Florida's GOP also got in on the act with a Valentine's Day post that was slammed as "so f**king dumb" and more.
Lee Moran at HuffPost:
The national Republican Party and the Florida GOP drew fierce backlash Saturday — Valentine’s Day — over social media posts that critics condemned as juvenile and offensive.
On X, the national GOP account shared a cartoon-style image depicting Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (who has long been the subject of fat jokes from the political right) eating fast food alongside the caption: “My love for you is bigger than JB Pritzker.” See the post here.
The post quickly drew criticism, including from some Republicans.
Gregg Nunziata, a former adviser to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, slammed the targeting of Pritzker, a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, as “disgraceful, juvenile garbage” and suggested it made it harder for him to remain in the party.
Doug Heye, a former Republican National Committee communications director, criticized the post, writing: “This never would have gone out when I was running the RNC comms shop. Reveling in unprofessionalism.”
Others described the image as “nasty and self-debasing” and “disgraceful.”
The national GOP and Florida’s chapter of the GOP put a disgraceful meme of JB Pritzker and his fatness for Valentine’s Day, in which even his likely opponent Darren Bailey condemned.
A new Pritzker campaign ad features excerpts from textbooks published by Bob Jones University, which Darren Bailey uses at his private relig
The year before he ran for a seat in the Illinois House of Representatives, Bailey and his wife Cindy launched a fundamentalist Christian school based in Louisville, Illinois, in 2016. In that same year, Bob Jones University Press was once again in the process of rewriting its history books to soften or remove some of the more dubious or offensive claims found in its pages. The BJU Press altered its textbooks on several occasions in recent years to remove racially charged content that sometimes spoke about slave owners or the Ku Klux Klan in forgiving terms.
BJU publishers shipped history books to Christian classrooms in the early 1990s that claimed, "The majority of slave holders treated their slaves well." That line was published in BJU's second edition textbooks long before Bailey founded Full Armor Christian Academy in 2016.
In its third edition, Bob Jones University Press authors highlighted the Ku Klux Klan's affinity with strict Christian morals, writing in 2001 that the KKK "tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross. Klan targets were bootleggers, wife-beaters, and immoral movies. In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians."
Bailey has at times described himself as a force that fights against what he sees as moral decline and "moral rot" in state government.
5 On Your Side obtained hard copies of several of the textbooks on the shelves at Full Armor Academy. While the racially charged language is more subtle than previous editions, it is still present.
For example, textbooks on the shelves at Bailey's school now teach students that "God regulated but did not forbid slavery." Teachers are instructed to ask students to compare outlawing abortion to ending slavery, and to ask students to explain the strengths of the Three-Fifths Compromise, the part of the U.S. Constitution that counted slaves as three-fifths of a person.
Top staff to Governor J.B. Pritzker (D-IL) are planning secret post-election preparations to force every child in the state of Illinois to r
Top staff to Governor J.B. Pritzker (D-IL) are planning secret post-election preparations to force every child in the state of Illinois to receive a COVID-19 vaccination, or else they will be barred from attending school.
Printed newspapers sent out across Illinois push Republican talking points against Democrats just in time for election season. They're taking advantage of the erosion of local news.
David Folkenflik at NPR:
Since late summer, many Illinois residents have been receiving newspapers that they haven't paid for nor, in many cases, even heard of.
Each paper bears a clear-cut tagline: Real data, real news.
And each publication that shows up in driveways and mailboxes carries a partisan punch that's blatant, but not formally disclosed.
"They present a strongly one-sided view of things," said Bernard Schoenburg, who covered Illinois as a journalist for decades.
Schoenburg retired as a columnist for The State Journal-Register in Springfield in December 2020, 44 years after walking into his first job out of college at the Bloomington Pantagraph. In the intervening decades, traditional newsrooms throughout the state have withered, from the Pantagraph right up to the once-mighty Chicago Tribune. Some have shut down.
That erosion of local news has created an opening for these newer publications, which lie dormant and then spring up at election time. They look a lot like hometown newspapers — nothing flashy, just long, printed broadsheet pages with color photos and graphics — but without any real interest in local news.
"You get these glaring headlines of ... what's so terrible about our tax system right now or what's bad about a Democratic governor," Schoenburg said.
All signs point in one direction
The coverage all points in a single political direction: hard right.
