Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Wednesday was put on the spot as to who is more offensive: Snoop Dogg, or the country rock band Confederate Railroad.

He did not choose Snoop.

A day after the Pritzker administration defended its decision to bar Confederate Railroad from performing at the downstate Du Quoin State Fair, the Democratic governor called the Confederate flag “a symbol of murder, of kidnapping, of rape.”

“The Confederate flag is a symbol of not just slavery, but of treason against the United States,” Pritzker said at an unrelated press conference in Chicago.

The band’s logo features Confederate Navy Jacks, the star-filled blue X on a red field that is the most-recognized symbol of the Confederacy. The band had been scheduled to perform on Aug. 27, but the Pritzker administration canceled the show last week.

“That’s what happened under the banner of the Confederate flag many years ago in this country,” Pritzker said at an unrelated press conference in the Loop. “It is today the symbol of racists, of white nationalists, of the alt-right and so I do not think that the state of Illinois should be sponsoring something that is amplifying that symbol.”

But Pritzker, too, was asked to respond to a lawmaker’s claim that Snoop Dogg, scheduled to perform at the Illinois State Fair on August 16 in Springfield, also has some controversial imagery. The rapper’s latest album, “Make America Crip Again,” features Snoop Dogg standing over a corpse with a toe-tag that reads “Trump.” That comparison was brought up by state Rep. Terri Bryant, R-Murphsyboro.

“There’s a big difference between what I just described and the hundreds of thousands of people [who] died; millions, in fact tens of millions of people, were enslaved. We’re talking about a history, a terrible history in the United States,” Pritzker said. “Death and destruction that took place under that flag — and on the other side, political satire.”

The Pritzker administration on Tuesday had said their “guiding principle is that the state of Illinois will not use state resources to promote symbols of racism.”

“Symbols of hate cannot and will not represent the values of the Land of Lincoln,” Pritzker spokeswoman Emily Bittner said.

The band’s singer Danny Shirley issued a statement calling the news “very disappointing” and adding: “This ‘political correctness’ has to stop. It’s tearing our country apart.”

Du Quoin is about 300 miles southwest of Chicago.

Contributing: AP