CPAC Panel in Dallas with Gordon Chang
Pictured above: Gordon Chang, Jillian Rojas from Manteno, Illinois, Lori Brock from Green Charter Township, Michigan, and Jeanne Ives
I’m very thankful to Gordon Chang for inviting me and others fighting the CCP-affiliated company Gotion to CPAC to let others know that hard work and grassroots activism can make a difference.
While Michigan activists have been successful in stopping the Gotion project, their battle is not over. Gotion, Inc. continues to harass them with a counter lawsuit and has left them with an $800,000 legal bill.
The fight to stop Gotion in Manteno, Illinois, is far from over. The Concerned Citizens of Manteno are in the middle of a lawsuit to stop the plant from operating, and that fight has become more important now than when they began. Once Gotion got kicked out of Michigan, they moved the manufacturing of EV batteries to Manteno, which was only supposed to be the site for battery assembly, so environmental concerns are even greater.
This fight is not easy. Local citizens had to organize immediately in order to begin the arduous process of holding elected officials accountable. The volunteer work these ladies and others in their No Gotion groups are doing includes: protests for awareness, going to every public meeting, recalling elected officials in Michigan, electing new people in both Michigan and Illinois, using the FOIA law to request thousands of pages of documents and then piecing together the important information and relationships, setting up websites, social media accounts, and non-profits, hiring lawyers to sue for their rights, and raising money to fund the legal work.
One of the biggest issues that has come out of these fights is that local and state officials are hiding behind non-disclosure agreements to obscure the deals they are making with taxpayer money and agreements to change zoning before open hearings have occurred. These NDAs between elected officials, business, and quasi-governmental economic development corporations should be outlawed.
The work of these volunteers is tireless and tiresome. This is why really knowing who you are electing and what they stand for matters before you elect someone to office. Spending time electing the right people saves time, money, and heartache on the backend once they are elected.
Just ask Joe Abraham or Sheridan Gorman’s parents about how policy affects lives. Joe Abraham has admitted that before his daughter was murdered by an illegal alien, he wasn’t that political. But Joe is speaking out now and has been speaking out for the last year.
Joe testified in the U.S. Senate this week about our Illinois sanctuary laws that protected the illegal immigrant who killed his daughter.
I watched the hearing.
IL Senator Dick Durbin participated and shamefully made no apology for or acknowledgement of Biden’s open border or Illinois’ sanctuary law as being the root cause of Katie Abraham and Sherdan Gorman’s deaths.
In his opening remarks, Durbin chastised President Trump for not getting only the “worst of the worst” criminal illegals out, but instead wasting time deporting illegals with no criminal record or only small misdemeanors, implying that Trump should have deported these killers. But this point is ridiculous if you know the facts.
Joe valiantly rebuked Durbin, saying all who came in under Biden must go. The guy who killed his daughter wasn’t considered a “worst of the worst.” Jose Medina, who allegedly killed Sheridan Gorman, only had a record of shoplifting until he decided to murder an American college student, and wouldn’t be considered the “worst of the worst”. Same with Laken Riley‘s killer.
More about Jose Medina-Medina, the alleged killer of Gorman. He reportedly crossed the border illegally in 2023, was released by Biden’s border control, and bussed up to Chicago. Only a few months after arriving he was arrested for shoplifting, skipped court, and the warrant for his arrest was never effectuated.
Medina-Medina was protected in Illinois.
And the national outrage of the murder of Sheridan Gorman is not going away soon. At a vigil in Yorktown Heights, NY, on Saturday, her mother spoke out:
“I want to say this gently, but honestly, as a mom. I’m angry,” Jessica Gorman said. “I’m like completely heartbroken, and we are going to fight for justice for our sweet Sheridan, and we’re going to fight for change.”
At the vigil, the family’s attorney, Thomas Tripodianos, warned against what he described as growing complacency about public safety.
“If we accept this, even silently, then we are accepting a reality where young people are not as safe as they should be. And that is not acceptable,” Tripodianos said. “And there must be justice. Real justice.”
Will accountability in Illinois have to come from a family in New York?
As with Katie Abraham’s killer, a number of questions arise about how Julio Cucul-Bol and Jose Medina-Medina were supported for years at taxpayer expense and never assimilated despite the hundreds of millions spent on programs to do such. Both killers also had communicable diseases, HIV and tuberculosis, respectively, and are now being treated at taxpayer expense.
