From the stage at the New Hampshire Democratic Party’s McIntyre-Shaheen 100 Club Dinner on Sunday, Gov. JB Pritzker, D-Ill., urged “mass protests … mobilization” and “disruption” so that Republicans “cannot know a moment of peace.”
“Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now,” Pritzker said.
“These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace,” Pritzker said. “They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on a soapbox and then punish them at the ballot box.”
Pritzker then called out “do-nothing Democrats” who “want to blame our losses on our defense of Black people, of trans kids, of immigrants…” — as though any of those persons are under some kind of attack.
“We will never join so many Republicans in the special place in hell reserved for quislings and cowards,” Pritzker reportedly continued. “We will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors.”
The language is all too familiar and can only be described as assassination prep — carefully cloaked in moral outrage — designed to incite the most egregious acts of political violence. His words follow the same formula of other leftists: frame the political opposition as not merely wrong, but evil and tyrannical, then justify any means to defeat them. Such language is meant to dehumanize their opponents and provide moral permission for violence.
And the groundwork for Pritzker’s comments has been long laid by fellow Democrats.
In 2021 Rep. Maxine Waters, D-CA, called on protesters to “get more confrontational” if they didn’t like the verdict in the Derek Chauvin-George Floyd trial. Her comments came three years after she called on people to harass Trump administration officials.
“Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd,” she said back in 2018, her comments referring to the “children in cages” hoax. “And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
Waters then doubled down on those comments hours later while on MSNBC and said “The people are going to turn on [the Trump administration]. They’re going to protest. They’re going to absolutely harass them until they decide that they’re going to tell the President, ‘No, I can’t hang with you.’”
Then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, stood on the steps of the Supreme Court in March 2020 and threatened Justice Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh: “You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you.”
Two years later, a man armed with a gun, knife, and zip ties traveled to Kavanaugh’s home intending to assassinate him.
In 2024, then-President Joe Biden told donors in a private call that it was “time to put Trump in the bulls-eye.”
Rep. Dan Goldman, D-NY, said that Trump is “dangerous” and “has to be eliminated.” Though he later walked back the comment, the message had already landed.
But this type of incendiary rhetoric isn’t an outlier — it’s part of a broader pattern of political conditioning. This language primes support for confrontation and, in the minds of the most unstable, legitimizes violence. When Democrats talk about “fighting back” they increasingly mean it literally — and the results have been both tragic and undeniable.
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Congressman Steve Scalise was nearly killed in an assassination attempt in 2017 by a deranged Bernie Sanders supporter. The horrific act of political violence was bad — but Republicans were worse, so said Charles M. Blow for The New York Times in the immediate aftermath.
“The country has a violent culture, is full of guns, and our federal lawmakers — mostly Republicans, it must be said, because there isn’t any real equivalence — are loath to even moderately regulate gun access.” Blow later wrote that “some rhetoric is necessary and real” because “Trump and the Republican-led Congress are attempting to do very serious harm to the country and its most vulnerable citizens.”
President Donald Trump himself has now survived two assassination attempts — the first on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, that claimed the life of father and firefighter Corey Comperatore. Trump was nearly assassinated a second time just a few short weeks later, with the propaganda press excusing the the attempt by linking Trump to unsubstantiated bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio that later turned out to be hoaxes.
The pattern is clear: the left manufactures moral permission for violence by reframing it as justice, then uses euphemism and outrage to make the unthinkable seem necessary. Pritzker’s remarks are part of that pattern, and his calls for disruption sound like an invitation to something far more dangerous.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
