The burning cross discovered in Grant Park last week, which Governor Pritzker immediately denounced with characteristic rhetorical fury as hate with one purpose: to stir up intimidation and terror, turned out to have been placed there by a twenty-one-year-old Naperville native and University of Illinois Chicago senior named Merlin Louu, who told NBC 5 that he burned the cross as a protest against Trump administration injustice, placed a MAGA hat on top, and freely acknowledged knowing the implications of what he was doing.
Ted Dabrowski, former president of Wirepoints and former Republican gubernatorial candidate, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to discuss the episode, the state of Illinois politics, and what it would actually take to build an opposition capable of contesting the ruling class.
Dabrowski said Pritzker should be rhetorically pilloried for his immediate rush to characterize the burning cross as a hate crime, which followed the now-familiar pattern of jumping to the wrong conclusion in service of identitarian politics, exactly as Kamala Harris did with the Jussie Smollett hoax. He said the larger lesson is that the identitarian political framework that produces these reflexive responses needs to be dismantled entirely in favor of merit and accountability, but acknowledged Illinois is very far from that.
On the broader state of Republican politics in Illinois, Dabrowski said the Spencer Pratt example, while Pratt ultimately did not make the runoff in Los Angeles, is instructive about the possibility of using AI tools, humor, and relentless visibility to build a movement that takes on a corrupt ruling class with energy and specificity. He said the failures in Illinois are sitting right there waiting to be prosecuted by someone willing to do it, that the moral case and the data are both on the reform side, and that nobody seems willing to put a marker down. He said the approach of always deferring one opportunity to contest in order to preserve the ability to defer the next opportunity is the order of the day in Illinois and it has to stop.
On the mayor’s race taking shape in Chicago, Dabrowski said the same tired names keep circulating, including career politicians whose connections to the old machine like HDO are being conveniently minimized as they attempt to reintroduce themselves. He said the moment is ripe for a center-right candidate in what is technically a nonpartisan race, that the failures are visible and the case is easy to make, and that someone with energy and specificity about solutions could build the kind of coalition Pratt demonstrated is possible. He said the question is whether anyone will actually do it rather than talk about doing it.
On the Bears situation, Dabrowski said he is sick of hearing about it and wants to put it in demographic context. He said going back to 2000, Illinois has lost a net average of approximately seventy thousand people per year to out-migration, which is roughly the capacity of a Bears stadium. In 2017 the number hit 130,000, two stadiums worth of people in a single year. He said if the Bears is such an important institution to protect, the same urgency should apply to the population that is leaving at the same rate. The Bears are leaving because Illinois makes it hard to operate a business. People are leaving for the same reason.
His policy proposal to address the underlying problem is a $3 billion property tax rebate to Illinois homeowners, which he calculates at roughly an eight percent reduction. He said the political class has never had any difficulty figuring out how to extract more money from residents and simply telling them to figure out how to pay it. He said local governments should be told to figure out how to give $3 billion back. Proft offered the Florida model, where the first $250,000 in assessed valuation of a homesteaded property is exempt from property taxes entirely, covering approximately sixty percent of homeowners, as a more structurally clean version of the same idea.
Dabrowski said whichever form the proposal takes, the purpose is to start a fight, because the fight is the point. You cannot cut property taxes without cutting spending. You cannot cut spending without confronting the public union power structure, the pension bloat, the excessive administrative layers, and the too many units of government that have made Illinois ungovernable. A big specific idea forces that conversation. Pratt did this in Los Angeles with a nine-minute presentation on homelessness policy that was more substantive than anything the ruling class offered. The same approach is available in Illinois to anyone willing to do it. Dabrowski said he does not know yet who that person will be, but the opportunity is sitting there waiting.