The List of 23: policies hostile nations must be thrilled to see Illinois has adopted – Wirepoints

By: Mark Glennon*

Imagine yourself as a hostile ruler who was particularly cunning and exceptionally smart about American politics. Suppose you thought you had a means to influence Illinois government. How much could you have gotten away with in recent years if you wanted to undermine the state from within?

Specifically, what’s the list of policies you would have tried to help put through that Illinois’ political establishment would have supported but that would be certainly end in failure and strife?

I mean policies that you could reasonably have hoped Illinois’ leadership would actually adopt, not openly hostile actions, illegal subversion, military actions or the like. Pretend you were a master at calculating the most you could get away with, and take the challenge seriously.

The list would have looked like the one below, and it’s already fully in place in Illinois. My point is not that these policies resulted from foreign influence. To the contrary, and worse, no foreign influence was required for their adoption.

This column is prompted by a recent, similar piece about national issues by Bill Ackman, a prominent financial expert, listing 33 such polices that loom or are already in place at the national level. There’s some minor overlap and I included a few of his verbatim, but his point applies just as forcefully to Illinois on different matters.

Here’s what might have been an imaginary foreign adversary’s wish, adopted gratuitously by our own elected leadership:

1. Turn a blind eye toward failing public schools, especially in poor, urban areas where they are most needed.
2. Extend welcoming and sanctuary policies drawing in over 600,000 illegal border crossers not screened for their risk to the country or suitability to our employment needs, at the expense of our own citizens, costing Illinoisans alone something around $6 billion per year.
3. Introduce dozens of new and unnecessary laws and rules, overburdening employers and interfering with businesses’ ability to compete, spiking prices by restraining the efficient creation of energy, housing, food and virtually every consumer good.
4. Incite division by teaching our students and citizens that the nation is comprised only of the oppressed and oppressors who are implicitly biased, ruling over a rigged system that’s systemically racist.
5. Endorse the election of state’s attorneys who won’t prosecute violent criminals and who make shoplifting (except above large thresholds) no longer a criminal offense. Cook County’s Kim Foxx, for example, was endorsed twice by the entire Illinois political establishment.
6. Give any two employees anywhere the right to collectively bargain over any matter they choose, and make that right fundamental and constitutional, as was done by Amendment 1 in 2022.
7. Choose an inferior candidate for the presidency when other much more qualified candidates are available and interested to serve.
8. Impose DEI policies to award jobs, recognition, and university admissions not on the basis of either merit or disadvantage, but blindly on the basis of race, sexual identity and gender criteria.
9. Incite puplic outrage by letting biological boys and men compete in girls and women’s sports, depriving girls and women of scholarships, awards, and other opportunities they would have rightly earned otherwise.
10. When overwhelming evidence says the state’s population and tax base are fleeing, simply deny the numbers as the Pritzker Administration still does.
11. Encourage and celebrate mass protests and riots that produce deaths, burning and destruction.
12. Shutter schools based on fears of a virus that in fact presented statistically negligible risks to students and teachers, as Illinois did for Covid.
13. Permit antisemitism to explode with no serious efforts to quell it, particularly as in leading universities such as Northwestern.
14. Effectively mandate Covid vaccines that were not adequately tested while censoring the contrary advice of top scientists around the world.
15. Rule the state through “emergency orders” for 40 consecutive months, as Illinois did during the Covid pandemic.
16. Claim that “equity” is a central feature of Illinois government even while study after study says the state ranks near the bottom for equity measured in many ways.
17. Litigate to keep leading candidates off the ballot, as was done in Illinois respecting Robert Kennedy, Jr. and Donald Trump, and pass a law that retroactively attempts to knock minority party candidates off the ballot (that law now having been invalidated as unconstitutional).
18. Denigrate the entire membership of the minority political party as racist, insurrectionist and opposed to life in any context.
19. Oppose common sense election integrity requirements such as picture IDs, creating widespread distrust in the election process.
20. Impose sweeping “Net Zero” energy goals that seek to end the use of fossil fuels, saddling consumers with billions of dollars of cost and creating a looming electricity crisis.
21. Maintain an opaque, corrupting and unaffordable public pension system that bribes public workers. enlisting them to support establishment politicians, and taking one of every five dollars from the state budget.
22. Promise fair election maps then deliver the most politically gerrymandered maps in the nation.
23. Repeatedly pass state laws that violate First Amendment free speech rights and call for vastly expanded government censorship powers.

Maybe you, as an imaginary foreign enemy, have some additions to the list above, but does that matter? Any foreign enemy would have to be thrilled with the list, and didn’t have to lift a finger to make it real. And they could rest assured that, next Tuesday, Illinoisans will vote to ratify the list by electing the same leadership.

*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.