The President Lies About Chicago and Threatens ‘War’; a Link Between Climate Change, Sugar Consumption–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: Sept. 8, 2025

Indy Digest: Sept. 8, 2025

This is a real post from the president of the United States on Truth Social.

Yep: The president of the United States made a social media post declaring war on a U.S. city.

Then this happened, according to The New York Times: “On Sunday, when asked whether he was ‘threatening to go to war with Chicago,’ Mr. Trump called it ‘fake news,’ and chastised the reporter when she asked why he would use the Department of Defense. ‘We’re not going to war, we’re going to clean up our cities,’ Mr. Trump said. ‘We’re going to clean them up so they don’t kill five people every weekend. That’s not war. That’s common sense.’”

OK. So how badly is Chicago in need of a “clean up”? BBC News crunched the numbers.

Last year, Chicago’s violent crime rate was down 11% on 2023 levels and roughly half what it was in the years leading up to the Covid-19 pandemic.

On this measure, the city ranked near the bottom of US cities with populations larger than 500,000 (29th out of 37), according to BBC Verify analysis of FBI data.

New York, Los Angeles and Washington DC had higher violent crime rates last year.

Memphis, Detroit and Baltimore had the highest rates—with more than 1,500 violent crimes per 100,000 people.

Chicago’s Police Department (CPD) publishes separate crime figures.

It also recorded a drop in violent crime, announcing in August that offences had fallen by more than a fifth on the same period last year.

In Trump’s defense, Chicago had a rough Labor Day weekend, with Chicago news outlets reporting eight murders and 51 injuries during shootings. But as for the overall trend, let’s go back to that BBC story:

As of the end of August, preliminary data from the CPD shows 278 homicides so far this year, down by a nearly a third on the same period last year.

In 2024, the CPD recorded 591 homicides, a term which includes both murder and manslaughter.

The FBI has a lower number for last year of 461, which crime analyst Jeff Asher says is because the CPD has under-reported the number of homicides to the agency in recent years.

It was the highest number of homicides of any US city last year, recorded by the FBI. …

The homicide rate has been falling in recent years, according to FBI data.

Last year, there were about 17 homicides per 100,000 people, down from about 19 in 2023 and 23 the year before that.

Today, the Department of Homeland Security launched what it’s calling “Operation Midway Blitz” in the city.

The president has more or less threatened war against a major U.S. city where crime and murders are decreasing. Why does anyone think this is OK?

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• The conservative wing of the Supreme Court doesn’t really seem to think the concept of “due process” is important anymore. Our partners at Calmatters say: “The U.S. Supreme Court today granted the Trump administration’s emergency request to lift a temporary restraining order barring federal immigration officials from conducting ‘roving patrols’ and profiling people based on their appearance in Los Angeles and Southern California. The case is likely to have an enormous impact, not just for Los Angeles but across the country, several experts told CalMatters. … Justices do not have to publish an opinion when they act from the emergency docket. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, nonetheless, wrote a concurring opinion explaining his reasoning in lifting restrictions on Los Angeles immigration sweeps. ‘Here, those circumstances include: that there is an extremely high number and percentage of illegal immigrants in the Los Angeles area; that those individuals tend to gather in certain locations to seek daily work; that those individuals often work in certain kinds of jobs, such as day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction, that do not require paperwork and are therefore especially attractive to illegal immigrants; and that many of those illegally in the Los Angeles area come from Mexico or Central America and do not speak much English,’ he wrote. ‘To be clear,’ he continued, ‘ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this Court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a “relevant factor” when considered with other salient factors.’”

