Connor Towne O'Neill
speaker
230 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 5 Jul
Connor Towne O'Neill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Hey, Alicia.
Great to be here.
Yeah, I've been talking to people in the New Illinois movement.
New Illinois, that's what they'd call this new state.
And what they want is for all the counties in Illinois, except Cook County, that's where Chicago is, to succeed and become their own state, the 51st state.
Power.
In Illinois politics, to be far from Chicago is to be far from power.
Chicago is a big city, the third most populous in the country.
The rest of Illinois, rural, far less populated.
What that means is they don't have the same voting power as the Chicago area in the state legislature.
Right now, because Chicago is a blue, liberal area, Democrats have a veto-proof supermajority in the state legislature, to the dismay of the people in rural, downstate Illinois, who are mainly conservative.
There is, and it's in the U.S.
Constitution.
The Constitution lays out, in Article 4, what has to happen in order to admit a new state to the republic.
There are two big things, the approval of Congress and the approval of the state's legislature.
Right, exactly.
And there's no shortage of irony that this is all happening in the land of Lincoln.
But to be clear, those in the New Illinois movement, they don't want to start a new country like the Confederacy did in the Civil War.
They see themselves as a very proud, very patriotic movement, taking inspiration from the Founding Fathers.
They want to stay in America, just not in the same state as Chicago.
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