U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis) speaks from his office in the U.S. Capitol as rioters storm the building on Jan. 6, 2021 (Screenshot via Youtube)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher was a rising star in the Wisconsin Republican Party before Feb. 10, when he suddenly announced his plans to retire.

Heavily recruited to challenge Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, he was seen by top Republican strategists as “their best shot to block Baldwin for a third term,” according to Politico.

In a closely divided purple state, Gallagher looked like the rare Republican who could break out beyond the hardcore base and match Baldwin’s strength — garnering bipartisan support to win statewide elections. Young, friendly, a Marine Corps veteran with a forthright style and a reputation for seeking bipartisan consensus as the chair of a committee investigating China, Gallagher was widely perceived as the face of the Wisconsin Republican Party’s future.

But that was before last week’s failed vote to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas — a political stunt Gallagher refused to join. He enraged his pro-Trump colleagues with his sensible rejection of their effort to pin the entire broken U.S. immigration system on Mayorkas. He knew Mayorkas had been working on the bipartisan border security deal with Republicans before they reversed course and shot the whole thing down at the behest of former President Donald Trump, who wants to use border security as a wedge issue in the 2024 election. In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, he explained why he didn’t believe in pursuing impeachment efforts aimed at “maladministration.” While repeating his party’s hawkish talking points on immigration, he pointed out that none of their complaints against Mayorkas rose to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Gallagher’s refusal to go along sank the impeachment effort, which lost by a single vote. Immediately, MAGA political consultant Alex Bruesewitz announced he was launching a primary challenge against Gallagher.

Gallagher denies there is any relationship between the challenge from the right and his decision to leave Congress. But all of the Republican candidates who immediately expressed interest in running for his seat are Trump loyalists.

Gallagher is no progressive. He supported the U.S. Supreme Court decision ending federally protected abortion rights, saying “the power to make abortion law should have always rested with elected officials,” and he has avoided stating his position on a national abortion ban. He was a staunch opponent of President Joe Biden’s efforts to help Americans struggling with student loan debt.

His district in northeast Wisconsin, while heavily Republican, is also home to increasingly Democratic Green Bay and Democrats had been considering mounting a serious challenge there for the first time in years, specifically focusing on the abortion issue, with OB-GYN Dr. Kristin Lyerly considering a run against Gallagher. When Gallagher stepped down, state Democrats put out a statement saying they “look forward to competing in the 8th and bringing some stability and competence back to the House.”

We’ll see how that goes — and whether the national Democratic Party decides to invest money in even more winnable House seats including the 3rd Congressional District in Wisconsin, which it failed to do last time around.

But the upshot of Gallagher’s departure is that Wisconsin is losing a voice of sanity within the increasingly Trump-captured Republican Party.

That’s bad news. Gallagher’s rejection of the Jan. 6 insurrection, which he memorably referred to as “banana republic crap,” was an important moment of truth and courage in a time of dangerous political cowardice.

Although he ultimately voted against impeaching Trump (and was accused by former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois), a member of the select committee that investigated Jan. 6, of acting out of fear that a vote to impeach would ruin his chances of being reelected) Gallagher called out his colleagues who were spreading the Big Lie.

In a forceful video he posted while locked in his office during the Capitol attack, Gallagher addressed the Republican members of Congress who objected to certifying the 2020 presidential election.

“The objectors, over the last two days, have told me there is no problem having a debate: ‘We know we’re not going to succeed. So we’re just going to object. We’re going to have a debate,’” Gallagher said in the video, adding that other Republicans claimed, “There will be no cost to this effort.”

“This is the cost of this effort!” he declared, as protesters stormed the halls outside his office, clashing with Capitol Police, while Vice President Mike Pence was hustled to safety. “This is the cost of countenancing an effort by Congress to overturn the election and telling thousands of people that there is a legitimate shot of overturning the election today, even though you know that is not true,” Gallagher said.

He called on Trump to stop the insurrection. “Call it off,” he said. “This is bigger than you. It is bigger than any member of Congress. It is about the United States of America, which is more important than any politician.”

We are going to miss having a Republican member of Congress who still believes that.

