"[Madison Police Department] command telling cops to STAND DOWN.... Police KNEW the [City-County Building] would be firebombed... They did NOTHING."

The city of Madison KNEW the CCB would be firebombed. The rioters blocked access to the building. There were juvenile inmates in this building. A fire investigator examining the scene remarked it was only by fast action by deputies that the entire building didn’t go up in flames pic.twitter.com/CDtsrNnweu

— Vicki McKenna (@VickiMcKenna) June 24, 2020

No one is covering this! MPD command telling cops to STAND DOWN. THIS WAS PLANNED--access to CCB was CLOSED OFF by the rioters around 5pm. Police KNEW the CCB would be firebombed. That's a FEDERAL CRIME. They did NOTHING. Cops were prohibited from using gas. READ THIS. SHOCKING. pic.twitter.com/TWMPlRzjT0

— Vicki McKenna (@VickiMcKenna) June 24, 2020

Vandalized stores on State Street.

Madison’s State Street. pic.twitter.com/nfrwvlmmHH

— Vicki McKenna (@VickiMcKenna) June 2, 2020

They got Ian's Pizza! The darling of the 2011 anti-Walker protests!

A closer look — "Nasty ass Pizza":

A free woman in Wisconsin.

Local and NATIONAL Media HOUND WI nurse who went to bar to help her sister reopen, harass her into apology. There is NO reason to apologize for behaving as a free woman in WI or anywhere else. https://t.co/9xQEGONeg3

— Vicki McKenna (@VickiMcKenna) May 17, 2020

Madison's Vicki McKenna has a run-in with Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib — over the meaning of a wink.

Rashida Tlaib: WHY WERE YOU WINKING

>"I know Glenn Grothman. He introduced me. He's a friend."

Rashida Tlaib: Oh. I thought there was a conspiracypic.twitter.com/fA9w90L9md

— Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) September 24, 2019

Listen to McKenna's radio show today: "Ms. McKenna goes to Washington."

ADDED: If that link to the radio show doesn't work for you, you can go here (later).

And here's the coverage at Reason: "Witness Says Vaping Helped Her Quit Smoking. Rashida Tlaib Asks 'Are You a Conspiracy Theorist?'/'Vaping is a health miracle to me,' said ex-smoker Vicki Porter [AKA McKenna]. 'Not safe, but less harmful.'"

On the UW–Madison campus last night, student activists obstructed the speech — by conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro — "Dismantling Safe Spaces: Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings."

There were about 20 protesters, Wisconsin Watchdog reports:

Shapiro, invited to speak by the UW’s Young Americans for Freedom and Young America’s Foundation, got through his introduction and then all hell broke loose.

The demonstrators stood up and chanted, “Safety! Safety! Safety,” interrupting Shapiro’s address...

The protesters, including children, constantly interrupted Shapiro’s speech, which in part was on why “diversity doesn’t matter, decency matters.”

“Shame! Shame! Shame!” chanted the leftists in response....

Shapiro mocked the practice of wearing of safety pins to protest the election of Trump:

“They started wearing safety pins. They can wear them with this diaper,” Shapiro said, in a jab at the sentiment.

“You want to wear a swastika?” a safe space protester shouted.

Shapiro is Jewish, and he taunted back.

Campus police watched but did nothing to stop the interruptions. At one point, they looked on as the protesters stormed the stage and continued their chants. Shapiro was told by police that they were instructed not to stop the demonstrators, who made their intentions to disrupt clear on Facebook days before the speech.

Local conservative radio talk show host Vicki McKenna was there.

Upon leaving the event, she was surrounded by demonstrators. They shouted all kinds of vile things at the talk show host, the kind of offensive, “war on women” words for which liberals castigated Trump. One protester even charged that McKenna was responsible for the murder of a University of Wisconsin-Stout student from Saudi Arabia.

“The black supremacists mob shout me down–all 5’3″ &48 years old of me–and UW cops try to move ME away because I am the THREAT Film at 11!” McKenna wrote on Twitter.

The Badger Herald has an article with pictures and video of the protest and the crowd's response to the protest. Here's the harrowing and NSFW video McKenna's team shot after the event.

ADDED: Here's the University's official statement. Excerpt:

The university worked to ensure the event would be safe and provide a forum for both the speaker and those dissenting with his statements to express their views, by meeting with organizers and protesters, along with providing security for the event....

I'd like to see a statement on how the university police treated Vicki McKenna. Why was she pushed out when she was trying to cover the news and she was the one being subjected to physical intimidation?

