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Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker represents just about everything that nudged me out of the liberal Democrat fold. I was a John F. Kennedy Democrat and I voted for every Democratic presidential candidate from Lyndon B. Johnson through Michael Dukakis. That includes George McGovern, who then was as far left as the Democrat Party would go (but not Americans as he lost every state except one).
But I realized that there was a growing difference between the party and me. It was a rift that turned into a yawning gap. It wasn't so much that I had changed, but that the party was moving away from me until I was utterly abandoned.
Here's an example of how it happened. When the HIV/AIDS epidemic broke out in the mid-1980s, the widely accepted public health measure to combat the disease was contact tracing. I wrote a Sun-Times column supporting the science, but not only did liberals disagree, they accused me of being homophobic.
Why? The liberal agenda abruptly changed, so far to the left that it denied the science. You couldn't contract trace because it would be "embarrassing." It would needlessly exposed men who hadn't come out of the closet to discrimination. It would discourage gay men from getting tested. Laws were passed by pseudo-liberals to "protect' the identity of gay men. In Illinois, the long-established rule that required a blood test before marriage was abolished. And if you can believe this: One reason to end the required blood tests because "too many" people were getting married outside of Illinois to avoid getting the test. (Just think of the business the state was losing!)
Meanwhile, the disease spread to others: women and their newborns. Seriously ill patients who were infected from infected donated blood. So many of those who died from what was considered to be a death sentence. Effective treatments were eventually developed, but even without them, liberals and Democrats early on believed that it was better that people would die instead of properly following the science.
The liberal/progressive/Democrat left ironically have raised the anti-science banner against anyone who disagreed, even on legitimate scientific grounds, with the favored "remedies" to fight the Covid-19 pandemic. In truth, liberals/progressives/Democrats were the first to so crassly exploit science to run things. Trouble is, hardly anyone remembers.
So, read my book to understand my loathing of Pritzker and the progressive agenda and why they have betrayed my liberal values.
The book is free. If you haven't received one in the mail, you can find it at pritzkerbook.com where you can download a PDF or audio version. Thank you for reading.
