Go woke, go broke. Some people figure it out the first time. Others? Their family trees look more like wreaths. The Illinois Times is a Springfield chapel that mistook an “alternative” weekly for a moral superpower. Because, of course, the already lefty mainstream media that few trust isn’t quite woke enough.
The Illinois Times on the other hand. They cover stories objectively and responsibly. Or so they’ll tell you.
Three doctrines, one priest: the state is good, the public is the problem, and anyone who notices is a bigot with a coupon book.
Start with the ICE homily. Riverton police stop Daniel Torrez Perez for 15 over. Previously deported in 2023. ICE warrant. Outstanding Illinois DUI warrant. Booked on the state paper. ICE collects him. He pleads guilty to felony illegal reentry and goes back to Guatemala. The Times and Injustice Watch call that “collaboration,” as if the scandal were the phone call and not the man already thrown out of the country driving Sangamon County with a drunk-driving warrant. The TRUST Act is the stained glass: cops must mime so the sanctuary brand lives, then the paper discovers the workaround and gasps. Process is sacred. The next lane is an extra.
Flip to guns. Wire copy on PICA, FOID, and “Karina’s bill” is Springfield stenography. Opinion is the tell. Responsible storage or the law will make you. Australia as gospel. Assault-weapons bans as hygiene. A pediatric piece handing the mic to universal checks and “uncomfortable conversations” about whether the right to arms is “absolute.” Durbin demanding military-style rifles outlawed. A poem sneering at the Second Amendment. Same geometry: the armed citizen is the outbreak.
COVID was the dress rehearsal. They transmitted the catechism without a heretic in the choir. IDPH and CDC say every kid and teacher masks regardless of shots — print it. Colleges “strongly encouraged” to mandate the vaccine — print it. Hospital features blame the unvaccinated and the maskless for “prolonging the pandemic.” Rich Miller treats conscience-act holdouts as rabble and a downstate mask TRO as “weird logic.” Years later they are still the house organ for Pritzker issuing Illinois-only vaccine guidelines against RFK’s CDC and joining a WHO outbreak network after Washington walked. A measles story even pins “vaccine skepticism” on people who noticed the COVID shot did not do what the posters promised. Mask, jab, comply — or you are the strain on the system.
That is not a newspaper. That is a limited-circulation radical-left bulletin, produced by high school-level “journalists” with a food section. Springfield is not Brooklyn. The ad base for sanctuary theology, rifle panic, and forever-mitigation in the capital of downstate is a rounding error. They lecture the cop who answered the FBI, the FOID holder who read Bruen, and the parent who got tired of cloth theater, then wonder why the car dealers and the diners wandered off. They got woke and they’re goin’ broke. You cannot sell piety to a shrinking choir and call it “the capital city’s source.”
Three stories, one product: manage the street, manage the gun safe, manage the face. Deporting a repeat immigration violator with a DUI warrant is a favor. Another Springfield arms ban is not compassion. Two years of mask-and-mandate stenography was not courage. It was a boutique sheet betting the public would keep subsidizing the sermon. If they vanish, it will not be because ICE did its job. It will be because they confused a choir loft with a market — woke, broke, and still sure the problem is that somebody in Illinois still believes in borders, a right to keep and bear arms, and the right to tell a weekly to take the cloth off.