Wisconsin landscape | Photo by Greg Conniff for Wisconsin Examiner

President Donald Trump’s tariffs are becoming a major drain on Wisconsin’s agricultural economy. China stopped purchasing U.S. soybeans amid a new trade war this spring, triggering a price collapse and leaving farmers wondering what to do with the bumper crop they are now harvesting. Cranberry growers say they’re facing low prices and market uncertainty, too, as other countries turn away their products because of tariffs. 

Small wonder the latest ag economy barometer published by Purdue University on Oct. 7 found that nationwide farmers say their economic condition is weakening. Despite expected record-high corn and soybean yields, farmers report they expect weaker financial performance in 2025 than in 2024 and have a weaker capital investment outlook.

Yet even as optimism about the farm economy is fading, support for Trump among farmers remains strong.

Back in March, 70% of farmers who answered the Purdue survey said they believed tariffs would strengthen the agricultural economy in the long run. That number dropped steeply to 51% by September. Still a large majority — 71% – continue to believe the country as a whole is moving in the right direction, and 80% believe the Trump administration is likely or very likely to give them an aid package to compensate for the damage done by tariffs and trade wars.  

U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wisconsin) reinforced this hope on the WRDN radio podcast from the World Dairy Expo in Madison last week. Tiffany, who is running for governor, was asked what he says to farmers who are “fed up” with Trump’s tariffs. He replied that Trump tariffs are not going away, but, he said of the administration, “they’re gonna use some of that tariff revenue, which is significant, to help farmers out. Because they know, I mean, President Trump has no better friends than the farmers of America.” 

Trump has suggested he will unveil another farm bailout as he did during his first administration, when China responded to steep tariffs by scaling back purchases of U.S. agricultural products. 

The problem with the bailout solution, says Gbenga Ajilore, chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and former senior adviser for rural development at USDA, is that the revenue generated by tariffs that Trump proposes to convert into handouts to farmers comes directly from the farmers themselves.  

“It’s not even like robbing Peter to pay Paul. It’s like robbing Peter to pay Peter,” Ajilore said in a phone interview Wednesday. “What’s happening is that there are tariffs on a lot of goods — looking at steel, aluminum, looking at fertilizers. So farmers are paying more for their inputs. We’re seeing this impacting these companies like Caterpillar, John Deere. And so you can say there’s a lot of revenue, but it’s coming out of the pockets of consumers, businesses and farmers.” 

If farmers are not already feeling seasick as the Trump administration spins the ag economy around on a cycle of tariffs and bailouts, the administration’s immigration crackdown is also making them queasy. 

A panel discussion at last week’s World Dairy Expo focused on a labor shortage made worse by a Trump administration that seems hell-bent on deporting the agricultural workforce.

The recent ICE action that scooped up 24 dairy workers in Manitowoc, most of whom had no criminal records, and deportations of entire crews of legally present H2A workers in Texas had farmers who attended the discussion worried.

“Taking hard-working employees off farms does not make communities safer,” said Brain Rexing, a dairy farmer from Indiana. He described the Hispanic workers on his farm as “way more than employees. — they work together with me and my family side to side.”

Like other farmers, he said, he goes to bed at night worrying about his workers and wakes up in the morning worrying about them. Instead of threatening farmworkers with deportation, Rexing and other farmers at the Expo said, Congress should finally get around to creating a year-round visa that recognizes their essential contributions to the U.S. economy. 

U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wisconsin) spoke to the group and assured them that the Trump administration has their back. He had personally spoken with Elon Musk he said. “I was like, hey, Elon, there’s two groups of people in the United States that we need to really watch out for. One of them are service members and veterans, because they gave us our freedom and keep us free. And the second one are our farmers, because they feed us. .. So he really zoned in on that and grasped it,” Van Orden said. 

Another “incredibly, incredibly strong proponent of the dairy industry,” he added, “is Tom Homan.”  Homan is Trump’s border czar and the architect of the family separation policy during the first Trump administration. “He was raised on a dairy farm,” Van Orden said. “So keep that in mind. There are some people in D.C. that understand what’s going on. We’re trying our best to help you. So I would just ask that you stay in the business and that God will bless you.”

It was not the most reassuring speech. But Van Orden also asked the dairy farmers in the room to support his proposal for a new system to make their workforce legal, which would impose a fine on employers and dairy workers and then require the workers to self-deport before returning to the country under a new federal program that would allow them to do their jobs legally. He introduced the bill in July and it was referred to the House Agriculture Committee, of which he is a member. 

The farmers, understandably, had a lot of questions.

What was their workers’ incentive to participate? How long would it take the government to process their paperwork, remove them from the country and let them back in again? How do they know they won’t be deported as soon as they come back? 

