Illinois Nazis, seriously GOP?
Republican state reps., Senate candidate court ‘Reopen Illinois’ protesters carrying anti-Semitic signs
Protesters outside the state Capitol Saturday compare Gov. Pritzker to Adolf Hitler. (Twitter/Mike MiletichTV)
By Ted Cox
Republican elected officials speaking at so-called Reopen Illinois demonstrations have addressed protesters openly carrying anti-Semitic signs comparing Gov. Pritzker to Adolf Hitler, and they’ve not only failed to denounce those protesters but have appeared to welcome their support.
We’ve crossed a very serious line here, and it’s time to denounce it in no uncertain terms, because the GOP is playing with a fire that can spread and overwhelm the political system in ways no different from a pandemic overwhelming the hospital system.
Are they allowing their cause, however misguided, to be hijacked, or are they willingly siding with those protesters? That doesn’t offer much of an option to anyone looking on from outside the fray.
Such anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi protesters are nothing new, to be sure, but they’re usually on the fringe. They’re usually in the shadows. Mainstream politicians don’t usually engage with them, because their views are so extreme and so far outside what’s considered public discourse, even in the no-holds-barred arena of our current politics.
Look at the way Republicans backed away from Arthur Jones, the openly neo-Nazi Holocaust denier who has now run for Congress several times in the southern suburbs of Chicago. In 2018, in fact, he was the GOP standard bearer, having run unopposed in the Republican primary, an oversight we’ll charitably ascribe to a party in disarray under then-Gov. Rauner. GOP leaders, to their credit, denounced him and advised voters in the district to vote against him, and earlier this year they made sure there was another Republican in the race to prevail, as Jones amassed just 10 percent of the vote in the primary election.
But that’s still 10 percent too much, even among Republican voters.
Anti-Semitic signs have been seen at protests against the Illinois stay-at-home order both in Chicago, outside the Thompson Center, and in Springfield, outside the Capitol. One sign at a Saturday protest in Springfield, held by a woman wearing a “Trump 2020” T-shirt, called Pritzker a “Nazi hypocrite,” with swastikas alongside a picture giving him a Hitler mustache. Another placed photos of Pritzker and Hitler side by side with an equal sign between them.
Asked by reporter Mike Miletich of WGEM-TV to explain that sign, a man who identified himself as Doug Walter of Pana, south of Decatur, said, “Are you serious? He's trying to control all of the people in this country, or this state. … He is Hitler. They are one in the same. They are one in the same.”
It’s not lost on anyone that Pritzker is also Jewish, so these anti-Semitic tropes become additionally barbed when they’re turned on him.
It’s not just a few lunatics turning up at these rallies. The most offensive part here is you have two Illinois state representatives, Darren Bailey of Xenia and Chris Miller of Oakland, who know better. They’re elected officials. To see them stand up in front of a crowd clearly bearing anti-Semitic signs on Saturday and say things, as Miller did, such as, “The silver lining here is we are able to identify our enemies — both foreign and domestic,” a trope drawing on that classic Nazi attack on Jews as the domestic enemy — well, he knows what he’s doing and just who he’s appealing to.
Everyone knows exactly what he’s saying. It’s just encoded, as it usually is.
As state Rep. Bob Morgan of Deerfield tweeted: “If there are two sides of a debate, and your side is the one carrying Nazi symbols and racist messaging — you’re on the wrong side of the issue.”
None of this missed the attention of the Anti-Defamation League. David Goldenberg, the ADL’s Midwest regional director, issued a statement saying: “The comparison of Illinois’s democratically elected governor to Hitler is anti-Semitic — period. Such vile comparisons trivialize and dishonor the memories of millions killed by Nazi Germany. With anti-Semitic incidents at an all-time high and up 340 percent in Illinois since 2016, these protests are becoming rallying points for hate and extremism. We are deeply concerned by the silence of speakers at these protests — including elected officials — who failed to condemn the anti-Semitism, racism, and Nazi comparisons of attendees while stoking the flames of hatred. Leaders across the state and political spectrum must forcefully and unambiguously condemn this language.”
