Pritzker chief of staff Anne Caprara and the governor’s spokeswoman Jordan Abudayyeh both re-tweeted the post with the photo of the “Arbeit macht frei, JB” sign at the Chicago rally. ![]() The governor’s top aides had stronger words for the protesters who displayed the Nazi symbol. “I’m very hopeful that nobody gets sick as a result of showing up at a protest and not wearing a mask and not adhering to social distancing more,” Pritzker said. Many protesters did not wear masks or follow federal social-distancing guidelines suggesting people stay six feet apart. That man’s sign read, “The only reason to wear a mask is to show obedience to tyranny.” Photos taken by reporters at the event in Springfield included shots of a woman holding a “Heil Pritzker” sign decorated with a swastika and a man who had drawn a Hitler mustache on a picture of Pritzker. HE WANTS HIS POLICE STATE BACK!!!”Ī replica of The General Lee - a car from the old TV show The Dukes of Hazard that displays the Confederate flag - circled the Thompson Center during the rally. “I am so grateful to live in a state with those millions of people.”Īt the protest in Chicago on Friday, one person displayed a sign that read, “HEY, PRITZKER!!! HITLER CALLED. “We’re doing the right thing protecting each other during this extraordinary crisis,” the governor said. The total number of people who have died with confirmed cases of COVID-19 is 2,559. Pritzker’s comments on the protests came as his administration announced that 105 people had died of the coronavirus in the past 24 hours. Pritzker and his aides say the shutdown has helped prevent more deaths in the state in the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, and they said most people in Illinois have respected the orders.īut some protesters - including a downstate lawmaker who has challenged the governor’s orders in court - say the measures taken to fight the pandemic stripped people of their liberty and have caused undue economic harm, with hundreds of thousands of newly jobless workers filing for unemployment in the past couple months. It’s a symptom of moral & intellectual degeneration. It’s painful to see this symbol instrumentalized & used again to spread hate. Those words became one of the icons of human hatred. “Arbeit macht frei” was a false, cynical illusion the SS gave to prisoners of #Auschwitz. “It’s a symptom of moral & intellectual degeneration.” “It’s painful to see this symbol instrumentalized & used again to spread hate,” wrote the on Twitter. That message, which is German for “work sets you free,” is the same slogan the Nazis wrote above the entrance to the death camp. At one point, the hashtag #IllinoisNazis was trending nationally on Twitter.Īnd the official Twitter account of the museum at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland criticized one protester who held up a sign with the phrase “Arbeit macht frei, JB,” according to a photo posted by a counter-demonstrator. The original order was extended through May, although some of the restrictions have been relaxed this month.Īlthough polls show deep support for the stay-at-home orders, it was some of the messages at the protests that drew broad, even international condemnation. The protesters at the “Re-open Illinois” events targeted the governor’s decisions to shut down all businesses except those deemed essential and limit gatherings to no more than 10 people since March. After citing his experiences helping build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie and working with survivors of the Nazi-perpetrated genocide, the first-term Democratic governor said, “The meaning of that swastika is apparently unknown to the people who are carrying it, or if it is known, it is a demonstration of the hate that is among us.”īut Pritzker added that the protests at the state’s Thompson Center in Chicago and the Illinois State Capitol drew only “a few hundred demonstrators.”
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