Thousands of former President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol building following a “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to pardon the Jan. 6 rioters imprisoned for their role in the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, one of the candidates running for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court joined the campaign to rewrite the history of what happened that day, glossing over the offenses of the Jan. 6 defendants.

Speaking with right-wing radio host Vicki McKenna on her iHeart Radio podcast on Thursday, former Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel, who is running in the April election for a seat on the state’s highest court, complained that the Jan. 6 defendants never got “a fair shot” in court and accused Democrats of “abusing the court system” for “political gain.”

McKenna and Schimel agreed that Democrats are guilty of “lawfare” — political warfare via the courts. But it was Schimel who specifically brought up Jan. 6.

“Another piece of the lawfare manipulation is that they utilize jurisdictions that are overwhelmingly to the left in terms of the voters — which means the jurors that you’re going to draw to hear these cases,” Schimel said. In Trump’s New York hush money trial, for example, he said, “there was no way any jury was going to rule anything other than he’s guilty of whatever you can give him, whatever charge you give them.”

“The same thing for these January 6th defendants who were all prosecuted in the Washington, D.C., district, which is overwhelmingly liberal,” Shimel continued. “This part of the manipulation is to go to districts like that. They would never take you, they would never take their prosecution in a district where you had a fair shot as a defendant.”

Republicans across the country have hopped on the bandwagon to “flip the script” on Jan. 6, as The New York Times reports in a long article detailing how Trump and his supporters “laundered the history of Jan. 6, turning a political nightmare into a political asset.” Two weeks from now, the piece points out, Trump will take the oath of office on the very spot where his followers stormed the Capitol, kicked and stomped a police officer, beat another officer with an American flag pole and broke into the building vowing to attack and kill the officials who were there to certify the election Trump lost.

After a brief period during which Republican lawmakers who hid under their desks during the attack emerged to denounce the desecration of the Capitol and the Big Lie about a stolen election, Trump made his comeback, campaigning on the idea that Jan. 6 rioters were martyrs, and former Republican critics began to change their tune.

Still, Schimel’s comments stand out. For a Supreme Court candidate to suggest that jury trials don’t work and that the whole U.S. system of justice is so politicized it can’t be trusted is deeply undermining of the very institution Schimel proposes to join.

During the McKenna show, both McKenna and Schimel engaged in some familiar partisan liberal-bashing, casting aspersions on Dane County and suggesting that the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s decisions allowing absentee ballot drop boxes to be used again and declaring the Republicans’ egregiously gerrymandered voting maps unconstitutional were merely political, not serious constitutional decisions.

Both implied that courts dominated by conservative justices are fair and impartial and that only Democrats and liberals politicize the process.

That’s pretty rich coming from Schimel who, as former Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s attorney general, was involved in a Christian conservative coalition’s plan to end federally protected abortion rights.

Schimel made government transparency a major talking point in his campaign to be the state’s top lawyer, but then tried to hide records of his trip to a conference hosted by the controversial Alliance Defending Freedom, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled an anti-gay hate group. Schimel was there with his colleague at the state Department of Justice, attorney Micah Tseytlin, who, according to The New York Times, presented “his legal strategy to end Roe. … He proposed his idea for an abortion ban that set a limit earlier than 20 weeks to undercut Roe more openly.”

Schimel told McKenna that, unlike liberal justices on the court, “I’m going to follow the law and the Constitution. That’s something we’re missing right now.”

He criticized the Court’s liberal majority not just for their decisions but also for the cases they haven’t decided yet on the anti-union Act 10 law and on whether abortion is legal in Wisconsin. “They don’t want this issue to be resolved. They want to keep dragging it out. And that’s, that is playing political games with these cases,” he said.

It’s pretty obvious from Schimel’s political background that he is hardly the impartial, nonpartisan figure he claims to be. His insistence that the Jan. 6 defendants couldn’t get fair treatment in a Washington, D.C., courtroom is a big clue. In our increasingly toxic political atmosphere, it’s easy to forget that there are other kinds of judges, who listen to the evidence and make clear-eyed decisions based on the law, not partisanship.

Take the Washington-based federal judge who heard the case of Philip Sean Grillo, who bragged about storming the Capitol on Jan. 6. Judge Royce C. Lamberth, the Times reported, rejected Grillo’s request for a delay of sentencing on the grounds that he was about to be pardoned by Trump. Lamberth filed a court document reminding everyone of the gravity and the violence of the Capitol attack. He and his colleagues on the D.C. Circuit had presided over hundreds of trials, heard from witnesses, read hundreds of documents and watched thousands of hours of disturbing video footage.