These are reasonable fears, given the terrifying scenes of ICE grabbing people off the street, busting down doors and zip-tying parents and children, sweeping up people with and without legal authorization to be in the country, whether or not they have committed any crime.

Recently, even the Trump administration’s Labor Department declared that the nation’s food system faces an emergency due to the administration’s aggressive mass deportation program, warning in a federal filing uncovered by the American Prospect that the immigration crackdown on agricultural workers has created a significant “risk of supply shock-induced food shortages.” 

“The Department does not believe American workers currently unemployed or marginally employed will make themselves readily available in sufficient numbers to replace large numbers of aliens,” the filing states, contradicting Trump administration rhetoric about immigrants stealing American jobs.

The solution proposed by Trump’s labor department is to pay H2A seasonal agricultural workers even less — offsetting the cost to employers of a terrified workforce that is disinclined to show up to work after ICE raids.

It seems like a weird solution, as David Dayen of the American Prospect observed, “since cutting wages across the sector will likely drive existing workers to look elsewhere for jobs.”

But there is a dark logic behind the move to slash wages for agricultural workers in the midst of the moral panic over immigration. Dayen quotes Antonio De Loera-Brust of the United Farm Workers, who sees a government threatening mass deportations working hand in glove with employers who benefit from a powerless immigrant workforce. 

“We call it the ‘Deport and Replace’ strategy,” De Loera-Brust said, “which is defined above all to make it easier for corporate agribusiness to exploit its workers, whether terrified undocumented residents or an unlimited pool of cheap foreign guest workers … The Trump administration would rather expand the abusive H-2A program than do right by the workers who are already here, feeding America for decades.”

This situation does not directly apply to Wisconsin dairy farms, since dairy workers are not eligible for H2A visas. But it was not at all clear from Van Orden’s remarks at the World Dairy Expo that he understands that fact. 

“The H2A program is broken and it sucks. There you go. That’s the whole press conference,” he said after he was introduced. Later, he referred to “all this garbage you’ve been dealing with, these H2As and H2Bs” insisting his own proposal for a new visa system would work better. In fact, dairy farmers are not dealing with the H2A (seasonal) or H2B (non-agricultural) visa systems at all.

Van Orden did acknowledge the difficult situation for the dairy industry, which depends on a labor force 60% to 90% of which is made up of immigrants who lack any sort of legal authorization to be in the country, since there is no such thing as a year-round visa for low-skilled work.

“Rocks are heavy. Trees are made of wood. Gravity is real. If we deport every single person that is working in the agriculture industry, the hospitality industry and the construction industry, all of those industries will shutter in a moment’s notice,” Van Orden declared.

But it’s unclear if his plan, the Agricultural Workforce Reform Act of 2025, will help.

One farmer asked if his workers would be barred from returning to the U.S. if they committed a traffic violation (a common concern in Wisconsin, where immigrants without legal papers cannot get a driver’s license). Van Orden fobbed him off, saying that would be a question for the executive branch to resolve through its rule-making process.

Several farmers listening to Van Orden affirmed that they supported Trump’s goal of securing the border, but added that they thought that mission had been accomplished. Now they hoped the administration would turn its attention to a new public safety issue — the threat mass deportations pose to the U.S. food supply.  

Farmers across the country seem inclined to give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt. But the doubt is growing. 

“Farmers are getting it in so many ways; their exports are down, their costs are up, and they’re losing their workforce,” said Ajilore, the former USDA economist. Given all that, farmer sentiment “actually hasn’t really moved as much as you would expect, given what’s happening,” he said. He attributes it to a wait-and-see attitude among farmers who have faithfully supported Trump for years. But now, he added, “the impact is starting to really hit home.”

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Marchers organized by Voces de la Frontera demanded immigration reform from the federal government. (Photo | Joe Brusky)

A family friend who lives in Mexico flew into Chicago last week to visit his college-aged son. We exchanged messages about getting together. Could the two of them come up to Madison, I asked. “The truth is with everything that’s been happening in Chicago, and the arbitrary arrests, we almost haven’t gone out at all these last three days,” my friend wrote back. “This stuff with ICE, it’s unbelievable,” he added. “But there it is. It’s happening.” 

Sadly, he felt safer staying in his son’s apartment and then dashing to the airport Saturday to fly back to Mexico than driving across the border to visit us in Wisconsin.

The same day we exchanged messages, an ICE raid on the northeast side of Madison, not far from my home, swept up seven people. Madison police didn’t even know about the ICE raid until it was over, according to chief John Patterson.

So far, Wisconsin has not been targeted for the massive escalation in immigration raids taking place in neighboring states. But the Thursday morning arrests in Madison and a Sept. 25 sweep of dairy farm workers in Manitowoc mark a sudden shift.

