If you thought the better man lost the mayoral election and want to feel better about it, don't read this rundown on what the winner said about major issues Chicago faces . . .

. . . You may want to consider another city to live in.

Things he said and later denied he said:

Never said defund the police, he said in the campaign. But he did, in 2020 as a county board member, calling it “an actual real political goal,” as seen in a video shown during a campaign debate.

“There is no [amount] big enough” when it comes to “Reducing the sheriff’s budget,” he added.

And on a widely reported panel on a Police-Free Future,” he recommended doing away with “state-sponsored policing” and other “tools . . . placed against Black folks [and] used violently, whether . . . policing or administering standardized tests or . . . [other ways in which] white supremacy finds its way [into] every facet of our lives [and] that we have to fight and resist . . . ”

He also defended looting in the summer of 2020 as “an outbreak of incredible frustration and anguish” tied to “a failed racist system.” 

His position was common to defenders of the looting. A Black Lives Matter activist supported looters “one hundred percent.” It’s “reparations,” she said, claiming starvation as their only alternative. “If they need to do that in order to eat, then that’s what you’ve got to do to eat.”

Johnson took offense — “bristled” — when asked if he worried about “stores leaving Chicago and the county because they don’t think it’s safe.”

He dismissed the problem, as protecting “capital and the wealthy” when it’s equally important to “provide relief for families that have been devastated through structural racism for generations.”

Johnson went further. It’s a matter of moving money around: “We have to redirect dollars away from a failed racist system and move it into the hands of people who really are trying their very best to survive day-to-day. And if we can’t do that as a government, we are failing to meet the moment . . .

“To continue to criminalize people, and to chastise [them] for being poor, it’s tired and it’s old. We actually need a new direction that really calls for massive investments in neighborhoods.”

Meet the new mayor.

This investing in the ‘hoods figured big in his campaign message. He meant it then, he means it now, vague as it is.

So does the teachers’ union, where Johnson worked and from whom he received the all-hands-on-deck support that put him where he is today and where its “equity” page features a video, “How Can We Win?” with a woman who says blacks’ only way to get some of the things that “we flaunt and flash in front of them all the time is to walk through a broken glass window and get it.”

Johnson for his part wants $800 million more in local taxes for “anti-violence programs, mental health services, and other social spending, including a big round of new hiring at Chicago’s public schools.”

And what do you know about that?