“They told the world that the election was stolen, a claim for which no evidence ever emerged,” Lamberth wrote of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. “They told the world that they were there to put a stop to the transfer of power, even if that meant ransacking, emptying, and desecrating our country’s most hallowed sites. Most disturbingly, they told the world that particular elected officials who were present at the Capitol that day had to be removed, hurt, or even killed.”

Lamberth’s sober judgment, and his biography, undermine Schimel’s claims about D.C. courts stacked with liberals who made a partisan target of the Jan. 6 defendants. Lamberth was appointed to the court in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan. 

Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, introduces Sen. Tammy Baldwin at her victory celebration Thursday. (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)

The Democratic leader of the U.S. Senate, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, is backing Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Ben Wikler in his bid to lead the national party. 

In a statement released Thursday, Schumer said he is “enthusiastically supporting Ben Wikler to be the next Chair of the Democratic National Committee.”

Schumer called Wikler “a tenacious organizer—one of the best organizers in the country—a proven fundraiser, a sharp communicator, and able to reach out to all segments of the Democratic Party.”

“Most importantly,” he added, “he knows how to win.”

Wikler assumed leadership of the state party after Democratic Gov. Tony Evers defeated former Republican Gov. Scott Walker in 2018. Since that time, he has led the party as state Democrats slowly clawed back power, holding the governorship and winning key state Supreme Court races to flip the ideological balance of the court. Those victories led to the elimination of gerrymandered voting maps that had locked in disproportionate Republican control of the state Legislature. In the 2024 election, Democrats flipped 14 previously Republican-held legislative seats, narrowing GOP majorities and, Wikler says, setting Democrats on a path to win control of at least one chamber in 2026 for the first time since 2010.  

“Since becoming the state party chair in 2019, Ben has led Wisconsin Democrats to victory after victory, up and down the ballot,” Schumer said. “Under his leadership, Wisconsin Democrats have become one of the most formidable fundraising and organizing machines in the entire country. I am confident he will bring that same record of success to the national party.”

Madison, Wisconsin high school students march on the Capitol on Friday, Dec. 20 | Photo by Daphne Cooper

It was a brilliant, snowy Friday, the last day of school before winter break, as more than 100 students from high schools across Madison converged inside the Capitol. They gathered around the 30-foot balsam fir festooned with handmade ornaments, a model train chugging around the track at the base of the tree. At first it looked like a festive scene, but as the students poured into the first floor of the rotunda, then filled the second- and third-floor balconies, their shouting drowned out a group of Christmas carolers, who retreated, their songs giving way to chants of “No more silence! End gun violence!”

The Madison teens showed up to express their grief and outrage over the deaths this week of a 14-year-old student, her teacher and a gun-wielding 15-year-old girl who opened fire Monday in a classroom at the small private Abundant Life Christian School on Madison’s east side. It was the city’s first school shooting but, incredibly, the 323rd in the nation this year.

Gun violence is the leading cause of death of children and teens in the U.S. Shouting, chanting, demanding to be heard, the crowd of children came to the Capitol Friday demanding that we wake up and do something about this appalling fact. 

Our nation is an outlier, with a rate of gun violence that dwarfs other large, high-income countries. Firearm homicides here are 33 times higher than in Australia and 77 times higher than in Germany, according to a report from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington medical school. Not surprisingly, firearm injuries tend to be more frequent in places where people have easy access to firearms, according to a 2018 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

What other country in the world could live with the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, where 20 little children between 6 and 7 years old and six adult staff were gunned down, and respond by making no significant restrictions on firearms? 

“My parents constantly talk about how, when Sandy Hook happened, they thought that would be the end of it,” said Danny Johnson, a first-year student at Madison West High School who joined the 3-mile march to the Capitol on Friday, carrying a sign scrawled on a sheet of notebook paper that said, “Thoughts and prayers until it’s your own child.” 

“To constantly have to go through it — we shouldn’t have to be here. We should be in school not having to worry about it at all,” Johnson added.

Hanging over balconies and leaning against marble pillars, teens held up handmade signs that said; “Enough!” “You write your policies on a carpet of our dead bodies,” and “Graduations not funerals.”

In Wisconsin, the rate of gun deaths increased 45% from 2013 to 2022, compared to a 36% increase nationwide, according to the Giffords Law Center.

Every year since he was elected in 2018, Gov. Tony Evers and Democrats in the state Legislature have tried in vain to get Republican cooperation on ending the state’s current exemption from background checks for private gun sales. A proposed “red flag” law that would allow police or family members to seek an extreme risk protection order in court to take guns from gun owners who are found to be a danger to themselves or others has also gone nowhere. Both of these measures are broadly popular with voters across the political spectrum. Somehow that doesn’t seem to matter.

