The following are excerpts from recent speeches by Governor Jay Pritzker of Illinois. He is a Democrat. He has balanced the budget (Republicans, take note of what used to be an article of faith for you). He is intelligent. He is articulate. He is terrified at what is happening to his country. And, yes, he is rich.

In reading them, recall that while the Democratic presidential ticket carried the state comfortably in 2024 (54.37% for Harris/Walz), there was a 6-point shift toward Republicans compared to Biden’s 2020 result.

For perspective, Governor Pritzker notes that “Our [Illinois] economy is over $1.1 trillion and growing – the fifth largest in the United States and the 18th largest in the world.” I had no idea.

State of the State and Budget Address — February 19, 2025 – end of the speech
[Watch on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DGTFzW4Oj4J/?igsh=MWd2Ym13aW5hN3BndA%3D%3D]

 “As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an American and as a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.

I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next?

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.

I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor …. according to the best of my ability.”

My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So, gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.

Thank you.”

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Later, on April 28, 2025, Governor Pritzker spoke at a Democratic fundraiser in New Hampshire. The video can be seen here if that is your thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMndfvxVeRo Transcript excerpts follow [the transcript was AI-produced; I have fixed typos when possible]:

“… we need to knock off the rust of poll-tested language and decades of stale decorum. It’s obscured our better instincts. We have to abandon the culture of incrementalism that has led us to swallow the cruelty and the callousness with barely a cowardly croak.

It’s time to fight everywhere and all at once.

Let’s start with something that should be easy to say: it’s wrong to snatch a person off the street and ship them to a foreign gulag with no chance to defend themselves in a court of law. I want to be clear this is not an argument about immigration. This is an argument about the Constitution.

Remember Trump just last week arrested and deported three children under 8 years old, all US citizens, all of them, one of them a four-year old with Stage 4 cancer. Let that sink in. This country was founded on the idea of habeas corpus. It’s a fancy legal term that in plain words means no government has a right to arbitrarily take your freedom away from you. Preserving habeas corpus is not some fever dream of the left-wing echo chamber. It’s a fundamental concept of justice that people have fought and died for dating back to the Middle Ages. It was in the Magna Carta. It was considered by our nation’s founders to be so vital to our liberty that they wrote it right into the Constitution.

Thomas Jefferson called it the essential principle of government. Benjamin Franklin opined that those who would give up habeas corpus for temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security, and Alexander Hamilton wrote that the practice of arbitrary imprisonments has been in all the ages the favorite and most formidable instrument of tyranny.

Franklin, Jefferson, and Hamilton standing for the idea that the government doesn’t have the right to kidnap you without due process is arguably the most effective campaign slogan in history. What do we think that Colonel Stark was talking about if not this when he said, “live free or die?” Today it’s an immigrant with a tattoo. Tomorrow it’s a citizen whose Facebook post annoys Donald Trump.

There are plenty of people in this country who hold opinions that I find abhorrent, but my faith and our Constitution dictate that I fight for their freedoms as loudly as I defend my own. As a Ukrainian-American Jew who built a Holocaust museum, whose family immigrated here as refugees from the Russian pogroms, let me say this to Donald Trump: stop tearing down the Constitution in the name of my ancestors. Do not claim that your authoritarian power grabs are about combating antisemitism. When you destroy social justice, you are disparaging the very foundation of Judaism.

When the pendulum swings back, and it always does, you will have contributed to the climate of retribution that will inevitably follow, so let’s dispel another myth from the MAGA Republicans: that we Democrats believe that undocumented people who are convicted of violent crimes shouldn’t be allowed to stay in this country. We want public safety just as much as Republicans do and when we get back in control of Congress, and we will, and when we get the White House back, and we will, Democrats need to make it a priority to pass real sensible immigration reform. We need to secure our border. We need to keep and attract hardworking taxpaying law-abiding people and give them a path to citizenship. Immigration with all its struggles and its complexities is part of the secret sauce that makes American great always. Immigrants strengthen our communities, enrich our neighborhoods, renew our passion for America’s greatness, enliven our music and our culture, and enhance understanding of the world. The success of our economy depends upon immigrants. In fact, 46% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants.

The return on investment for America’s 250-year commitment to immigration is incalculable, but because of Donald Trump’s xenophobia, we’ve seen foreign students already choosing not to attend our universities and being told to leave. Businesses from overseas are afraid to invest their money here and to bring their executives to our shores. Scientists are choosing to innovate in European laboratories instead of American ones already in just 100 days. If the best and the brightest around the world no longer flock to this shining city on a hill, then the US economy is likely to fail.