Pro-illegal immigrant NGOs are part of the problem.
In this story from Chicago City Wire, “Chicago Ald. Ray Lopez (D-15th) says the city should pull the funding of RefugeeOne, the taxpayer-backed non-profit allegedly funding the living expenses of Venezuelan Illegal alien Loyola University murderer Jose Medina-Medina.
In a comment on X.com, Lopez said West Ridge-based RefugeeOne “should have its $2.7M (in) grants” revoked.”
Refugee One receives millions of dollars from the federal government and hundreds of thousands from Illinois taxpayers. “The organization promises to provide illegal aliens with “access to employment, therapy, education and more,” according to its 2024 Annual Report.”
It’s another NGO that should be defunded.
On the topic of NGOs getting money for bogus programs, a very important article came out in The Free Press called What Happens When You Pay Ex-Gang Members to Stop Crime? Ask Chicago.
The article discusses the millions of dollars spent on violence-prevention grants in Illinois, with little to no results. Alderman Tabares even calls these grants a scam in the article, which raises the question of why she hasn’t spoken up against the funding. Prior to being an alderman, Tabares was a state rep – she knows how this funding happens and was there when the big blowup over misuse of violence prevention grants under former Governor Quinn was a front-page story.
Under Pritzker these grants, have exploded and public money has replaced private money in funding NGOs engaged in “violence prevention.” Over Pritzker’s last eight years in office, he has spent nearly $770 million on these programs.
The lengthy article should be read by all, but most importantly, by elected officials. It’s behind a paywall, but worth the price of a subscription.
Picture from a No Kings protest in Lombard, Illinois
Could there be a more pathetic picture than the one above? We haven’t had a king for 250 years and the closest Illinois has been to tyranny has been Governor Pritzker during COVID. The cognitive dissonance to protest a kingship in America under Trump when someone lives in Illinois under one-party rule is a psychosis that should be analyzed by our best psychologists.
Various protests included the predictable signs of a mal-educated, privileged soft society. Their themes were: F- Trump, ICE Out of Chicago – this after Sheridan Gorman was killed the week before, Hands Off Iran, calls for communism with red hammer and sickle flags flying, and of course, pro-union posters.
In Chicago, Juliana Stratton, the Democrat nominee for the U.S. Senate took center stage. It’s frightening how stupid these people are.
At our Breakthrough Ideas office, which is frequently the site of local protests from the progressives, we put up our own banner ahead of the No Kings protest weekend to remind people of the history they forgot.
IN OTHER NEWS
Onto Springfield – It was House Committee deadline on Friday. Technically, this is the last day that House bills can be passed out of committee to have a chance to be considered for a full vote before the entire House. This is, of course, BS. The only bills that have this artificial deadline imposed on them are Republican bills. A Democrat can get any bill out of committee at any time. The only rule is that there are no rules for Democrats.
Just this week, 262 bills passed out of a House committee. Here are a few of them, I want to highlight:
HB 4942 New Work Comp Fee – adds a new fee on businesses to pay for workers compensation administrative expenses.
HB 4743 Uber Driver Unionization Bill – allows ride share workers to unionize.
HB 2851 Sparkler Excise Tax – new tax for people who purchase ground-based sparklers.
HB 4039 – Creates the Holistic Overdose Prevention and Equity Act. Provides for medication for opioid use disorder and fentanyl testing. Restricts the use of abstinence-only or sobriety requirements to housing, with certain requirements. Creates a Harm Reduction board.
HB5071 – Tollway Bilingual Supplemental Pay. Allows tollway to pay more of workers who have language skills other than English.
HB4502 – No tolls for veterans going to a medical appointment. Good Grief – how about no tolls for anyone. This bill is sponsored by a downstate Republican who rarely pays tolls anyway.
HB 5028 – New Forest Preserve Tax for Kendall County.
HB1581 – Adequate and Equitable Public University Funding Act. This is the updated version of race-based funding for higher education. It uses the 2017 elementary and secondary funding formula model which has been a complete failure and requires the same type of model for higher education. This bill would be a disaster! But, I expect a version of it will pass.
But, let’s end on a positive note.
