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SPRINGFIELD (LifeSiteNews) — Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has drawn national attention by invoking Nazi imagery in a critique of President Donald Trump and his administration during a State of the State address last Wednesday evening.
Distinguished as one of the wealthiest politicians in the U.S., being worth around $3.7 billion due in part to his family’s ownership of the Hyatt hotel chain, the second-term governor spent a considerable amount of time in his speech criticizing Trump administration fiscal policies and drawing comparisons to the rapid rise of Germany’s Third Reich.
He also challenged his fellow Democrats, along with Republicans, to resist an appeasement of Trump’s federal policies.
“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,” he said. “I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.”
Pritzker, who is Jewish, highlighted his role in building the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie which is “dedicated to preserving the legacy” of the Nazi genocide against Jews while also fostering “the promotion of human rights and the elimination of genocide” altogether.
READ: On Holocaust Memorial Day, Jewish group protests Israel’s ‘sadistic’ genocide in Gaza
“I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly,” said the governor who may be a 2028 presidential aspirant. But “I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now.”
“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?” he challenged.
“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,” Pritzker said.
READ: The West cannot hide’: Compelling documentary presents Israel’s ‘live stream genocide’ in Gaza
“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.”
Illinois House GOP Leader Rep. Tony McCombie commented the “political rhetoric” of Pritzker’s speech was designed to “put him on the stage for the presidential race.”
“That was some speech,” she said. “It certainly wasn’t what we anticipated. We had obviously thought we were going to have a little gaslighting but certainly didn’t think we were going to see a flamethrower by any means.”
She was supportive of fellow members in their minority caucus who left the House chamber when Pritzker invoked the Nazis. “To sit there and basically be called Nazis, not only Trump, but the Republican Party, it was disgusting.”
Trump defended from Nazi charge due to support of Israel
One writer for the Jewish Press took Pritzker to task defending President Trump from these serious charges. Though the Illinois governor did not mention Trump’s policy toward Israel in his blistering critique, Sara Lehmann cited a recent comment by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to support her case that Mr. Trump was the very opposite of a Nazi.
Earlier this month during a press conference the 47th president announced his backing for Israel’s hard-right government to finish the job in ethnically cleansing two million Palestinian people from their own internationally recognized territory in Gaza. He additionally expressed his intention to have the U.S. annex this stolen land to build beach resorts.
In response, Netanyahu pronounced Trump “the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House.”
READ: Most of the world is rejecting Trump’s plan to ‘take over’ Gaza and displace Palestinians
Lehmann went on to praise Trump’s shipping of 1,800 MK-84 2,000-pound bombs to the Israelis of which they have dropped hundreds in Gaza over the last 16 months. Such bombardments have contributed to, as expressed by Trump himself, the wiping out of that land’s entire civilization.
Donald Trump just admitted that Israel has committed genocide. pic.twitter.com/86wGP1zGCu
— Owen Jones (@owenjonesjourno) February 11, 2025
With the vast majority of buildings and infrastructure having been destroyed by Israel through the virtually unconditional support from the United States, reliable reports of Palestinian deaths in Gaza include at least 47,283 killed (~20,600 children), with the Lancet estimating the deaths to likely be over 70,000.
Extensive documentation of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians
In December, advocacy groups Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International released extensive reports concluding Israeli authorities were deliberately seeking to bring about the destruction of the people of Gaza by various means, including the deprivation of necessities like water, food, energy and medical care, amounting to crimes of genocide.
READ: Genocide ‘only reasonable conclusion’ to Israel’s crimes in Gaza: Amnesty International
Additionally, in January 2024, the International Court of Justice delivered a preliminary ruling, finding the charge of genocide against Israel to be “plausible,” and last November the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defense chief Yoav Gallant “for crimes against humanity and war crimes,” including “starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”
Pritzker’s support of Israel’s ‘racist and Jewish supremacist’ government
Like Trump, Pritzker too has been a strong supporter of Israeli government objectives formerly serving on the board of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a flagship of the Israel lobby in the U.S. He also expressed strong support for Israel’s war in Gaza and voiced disappointment when the City of Chicago passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in February of last year.
READ: Col. Macgregor: The ‘top priority’ for Israel is to make Gaza ‘unlivable,’ expel all survivors
When Netanyahu’s new government took power in December 2022, a report from Axios called it “the most right-wing government” in the nation’s history, which included powerful minsters who espouse “racist and Jewish supremacist” views, such as finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and former national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir.
After asserting in August that it would be “right and moral” to starve the two million Palestinians (1 million children) in Gaza “to death,” Smotrich proposed in November his further ethnic cleansing plans by creating “a situation where Gaza’s population in two years will be less than half its current size.” Ben Gvir has affirmed his own desire for intensifying attacks on Gaza and promoting “the encouragement of migration” from the Strip.
Former Defense Minister: Israel’s extremist government ‘Mein Kampf in reverse’
In late November former Israeli Defense Chief Moshe Yaalon protested that “the path” these far-right religious elements were “dragging us down is to occupy, annex, and ethnically cleanse” the Gaza Strip.
READ: Former Israeli defense minister affirms IDF is committing ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Gaza
Yaalon, who has been warning for years about the grave dangers of the radical religious Zionism espoused by these extremist ministers, gave an interview in March 2023 where he framed this movement’s perils with the sharpest irony.
“When you talk about Smotrich and Ben Gvir,” he said at the time, their ideology of racial subjugation is a concept that “rests on Jewish supremacy: Mein Kampf in reverse.”
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