responsibility. Because real leadership isn’t measured by proximity to power, but by faithfulness to truth.

Public health threat and public safety threat. A sanctuary state twofer. The good news is he stayed more than six-feet apart when he murdered Sheridan Gorman.

"Wrong place, wrong time" as one Chicago, state-run media outlet, indistinguishable from all of the others, described Sheridan Gorman's murder is a real tell. A college kid hanging out with her friends on the beach to see the northern lights is being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Being in America illegally with the intent to prey on others, even after having been previously arrested, is not. It's just like commuting to and from work on the El is being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But being on the same train with the intent to light someone on fire after having been arrested 70+ times is not. It's just like being a Chicago firefighter who shows up to fight a blaze is being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But being a meth head on felony pretrial release who started the fire is not. Maybe the Chicago press corps has a point: the people who play by the rules in Chicago--getting their education, doing their job or trying to protect others--are in fact in the wrong place at any time.

The Sun-Times' "wrong place, wrong time" back-of-the-hand coverage of Sheridan Gorman's murder is so typically grotesque. The political press corps in Chicagoland is just another mediating institution--like the schools, the arts, the C-suites--that have disintegrated by serving only as arms of the kleptocracy rather than foot soldiers for western civilization. And so the populace lives by beautiful lies--like "Venezuelan migrant"--because they have lost the ability to confront ugly truths. The majority lacks even the common decency to acknowledge the lives taken and promise lost at hands of their barbaric policies. They are all-consumed with raging against imaginary bogeymen they've been conditioned to hate. They are contemptible.

All those Leftist pols singing '60s protest songs for the cameras on behalf of federal workers during the days of DOGE were the good guys and Musk was the bad guy, subverting public safety and presenting an existential threat to the Republic. But he was also nothing keying some Teslas couldn't overcome. There is no common/middle ground to be forged between grown-ups and Leftists.

@DanProft @MorningAnswer Hey, that’s my husband’s poem! Joe from Arlington Heights is not only the Morning Answer’s Poet Laureate, he’s also the novelist J. Daniel Reed, a man of many talents.