Schoenburg first noticed these papers several election cycles ago, born out of the conservative Illinois Policy Institute, which crusaded against greater taxation and regulation. Since then, they have spread across the state, presenting themselves as down-home newspapers in multiple communities with names that hark back to times before people relied on social media to find out out about developments in their communities.
"In this age, with so many kinds of media that hit people," Schoenburg said, "people don't know, necessarily, what's real, if they're not sophisticated in this way."
This fall, readers encountering the Sangamon Sun or Chicago City Wire or the Dupage Policy Journal or their sister publications will find coverage uniformly beating up on the policies and persona of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat who happens to be up for reelection.
The West Cook News splashed an incendiary quote across the top of its front page recently: "It's going to be literally the end of days."
A two-page spread inside presented a vivid display of photographs of 36 men who were charged with violent crimes — but had not been convicted. They would all be released to Cook County's neighborhoods, the accompanying headline said, under legislation signed into law by Pritzker last year that eliminates cash bail. (Actually, judges will retain discretion to determine whether people facing serious charges pose a threat, according to reporting by WBEZ and other news outlets.)
All but four of the 36 men in the photos were people of color.
"This is Republican propaganda and, in some instances, just outright lies," said Pritzker campaign spokeswoman Natalie Edelstein. "The information being presented is intentionally being set up to mislead people. It looks like it's independent, local news. But in reality, when you read the content, it's playing on people's emotions and fear."
A GOP candidate says papers are filled with "fact and truth"
Among the people quoted in that front-page story in West Cook News: conservative talk show host Dan Proft.
Proft runs a political action committee called People Who Play By the Rules PAC that has spent millions aiding Pritzker's Republican opponent, state Sen. Darren Bailey.
"These newspapers that are circulating the state are full of fact and truth — and Gov. Pritzker has the gall to call it a lie," Bailey said on Proft's radio show in early September.
Proft's PAC also helps to underwrite the papers, which he conceded on the air recently.
Yet nowhere in the publications themselves is there any disclosure of the papers' pro-Republican agenda, its source of funding, or even its point of view — except, of course, in the relentless punching of hot-button issues for the right, including trans rights, COVID restrictions and taxes.
Proft did not respond to NPR's efforts to seek comment, nor did cardboard shipping magnate Dick Uihlein, a major party activist who falsely argues that the 2020 presidential race was fixed and who has financed the PAC with more than $40 million this year, according to the Center for Illinois Politics. He did speak to the Chicago-based NewsNation television broadcast, telling anchor Leland Vittert that his readers do not trust mainstream news organizations.
"We provide angles to stories and information that you don't get from left leaning or left — or not so leaning, just hard left — news outlets," Proft said on NewsNation. "They're all sharing a brain and we're providing a different perspective on some of the issues that are salient in people's lives."
In Proft's recounting, the Illinois papers put out by the Local Government Informational Services -- their publisher — sound like a throwback to an earlier age, when papers were openly partisan and ideological on their news pages as well as their opinion section. And there's a school of thought that that's a more intellectually honest way than reporters saying they shelve their own points of view.
Right-wing fake news purveyors owned by LGIS, such as Chicago City Wire, DuPage Policy Journal, Metro East Sun, and Will County Gazette, are sending out newspaper copies to Illinois voters that are full of disinformation, especially about the SAFE-T Act and sex education.
GOP candidate Darren Bailey started a Christian school that allegedly teaches that slaveowners were mostly kind to slaves...
Alex Bollinger at LGBTQ Nation:
A new scathing ad in Illinois’s gubernatorial race attacks the Republican candidate for allegedly teaching kids to hate at the Christian school he runs.
State Sen. Darren Bailey (R), who is challenging Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D), founded Full Armor Christian Academy in 2016, a preschool through 12th-grade school that says it teaches kids “the courage to act upon Christian values and beliefs.”
The school uses a curriculum developed by the far-right Bob Jones University that’s so extreme it teaches that gay people are the moral equivalent of child molesters and that most slaveholders treated slaves well.
The school, according to Pritzker’s new ad, says that Full Armor Christian Academy teaches that “women in the workforce have been harmful to America” and that “evolution isn’t real.”
Good on Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) for calling out State Sen. and Gubernatorial nominee Darren Bailey (R) for his fundamentalist curriculum at Full Armor Christian Academy that features historical revisionism, sexism, creationism, and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments in a recent ad.