After this week’s school shooting. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos released a statement saying, “Today’s tragedy is shocking, senseless and heartbreaking. My thoughts and prayers are with the students, parents and faculty who will have to live with the trauma and grief of this day for the rest of their lives.” But Vos stopped short of saying he would make any effort whatsoever to protect kids and teachers from being shot to death at school. That phrase “thoughts and prayers,” rightly derided by the students who protested at the Capitol on Friday, is a pathetic substitute for action. 

“Last year it was 12 years since Sandy Hook, 25 years since Columbine, and all our politicians can say from their cushy seats is that they’re sending out their thoughts and prayers about the leading cause of death for children in America!”  yelled Ian Malash, a senior at Vel Phillips Memorial High School in Madison, pacing around the tree in the center of the rotunda. “We’re showing them right now and we are going to continue to show them that we are done with thoughts and prayers. We will make change happen because our lives depend on it.”

Vos, apparently recovered from his heartbreak over Monday’s tragedy and back to his old snarky self by Wednesday, mounted a robust defense of the status quo on X, retweeting a post from Wisconsin Right Now that mocked Democrats who “politicize this tragedy with cheap talking points.” The post claimed that, since it’s already illegal for a 15-year-old to possess a handgun, it’s ridiculous to connect the recent shooting to any effort to change gun laws.

But, as state Sen. Kelda Roys told the crowd on Friday, “We know that states that have passed gun safety laws like background checks, like red flag laws … they see gun deaths and firearm injuries go down. We can do that here in Wisconsin, too.  We just need to change the minds or change the legislators — and the judges, too, by the way.” 

“My generation and the people in this building have let you down,” Rick Abegglen, the parent of a West High School daughter who helped organize the protest, told the crowd in the Capitol. “I am so proud of each and every one of you for standing up for yourselves. A few moments ago I saw somebody close the doors of the Senate because they did not want to hear your voices. Think about it.”

As he spoke, the students yelled louder, their voices bouncing off the marble walls, becoming harder and harder to ignore.

Wisconsin Examiner photo

The Wisconsin Policy Forum recently reported that property tax bills mailed out to Wisconsin taxpayers this month will show the biggest tax increase from a previous year since 2009.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos wasted no time in assigning blame. On X, Vos wrote: “When you receive your property tax bill this month, please remember it was Governor Evers who used his line item veto to create a 400 year guaranteed property tax increase.”

It’s true that Evers’ headline-grabbing partial veto of the last state budget extended the two-year tax increase the Legislature approved for school districts. The Legislature allowed schools to raise another $325 per pupil per year from local taxpayers for each year of the 2023-25 budget. By deleting some digits, Evers stretched that out until the year 2425. 

But Vos’ accusation is fundamentally misleading in a couple of ways. First, the Legislature approved the increase for the duration of the current budget cycle. The fact that Evers extended it for centuries into the future made a big splash, but it didn’t add a penny to anyone’s property taxes this year. 

Second, and more important to understand, as we begin another budget cycle and another slugfest over spending on schools, is that the Legislature’s stinginess when it comes to the state’s share of school funding is a major driver of property tax increases. 

As the Wisconsin Policy Forum points out in its report, one key reason for the recent spike in property taxes is the historic number of school district referenda passed by local communities. Local property taxpayers voted to raise their own taxes. And why is that? Because the Legislature refused to give school districts enough money in the state budget to cover their costs.

But, you might object, Vos and other Republicans made a big point of touting their last budget’s “historic” $1.2 billion increase in funding for schools. Unfortunately, that claim is as misleading as Vos’ effort to blame Evers for your property tax bill.

To understand why school districts are begging local taxpayers for money at the same time Republicans claim they gave schools a “historic increase,” take a look at how little of that $1.2 billion in “education spending” actually went to schools. 

For each budget cycle, the Legislative Fiscal Bureau produces a detailed summary of budget items by category. In the “Public Instruction” category, the Fiscal Bureau reports that “total school aid” in the 2023-25 budget came to $625 million. 

Where did the rest go? To find out, you have to look down the list of Fiscal Bureau categories to “shared revenue and tax relief.” There, under the heading “school levy tax credit” you will find the missing $590 million in so-called school funding, in the form of a rebate to property taxpayers. Schools never get to touch that money. It is an oddity of Wisconsin law that the school levy tax credit is labeled as school funding.

The school levy tax credit puts school districts in an awkward position every year. At the end of October, every district sets its levy. People believe, based on that number, that they know what their tax bill will be. But later, on Nov. 20, the Wisconsin Department of Revenue tells each municipality the amount of the school levy tax credit that will be applied to local property tax bills and the number is readjusted. The state calls this tax credit money for schools, but it’s actually just a straight-up discount for property tax payers. 