Darryl Morin of the nonprofit Forward Latino addressed the Madison and Manitowoc raids at a Friday press conference in Milwaukee. “While other states such as California and Illinois have borne the brunt of these new immigration enforcement actions,” he said, “I fear we are turning the page and entering a new chapter, a new sad chapter, in immigration enforcement right here in our great state.”

“What we’re seeing in Chicago is now starting to hit closer to home,” agreed Jennifer Maldonado, an immigrants’ rights advocate in Manitowoc, who joined the press conference by video link. She described fielding calls from terrified family members after the crackdown in her area. “Many are people asking, ‘Should I send my children to school? Should I go to work?’” she said.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security claims it disrupted an international sex and drug trafficking ring when it grabbed the 24 Manitowoc farm workers at a Walmart parking lot and in a door-to-door operation targeting workers’ homes. 

But this is the same Department of Homeland Security that insisted a Mexican-born Milwaukee resident wrote a letter threatening to assassinate President Donald Trump — even after the person who actually wrote the letter, Demetric Scott, admitted that he was the real author and that he was trying to frame the other man to keep him from testifying against Scott at trial. Long after that confession a statement from DHS Secretary Kristi Noem celebrating the detention of “this illegal alien who threatened to assassinate President Trump” remained on the DHS website, uncorrected, connecting the wrong person to an image of the letter written by Scott. 

Dubious hype about immigrant workers, portraying them as dangerous, violent criminals, is the now-familiar backdrop to a crackdown that does not, in fact, have anything to do with fighting crime. Fewer than half of the people ICE has arrested under Trump are convicted criminals. Of those, only 7% have been convicted of violent crimes and only 5% of drug-related crimes, Tim Henderson of Stateline reports.

In Manitowoc, “This [criminal network] narrative was pushed without any basis to try to paint a negative image of an entire community,” Christine Neumann-Ortiz of Voces de la Frontera said during the Friday press conference. Of the 24 people arrested, ICE identified one person who faced serious criminal charges. But, as Henry Redman reported, that person was not among those rounded up and was already sitting in custody during the Sept. 25 raid. 

Neumann-Ortiz described seeing disturbing videos documenting ICE actions — agents barging into a home “as if this were some kind of cartel, when it’s a working class family” and of a father who was grabbed by ICE while taking out the garbage. “It’s disturbing. It’s very, very disturbing,” she said. 

One bright spot, she said, has been the community response to “the tragedy that we’re witnessing around the U.S. and here in Wisconsin as well.” She praised Wisconsinites’ sense of “urgency to build community — to support each other.” 

Voces and other groups have been training community members across the state, with Know Your Rights seminars and instruction on how to effectively document ICE activity without escalating a dangerous situation. They’ve been lobbying local communities to reject 287(g) ICE cooperation agreements along with the cash incentives the federal government is offering local law enforcement in exchange for rounding up immigrants — a system Neumann Ortiz described as allowing local police to “essentially function like bounty hunters.” And they’ve been trying to help immigrants prepare for the worst, connecting them with immigration attorneys and helping them make contingency plans by naming caretakers for their property and guardians for their children in case they are deported. Forward Latino is sharing helpful information in a “family separation toolkit.”

Advocates, Neumann-Ortiz said, are getting good at “combatting lies,” connecting immigrants with legal support, and moving fast.

Several Manitowoc workers have already been deported, she said, and another was moved to detention outside of Wisconsin, where it’s hard for his family members and his lawyers to be in touch with him. 

Morin said he was on the phone with a Wisconsin resident who had been detained by ICE and he could hear an agent yelling in the background that the man had to sign a self-deportation order. Morin was also yelling, telling the man not to sign, and that they had to let him see a lawyer. “That’s happening on a daily basis,” Morin said. “The violation of constitutional rights is happening right now on a daily basis.” 

Against a gale of misinformation, immigrants’ advocates are fighting to get out the truth. 

“You can fight your deportation. But people need to know that and not be tricked or conned into signing deportation orders,” Neumann Ortiz said.

“It’s not a crime to be undocumented in the US. It’s a civil violation,” Morino added. 

Farmers, alarmed at the prospect of losing the immigrant workers who perform 70% of the labor on Wisconsin dairy farms, have been communicating with each other and with immigrants rights groups, Neumann-Ortiz said, trying to help their employees protect themselves. 

“We need to scale it up even more, so that people are not tricked into giving up their rights,” she said. 

The federal immigration crackdown, and the way it has seeped into local communities, does nothing to improve public safety. We are all safer if immigrants are confident enough to call 911 to report crime and abuse “or if their neighbor’s house is on fire,” as Morin put it. 

Despite the dire news, advocates see progress in community engagement and responsiveness. 

“In the early days we were getting flooded with false reports,” Morin said. “People wanted to spread fear.” Now, through training and preparation, advocacy groups have created a reliable channel for information about ICE raids and are able to screen out unsubstantiated rumors.

