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Pritzker’s dystopian “Afraid New World” strategy
Gov. Pritzker continues to hold his daily press conferences to update the public on the coronavirus, sometimes with Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot. And while they speak to the issues of fighting the virus, including social distancing, stay at home orders, and more, too often Pritzker and Lightfoot instead use the briefings to launch political attacks against President Trump, instead of seeking to bring the country together at a time of major crisis
Published in the Southwest News newspaper group April 8, 2020
By Ray Hanania
If I had to come up with a book title to describe what is happening in America today, it would be “Afraid New World.” It would be the modernday version of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel, “Brave New World.”
Huxley, who wrote his novel in 1931 from France when the world was deep in a depression, basically envisioned a futuristic dystopian totalitarian world where everything and everyone was engineered and controlled. He also accurately predicted that the future world would rely heavily upon technologies, many of which he never knew, like the Internet, television or TikTok.
The world of tyranny Huxley described almost feels that way, today. Every day, Big Brother JB Pritzker stands at a podium playing politics unable to do anything about the coronavirus Pandemic except to bully the public with restrictions into fear.
The term “Social Distancing” is a pandemic trade word that was first made popular in the science fiction movie, Contagion, which has seen a resurgence in popularity, and profits as greedy cable and movie streaming companies price gouge charging $20 to watch it.
Pritzker is the actualization of Huxley’s amalgam of a nightmarish leadership of tyrants who saw themselves — portrayed themselves — as being caring and benevolent.
Every day, Pritzker comes on TV and really says nothing. Seriously, what is he saying? “Stay home.” That’s leadership? This is a guy who imposed the largest wave of new taxes to generate billions in new income and he can’t use that to find a cure? If he did that, I might think differently about him.
But instead of leading, Pritzker panders to our fears, fears fanned like embers into flames by a national media that thrives on death, destruction and tragedy.
Who is enforcing all of his orders? People are out on the streets in groups. They are in grocery stores, parks, fighting to horde products. “Stay at Home” without any enforcement teeth is worthless. He won’t enforce it because he’s the quintessential politician. And what is that? That’s someone who knows that he can jack up taxes during their first year in office, knowing the public will forget four years later when he runs for re-election.
Pritzker knows that the easiest way to stay popular is to define someone else as the boogeyman, in this case President Trump, a former reality TV star and businessman who is stumbling through his term in office put there not by his own appeal but by the immeasurable dislike of Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Dynasty. If there ever was a tyranny passing itself off as benevolence, it is the politics of Clintonian arrogance.
The Illinois governor knows that the coronavirus is his perfect opportunity to sweep under the rug the fact that he is incapable of digging Illinois out of its disparity. Illinois is last in line when it comes to anything that is good. Pritzker can’t solve the pension problem. He can’t solve the unemployment problem. He can’t solve the crime problem that emanates from a ruthless street gang-run Chicago.
But Pritzker can engage in political hyperbole.
Businesses are going to close. People are going to lose their jobs. Many people are going to get violently ill, and about 20 percent of the sick may die from this disease. I lost my best friend to the virus last week because of a hysteria that has overcome commonsense. When Mansour Tadros went to the hospital for coronavirus treatment, he was told to go home and “self quarantine.” Two days later, at home, he couldn’t breath and died on the way back to the hospital in the ambulance.
This week, Pritzker announced hospitals will be protected from lawsuit liabilities when they make mistakes.
What should he do? Stop talking politics. Stop whining about the Federal Government and start finding ways to work with them. Do your job. Lead. Your daily, failed attempts at replicating FDR’s fireside chats are not working.
We need to fight this virus medically, and we need to instill confidence, not fear, to strengthen our society.
But it isn’t going to happen in the dystopian reality of Pritzker’s “Afraid New World.”
Pritzker will do well when it’s over. I don’t know if the rest of us will.
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Hanania also writes about Middle East issues for the Arab News, and The Arab Daily News criticizing government policies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Hanania was named "Best Ethnic American Columnist" by the New America Media in November 2007, and is the 2009 recipient of the SPJ National Sigma Delta Chi Award for column writing.
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