Mayor Brandon Johnson accused the city’s corporate class of ignoring Black and brown lives Wednesday in a wide-ranging speech to a crowd of business leaders who cheered his ideas but greeted with silence his promise to pay for them by taxing the rich.

The appearance at the City Club of Chicago was Johnson’s first major public speech since announcing his reelection campaign a little over two weeks ago, and signals that he is entering his fight for a second term — and his fourth budget — with as feisty a message as ever.

After quipping that the crowd’s applause as he took the stage was a sign he will be strong heading into the February election, Johnson delivered a sermon-style address, heavy on religious rhetoric, where he contrasted the “absence of crime” with the “absence of investment.”

On the absence of crime, he nodded to the 300-plus homicides so far in 2026 as still far too many, before reminiscing about taking his eldest son to college this summer.

“I allow myself to imagine a day where every parent in Austin and every parent in Chicago, where they get to miss their kid because they dropped him off at college, and not because of violence,” Johnson said. “That’s the world … I won’t stop building, no matter how many converging forces try to bully us into austerity politics because they think it’s more important to preserve corporate profit margins than it is to preserve the lives of my neighbors.”

He also offered, “To borrow from my Jewish brothers and sisters, every life is a universe.”

Addressing a room of political, labor and business leaders, Johnson made the case for pinning his rocky first term on unnamed class enemies and the political establishment. The mayor appeared to foreshadow his upcoming budget proposal, due by mid-October, by arguing the wealthy and corporations must do more to fund the city’s anti-violence efforts.

Johnson teased an expansion of the city’s youth jobs program, One Summer Chicago, to a year-round program. He also pledged to open more public mental health clinics should he get another term — a promise he also made in 2023, though the city has only reopened three of 12 shuttered clinics.

The mayor also touted his meeting with Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican this May, saying they shared a mission of “uplifting people who have been historically marginalized” — but not of Chicago baseball teams, given that Johnson roots for the Cubs and Leo is a Sox fan.

“I have spent more time than I would like to be reminded, challenging the power brokers in our city, that there is a reason that no religious or community tradition calls for us to take care of corporations and billionaires,” Johnson said.

The mayor also took a shot at Gov. JB Pritzker, without mentioning his name, when noting the city’s new tax on social media companies that debuted this year.

“It’s a tax on big tech companies,” Johnson said. “Even the governor said it was a good idea. So it turns out that a working class Black man can put forth a policy and a financial decision that even a billionaire governor could say, ‘You know what, we can do that.’”

Johnson grew impassioned as he challenged the lunch crowd packed with civic and business leaders to join his fight to continue decreasing violence by investing more tax revenue in the city. The crowd was notably silent as he attacked the business community but offered robust claps toward his progressive policy vision — before growing quiet again when he hinted at how he’ll raise the money to pay for it: taxing the wealthy and corporations.

After he concluded his speech, he also joked that he was hoping to talk long enough to avoid questions. He then told City Club moderator Dan Gibbons he blames Chicago’s entrenched segregation on why more of his accomplishments aren’t touted.

“The other thing that I learned was that people think that I could do anything and everything, and it turns out that there’s a whole body of government called City Council, and sometimes Springfield, that require more control to be able to get it done,” Johnson said.

With her phone raised to film parts of the speech, progressive influencer Raven Schwam-Curtis sat next to Johnson’s political spokesman Christian Perry at a table marked Office of Mayor Brandon Johnson. Rainbow PUSH Coalition president Yusef Jackson joined them at the table.

Other notable names at the City Club speech were council Budget Committee chair Ald. Jason Ervin, former Ald. Walter Burnett Jr. and Chicago school board president Sean Harden. And most of Johnson’s top advisers, including Cristina Pacione-Zayas, Jason Lee, Sheila Bedi, Kennedy Bartley and Jung Yoon, also attended.

Though he received a warm welcome from corners of the room, Johnson will need to convince enough voters he deserves four more years to realize his promises to Chicago’s working class. He will face attacks every step of the way from a crowded field of challengers — 10 top declared opponents, as of now — who smell blood in the water.

The election takes place Feb. 23, with a runoff set for April 6 if no candidate nets a majority in the first round.