Largely forgotten now, events in Wisconsin from 2011-14 set the stage for much of what we've seen in the political and legal arena in recent years - storming of a capitol, labeling a chief executive as a fascist and Nazi, fake and misleading news coverage, and use of the legal process to intimidate political opponents.
Republican Scott Walker was elected governor in 2010 and his first initiative was the Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill which, among other things, ended collective bargaining for public employee unions other than police and firefighters. In 1959 Wisconsin had become the first state to allow for collective bargaining rights for public employees.(1) Along with lowering state and local government costs, the proposal also would have lowered union employee healthcare costs.(2)
The proposal generated furious opposition from unions and Democrats. Starting in February 2011, large groups of protesters occupied the capitol in Madison, while Democratic legislators fled the state to avoid a vote. Though the police were not covered by the proposed bill, in an act of solidarity with the protestors they refused to block access to the capitol. The occupation was greeted with cheers from most national media and Democrats - Nancy Pelosi called it "democracy in action" - which portrayed Walker as a fascist. Lest you think I'm exaggerating, here is how one well-informed progressive characterized Walker at the time:
No Democrats complained that the occupation and obstruction of government proceedings was anti-democratic, nor, for that matter, did most of that same media see anything wrong with the attempted storming of the White House and the injuries suffered by law enforcement personnel in late May 2020.
Despite continued obstruction and the media-induced hysteria, the bill passed a month later to the benefit of the citizens of Wisconsin.
But that wasn't the end of it. 2012 saw a failed recall election by Walker's opponents, as well as a more insidious and anti-democratic effort via manipulation of the legal system, a manipulation applauded by the press when it became public. That year, a Democratic district attorney began an investigation of alleged fund raising violations by Republicans; a search for a crime, but, more importantly, designed to interrupt fund raising by the GOP. It was a secret probe, involving more than 100 subpoenas, and dawn raids on homes. Individuals who were targets and suspects were told they could not speak publicly about it.
In early 2014, a court finally put an end to it all, quashing the subpoenas after finding they "do not show probable cause that the moving parties committed any violations of the campaign finance laws". What happened next is even more appalling - the creation of a deliberately misleading narrative by local papers as well as the New York Times regarding the investigation. Gabriel Malor discusses it in this 2014 piece:
And that is where the litigation stands as of today. Having launched a secret probe that has now been shut down by both the state and federal courts, the Democratic district attorneys find themselves the subject of an ongoing civil rights lawsuit for infringing the First Amendment rights of conservatives. But that is not how the media have reported the case.
Upon the unsealing of some of the probe documents by the federal appeals court, the media worked itself into a frenzy claiming that Walker was part of a criminal conspiracy. The media claim was based entirely on the subpoena document that was denied by the state judge as failing utterly to demonstrate probable cause to believe a crime occurred. In short: the judge, looking at all the evidence, found no reason to believe that a crime had occurred. That has not stopped the media from falsely implying otherwise.
This is largely accomplished by playing with verb tense. For example, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel kicked off this infuriating libel with a piece that claimed, “John Doe prosecutors allege Scott Walker at center of ‘criminal scheme.'” The more accurate word, of course, would have been “alleged,” past-tense with the addition of the words “in denied subpoena request” or perhaps “in failed partisan investigation” or even “in politically-motivated secret investigation rejected by the state and federal courts.”
The New York Times, trumpeting the story on today’s front page, also uses the present tense to give the wrong impression. The piece begins “Prosecutors in Wisconsin assert that Gov. Scott Walker was part of an elaborate effort to illegally coordinate fund-raising and spending.” Again, the true story is that this took place last year and was ended by the courts. You’d have to read all the way down to the tenth paragraph to learn that the subpoenas weren’t granted because there was no probable cause to believe that a crime had occurred. Oddly, the Times piece muses on the electoral consequences for Walker in the third paragraph.
In other words, the Times, pandering to the preferred narrative of its readership, portrayed the investigation as something of substance. The New York Times publicly stated its intent to construct narratives, and no longer report the news, after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, but that paper and most other media had already abandoned traditional reporting standards by that time.
While we are at it, here's another precursor, or rather an illustration of how the system can be manipulated in your favor if you have the right political affiliation.
In March 2022, the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) agreed to pay $113,000 in fines to the Federal Election Commission for claiming in their government filings that payments made in 2016 to the law firm of Perkins Coie were for "legal/compliance consulting", even though those payments were actually being funneled by the law firm to FusionGPS to help fund the fake Steele Dossier.
Hillary Clinton and the DNC lied to the United States in violation of federal law about a scheme to compile a fraudulent dossier to be used to influence a presidential election and then to undermine a presidential administration and were let off with a slap on the wrist, very little adverse publicity (the state affiliated media characterized the fine as a technical violation), and no investigation of potential criminal malfeasance. It's good to have friends in the right places.
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(1) At the state and local level the greatest public policy mistake of the 20th century was allowing public employees to unionize. At the federal level, FDR was smart enough the reject the proposal when first made in the 1930s, exclaiming that while private sector unions dealing with profit-making companies made sense, government employees organizing against the people was nonsense. To bad JFK reversed that decision in 1962, though the impacts have been less severe at the federal level.
(2) Really, lower healthcare costs. I know this first hand. A relative took an early retirement package from a Wisconsin school system in 2003. The package provided that the school system would continue to pay him an amount equal to his healthcare costs as of his date of retirement, but he would be responsible for anything above that over time. Under Wisconsin's collective bargaining law, school districts had to purchase health insurance for teachers from the union's captive insurer. By 2011 my relative was paying $300 a month because of increased insurance costs. After the passage of Walker's proposal, which allowed school districts to seek competitive bids, healthcare costs dropped, in my relative's case by $400 a month, so he actually ended up $100 a month ahead. School districts used the savings in a variety of ways, including hiring more teachers. I guess that's just fascism at work!
In light of the reality of what the bill accomplished, it was stunning to see various religious organizations opposing it on moral grounds. As often happens, gullible activists don't bother to even read or understand these proposals, which is what the Democrats and the media count on (for other examples, see fake news stories like "Jim Crow 2.0" and "Don't Say Gay" for narratives completely detached from reality).
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