Now, had the Legislature actually put $590 million into school funding, schools would have been in a much better financial position, and we probably would not have seen a record-breaking number of districts asking property taxpayers to hike their own taxes to keep their local schools afloat. 

The backdrop to all this was a huge, historic cut to school funding in Wisconsin back in 2012, followed by a decade and a half in which schools never recovered. Wisconsin has not given schools enough funding to keep pace with inflation for the last 15 years, state schools superintendent Jill Underly pointed out when she released her $4 billion 2025-27 budget proposal.

Vos dismissed Underly’s budget proposal as completely unrealistic. But in truth, it would pretty much restore Wisconsin schools to the level of funding they enjoyed right before the brutal cuts of former Gov. Scott Walker’s administration.

One of Underly’s top budget priorities is asking the state to meet its neglected commitment to cover 90% of special education costs, instead of the current 32%, which forces schools to raid general funds and cut programs to cover this unavoidable, federally mandated expense.

Another sensible idea, endorsed by the Legislature’s bipartisan Blue Ribbon Commission on School Funding in 2017, is to end the deceptive practice of putting money into the school levy tax credit and pretending that it funds schools.

Instead of playing a shell game with school funding and pointing fingers as local taxpayers continue to shoulder more and more of the cost, Wisconsin should use a portion of the state’s massive budget surplus to adequately fund schools.

Getty Images

The news that a Dane County judge struck down key parts of Act 10 — former Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s signature anti-union law — prompted Walker to comment on X: “Collective bargaining is not a right. It is an expensive entitlement.” 

That’s the kind of message that helped make Walker a national Republican star back in 2011. The billionaire Koch brothers supported him and his pioneering approach to politics — turning neighbor against neighbor by weaponizing the resentment of working class people and training it on teachers and other public employees whose union membership afforded them health care and retirement benefits. Walker memorably called his approach “divide and conquer.” That philosophy is at the heart of Judge Jacob Frost’s decision, which found that Act 10’s divisive carve-out for “public safety” employees (i.e. Republican-voting cops) is unconstitutional. 

Walker started by pitting private sector workers against public employees. The next step, he promised his billionaire backer Diane Hendricks, would be to make Wisconsin a right-to-work state, smashing unions across the board.

Walker made good on that promise and signed the right-to-work law that undercut private sector unions. And he certainly succeeded in dividing Wisconsin, ushering in a toxic style of politics that set the stage for Donald Trump and nationwide polarization.

But Walker’s war on organized labor is out of tune with the populism of today’s Trump-dominated Republican party, which courted union support in the recent election. It’s also out of step with public opinion. A September Gallup poll found near record-high approval of labor unions with 70% of Americans saying they approved of unions, compared with 48% approval in 2009. 

In embracing Act 10 and Walker’s dubious legacy, Wisconsin Republicans are marching to a different beat than the rest of the country. 

“Act 10 has saved Wisconsin taxpayers more than $16 billion,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos declared in a statement. “We look forward to presenting our arguments on appeal.”

Other Republicans have made even bigger claims about the “savings” that came out of teachers’ paychecks and benefits. But over time, it has become clear who the real beneficiaries of those savings were. The Kochs and Hendricks didn’t support Walker because they thought he would do wonderful things for working class voters. They backed him because they wanted to squeeze workers and enrich themselves.

Act 10, and the other measures passed by the Wisconsin Legislature in its wake, including right-to-work and prohibitions on local governments from increasing wages and improving working conditions in city and county contracts, hurt Wisconsin workers and the state economy. 

“The changes, labor leaders and experts say, have caused flattened real wages for construction workers, higher pay for their bosses and local governments stuck offering wages that make it difficult to hire contractors — and hard for those workers to make a living,” Wisconsin Watch reported. 

A study by the Economic Policy Institute compared the economies of states with strong collective bargaining laws with so-called “right-to-work” states from 2011 to 2018. “Those ‘right-to-work’ states see slower economic growth, lower wages, higher consumer debt levels, worse health outcomes and lower levels of civic participation,” one of the study’s authors, Frank Manzo, told Wisconsin Watch.

On top of all that, Walker’s oft-repeated promise to create 250,000 new jobs in his first term was a bust. He made it just over halfway to that goal, according to a “gold standard” report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. At the end of his second term, Walker still hadn’t reached the 250,000 jobs number. Instead, when he left office, Wisconsin ranked 34th in the nation for private sector job growth, according to the BLS. Walker’s 10.3% growth rate fell far behind the national growth rate of 17.1%. And Wisconsin public schools have never recovered from Walker’s savage budget cuts.

