* National Review has published a fawning profile of Dick Uihlein…

As a young man in 1969, Uihlein learned about getting things done in politics when he knocked on doors for a little-known congressional candidate in a special election: Phil Crane, who won that race and whose career as a conservative in the House of Representatives lasted until 2005. “It was a huge upset and it was done through the grassroots — and that’s where a lot of my activity is now,” says Uihlein. For a long while, however, Uihlein put politics on hold. “I was so dang busy building this company,” he says. “There was so much going on.” Decades passed. When his father died, in 2005, he knew he wanted to get more involved.

Around this time, Uihlein met John Tillman, a businessman who was looking for work after selling his sporting-goods store. “I’d been getting the Uline catalogue for a while,” says Tillman. “So I wrote a letter to the owner.” They met and discussed a sales job, but soon their conversation turned to Tillman’s real passion: creating a network of freedom-minded organizations in Illinois. “Dick became my anchor donor,” says Tillman. An initial gift of $50,000 helped Tillman launch the Illinois Policy Institute, a free-market think tank. Millions followed, destined for a variety of projects, including the Liberty Justice Center, a public-interest law firm with national sway: Its Janus v. AFSCME case, which challenges the rights of labor unions to collect fees from nonmembers, is now before the Supreme Court. A ruling, expected by the end of June, has the potential to halt a major source of revenue for Democrats.

Uihlein also donated to candidates for office in Illinois, trying to strengthen the Republican presence in Springfield as well as to make the GOP caucus there more conservative. Democrats still dominate the state legislature, but Uihlein won’t bow to pessimism: “Nothing is hopeless.” He points to the election of Governor Bruce Rauner in 2014 as proof that Republicans can compete in a state that many other conservatives have written off. Yet 2017 featured tax hikes as well as Rauner’s approval of an abortion-funding bill, prompting Uihlein to break with him and donate heavily to Jeanne Ives, a conservative state lawmaker who nearly beat Rauner in a March primary. “Jeanne proved that people are hungry for change,” says Uihlein. He’s now skeptical about Rauner’s ability to deliver it but says that the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, J. B. Pritzker, would be a disaster for Illinois: “I will vote for Rauner over Pritzker.” […]

Uihlein’s political activism has made him a person of interest in the media, even though he rarely grants interviews. Crain’s Chicago Business invoked the bogeymen of liberalism when it dubbed him “the Koch of conservative politics in Illinois.” Recent articles in Politico, the Washington Post, and elsewhere have treated him with a mix of curiosity and suspicion, and the Daily Beast even dug up a story about a woman who claims to have suffered from employment discrimination at Uline — a tale that wouldn’t have interested its editors if Uihlein weren’t a major funder of Republicans. Uihlein doesn’t relish the attention, but he recognizes its inevitability: “I’m not going to give up supporting the people who deserve it. That’s what they want me to do.”

* Buried in that Daily Beast article was some info about Mr. Uihlein’s health…

Regulators in Wisconsin say they have found probable cause to believe that Liz Uihlein and her company, industrial supply giant Uline, may have refused to hire an executive because she suffered from lupus, an autoimmune disease, according to internal state government records obtained by The Daily Beast. Uline denies the charges. […]

The job applicant said in her complaint that, during her interview, Uihlein even inquired about her prescribed dosage of Prednisone, a steroid used to treat lupus, “which is a highly inappropriate line of conversation during a formal interview and none of her business.” […]

In a response to the complaint, Uline, the company, flatly denied that it had declined to hire the applicant due to her medical condition. Uihlein’s discussion of that condition, the company’s attorney wrote, “was one of compassion, not discrimination. Ms. Uihlein relayed her and her husband’s own personal experiences with his autoimmune disease in an effort to empathize with Complainant.”

“Yes, Ms. Uihlein referenced her own husband’s personal experiences as detailed in my initial complaint,” the applicant responded in a written retort, “but it wasn’t to empathize with me over my disease but rather to further justify her concerns that she didn’t believe someone with an autoimmune disease could do the job.”