• Here’s the 24,972nd entry on the list of Things Are Politically Not Normal Now, complements of The Athletic/New York Times: “The United States Tennis Association asked broadcasters of the U.S. Open to censor any protests or reaction to President Donald Trump’s appearance at the men’s singles final Sunday, according a memo reviewed by The Athletic on Saturday. The memo was first reported by the tennis reporter Ben Rothenberg of Bounces. According to the memo, Trump will be shown on feeds from the tournament during the pre-match ceremony, which includes the presentation of the U.S. national anthem, ahead of the final between Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz. ‘We ask all broadcasters to refrain from showcasing any disruptions or reactions in response to the President’s attendance in any capacity,’ the USTA said in the memo. … ‘We regularly ask our broadcasters to refrain from showcasing off-court disruptions, USTA spokesman Brendan McIntyre told The Athletic.”

• ProPublica takes a deep dive into the story of what happened when DOGE first came to the Social Security Administration. Some people there actually hoped that tech-savvy individuals concerned with efficiency might help the antiquated organization. But, alas, no: “The Social Security Administration is 90 years old. Even today, thousands of its physical records are stored in former limestone mines in Missouri and Pennsylvania. Its core software dates back to the early 1980s, and only a few programmers remain who understand the intricacies of its more than 60 million lines of code. The agency has been talking about switching from paper Social Security cards to electronic ones for two decades, without making it happen. DOGE, billed as a squad of crack technologists, seemed perfectly designed to overcome such obstacles. … Before long, though, he and the other DOGErs buried their heads in their laptops and plugged in their headphones. Their senior leaders had already written out goals on a whiteboard. At the top: Find fraud. Quickly. … DOGE, (then-Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek) said, began acting like ‘a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing, with ideas of how government should run—thinking it should work like a McDonald’s or a bank—screaming all the time.”

• The Los Angeles Times looks at a possible weapon at preventing or lessening damage from wildfires: a “Roomba for the forest.” The lede: “The giant, remote-controlled vehicle—somewhere between a tractor trailer, a tank and a Zamboni in appearance—slowly rolled across the dry, brittle grass growing between the tangle of freeways making up the 101 and 23 interchange in Thousand Oaks. Inside the beast, fire churned. And as it rolled over the land, that fire incinerated any brush it encountered, leaving only a thin smoke cloud billowing from the top of the machine, some flashes of orange and red from behind its metal skirt and, in its wake, a desolate, smoldering black line. BurnBot isn’t the fastest way to rid a landscape of dangerously flammable vegetation (it tops out at around 0.5 mph) but it can do something that traditional vegetation management techniques cannot: With almost surgical precision, it can kill the flammable brush sitting within feet of homes and highways on even the hottest and driest days and with virtually no safety risks or disruptions to daily life.”

• Today’s recall news involves … lemon meringue pies! The Healthy reports: “A notice from The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), made publicly available on September 5, warns that Jessie Lord Bakery, LLC, a Torrence, CA-based company, has recalled 136,252 cases of Lemon Meringue Pies and Sugar Free Lemon Meringue Pies. The pies were reportedly sold under the brand names Jessie Lord Bakery, First Street, or H‑E‑B Bakery. Undeclared dyes were the reason for the recall, the FDA report states. Specifically, the pies were found to contain Yellow #5, also known as tartrazine, with no mention of its presence on the label. … The pies were distributed ‘at the retail level’ in 14 states (including California).”

• And finally … a new study shows a link between climate change and … people eating more sugar? Yep. The Associated Press says: “When the temperature rises, Americans—especially those with less money and education—drink lots more sugary beverages and a bit more frozen desserts. It amounts to more than 100 million pounds of added sugar (358 million kilograms) consumed in a year, compared to 15 years earlier, according to a team of researchers in the U.S. and United Kingdom writing in Monday’s Nature Climate Change. ‘Climate change is shaping what you eat and how you eat and that might have a bad effect on your health,’ said study co-author Duo Chan, a climate scientist at the University of Southampton. ‘People tend to take in more sweetened beverages as the temperature is getting higher and higher,’ Chan said. ‘Obviously under a warming climate that would cause you to drink more or take in more sugar. And that is going to be a severe problem when it comes to health.’”

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