There has been a lot of talk since the 2024 election about how Democrats have lost touch with working class voters, allowing the Trump-led Republican Party to capture disaffected working people who are suspicious that politicians don’t really care about them or represent their interests.

The Act 10 fight, which will be front and center in Wisconsin’s spring state Supreme Court race, reverses that dynamic. Democrats in Wisconsin have been fighting all along for better wages and working conditions for working class people, and Republicans have been outspoken in their opposition to workers’ rights.

Walker’s war on workers prompted historic protests in Wisconsin back in 2011, bringing together teachers, firefighters, police, prison guards, snowplow drivers and tens of thousands of citizens from across Wisconsin to protest at the Capitol. Democrats in the state Legislature fled to Illinois to temporarily deprive Republicans of the quorum needed to pass the law. Walker dismissed the protesters as “union bosses” and agitators brought in from “out of state.” But anyone who was there could tell you the crowd was made up of lots and lots of regular Wisconsinites outraged that the governor had made hardworking people his target.

The uprising in Wisconsin inspired other pro-democracy protests around the globe. Egyptian activists ordered pizza from Ian’s Pizza downtown for the protesters at the Capitol.

Still, in the short term, the protests failed. A grassroots recall effort against Walker fell short, and he went on to be reelected to a second term. But the tide has been turning steadily ever since. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers defeated Walker in 2018. Evers’ reelection by a larger margin in 2022 was one of 7 out of 10 statewide races Democrats have won since 2019. In one of those races, the Democratic-backed Supreme Court candidate Janet Protasiewicz beat her conservative rival by more than 10 points, flipping the ideological balance on the court and setting up the demise of Republican gerrymandering and, potentially, a final judgment against Act 10.

Today, as Democrats reel from their losses in the recent national elections, Wisconsin offers an example of a state where the fight over workers’ rights is at the center of politics. The Act 10 battle makes it clear which side each party is on. That’s good news for Democrats. For Walker’s brand of Republicanism, not so much.

Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Ben Wikler speaks at a climate rally outside Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson's Madison office. On Sunday Wikler announced his bid to lead the Democratic National Committee.(Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Ben Wikler announced Sunday that he is running for chair of the Democratic National Committee. 

In a launch video, Wikler described the “permanent campaign” he has created in Wisconsin. After Democrats lost the White House in November and failed to gain a majority in either chamber of Congress, the national party is searching for new leadership and a new strategy. Wikler, in his video, said his record in Wisconsin, a closely divided swing state, can serve as a model. 

Under Wikler’s leadership, Wisconsin Democrats reelected Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in 2022 by a wider margin than Evers won four years earlier. In the most recent election, Democrats reduced large Republican majorities in both houses of the state Legislature, flipping 14 formerly Republican-held state legislative seats. 

Those legislative victories came after Wikler and state Democrats helped elect a new liberal majority on the state Supreme Court, setting in motion a process that ended gerrymandered voting maps that had heavily favored Republicans.

Wikler, a prodigious fundraiser, helped the Wisconsin Democrats raise more than $53 million in the last election cycle, according to Open Secrets, more than any other state party in the country. He also opened new Democratic field offices throughout the state and has made it the party’s mission to compete in rural, urban, red and blue areas alike. 

“This past election, the nation shifted 6% towards Trump — but Wisconsin only shifted by 1.5%, the least of any battleground state,” Wikler said in announcing his campaign for national party chair.

“I have led the Democratic Party of Wisconsin for the last five years, helping to transform it into an organizing, fundraising and winning machine,” he said, adding, “I’m now running for chair of the Democratic National Committee to supercharge our work in every state.” 

Echoing former DNC Chair Howard Dean’s call for a “50-state strategy,” Wikler said, “For Democrats to move forward, we must build a big tent, organize and communicate in every place and on every platform, and find the resources, people, and focus to reach voters who currently get their news about Democrats from Republicans.”

Hundreds of immigrant rights advocates and others participate in rally and demonstration at the Federal Building in lower Manhattan on June 1, 2018 in New York. In coordinated marches across the country people gathered outside U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field offices, U.S. attorney's offices, and the Department of Justice headquarters in Washington, D.C. (Spencer Platt | Getty Images).

The week before Thanksgiving, I spoke with an immigration attorney in Madison, Grant Sovern, who helped found the Community Immigration Law Center (CILC) — part of a flurry of new services created in the wake of the 2018 ICE raids that terrorized Dane County during President-elect Donald Trump’s first administration. No one knows what the immigration crackdown Trump has promised for his second term will look like. But advocates are once again meeting to try to prepare.

