Will County Gazette

Former Republican U.S. Senate candidate Thomas McCullagh is relieved to finally see Illinois business owners doing what he thinks they should have been doing for months now.

“I’ve said from the start if these small business owners don’t take a stand against Gov. (J.B.) Pritzker’s tyranny, they won’t have a business to go back to once all this is over,” McCullagh told the Lake County Gazette. “The way I see it, they’re doing the only thing they can do.”

With the stakes being as high as they are, McCullagh adds he also isn’t surprised to see more state leaders like McHenry County State's Attorney Patrick Kenneally putting their feet down. Kenneally recently revealed he has no intention of enforcing the ban against indoor dining recently enacted by Pritzker across the region.

“This is about survival,” added McCullagh, who netted nearly 45% of the vote in his hard fought loss to Democratic incumbent state Rep. Meg Loughran Capel in the 49th District.

McCullagh said the governor now threatening to strip businesses that violate his order of state licenses is just more of the same flawed thinking and bullying.

“He’s just being a tyrant, not to mention a terrible leader,” he added. “No good leader forces someone into doing something they know will destroy them. He’s showing just how bad he really is at this.”

McCullagh has long blasted Pritzker over what he sees as his lack of transparency in dealing with the virus.

“The governor needs to be a lot more transparent about where he’s getting the data from he’s basing the decisions he’s making that are impacting so many people on,” he said. “In some cases, we’re finding that we're triple counting the real number of COVID-19 cases. You don’t want to be an owner out there on the verge of losing your business and seeing your livelihood go down the drain based on this kind of faulty information.”