Just last week, the ADL issued a report finding: “The American Jewish community experienced the highest level of anti-Semitic incidents last year since tracking began in 1979.”
The Pritzker administration had a more measured response on Saturday, with spokeswoman Jordan Abudayyeh issuing a statement saying: “Today, as millions of Illinoisans followed the public health guidance in place to keep everyone safe, a loud minority gathered in an attempt to get headlines for their hateful, ignorant, anti-Semitic protest against science. We know the majority of Illinoisans who remain vigilant in this fight against COVID-19 are the reason we’re flattening the curve and those gathering in defiance of the medical experts have them to thank for their health and safety.”
Polls have repeatedly shown that Pritzker has the support of more than 70 percent of Illinois voters in his handling of the crisis — even higher than that when it comes to the statewide stay-at-home order. But that doesn’t mean the governor isn’t wary of the very real threat posed by that increasingly vocal and aggressive minority. Just on Friday, in the daily coronavirus briefing, he acknowledged “threats to my safety” and the safety of his family, in the form of “people that stand outside the Thompson Center and stand outside the Capitol in Springfield holding hateful signs that reference me personally and that suggest, if not say, the potential for violence.”
Is Pritzker crying wolf? Consider that also on Friday the Associated Press reported that a Michigan man had been charged with terrorism over what a local prosecutor called “credible threats to kill” Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Attorney General Dana Nessel in the midst of a protest movement against government restrictions imposed to curtail the spread of COVID-19.
The AP also reported last week that protests against stay-at-home orders have been used as a soap box by right-wing militia groups, including those under the “boogaloo” anti-government movement. That came after Rich Miller’s Capitol Fax reported earlier in the month that the ADL was charging that Illinois rallies were being organized by “Three Percenters, a wing of the anti-government movement.” Miller explained that the term “refers to the erroneous belief that only 3 percent of colonists fought against the British during the Revolutionary War — but achieved liberty for everybody.” The ADL specifically cited the “Orphans of the American Dream Podcast,” a group that has sponsored Springfield protests. Miller reported that the group denied the charge, but he pointed out that it has held protests including a banner with its logo, which finds a “Don’t Tread on Me” serpent entwined in a Roman numeral III.
(Facebook)
Bailey, Miller, and Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mark Curran all spoke directly in front of that banner on Saturday.
So we ask those elected officials and those who aspire to office, who are those really behaving like Nazis? And are you on their side or not?
Nazis and those who wish to emulate them are nothing new, but their increasingly high profile at protest rallies is. It needs to be confronted immediately by anyone with a respect for American democracy and an interest in preserving it.
Yet what’s really confounding is that people are literally protesting against an elected official who’s saying, “Your life is important. Saving your life and preventing you from getting sick with a potentially fatal disease is more important than anything else.” And protesters compare that approach to Hitler, who systematically attempted to exterminate an entire religious group across Europe?
Bailey and Miller argue that their parts of the state have not been stricken by the coronavirus pandemic — wrongly, as it turns out. As Pritzker pointed out when Bailey filed suit against the extended stay-at-home order, Bailey’s district had the lowest number of available hospital beds and ventilators in the state and includes Jasper County, just outside Effingham, the county with the highest COVID-19 mortality rate per capita. Numerous recent news stories have reported that the pandemic is spreading to rural counties, and Time magazine reported just this weekend that an “analysis of county-level COVID-19 cases shows that the virus is only just now arriving in much of rural America. That means some of these sparsely populated areas could be letting down their guard just as the disease is about to hit.”
In what world would people be upset with a leader saying, “I value your life and I care about your life, regardless of whether you support me or not?” That’s not a place or a people we recognize. And what are they saying instead: “I don’t care about my life, I just care about the dollar?”
Or is it something more insidious than even that?