John Adams’s test of character, the Pritzker story J.B. tells, and the history the polished biographies leave out

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” — John Adams, October 11, 1798 _[1]

John Adams was not advocating a religious test for office. He was arguing that in self-government, our constitution—our laws—cannot replace character. In the same letter, Adams warned that avarice, ambition, revenge, and other passions, if unrestrained by morality and religion, could break even the strongest constitutional restraints.… Continue Reading

Governor JB Pritzker delivered his eighth consecutive budget address on February 18th. If you closed your eyes and listened, you might have thought you were hearing a man of the people, a defender of the powerless standing up to a tyrannical federal government. He invoked Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Reverend Jesse Jackson. He quoted the great reform governor, John Peter Altgeld.

He spoke of empathy, love, and the courage to resist authoritarianism.… Continue Reading