And some communities that have been tempted to accept federal dollars and cooperate with ICE have begun to think twice.

In Palmyra, where the local police department signed an agreement with ICE, community pushback has slowed down implementation of the agreement. In Walworth County, Neumann-Ortiz said, public pressure helped persuade the sheriff to reject a 287(g) agreement and Ozaukee County rolled back an agreement to accept federal money in exchange for detaining immigrants arrested by ICE.

The massive increase in funding for ICE — and the incentives it offers local law enforcement agencies to pursue immigrants in their communities — is funded through the same “Big Beautiful Bill Act” that slashes health care, food assistance and education funding. “We’re taking away food from hungry kids, medical care, money from schools, to do what?” Neumann-Ortiz said, referring to the push to terrorize immigrants. “That does not promote public safety.”

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Rep. Mark Pocan and Sen. Tammy Baldwin | Collage of screenshots via Zoom

Last time the government was on the brink of a shutdown, Democratic leaders rushed to negotiate with Republicans and reached a deal to keep federal agencies open and basic services flowing. Now that deal is about to expire and there seems to be little appetite for compromise in Washington. 

President Donald Trump has directed Republicans “don’t even bother dealing with” Democrats, and the House rammed through a near-party-line resolution to keep the government open that ignored Democratic demands and had no Democratic input at all. 

“We’re not sure how serious they are about actually trying to have something done by September 30,” Wisconsin Democratic U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, who sits on the House Appropriations Committee, told reporters in his Madison office Wednesday. Trump had just canceled a meeting with Democratic leaders of the House and Senate, and the House isn’t even in session during the last days of September, as the shutdown clock winds down. 

Still, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) called the Democratic caucus back anyway, “so I’ll be flying Monday out to Washington,” Pocan said.  “Hopefully they’ll decide we’ve got work to do. But you know, this is something where we don’t run the House or the Senate or the White House.” In other words, if the government shuts down, it’s the Republicans’ fault. Republicans, who don’t appear worried about a shutdown, say the opposite, rolling their eyes at Democrats’ demands that a stopgap government funding bill must reverse Medicaid cuts and extend Affordable Care Act premium tax credits, which are set to expire at the end of the year and without which an estimated 5 million Americans will no longer be able to afford any health insurance at all.

A shutdown means hardship for people who depend on government services and could harm the whole economy, “But at the same time,” Pocan said, “we’re trying to fight for people who lost their health care and other things from what we call the Big, Ugly Law.”

Pocan cited data from the nonpartisan health research organization KFF on likely health insurance premium hikes in Wisconsin if the ACA tax credits are not extended. A KFF calculator estimates premium increases for families of different sizes and income levels in every state. A family of four earning $130,000 per year in Wisconsin could see premiums jump by as much as $1,588 per month or $19,081 per year, according to the calculator.

Nationwide, premiums will soar by more than 75% if the credits expire, according to KFF.

Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin has called for legislation she introduced earlier this year to make the enhanced premium tax credits permanent to be included in any stopgap bill to avert a shutdown.

In a joint statement, Democratic leaders of the House and Senate criticized House Republicans for ignoring their pleas to address the expiring ACA tax credits, writing, “at a time when families are already being squeezed by higher costs, Republicans refuse to stop Americans from facing double-digit hikes in their health insurance premiums.” 

The sudden jump in health insurance premiums, combined with high costs for consumer goods because of Trump’s tariffs, will hit voters just ahead of the midterm elections, which take place right after the ACA tax credits are set to expire. Politics alone should make the idea of forestalling the sudden cliff appealing. But this is no ordinary Republican party. Back in their districts, ducking in-person meetings with constituents, members of Congress who voted for the Big Beautiful Bill Act to slash health care, food assistance and federal agencies that serve their constituents are still in lockstep with Trump. No wonder they don’t care if the entire government grinds to a halt.

A shutdown will be bad. But what Trump and the Republicans have in store for Americans is worse. 

More than the effects of a shutdown, said Pocan, “I’m far more concerned about what they just did to people that we need to try to fix, and if they’re not willing to have those conversations with us — that’s a big problem.”

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Main Street in the Wisconsin community of Cambridge. (Photo by Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)

As we begin our seventh year as a carwash marketing agency in Wisconsin, we’re daily confronted with challenges like scaling, taking on investors and staying competitive in a saturated market. Yet consistently the toughest issue to navigate has been how to approach health care for our employees amid national uncertainty.

Since health care is largely tied to employment, one of our earliest priorities was to make sure that we could be in a position to offer affordable, comprehensive coverage to our employees. And here we are, a few years later, still unable to swing it.

