This week marks five years since the COVID hysteria began. If the Irish Blessing, above, is to be taken seriously, then what happened five years ago and for the subsequent years under Governor Pritzker’s rule is something worth remembering. In fact, none of it should be forgotten.
We should not forget what the political ruling class Democrats, with support from a few cowardly Republicans, in this state did to our children and our livelihoods. But the buck stopped with Pritzker. He wanted it that way. At no other time in his life did Pritzker feel more empowered than when he got to rule from on high and literally control everyone’s movement, work, schooling, business, and health.
We must remember the details of Pritzker’s tyranny – and his hypocrisy. We should not forget how Pritzker treated us – not as fellow citizens but as people unable to think for ourselves.
Pritzker thought he knew best how to keep us healthy. Yet, he is the last person who should give anyone health advice. His outrageous COVID shot mandates cannot be forgotten. People lost jobs. People fled the state. In a disgusting display of hypocrisy, his own family fled to Florida, a state that lightly shut down and then re-opened by Summer.
For 1,155 days, Pritzker kept his COVID emergency orders in place. We must remember.
But in case you forgot, here’s how it went. On Friday, March 13, 2020, King Pritzker announced that schools would close beginning Tuesday, March 17th, for just two weeks. That weekend, though, because the corned beef had already been prepared and extra Guinness bought, Chicago let revelers go from pub to pub celebrating St. Patrick’s Day. Nobody gave two thoughts to social distancing and masks. The pandemic could wait; after all, there was fun to have and tourist money to collect.
Two weeks turned into two months, which turned into waiting for a vaccine, waiting until more people were vaccinated, and whatever else they wanted to make up as a reason to stay shut down. DO NOT FORGET THIS.
Nearly two years later school children continued to wear masks. Governor Pritzker had to be sued before he would let up on that tyranny. He destroyed businesses. His lockdowns led to massive mental health issues with children, including suicide, and his lack of management led to billions of dollars of fraud.
Five years later, the state is in worse shape as the last COVID funds are being used up. Students are still not back to proficiency in Math and only just got back to the proficiency standards of pre-COVID in reading. Jobs only recently returned to pre-pandemic levels.
And about that fraud, it looks like, in Illinois, the fraudsters may get a pass.
Doug Wolfe reported in this WAND March 6, 2025 article that state employees across 18 different state agencies “using falsified information on loan applications…obtained approximately $8 million in taxpayer funds.” The Office of Executive Inspector General, through the end of 2024, conducted 374 investigations with findings of fraud in 305 cases and 40 more cases that came up in 2025.
Wolfe also noted that Attorney General Kwame Raoul is only planning to prosecute the middlemen who helped arrange the fraud for the state employees, not the state employees themselves.
This is ridiculous.
Also, remember, the Illinois Auditor General in July 2023 reported: “Illinois overpaid unemployment benefits to the tune of $5.2 billion during the first 18 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, with much of it paid to fraudulent claimants, according to a comprehensive new audit.” As reported in this NPR article.
This was preventable, as NPR further reported, “The audit noted that Illinois failed to follow federal recommendations issued in May 2020 to prevent some of the fraud. It wasn’t until September 2021 that IDES implemented the use of a multi-state crossmatching tool called the Integrity Data Hub, according to the audit.”
Now, here comes the rub. This week, Congress passed HR 1156, which extends the statute of limitations for prosecuting fraud stemming from the COVID-19 payments. Read more HERE. This is good news. Maybe our AG will go after every person who defrauded the taxpayers.
Unbelievably, though, 127 House Democrats, including Illinois Democrats Casten, Davis, Garcia, Jackson, Kelly, Krishnamoorthi, Ramirez, Schakowsky, Schneider, and Underwood, voted against the bill.
FLASHBACK