But failure is starting to look like that’s the point of all this, doesn’t it? We have a Secretary of Education who hates teachers and schools. We have a Secretary of Transportation who hates public transit. We have an Attorney General who hates the Constitution. We have a Secretary of State, the son of naturalized citizens and a family of refugees. on a crusade to expel both from our country. We have a head of the Department of Government Efficiency, an immigrant granted the privilege of living and working here, a man who has made hundreds of billions of dollars after the government rescued his business for him, who is looking to destroy the American middle class to fund tax cuts for himself.

And we have a president who claims to love America, but who hates our military so much that he calls them losers and suckers, and who can’t be bothered to delay his golf game to greet the bodies of four fallen U.S. soldiers. And we have a Grand Old Party  founded by one of our nation’s bravest presidents, Abraham Lincoln, who today would be a Democrat I might add, a Grand Old Party so afraid of the felon and the fraud that they put into the White House that they would sooner watch him destroy our country than lift a hand to save it.

Democrats, we may have to fix our messaging and our strategy, but our values are exactly where they ought to be, and we will never join so many Republicans in the special place in Hell reserved for quislings and cowards. It’s time for us to be done with optimism about their motives or their objectives, time to stop wondering if you can trust the nuclear codes to people who don’t know how to organize a group chat. It’s time to stop ignoring the hypocrisy wearing a big gold cross while announcing the defunding of children’s cancer research, and time to stop thinking we can reason or negotiate with a madman. Time to stop apologizing when we were not wrong. Time to stop surrendering when we need to fight.

Our small businesses don’t deserve to be bankrupted by unsustainable tariffs. Our retirees don’t deserve to be left destitute by a Social Security Administration decimated by Elon Musk. Our citizens don’t’ deserve to lose health care coverage because Republicans want to hand a tax cut to billionaires. Our federal workers don’t deserve to have a 19-year-old Doge bro called Big Balls destroy their careers. Autistic kids and adults who are loving contributors to our society don’t deserve to be stigmatized by a weird Nepo baby who once stashed a dead bear in the backset of his car, Our military service members don’t deserve to be told by a washed-up Fox TV commentator who drank too much and committed sexual assault before being appointed Secretary of Defense that they can’t serve their country simply because they’re Black or gay or a woman.

If it sounds like I’m becoming contemptuous of Donald Trump and the people he has elevated, it’s because I am. You should be too. They’re an afront to every value this country was founded upon.

But there’s a way out of this mess. I know because I’ve been to this movie before. When I was elected Governor in 2018, it was after four years of a very destructive Republican chief executive. He had run on the idea of shaking things up as Governor, and he promptly started defunding key government agencies, slashing state benefits, and refusing to pass a state budget. Illinois’s credit rating took a dive. Companies fled. State social service agencies closed, and government services that the poor and elderly and sick relied upon vanished.

Does that sound familiar? Illinoisans hated it, even the ones who voted for the guy. They hated it so much that four years later they elected me.

Here’s the lesson that I learned. When we emerge from this, and we will emerge from this. our democratic agenda must be bold and our ideas fearless. We must be willing to slay sacred cows and allow the courage of our actions to match the immediacy of our words. We must deliver on that agenda for working families and for the real people who truly make America great.

I understand the tendency to give in to despair right now, but despair is an indulgence that we cannot afford. In the times upon which history turns never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption, but I am now.

These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soap box and then punish them at the ballot box. They must feel in their bones that when we survive this shameful episode of American history with our democracy intact, because we have no alternative but to do just that, we will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors. And when the courage of our civic leaders waivers, when they fail to stand up for our country in its moment of greatest need, then we should remind them that cowardice always comes at a cost in the world’s most successful republic.

No generation of Americans has escaped our true inheritance, the test that we are given that asks how hard we are willing to fight to keep our society free. It was selfish to think that ours would be the first but the fact that we are still here debating the question tells me our predecessors never failed this test in the past. Often in situations just as dire as the one in front of us cowardice can be contagious, but so too can courage. Courage born during times when complacency beckons like a siren call is the most important kind of all. Just as the hope that we hold on to in the darkness shines with its own special light these days, I cling to the courage and the hope demonstrated by Andy and Gavin and Lucy. Courage and hope that risks limbs and livelihoods to go to the most visible place possible to wave a sign or to post an upside-down flag and remind everyone that what we do and what we don’t do matters.

So, tonight, I’m telling you what I’m willing to do and that’s fight for our democracy, for our liberty, for the opportunity for all of our people to live lives that are meaningful and free. I see around me tonight a room full of people who are ready to do the same. So, I have one question for all of you Granite Staters. Are you ready for the fight for real? Granite Staters, are you ready for the fight? Good night, New Hampshire. God bless you, and God bless these United States.”

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