With the current federal administration and the recent passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA, as we go forward, for brevity and so I don’t need to use those words together), our lofty goal of offering the most basic benefits to our employees seems more of a pipe dream than ever. While we wait for the tax breaks that are promised to trickle down from the top earners who benefit most,  we’re facing a very near-term future of funding cuts and even higher daily costs — and in the realm of health care, an uncertain few months of even higher premiums and more difficult access to basic care. Our Republican representatives are still parading the passage of the OBBBA as a win, but when it comes to the reality of the tax breaks and subsidies that are set to expire within the next few months, the silence from our Republican reps is deafening.

The OBBBA does offer tax breaks and incentives, but outside of a few breaks on  large equipment purchases in our industry, neither our customers, who are mostly small, mom and pop operators, nor we will see any benefit. We’re not in a position to fully depreciate the purchase of a private jet. In fact, because of the OBBBA and  the economic instability associated with tariff threats, we’re now facing the potential of our first year of non-growth.

As small business owners in Wisconsin, we’re watching the numbers come out on the OBBBA and realizing just how uneven this deal really is. More than 70% of the tax breaks will go to the wealthiest one-fifth of households, while the middle class gets just 10%. Here in Wisconsin, the top 1% of earners will walk away with average breaks close to $70,000. For families making under $80,000 a year, the break is less than $1,600.

When we weigh the minimal tax breaks we may see against the drastic losses in support, it’s clear this law shifts the burden onto families, state budgets and small businesses already at their limit. Medicaid cuts, in particular, threaten jobs, health care access and community well-being. The OBBBA is hailed as a win, but truly, it undermines our efforts to provide for our employees and community.

On health care, we’re coming up to a harsh deadline — the lapse of premium tax credits for the Affordable Care Act, an action propagated entirely by Republican lawmakers. With 90% of Americans relying on these subsidies to make coverage affordable, we’re looking at sharp increases in premiums. As a family, we’re already paying nearly $900 per month for non-substantial coverage. This is nearly the cost of our mortgage for coverage that does nothing of the sort — our out-of-pocket payments are ridiculous.

Already, insurance providers are pulling out of key markets in Wisconsin as it is no longer profitable to serve certain areas of the state. How are Wisconsinites supposed to counter this? How do people survive when premiums rise so high, it’s more cost-effective to gamble with one’s health rather than pay rates for coverage that only really serve to prevent complete financial catastrophe after one gets sick?

Ultimately, as small business owners, we can easily see the ripples from the OBBBA and the lapsing of ACA tax credits.

• Premiums will continue to rise to untenable levels.
• Businesses and individuals will have less money to spend.
• Entrepreneurship will stall due to more hesitation to give up benefits in corporate environments.

This legislation does not help small business owners, Wisconsinites, or working families — nor does it promote a healthy local economy. Instead, it burdens those already struggling while directing gains to the top. The damaging effects of these policies will only become more obvious as the new law  unfolds.

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Then U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin testifying against the U.S. Army during the Army-McCarthy hearings in Washington, D.C., June 9, 1954. McCarthy stands before a map which charts Communist activity in the United States. (Photo by Getty Images)

Driven by “a lineup of disgraceful racial bigots and American fascists,” a divisive political crusade by conservatives in the United States was “like a gigantic, tumultuous hurricane” that “dominated the thoughts and actions of the American people, disrupting their emotions, distorting their judgment ….” Those are the words of Michigan Republican Charles E. Potter, a member of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, who, in his 1965 book “Days of Shame,” repudiated the excesses of the McCarthy era.

I read Potter’s 60-year-old mea culpa in David Maraniss’s powerful personal history, “A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father,” (Simon & Schuster 2019), which traces the Maraniss family’s harrowing journey to Madison, Wisconsin. The anti-McCarthy Capital Times newspaper saved Maraniss’s dad, Elliott, giving him a job after he was blacklisted and then followed from town to town by federal agents investigating his political activities over “five years, five cities, four kids, eight homes, two papers that fired him, three papers that folded,” as Maraniss writes.

I binge-read the book amid a storm of news as the administration of President Donald Trump ramped up attacks on leftwing activists, Democrats, progressive nonprofits and the media, blaming them for the killing of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, and vowing to attack what White House adviser Stephen Miller called a “vast domestic terror movement,” using the full force of the federal government to “identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks.” 

I reached out to Maraniss Thursday in Madison, where the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author grew up and still spends summers. ABC had just indefinitely suspended late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel for criticizing the MAGA movement’s weaponization of the Kirk shooting. And Trump and his FCC chairman were threatening to yank broadcasting licenses from media outlets that criticize the president.

I wanted to ask Maraniss about the parallels he sees between the time he describes so vividly in his book and the current moment. 

“There are several obvious haunting similarities,” he told me on the phone, “the demonization of others, the calling of all opponents Marxist or communists or enemies of the state, the gross manipulation of truth, the use of fear to stifle dissent and pressure to silence the media or get the press to go along.”