Sovern told me about desperate calls from friends of his college-age daughter — students who are worried about losing their protected status under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). While he has been offering them hope that the new administration won’t start by targeting Dreamers, who grew up in this country and just want to continue to study and work here, he added that the easiest targets for mass deportation are other people who’ve followed the rules. Asylum-seekers and those with temporary protected status and work visas — like the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, that Trump and incoming Vice President J.D. Vance falsely accused of eating their neighbors’ pets — will be the easiest to find.

What an ominous holiday season. We need the warmth of gatherings with friends and family more than ever. But it’s a weird time to be celebrating the arrival of our nation’s first immigrants and the mythical meal where they bonded with Native Americans before swiping their land and wiping them out. Talking about colonialism, genocide and how our society is built on historic injustice is quickly dismissed as “woke” and out of fashion these days. But it’s unavoidable if you’re trying to understand the rise of right-wing authoritarianism here and around the globe.

The same week I spoke with Sovern about preparations in Dane County to counter Trump’s mass deportations, Israeli peace activist Rotem Levin came to Madison with his Palestinian peace movement colleague Osama Iliwat to speak out against the war in Gaza and to discuss their vision for “a path to shared safety, justice and liberation,” according to the promotional materials from Jewish Voice for Peace, Vets for Peace and a handful of local religious groups that brought them to the Presbyterian church near my house.

I met Levin at the home of a neighbor who hosted the pair (Iliwat was resting, feeling unwell after their trip). Levin said their goal was to get people to stop being “sleepy” about the occupation and the hopelessness of the seemingly endless war on Palestinians by his country, supported by the U.S.

“We’re not like you – you genocided all the Native Americans and now they have to accept you,” Levin said with startling Israeli frankness. “We’re in the Middle East. There are Muslims all around us. The only way to guarantee safety and security is by building trust.”

Of the recent U.S. election, he said, “I want to encourage you. We have been living with dictatorship for 20 years. You will be OK.”

People who have been living comfortably with the thought that they are part of a democracy, protected by the rule of law, are not the ones who need to be afraid, he added. In the U.S., “people without papers” are the most vulnerable, like the Palestinians in Israel, he said. His parents, among other Israelis, have been shocked by his country’s rapid slide into fascism under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu and his right-wing cabinet. For his mother, who suddenly doesn’t recognize her country, and for his father, who was beaten at a protest march, the shift to militarism and the crushing of free speech was unthinkable until recently. For his Palestinian friends, however, repression is a familiar fact of life. His message is that security depends on justice for everyone.

Levin was not keen to talk about the daunting project of finding a political solution to the conflict. He didn’t want to get bogged down in arguments about the details, he said. Focusing on the small things, building personal, humanizing connections between Israelis and Palestinians, is critically important, even if there is no big-picture solution on the horizon yet. 

The same approach applies here, on the cusp on the next Trump administration.

Community leaders and immigration attorneys have been meeting in Madison to try to figure out what to do. Local funding has dried up since the first Trump term. CILC lacks adequate resources and doesn’t have enough volunteer lawyers to respond to the crisis advocates see coming. And they don’t even know what shape that crisis will take. The prospect that the Trump administration will likely do away with its own practice, in the first administration, of not conducting raids in churches and schools “sends shivers down everybody’s spine,” Sovern said.

Mass raids like the 2018 ICE operations that shut down local restaurants could be scaled up, and could cause huge economic harm, especially for Wisconsin dairy farms where an estimated 70% of the workforce is comprised of undocumented immigrants.

But raiding isolated farms in rural areas of the state wouldn’t make the kind of news splash Trump is probably seeking. To achieve that effect, Democratic cities like Madison could be in the crosshairs. Instead of dropping busloads of migrants off in liberal northern cities, the publicity stunt gleefully executed by Republican Govs. Greg Abbot of Texas and Ron Desantis of Florida, the Trump administration could send in buses to round people up, crashing local economies by emptying out restaurants and other businesses that depend on an immigrant workforce.

According to The Hill, Texas has offered the incoming Trump administration 1,400 acres to build a mass deportation detention camp. 

In Madison, immigrant rights groups and local officials have begun trying to calm people down.

After the 2018 ICE raids, advocates hosted an information session to offer legal advice and “the only thing anyone wanted to ask was, ‘Who will pick up my kids from school if I’m deported?’” Sovern recalled.  

There is a lot to worry about, including the bill that recently passed the U.S. House allowing the federal government to designate U.S. nonprofits “terrorist supporting” organizations and strip them of their tax-exempt status.

But it’s also important to remember that, under current law, “they can’t do all the bad things they want to do all at once,” Sovern said.

