A recently resurfaced video from 2022 is going viral for one simple reason: it tells an uncomfortable truth that Democratic leaders in Chicago have spent years denying. In the clip, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski bluntly warned fellow business leaders that soaring crime and civic decay are making it “increasingly difficult” to operate a global company out of Chicago—a city long held up by the Left as a model of progressive governance.
The remarks, delivered behind closed doors to Chicago business leaders, are now being widely shared as a stark indictment of what unchecked progressive policies have done to one of America’s great cities. And coming from the head of McDonald’s—arguably Chicago’s most iconic corporate success story—the warning hit especially hard.
The clip begins with a journalist summarizing Kempczinski’s message. “The CEO of McDonald’s is making a stunning revelation to other corporate CEOs: Chicago—crime is making it very hard to do business,” the reporter says, framing the moment not as partisan commentary but as corporate reality.
Kempczinski himself doesn’t sugarcoat the situation. “Everywhere I go, I’m confronted by the same question these days: what’s going on in Chicago?” he says. “There is a general sense out there that our city is in crisis.” That’s not right-wing rhetoric—that’s the CEO of a Fortune 500 company describing the reputational damage done by years of soft-on-crime policies.
He goes on to explain that attracting top talent has become a serious problem. “It’s more difficult today for me to convince a promising McDonald’s executive to relocate to Chicago from one of our other offices than it was just a few years ago,” Kempczinski admits. Translation: executives with options don’t want to raise families or build careers in a city where law and order have collapsed.
Another journalist in the video drives the point home: McDonald’s, headquartered in Chicago for decades, is openly signaling that its future there is no longer guaranteed. “Crime has driven employees away. Executives refuse to relocate. The Golden Arches may be leaving for good,” the reporter explains.
Most striking is Kempczinski’s acknowledgment that corporate loyalty has limits. “McDonald’s commitment to Chicago is not open-ended. It is not unconditional,” he says. As a publicly traded company, he adds, shareholders would never tolerate sacrificing safety and profitability for political sentiment. This wasn’t posturing—it was a warning.
Conservatives online reacted swiftly, arguing the clip confirms what residents and businesses have experienced firsthand. “When even McDonald’s can’t make Chicago work, the problem isn’t perception—it’s reality,” one commenter wrote. Another joked darkly, “Chicago’s blue-city brilliance: turning Golden Arches into goodbye arches.”
Others pointed to the broader consequences of progressive mismanagement: ballooning deficits, rising homelessness, escalating violence against law-abiding citizens, and ever-higher taxes imposed on those still left footing the bill. “This is societal decay, step by step,” one user wrote. “You can’t tax your way out of a mess like this.”
For years, Democrats dismissed crime concerns as fearmongering and blamed “perception” rather than policy. But when one of the world’s largest corporations openly questions whether it can remain in your city, perception is no longer the problem. Reality is.
And Chicago’s leaders may soon learn that reality the hard way.
