 [National Review - June 2022] Today, Illinois voters go to the polls in the state’s party primaries. Democrats are virtually certain to renominate J. B. Pritzker, the state’s incumbent governor, even though his policies have managed to drive longtime Illinois businesses such as Caterpillar out of the state.
But while the state’s coffers suffer, Pritzker will be doing just fine. He is a scion of a billionaire family, whose members include former secretary of commerce Penny Pritzker, who was an Obama campaign donor. Another Pritzker sibling, meanwhile, exemplifies how the family has used its vast wealth to promote liberal causes: specifically, the cultural normalization of transgenderism. Earlier this month, Jennifer Bilek explained this in great detail for Tablet. (Bilek prefers to use the term "synthetic sex identities," or SSI, because she thinks the word "transgenderism" lacks "clear boundaries" and is thus "useless for communication."): A sample:
Ever since, a motivating and driving force behind the Pritzkers’ familywide commitment to SSI has been J. B.’s cousin Jennifer (born James) Pritzker — a retired lieutenant colonel in the Illinois Army National Guard and the father of three children. In 2013, around the time gender ideology reached the level of mainstream American culture, Jennifer Pritzker announced a transition to womanhood. Since then, Pritzker has used the Tawani Foundation to help fund various institutions that support the concept of a spectrum of human sexes, including the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, the Williams Institute UCLA School of Law, the National Center for Transgender Equality, the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Palm Military Center, the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH), and many others. Tawani Enterprises, the private investment counterpart to the philanthropic foundation, invests in and partners with Squadron Capital LLC, a Chicago-based private investment vehicle that acquires a number of medical device companies that manufacture instruments, implants, cutting tools, and injection molded plastic products for use in surgeries. As in the case of Jon Stryker, founder of the LGBT mega-NGO Arcus Foundation, it is hard to avoid the impression of complementarity between Jennifer Pritzker’s for-profit medical investments and philanthropic support for SSI.
Bilek provides further examples of the Pritzkers’ efforts (including some of Governor Pritzker’s policies) in the piece. It backs up what Helen Joyce wrote for National Review last summer, detailing the main forces aiding "Trans Activism’s Long March through Our Institutions":
One is an American transwoman billionaire, Jennifer (James) Pritzker, a retired soldier and one of the heirs to a vast family fortune. Pritzker’s personal foundation, Tawani, makes grants to universities, the ACLU, GLAAD, the HRC, and smaller activist groups. To cite a couple of examples, in 2016 it gave the University of Victoria $2 million to endow a chair of transgender studies, and throughout the "bathroom wars" it supported Equality Illinois Education Project, which is linked to a group campaigning for gender self-ID in the state.
It is an expensive endeavor to reject reality. One hopes that it is also, ultimately, a failed one.
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