He pointed to an evaluation of the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, the nation’s first public defender system for immigrants facing deportation. (CILC, in Madison, was the second such effort.) The project provided lawyers to all low-income immigrants facing deportation proceedings in New York City. Before the project, only 4% of those challenging deportation were successful. Once they were provided with attorneys, the rate of success rose to 48%. 

And despite polls showing increasing public support for mass deportations, even in the current amped-up anti-immigrant climate, most Americans (about 64%) say undocumented immigrants should be allowed to stay in the country if they meet certain conditions including applying for citizenship, working, paying taxes and not committing crimes.

People are more sympathetic if they hear the stories of real people who are affected by deportation threats, not just the lies about violent criminals who are eating pets.

It’s also important to spread the word that there are good people trying to hold up a light in the darkness. As Sovern puts it, “What we can do are little bits of tons of hard work.” 

Even if it’s impossible to solve the big problem all at once, brave people are doing their best to lead us to a better future.

Eric Hovde speaks in a video posted on X Tuesday, Nov. 12, in which he questions how ballots were counted in his election loss to Sen. Tammy Baldwin that was called early Nov. 6. Hovde did not concede then, only doing so on Monday, Nov. 18.. (Screenshot | Hovde campaign on X)

Poor Eric Hovde. His protestations that the election was rigged against him have fallen on deaf ears. Hovde’s grudging concession to Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who beat him by 29,000 votes to hang onto her seat in the U.S. Senate, came as Republicans across the country rejoiced at winning control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. Like his Tom Selleck mustache, Hovde’s election denial is way out of style. 

Hovde’s baseless accusations during his very tardy concession speech about the questionable “legitimacy” of “absentee ballots that were dropped in Milwaukee at 4 a.m.” is so 2020. This year, Trump won all the swing states and, unlike last time, when he lost to Joe Biden, allegations of illegal voting, fraud, recounts, court challenges and death threats aimed at election officials have disappeared like morning dew in the Southern California sun.

Hovde heads home to Laguna Beach, California, a lonely, sore loser instead of storming the U.S. Capitol as a champion for MAGA grievance with his Trump-supporting friends. 

“I entered the race for the U.S. Senate because I love our country and I’m deeply concerned about its direction,” Hovde declared in his concession speech Monday. By then, the country’s direction had taken a sharp right turn. 

The top concerns that Hovde, an enthusiastic Trump supporter, said motivated him to run — government spending, border security and international relations — are now firmly in MAGA hands. 

“Lastly, as I’ve repeatedly expressed, I’m very worried about the political divisions and rhetoric that are tearing our country apart,” Hovde declared.

This last worry led him, Hovde said, to run a campaign that “focused on issues instead of personal attacks.” He followed this assertion by besmirching the integrity of Wisconsin election officials, denouncing his opponent as a liar and blaming Democrats for underhandedly stealing the election from him by allowing third-party candidates to run and by spreading rumors that he’s a California bank owner (a verifiable fact). For good measure, he added, “Equally concerning is the large segments of the press that don’t care to fact-check these lies and even helped propagate misinformation to help their preferred candidate.”

Anyone who watched the debate between Hovde and Baldwin might be surprised to hear Hovde congratulate himself for running a high-minded campaign rooted in the “values of integrity and morality.”

“The one thing you’ve perfected in Washington is your ability to lie,” Hovde sneered at Baldwin at the start of the debate. While Baldwin focused on her long record of detailed policy work, reaching across the aisle to pass bills that helped Wisconsinites, Hovde relied heavily on unsubstantiated accusations and repeatedly called out Baldwin’s girlfriend, a Wall Street investment adviser, demanding that she release financial information she is not required to disclose and unsubtly calling attention to the fact that Baldwin, an out lesbian, is in a same-sex relationship. 

This week, Baldwin is back in Washington doing what she does best — focusing on unsexy issues that matter to her constituents (see her Wednesday press release: “Baldwin Calls on USDA to Provide Emergency Aid for Gamebird Farmers Hit By Tornadoes”). Hovde, who admitted during the debate that he doesn’t know much about what’s in the Farm Bill and then griped afterward to rightwing talk radio host Vicky McKenna: “Like, I’m supposed to study [the bill] in depth?!” can’t imagine why Wisconsin chose Baldwin over him.

There was nothing nefarious about Baldwin’s win. She received a predictable boost from absentee voters in heavily Democratic Milwaukee, and as she has done in her previous statewide races, and she got a lot of votes in Republican-leaning areas of the state where she has spent a great deal of time listening to her constituents and championing their interests in bills that help Wisconsin agriculture and manufacturing. That’s the kind of work that made her the only Democrat to win the endorsement of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau.

Hovde distinguished himself, according to The New York Times, by becoming the first prominent Republican in the nation to suggest the election was rigged, parroting Trump’s 2020 conspiracy theories. 