Donald Trump didn't bother to understand Wisconsin, and Wisconsin seems to mind.

Maybe you think we're a frumpy pathetic rustbelt backwater and we'd be happy that you showed up at all and acted like you cared.

But it's not that way at all. The WSJ's Kimberley A. Strassel does a great job of summing up Wisconsin GOP politics for outsiders:

Wisconsin has been in continuous political warfare for six years. Over that time, Republicans lived through Gov. Scott Walker’s epic battle for his Act 10 public-sector bargaining reform; judicial races; a Senate recall effort; a gubernatorial recall effort; a political assault in a vicious John Doe probe; another election cycle; campaign-finance reform; an overhaul of the state’s ethics body; a right-to-work law; and prevailing-wage reform. To name a few.

The state is also proudly home to the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, and a governor (Scott Walker) who ran for his party's presidential nomination. The result is a conservative electorate that is highly informed, highly energized and highly involved. The fights so far have given voters an acute appreciation of the conservative principles at stake, and a pride in defeating union and liberal priorities. They have radar sensitive to “fake” Republicans, and many aren’t keen on what they are hearing from Mr. Trump.

Wisconsin’s recent political battles also resulted in a dramatic shift in the state’s communications culture.... Four “talkers” in particular— Charlie Sykes, Vicki McKenna, Jerry Bader and Mark Belling—exercise enormous influence, and cover nearly every inch of the state media market....

Mr. Trump stumbled onto three of the four biggest shows on Monday, seemingly unaware that all the hosts are part of the “Never Trump” movement. Mr. Sykes likened Mr. Trump to a “12-year-old bully” and insisted he was no conservative. Ms. McKenna was similarly rough, though Mr. Trump did himself no favors by hanging up on her.

He’s also won no votes by lambasting both Mr. Walker and Paul Ryan. Mr. Trump might have been looking at Mr. Walker’s statewide approval numbers (in the 40s) and figured that hitting Mr. Walker’s tax cuts was smart politics. But the governor’s approval with Republicans is significantly higher—likely in the 70% to 80% range.

Mr. Ryan also is widely liked and admired among Republicans in the state, in particular because he still actively engages in state battles. He regularly goes on talk radio; he has openly supported Walker reforms; he helps out state legislative candidates. Mr. Cruz, by contrast to Mr. Trump, clearly was well briefed on the broader environment. His praise of Messrs. Walker and Ryan earns him strong applause at events, and he’s grasped the power of the state radio....

Cruz (and his people) seem to do much better at grasping complexity and dealing with it. I have no reason to believe either Trump or Cruz cares much about Wisconsin other than as just one more state to appease and gratify, but the 2 men are revealing quite a lot about their mental capacity and competence. To govern, you have to maintain your stamina and attention to all sorts of elaborate problems that are not intrinsically emotionally rewarding, like caring about Wisconsin.

"I’m a little surprised that talk show hosts would be supporting somebody. You’d think there’d be a certain impartiality."

Said Donald Trump as he encountered Wisconsin talk radio.

Trump did a show with Charlie Sykes yesterday not knowing that Sykes was a #NeverTrump guy until Sykes came right out and told him "I'm a #NeverTrump guy."

And Vicki McKenna said to him "You’re in Wisconsin, where it’s a different state, sir, than you might be used to." And:

“Look, if you’re going tobe the presidential candidate, you have to find a way to unify a whole bunch of people right now who are at each others’ throats,” McKenna told Trump. “And we feel it viscerally here because we went through the (protest) occupation in 2011 and a recall election in 2012. That’s the landscape you’re facing here when you’ve got Republicans acting like ‘recallers’ to other Republicans.”

Does Trump have the focus to understand Wisconsin? The linked article is by Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Craig Gilbert, who stresses "[t]he stand-alone nature of Wisconsin’s primary, where the national spotlight, more than a week of on-the-ground campaigning, a statewide anti-Trump ad blitz and a politically engaged, high-turnout electorate make for a volatile environment" and the "Upper Midwest culture where Trump’s flamboyant style of personal combat isn’t easily embraced."

If the front-runner can prevail in those conditions, it would be a huge blow to the “Stop Trump” movement. But if Trump loses, opponents will crow about his failure to win the kind of white, blue-collar “Rust Belt” state he claims he can wrest from the Democrats in November.

Scott Walker wants nothing to do with that rape metaphor.

Eric O'Keefe, head of the Wisconsin Club for Growth, spoke on local radio yesterday about the trauma suffered by targets of the John Doe investigation. (I recommend listening to the whole show, here, to get the full sense of the abuse the John Doe investigators visited upon their targets.)