“Back then,” he added, “most of the press did go along with McCarthy for a long time.”

The Capital Times stood out as an early critic of Wisconsin’s bombastic Red-hunting senator, Joseph McCarthy. Syndicated columnist Drew Pearson was another prominent anti-McCarthy voice, along with Murrey Marder of the Washington Post and Edward R. Murrow — all mentioned in Maraniss’s book. “But you could cite many more that were going along with McCarthyism.”

The main difference Maraniss sees between the McCarthy era and today is that “McCarthy was only a senator, and now we’re dealing with the president, with full control of the levers of power which McCarthy did not have, ranging from the Justice Department to the military.”

McCarthy took aim at major U.S. institutions — from government agencies to  universities to Hollywood to mainline Protestant churches — but he overstepped when began attacking the U.S. Army, infuriating then-President Dwight Eisenhower. 

Another glaring difference between then and now, Maraniss added, “is that McCarthy did not have the full support of his own party, the Republican Party.” Today, “almost any Republican who opposed Trump is now no longer in office or in the party.”

It took a long time, however, for mainstream media and mainstream Republicans to turn against McCarthyism and for the public to swing from the distorted thinking former HUAC member Potter finally repudiated to the consensus that leftwing political ideology did not, in fact, pose an existential threat to U.S. national security.

Among the many echoes of Red Scare fever resonating through national politics today is the central issue of race. One of the most gripping scenes in Maraniss’s book is future Detroit Mayor Coleman Young’s testimony before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in the Federal Building in Detroit. Young, a World War II veteran, confronts the southern racists on the committee as they question his loyalty, repeatedly correcting their slurring pronunciation of the world “Negro.” Despite the committee’s high-handedness and multiple attempts to silence him, Young has the last word. 

“I fought in the last war and I would unhesitatingly take up arms against anybody that attacks this country,” he says. “In the same manner, I am now in the process of fighting against what I consider to be attacks and discrimination against my people. I am fighting against un-American activities such as lynchings and denial of the vote. I am dedicated to that fight and I don’t think I must apologize or explain it to anybody, my position on that.”

Reading about Young and the other brave souls who stood up to McCarthyism, including the elder Maraniss’s lawyer, George Crockett, who was jailed for contempt and returned to continue fighting, is inspiring and thrilling. 

In contrast, Maraniss traces the sordid history of U.S. Rep. John Stephens Wood, a Democrat from Georgia and chairman of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan (though he claimed he only went to one meeting). He lays out the evidence that Wood attended the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish industrialist who was accused of killing of a young, female factory worker in Georgia. Wood was the “wheelman” for Judge Newt Morris, his mentor, helping to collect the body from the lynchers and drive it to the morgue. 

White racists, as Potter later acknowledged, played a prominent role in the McCarthy era purges of “un-American” activists. These were the people who sat in judgment of civil rights leaders, Black unionists and activists for racial equality. Maraniss’s father, an antifascist who joined the Communist Party when he was in college at the University of Michigan, led an all-Black battalion in World War II, and dedicated his life to his idealistic view of America, was the target of people who had little respect for equal rights or the Constitution.

Who are the real patriots, Maraniss asks — a question that resonates today.

“Race is at the center of American life, then and now,” Maraniss said on the phone. “And what we’re facing this time is really an attempt to erase the civil rights movement.”

“The chairman of the House un American Activities Committee that went after my father was a Georgia racist who was elected in white-only primaries and opposed every civil rights measure, and he was the one defining what’s an American,” he said. “And you have a similar thing going on now where Charlie Kirk is celebrated on NFL stadium screens and people are being fired left and right, for criticizing someone who disparaged Martin Luther King.”

It’s important not to be cowed by the deliberate use of language as a weapon to promote misunderstanding, he said, “as they have with DEI. I mean, what is on its face wrong with diversity, equity and inclusion, you know? Think about it. I mean, the same thing with being antifascist. I mean, people should embrace those ideas and not run away from them.”

Of his parents, Maraniss writes: “They never betrayed America and loved it no less than the officials who rendered judgment on them in Room 740 of the Federal Building in Detroit. They were dissenters who believed the nation had not lived up to its founding ideals in terms of race and equality, largely because of the reactionary attitudes of self-righteous attackers on the American right.”

The book ends happily. The Maraniss family arrived in Wisconsin in time to watch the Milwaukee Braves play their way to a pennant and eventually beat the Yankees in the World Series. “McCarthy was dead. The Supreme Court had essentially overturned the Smith Act, ruling it was unconstitutional to bring charges against American citizens solely because of their political advocacy. … The world was opening anew.”

