The brother and sister team have found a way to destroy a great state and a formerly premier university.
JB and Penny Pritzker are scions of the Hyatt family dynasty. Each has, on paper, had an impressive career of public and private service. Both are destroyers. While they are not twins, they both seem to employ the same techniques to ruin whatever they can get their hands on.
JB famously removed five toilets from a Chicago Gold Coast mansion so as to avoid paying $330,000 in tax. This ploy is reminiscent of John Kerry parking his yacht in a lower-tax state or Bruce Springsteen and others selling their hugely valuable music catalogs before Democratic-inspired taxes kicked in. Democrats are thrilled when you pay more taxes; they themselves always seem to find new ways to avoid paying their own. As Elon Musk paid $10 billion in taxes last year, he should be their favorite American. But like with Larry Elder, Jr., credentials end when your worldview does not comport with their rigid thinking. They hate Musk for DOGE, his association with MAGA and Donald Trump, and for his generally conservative views. Musk related that the IRS had to fix its program as it was never made to accept a payment with 10 figures.
JB will be celebrating seven years as governor of Illinois, and he is apparently thinking about a White House run. Wonder if he would remove the toilets there as well. Poor Putin or King Charles. So, how is my home state, still near and dear to my heart, doing these days? Let’s take a peek:
- Pension Liabilities: $150 billion unfunded.
- State and Local Taxes: 10.2 percent. 7th highest level of taxation in the country. Ranks 38th overall for the competitiveness of its tax system. Highest property taxes, third-highest corporate taxes; second highest gas tax.
- Population: Since April 2020, the state has lost 418,000 residents. It was noted that in the period between July 2023 and June 2024, the state lost over 56,000 residents. Yet, the state’s population is growing: how? During the same time, over 112, 000 “international migrants” entered the state. Hmmm. Might that not be population replacement?
- Business: The state ranked 46th in economic outlook, while Chicago was ranked 42nd among cities for “the ease of doing business." Chicago itself has $40 billion in unfunded pensions.
Now, let’s move over to Pritzker’s older sibling, Penny. She has been a “fellow” of the Harvard Corporation since 2018 and its head honcho since 2022. Under Pritzker, Harvard elevated Claudine Gay from copying other scholars’ research to the position of president of the university. It was under Pritzker’s leadership that Harvard devolved into a Jew-hating campus. Jews were threatened, attacked, verbally abused, demonized and marginalized. I have to give Penny Pritzker credit for being as wily as her brother. When things got really bad on campus, Gay was jettisoned from her position, though she conveniently returned to the faculty and kept her presidential salary. Since it was an emergency, Pritzker grabbed a straight, white Jewish male in the form of Dr. Alan Garber to be a temporary leader so as to stabilize the situation. Recently, I received consecutive emails from Pritzker and Garber announcing the latter’s continuation as president until at least 2027. Do you see what she did here? Under normal circumstances, such an important position would require DEI approval. So she put Garber in place “temporarily” and then crowned him as more than just an acting president. If she had gone to the DEI apparatus, it would have blessed the university with Claudine Gay II: the Sequel.
As things are at Harvard, Garber might be the only white male to find employment at the Maoist Reeducation Center on the Charles. Professor James Hankins wrote, “Why I’m Leaving Harvard” for Compact Magazine. After teaching history at the university for 40 years, he is taking his skills with him to teach in Florida. His criticism of Harvard is brutal.
“In reviewing graduate student applicants in the fall of 2020, I came across an outstanding prospect who was a perfect fit for our program. In past years, this candidate would have risen immediately to the top of the applicant pool. In 2021, however, I was told informally by a member of the admissions committee that "that" (meaning admitting a white male) was not happening this year. In the same year, a certifiably brilliant undergraduate I had tutored, who was literally the best student at Harvard—he won the prize for the graduating senior with the best overall academic record—was rejected from all the graduate programs to which he applied. He, too, was a white male.”
There is no such thing as “victimless” racism. It does not matter if a black man is denied entry into a restaurant or a white student is denied a position for graduate studies; somebody is going to pay. Harvard’s strength when I was there in the 1980s was that it had 50 times the number of applicants as open positions. It could take whatever it deemed was “the best”. With DEI and Marxist intersectionality, Pritzker and her cabal at the top of America’s formerly finest institution of higher education destroyed that which others before them had built up for over 350 years. Getting into Harvard was a privilege, and acceptance was a recognition of the quality of the applicant. Sure, there were sports acceptees as well as some number of legacy cases. But Harvard could pick and choose from a massive applicant pool in order to make graduating classes of great students. But then color or sexual orientation trumped SAT scores or high grades. The lawsuit brought by Asian students against Harvard showed the level of magic required to deny outstanding Chinese-American students entry for the benefit of minority students whose credentials would not have made the cut in 1985. Pritzker and her coconspirators thought that they were righting wrongs and doing good. Instead, they were pushing top students to competing schools and setting the stage for the “Let’s kill the Jews” rallies that Gay and Pritzker refused to stop. They babbled on about “free speech,” yet Harvard’s own rules are very clear about not creating a threatening environment for others in “the community.” They felt comfortable letting the Jewish students and faculty suffer, as long as their Muslim and minority students were enjoying their demands for the eradication of Israel: from the river to the sea.
Harvard is now out over $2 billion in federal research funding. I believe that Washington should end all aid to Harvard. Let it go to the capital markets as it did recently or draw down its endowment, something that has generally been considered verboten. Harvard is a cesspool of mediocrity, mental staleness, and ideological rigidity. When I was at Harvard, the Hasting Pudding Club gave Sly Stallone its annual prize. My friends and I had last row seats. One more row back and we would have been on the street. Today, they would never invite the Rambo/Rocky star as his politics are all wrong. 90 percent of the faculty in each department is Lefty. Maybe they’ll accept a white guy if he has two left arms.
There are two conditions that are not the same: getting to the top and staying there. The rare individuals like Ronaldo and Tom Brady who have done both. Harvard got to the top through outstanding leadership, faculty and students. Now at the top, Penny Pritzker and her buddies have decided to destroy Harvard in the name of ideological purity. Good Jewish students are starting to look elsewhere, where they can feel safe and enjoy their college years. When a professor leaves after 40 years, red lights should be flashing. Maybe Penny removed those lights from Massachusetts Hall to save some money. Just like JB.