But at one point, he said: "I have read some about rape and talked to people about rape, and I am saying this very deliberately... The reactions that I got from the people I interviewed were similar to a rape victim."

He may have said that very deliberately, but the Walker campaign also deliberated and said, via spokeswoman Alleigh Marre: "Eric O'Keefe, who has no ties to the campaign, deserves nothing less than outright condemnation for his egregiously offensive remarks."

I'm guessing the Walker side of the deliberation had 2 aspects:

1. Since the John Doe accusations are about coordination with the Club for Growth, the less we seem to be on the same page with them, the better.

2. "Rape" is a hot button word. It's a word they can kill you with. RIP Todd Akin. Unless you're talking about the crime of rape — or are a liberal — stay away from that word.

"Madison’s communities of color are constantly told by white progressives that people like Governor Scott Walker, radio talk show host Vicki McKenna and blogger Dave Blaska are the enemy."

"While some may agree, they haven’t been the ones silencing, patronizing and marginalizing folks of color in Madison. That distinction belongs to the liberal establishment in this community."

Tax Day oratory.

If you're wondering how the crowd was harangued at the Tax Day rally here in Madison on Saturday, I haven't processed any good video clips from what we recorded. But others, with more stable and well-positioned equipment have. You can watch Vicki McKenna and Dana Loesch. And here's some singing from Krista Branch (of "I Am America" fame).

Here, Meade took this picture of Branch belting:



Here are some non-Tea Party guys mocking the National Anthem.

ADDED: Here's the video I took during the National Anthem. (You can see Meade at "rockets red glare.")

Mic check... old style... with Vicki McKenna...

...and New Media Meade:

New Media Meade... on the radio, for the first time.

Listen!

ADDED: The main subject is what Meade is talking about here: "Where does Brian Solomon go to get his reputation back?"

Next to the meat, concern for the fish... and for fraud... chanting "shame"... yelling "Koch suckers!" at a 14-year-old girl... laughing at Andrew Breitbart's "Go to Hell!"

Yesterday, at the Capitol Square, there was a big Tea Party rally, starring Sarah Palin, but it was opening day for the Dane County Farmers' Market. We pass a farmer's meat stand, and then we get to the signs. (Oh, it was a hard day yesterday, as I just indicated to myself by typoing, for "signs": "sighs.") There's a woman with a fish sign, blaming Walker for some piscine woes. There are a couple of anti-Prosser/pro-Kloppenburg signs alarming us about the possibility of election fraud. As Abe Lincoln strides across the green, the rally comes into view. I gotta feeling... despair is not an option.



At 0:40, we arrive at some "shame... shame... shame..." chanters. These are anti-Tea Party people, and maybe they're ashamed of themselves for not making it clear what the shame is. What's shameful about a Tea Party gathering? Be clear, folks! This chanting is inarticulate, unless your purpose is that we should all just feel terrible about ourselves. Is self-esteem passé? "Despair is not an option" but shame is the only option. I know you want to manipulate our feelings, but I can't even understand how you want me to feel... except very, very tired of you.

At 1:04, a woman's "Recall Walker" chant is hilariously half-hearted. Maybe we could just recall him a little. Let's not recall him. Let's reminisce about him.

At 1:07, we jump to the middle of that 14-year-old girl, speaking from the podium over clamorous chanting and heckling. Last night, I put up an edit of the video Meade shot during her speech. This is my video, from a different place in the crowd. There's an older woman in purple who yells "Corporate thief!" after the girl says "the debt... in my future is overwhelming." There are periodic outbursts from this woman, including "Koch suckers!" Imagine yelling "Koch suckers" at a 14-year-old girl.

At 1:46, I talk to the guy with the sign that purports to be "hand printed in union blood." (He should meet this artist who works in used Band-Aids.) (I guess the AIDS scare is over.)

2:15: "That girl was 14-years-old and she made more sense than Barack Obama," says the announcer.

2:25: The voice is Vicki McKenna, the local talk radio personality, who has no trouble powering over the "You lie!" characters in the union T-shirts.

2:53: A rag-tag band that had been at the corner gets the idea to march straight into the back of the Tea Party crowd, apparently with no idea of the danger of pushing into the back of a crowd. If people in the front were getting crushed against a barrier, these self-involved musicians would not realize what they were causing . To them, it's just brash, youthful misbehavior, fun-loving japery — shutting up the people who need to be shut up.

3:36: The voice is Andrew Breitbart, who gets to the point where he tells the counter-Tea Party protesters to "go to hell." As you can see, they laugh at him.