But there is, of course, no real end to the struggle. In an epilogue, Maraniss writes about Cap Times reporter John Patrick Hunter, who, long after the Red Scare was safely over,  typed up sections of the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, combined it with a petition listing six of the 10 amendments to the Bill of Rights, along with the Fifteenth Amendment granting Black men the right to vote, then roamed a local park in Madison trying to collect signatures. “He gave the people the nation’s foundational truth and it did not go well,” Maraniss writes. “Of the 112 people he asked to sign the petition. Only one did. Twenty accused him of being a communist.”

“It is an endless struggle,” Maraniss said on the phone. “That’s what life is. And you know, it tends to go in cycles of reaction and counter reaction. This is a very, very difficult one of those cycles. But I’ve been an optimist my whole life. It’s being challenged like never before in my life. My father endured it and came out an optimist anyway, somehow. So to honor my father, I maintain my optimism.”

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Derrick Van Orden at an online press conference last year discussing crimes committed in his hometown by a Venezuelan immigrant. Van Orden's social media posts following the assassination of Charlie Kirk blame Democrat and journalists and predict 'civil war.'| (Screenshot via Zoom)

Fruitless thoughts and prayers. Familiar calls for de-escalating toxic partisanship. Promises to do something about the teen mental health crisis, violent video games, the epidemic of alienation and hopelessness. By now we are all accustomed to the ritual reactions to routine incidents of horrific gun violence that plague our country like no other wealthy nation on Earth, where firearms are the leading cause of death for children.

But if the usual, feckless responses to gun violence are maddening in a country that can’t get its act together to pass even marginal, commonsense gun safety measures, the reaction of Wisconsin U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden to the hideous assassination of rightwing provocateur Charlie Kirk this week was downright reprehensible.

As soon as the news broke that Kirk was shot while on stage at Utah Valley University, Van Orden began a stream of increasingly unhinged social media posts blaming Democrats and the media for the murder and declaring “the gloves are off.”

“The leftwing political violence must stop now,” Van Orden tweeted. In another post he wrote, “The left and their policies are leading America into a civil war. And they want it. Just like the democrat party wanted our 1st civil war.”

Contrast that with the statements from other Wisconsin politicians. 

Wisconsin U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin said, “there is no two ways about this: political violence has no place in America. I am keeping Charlie and his family in my thoughts in this truly horrifying moment.”

Van Orden’s fellow Wisconsin Republican, U.S. Rep. Tony Wied said, “There is absolutely zero place for political violence in our country.” 

“Violence against anyone because of their political beliefs is wrong. Violence against others is wrong,”  Gov. Tony Evers said. “Violence is never the answer for resolving our differences or disagreements. Wisconsin joins in praying for Charlie Kirk and the Utah Valley community and first responders.”

None of those statements mollified Van Orden, who told reporters in the U.S. Capitol that “every one of you” is responsible for Kirk’s death.

Reposting a news clip of Democratic Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, who called for the nation to de-escalate political violence and come together, Van Orden wrote, “Too late. You have sown the wind.”

“I am not sure they understand what they have done,” Van Orden ranted. “They missed in Butler, but it is on now.” 

Never mind that in Butler, Pennsylvania, the would-be assassin who targeted President Donald Trump was a registered Republican. Or that, as Van Orden spewed accusations against Democrats and journalists, the identity of the shooter who targeted Charlie Kirk was still unknown. When a reporter pointed that out to Van Orden, he replied, “You know what? Knock it off.”

Actually, it’s Van Orden who needs to knock it off.

Seizing on political violence to try to stoke more political violence is as dangerous as it is disgusting.

Far from recognizing the human tragedy for all of us as our country descends into this nightmare, Van Orden capitalizes on murder, whether the victims are liberals or conservatives, imposing the same crude narrative about a war with violent leftists every time.

After the horrible double murder of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, Van Orden falsely characterized the suspected shooter, a right-wing religious fanatic whose list of intended targets included Democrats and abortion providers, as an anti-Trump protester who “decided to murder and attempt to murder some politicians that were not far Left enough for them.” 

He seems to revel in the prospect of more violence. Unfortunately, his tone is matched by Trump, who issued his own threatening statement, politicizing the attack and claiming that it is part of a pattern of leftwing attacks on conservatives. “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now,” Trump said. “My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence.”

Of course, it is Trump who has a long history of inviting political violence against Democrats and members of the press. Van Orden is copying him by escalating that rhetoric in Wisconsin. 

Online, Van Orden’s belligerent posts got mixed reviews. Some people demanded that he explain what he means when he says “the gloves are off,” condemning him for encouraging hooliganism. “So you plan on using this to start Civil War II?” one person posted. “You don’t think things through before you say them.

You people fantasize about killing your fellow Americans like it’s a full-time job.”

Others celebrated his statements. “No other way to fix it at this point,” one of Van Orden’s followers replied to his post. “We need a 2-3 day national purge. We do business with whatever is left of the left.” Appended to the comment was a GIF celebrating Kyle Rittenhouse for shooting Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha.