Fortunately, this year Hovde’s complaints are just one man’s sour grapes. But in his incivility, his poor grasp of policy, and, most of all, in refusing to concede for so long and, even when he did, questioning the integrity of the election, Hovde made a divisive political environment more toxic.

As Sam Liebert, Wisconsin state director of All Voting is Local told Erik Gunn, “The rhetoric of questioning our democracy is more than just words. … It  contributes to chaos and confusion, which undermines public trust in our elections and the officials who administer them.” 

As Hovde himself might put it, the kind of campaign he ran is tearing our country apart. Fortunately for Wisconsin, in this case, it’s over. 

Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, introduces Sen. Tammy Baldwin at her victory celebration Thursday. (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)

In the midst of a barrage of absurd and appalling news pouring out of Washington, where President-elect Donald Trump keeps topping himself with new, unqualified cabinet appointments, Democrats are looking for hope in Wisconsin.

Two bright lights from our state made headlines after Nov. 5. U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin bucked the red wave to win a third term, and Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler was reported by Politico to be in the running to lead the national party. Baldwin and Wikler share an approach to politics that could help guide Democrats out of the wilderness. 

After losing the White House and failing to capture control of either the U.S. Senate or the House (not to mention the likelihood of two new Trump appointments on the U.S. Supreme Court that could create an enduring far-right supermajority), Democrats would do well to look to Wisconsin for a new approach to politics.

In Wisconsin, Trump’s margin of victory — 0.9% of the vote — was the narrowest among the seven swing states he carried. Baldwin, as she has consistently done, made inroads in rural, Republican-voting counties. And Wikler deployed an approach to organizing across rural and urban areas of the state that took no vote for granted.

While extreme polarization and losing touch with working-class swing-state voters are widely counted as prime reasons Democrats lost the 2024 election, Baldwin and Wikler have a recipe for addressing those problems.

“It’s a state where showing up, being present in all different communities, rejecting the kind of false choices that cable pundits might like to inflict on a state like Wisconsin, and rolling up your sleeves can make the difference,” Wikler told me back in 2019, shortly after he moved back to Wisconsin to reenergize the state party. At that moment, Republicans had just lost complete control over all three branches of state government, with the election of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in 2018. Since then, Wikler has overseen a scrappy fight to claw back power in a state where Republicans, until recently, still dominated politics.

Wikler followed his own advice, opening new field offices across the state. He remained tenaciously upbeat as he steered his party through the rough waters of the pandemic and, in addition to helping elect President Joe Biden and reelecting Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, helped shepherd in a new liberal majority on the state Supreme Court that ended the worst partisan gerrymander in the nation, which had protected a wildly disproportionate Republican legislative majority. 

I was impressed by Wikler’s optimism back in 2019, when the gerrymandered maps seemed insurmountable. 

He pointed to grassroots organizers all over Wisconsin who were building the case for fair maps, and “getting every elected group of human beings in the state to pass resolutions condemning gerrymandering.”

“All of that needs to clearly lead to electoral accountability for anyone who smashes the idea of representative democracy in the state,” Wikler said at the time. It sounded wildly optimistic. Yet here we are.

Commenting on the eternal debate about whether Democrats need to drive their base to turn out or persuade disaffected centrist Republicans and independents to vote for Democrats, Wikler told me, “in Wisconsin we have to do both.”

“The thing I’m frustrated by every day is the idea that you can’t fight for both white working class voters and voters of color,” he added. “Guess what? There are people of all races in the working class. And all of them want schools and jobs and safe communities and air they can breathe. And none of them like the effects of Trump’s actual policies—even if some of them think they might like Trump as a guy.”

That philosophy is very similar to the politics practiced by Tammy Baldwin, who consistently amazes pundits by winning rural and working class voters even though she is an out lesbian with a strongly progressive voting record. Listening carefully to her constituents and delivering for them, whether through the provision she wrote into the Affordable Care Act that lets children stay on their parents’ insurance until they turn 26, or federal investments in Wisconsin farming and manufacturing, or “Buy America” rules, Baldwin connects with her constituents across the ideological divide. 

As Baldwin puts it, “People across Wisconsin want solutions to their challenges and are not all that interested in Republican versus Democrat—they’re interested in who you’ll stand up to, and who you’ll stand up for.”

Wikler agrees: “The key thing to understand is that Wisconsin voters are less centrist than they are conflicted. There’s a populist streak that has both left-wing and right-wing flavors that runs through the state. And the fundamental question that voters are asking is: ‘Is this person on my side?’”

That’s a clarifying vision that could lead Democratic politicians and voters toward a brighter day.