A few years ago I was unwillingly subjected to local Chicago news on TV over the course of several months. The content that the newscasters were reading (are they still called anchor men and women?) was near parody. The people writing the news copy were either dumb, brainwashed, or evil. What was being reported was wrong, misleading, and frankly laughable.
It is no better when it comes to what constitutes the major print media sources in Illinois. Sure, an occasional commentary piece shows up that isn’t completely crazy, and a real news article possessing accurate news gets printed. But for the most part, both the news coverage and editorial pages are far from factual.
Yet that content is what many Illinoisans feed upon, thinking they are getting accurate information.
You would think that the millionaires and billionaires on the political right who give a damn about Illinois would fund the creation of legitimate news sources. But they do not. This would come both in the form of online newspapers and streaming services. There are a couple of efforts out there on the political right, but one is downright silly and can’t be taken seriously. The better one is mostly invisible—few people know it exists.
Thus, the political right in Illinois continues to lose the information war on a massive scale. While there are a lot of Illinoisans who know how to get legitimate Illinois news, too many citizens of the state are still feeding off of leftist-driven sources that almost could not be worse.
Then there is the political ground war—the place where the work gets done to recruit and elect people who support the right policies. As stated in this series of articles, Illinois Republicans and conservatives have not begun this effort because as I also keep saying, they haven’t bothered to take the arena seriously and study what needs to be done.
We are in 2025. For most Illinois Republicans and conservatives active in politics, time has passed them by. Back in the good old days before the Internet, Republicans could win merely by putting up good candidates who, with enough money, were able to reach enough voters.
Now, the arena is complicated. The airwaves, so to speak, are crowded. And leftists, starting decades ago, realized that getting the ground work done to elect their candidates was going to require an effort that kept pace with the times.
For Illinois Republicans and conservatives, however, it is still the 1980s and 1990s. The political arena is still simple to them—and no amount of losing shakes them out of their stupor.
Readers might misinterpret my position on all of this. I do not think Illinois Republicans and conservatives are hopeless. These articles are written to wake up our so-called political leaders (party and government and large donors) to the fact that they have to start thinking differently. The biggest part of that is the need for them to stop listening to losers.
Should a group of would-be leaders wake up, and then act as a force to wake up the mostly confused donor class in Illinois, our side could start to build what’s needed. It could then start to get serious about the information and ground level political wars, and stop wasting tens of millions of dollars every year.
Until that happens—call it a great Republican awakening—Democrats will continue to “ win” elections and continue to cause enormous suffering on the part of hard working residents of this state.
Up next: What a volunteer organization like the GOP is unable to do.