It’s unlikely that Van Orden, who has been unwilling to face his own constituents at an in-person town hall will actually lead the violent attacks against his fellow Americans he fantasizes about online. But feeding that violent fantasy is clearly inspiring for some people. And that’s exactly why it’s got to stop. 

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Photo courtesy Grassroots Organizing Western Wisconsin (GROWW)

Over the past two years, I’ve had the privilege of standing with people in western Wisconsin who are fighting for the health and wellbeing of our communities. Hundreds of people have turned out at community meetings, rallies and local government meetings to voice their opposition to the proposed expansion of one of the largest factory farms in the region. 

In May, 100 people showed up to get organized in support of a legal challenge against Ridge Breeze Dairy’s permit to spread 80 million gallons of manure across western Wisconsin. Another 100 people showed up in the town of Maiden Rock to support the passage of an operations ordinance aimed at protecting local health and property values. Over 400 people registered for a DNR public hearing last year to show their opposition to the expansion.

These actions represent a growing unity and commitment to safeguarding clean water, clean air and the small farms that are threatened by Breeze’s expansion. That kind of unity drives action. It inspired the Maiden Rock town board’s unanimous vote to pass its operations ordinance in December 2024. And it’s inspired many more towns that have started studying and drafting ordinances of their own. 

For the last two years, Grassroots Organizing Western Wisconsin (GROWW) has played a key role in bringing together ordinary people and small farmers to pass local ordinances to protect our homes. People across the region are holding strong as corporate mega-dairies try to take over our agricultural landscape. 

But powerful special interests are trying to prevent local leaders from taking action to protect our communities. Venture Dairy, a lobbying group representing industrial dairy interests, strongly supports Ridge Breeze Dairy’s $35 million plan to expand from 1,700 to 6,500 cows and has attempted to intimidate towns and counties looking to protect their land, water and roads from the impacts of industrial agriculture. 

In 2020, for instance, leaders at Venture Dairy falsely told Polk County supervisors that they would be committing a felony if they voted for a moratorium on factory farm expansions. The Wisconsin Counties Association’s general counsel wrote a letter publicly refuting this ridiculous claim. More recently, officials in towns like Pepin, Gilman and Rock Elm have been subjected to similar intimidation tactics and disinformation regarding the regulation of industrial dairy farms.

The truth is that, thanks to the efforts of industry lobbyists whittling down and undermining state rules and enforcement, oversight of large-scale livestock operations in Wisconsin has been stretched thin. With more than 330 factory farms across Wisconsin, our communities have largely been left to fill the gap. 

But that’s still too much for Venture Dairy. They were recently behind a lawsuit challenging Wisconsin’s authority to protect water quality. If they had gotten their way, there would be no DNR regulations for hundreds of factory farms across the state. Last month, that lawsuit was rejected unanimously by an appeals court.

Venture Dairy’s founding members include Todd Tuls, former owner of the Emerald Sky Dairy in St Croix County. In Emerald, the town well – only half-a-mile away from the facility – has nitrate levels that have reached as high as six times the Safe Drinking Water standards. Emerald Sky had a 300,000-gallon manure spill in 2016 that went unreported for months before a neighbor notified the state. Emerald Sky has since been sold to Breeze Dairy Group, owners of Ridge Breeze Dairy in Pierce County. 

Despite these challenges, people in western Wisconsin are making real progress. In the face of industry opposition, we are successfully organizing to fight the corporate consolidation of the agriculture industry. Our community organizing resulted in the DNR recently removing 2,000 acres from Ridge Breeze’s manure spreading plan due to risks to groundwater and surface water that we identified. If not for our comments provided in the public hearing process, those acres very likely would have been rubber stamped. Last year, we identified hundreds of acres of land that had been listed on Ridge Breeze’s plan for manure spreading without permission from landowners. Due to our organizing and public pressure at a public hearing, we were able to get that land removed and require Ridge Breeze to submit affidavits attesting to the fact that they have permission to spread on the land listed on their plan. Unfortunately, these affidavits have not worked, and people have continued to come forward to remove their land. 

Recognizing the holes in state regulations, we organized to pass local ordinances like the operations ordinance in the town of Maiden Rock, which was passed last year and protects the town residents from the risks of factory farms. That organizing is now reverberating through the region, with people in western Wisconsin and beyond going to town board meetings with their neighbors to create the change they need to protect their homes. Just this week, 75 neighbors gathered in the town of Isabelle for a public hearing on an operations ordinance drafted by their town board. Those neighbors were united in their support for clean water, clean air and local control.

Regular people have decided the future of rural Wisconsin is worth fighting for, but the only way to change the path we’re on is to get organized. It’s time to join together with your neighbors who share your vision for your community and make a plan to bring change. The future of our rural communities depends on it.