Gov. Pritzker, in State of State Speech, Compares Trump Admin. To the Start of a Nazi Movement

EXCERPT:

PRITZKER: “I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly, but I know the history intimately and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here is what I have learned. The root the tears apart your house's foundation begins as a seed, a seed of distrust and hate and blame. A seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago did not arrive overnight, it started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame. I am watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac and suggests, without facts or findings, that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash, or the Missouri attorney general who just sued Starbucks, arguing that customers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too female and nonwhite. The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here. They point to a group of people who don‘t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems. I just have one question: What comes next? After we have discriminated against, deported, or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian, transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women, and the minorities, once we have ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends, after that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face, what comes next? All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don‘t want to repeat history, then for God sakes, in this moment, we better be strong enough to learn from it!"