Kass is excited about the prospect of President Pritzker!

The good news is he's joining a national press tour with Oprah for Ozempic.

Escaping Illinois Doesn’t Mean You’ve Escaped Pritzker

April 23, 2025

By John Kass

When we were young raising our family, pinching pennies to pay the mortgage and take care of the children, we’d see news stories about rising violent crime in my hometown of Chicago.

We’d breathe a sigh of relief, thankful that we were no longer in the street gang neighborhoods where murders were commonplace.

Yeah, we paid high property taxes in the suburbs—too high because the Chicago Teachers Union dictated the state’s politics—but at least we thought we were safer.

We thought we’d escaped. That lasted until it didn’t. Now we’re gone.

And I see Illinois residents running as fast as they can for the exits, not only retirees and geezers like me fleeing to Texas, Florida, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee.

But young people with good incomes—the kind a place can’t afford to lose—are fleeing Illinois as if from the plague.

“We couldn’t have planned it this way,” write Ed Dabrowski and John Klingner of wirepoints.org. “But our seven most-read stories in 2024 each captured a different facet of what’s wrong with Illinois.

“Failing schools. Murders. Closing businesses. A bloated, overpaid government sector. Election interference. Population-loss denial. And Chicago’s twisted equity priorities.”

Who would disagree? Every former resident of Illinois knows that failed schools, murders, strangled businesses, bloated insufferable government, election interference, and twisted racist DEI priorities caused them to leave home.

And now, leading the parade of failed states–like some humongous balloon held by ropes and burly teamsters–is the fat man man from Illinois who wants to be president:

Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

If you find the image of Pritzker as a giant parade balloon to be objectionable, then please consider him as a lumberjack in hobnailed boots dancing on a log in a river, always rolling to the left, the left, the left, furiously keeping his feet moving lest he fall in.

“There is no doubt that he is going to run,” the Journal quoted Chicagoan Bill Daley, who served as President Bill Clinton’s commerce secretary and President Barack Obama’s chief of staff. “The real question is whether he runs for re-election first or just runs for president.”

My take? He’s a mean-spirited fool. The billionaire heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune was born on third base thinking he hit a triple.

Others are gaining momentum and just might eclipse his ambition. For example, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the princess of the neo-Marxists, comes to mind.

She’s the face of the Democrat Party now, buoyed up by old pal Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont as his spiritual great granddaughter.

The news coverage of AOC in the New York Times and other left leaning corporate legacy media outlets is gentle, soothing, bordering on the blatantly hagiographic.

It is all about building interest in her as a personality, rather like those media pieces once orchestrated by David Axelrod about Obama, as he walked barefoot on that beach in Hawaii, his chest glistening with ocean spray as if he were the winged mythological horse Pegasus that leftist journalists so wanted to ride. But no journalists would ride Pritzker even with a saddle and a horse blanket.

OK, maybe some, but no one I’d want to read.

As he progresses in sating his ambition, raising his public profile at various political dinners across the country, as he rails at President Donald Trump stoking hysteria, some journalists might even remember why some in Illinois call him Gov. Toilets. But I don’t think many will remember. It could ruin their appetite.

I leave the link here, because many of you read johnkassnews.com in the mornings, and I would rather not ruin your breakfasts. But he’s got to make a decision: Run for president or remain as governor. For years now, as taxes and crime have increased, as Democrat judges tried to sweep it all under the party rug, Illinois has been ruined by intellectual dishonesty.

Pritzker can’t do both. He can’t covet the throne in Springfield and still sit on the one at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue even if he plates it in gold.

It just won’t work.

“He can’t do it,” said a friend, “even if he’s 500 pounds, it’s impossible.”

Compounding his problem is the rise of AOC, the new media darling. Pritzker has long feared and has been intimidated by strident progressive women.

Years ago, I had lunch with him because he asked me for advice and he all but cried, his lips trembling, visibly frightened by leftist U.S. Rep. Janice Shakowsky, who Pritzker said was being mean to him. She was mean to him. She’s a witch.

But for all her progressive stridency, protected as she was by the political writers of both Chicago newspapers, Shakowsky is being challenged herself by another left winger who would be welcomed as one of Mao’s cultural revolutionaries.

Kat Abughazaleh, a 26-year-old hard-left social media influencer, announced Monday morning she will run to represent Illinois’ 9th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2026, setting up a presumed challenge against Evanston resident and longtime Democratic Rep. Schakowsky.

“I say it’s time to drop the excuses and grow a f—ing spine,” Abughazaleh says in a campaign video.

Nice.

And so, once again we are treated to the drama of the Menshevicks being devoured by the Bolsheviks. They’ll save Pritzker to eat last. And Kat Abughazaleh? All she needs is a burlap bag of middle-class heads to offer up to her Jacobin allies for their support. I don’t think the heads will be smiling.

Did they smile in “The Killing Fields?”

No.

Other Democrats toying with a presidential run, including Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota and billionaire Pritzker, have drawn attention from progressive activists because of their hatred of the Trump administration.

Spewing venomous rhetoric may excite legacy media and distract some Americans, but being victimized by violent crime and squeezed by the government taxman has a way of cutting through the fog. And it concentrates the mind.

The old crutch of federal COVID bailout money is gone and Chicago and Illinois are facing financial ruin. And the AWFLs, those Angry White Female Leftists in the suburbs begin to howl.

The state run Chicago newspapers by and large avoid crime so as to avoid confronting government masters, but at least CWB Chicago remains curious as to what happens to the people.

Despite Illinois pouring billions more into education than prior to the pandemic — $44 billion in 2024 against $35 billion in 2019 — “All the evidence points to that money being wasted,” Paul Vallas, the runner-up for the 2023 Chicago mayoral election wrote in the Chicago Contrarian. “Fewer Illinois students can read or compute proficiently today than could five years ago and overall state test scores are abysmal. Rather than sound the alarm over the bleak findings, Governor J.B. Pritzker is calling Illinois’ dismal results an inspiring success.”

At least we were able to leave Illinois years ago. My accountant congratulated me.

“You’ve given yourself a huge raise,” he said mentioning the difference we’re paying in Indiana compared to the property bill in Chicago’s Western suburbs.

We’ve saved tens of thousands of dollars by moving from quaint Western Springs to a comparable town in Northwest Indiana. I don’t miss Illinois. At least I live in a red state now.

But as the Democrat Party moves farther and farther to the left, as national media ignore the sins of Gov. Toilets, as they embrace AOC as their new show pony and celebrate political violence directed at conservatives, moderates and anything remotely anti-Trump, as the Democrat Party’s vice chairman demands his party get rid of whatever moderates remain, you’ve might ask yourself:

How far can you run?

With this leftist crew, with the national media at their side quashing dissent and censoring dissidents, if they take the House of Representatives in the mid-term election then they’ll have it all. They can finally pack the Supreme Court and engineer Letitia James as Attorney General and make sure Americans have all the Free Speech freedoms of any Londoner who used to have an opinion about how he was being governed.

And then “far” won’t be far enough, will it?