This column was originally published in the Wisconsin Examiner.

The post Mike Gallagher’s departure is a bad sign for democracy appeared first on Nevada Current.

José Valentín volunteers at The Community Space in Whitewater, Wis., helping recent immigrants access free food, clothing, furniture and English classes. Originally from Mexico, Valentín moved from working on a dairy farm to a spice factory and recently purchased a home. He says it makes him feel good to be part of a community that is dedicated to helping people. (Photo by Ruth Conniff)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

A few days after Whitewater, Wisconsin Police Chief Dan Meyer wrote to President Joe Biden asking for federal aid to help cope with an influx of recent migrants to his city, the right-wing news outlet Brietbart jumped on the story, publicizing the letter under the misleading headline: “Biden floods small Wisconsin town with 1,000 migrants.”

This was just one of many distortions of Whitewater’s immigration “crisis” peddled by conservative media and Republican politicians over the last few months.

As Meyer explained in his Dec. 28 letter to Biden, migrants from Nicaragua and Venezuela have been arriving in Whitewater over a period of years.

But that fact didn’t stop U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson and U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil from comparing Whitewater to big, Democratic-voting cities that have had a total of 80,000 desperate asylum seekers dumped on them by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott who has packed them off directly from the U.S./Mexico border on buses and airplanes to overwhelm northern cities’ services.

In a November press  conference, Steil tied the migrant population in Whitewater to U.S. border security. “It’s having a serious and substantive impact here in Whitewater. The answer to that is to secure the U.S./Mexico border.”

“They said it’s going to bankrupt New York,” Johnson added. “Well, the national media pays attention to the big cities, but we’re paying attention to what happens here in Wisconsin, to a city like Whitewater, to a county like Walworth, and it’s devastating, and it’s a growing problem that has to be dealt with.”

On Friday, a group of Republican state legislators sent their own letter to Biden, demanding urgent action on what they characterized as a surge in violent crime in Whitewater “including numerous sexual assaults and sexual assaults of juveniles, a kidnapping and the tragic death of an infant child.”

“We believe that taking a more decisive approach to secure our nation’s southern border will not only alleviate challenges in Whitewater, but also contribute to a secure environment for citizens nationwide,” Reps. Ellen Schutt, Tyler August and Scott Johnson wrote.

It was the latest salvo in a political war over U.S. immigration improbably centered in a small college town in southeastern Wisconsin.

‘They’ve been here for a while’

Sitting in the Sweet Spot cafe on Whitewater Street last Saturday, city council member Brienne Brown shook her head, bemused by the political storm that has descended on her town.

“I do want to impress upon you that they’ve been here for a while,” Brown  said of Whitewater’s immigrant population. Brown’s district is right in the center of the city, and includes a lot of the rundown rental properties that traditionally housed UW-Whitewater students. Lately, the same properties  are housing many of the estimated 800-1,000 immigrants and asylum-seekers, mostly from Nicaragua, who arrived during the pandemic when in-person classes were shut down and the students moved away. Brown noticed the transition while knocking on her constituents’ doors over the last several years, she said.

“No one really knows the reason for the increase in Nicaraguan refugees,” Whitewater school board member Miguel Arrandas told me on the phone. “But I’d argue the employers in our area are the reason. There’s a labor shortage.”

Arrandas’ Mexican-American family has lived in the area for decades and originally came to Whitewater for work. “The moment they learn there’s an employer looking for workers, people come,” he said.

Immigrants make up a significant part of the workforce on the farms surrounding Whitewater in rural Walworth County, where dairy cows and fields of grain and vegetables are tended by immigrant workers.

A recent Pro Publica investigation explored how this mostly undocumented workforce is cast aside without compensation or medical care when workers get injured on the job. It featured a dairy worker from the Walworth area who said he was fired and thrown out of the house where he lived when he got frost bite on his hands working outside in the bitter cold.

“Personally it’s hurtful when you hear this kind of rhetoric,” Arrandas said of the alarmism about the new immigrants in Whitewater. As a school board member, he worked on creating a multilingual curriculum. “There was some pushback at the time, but it passed,” he said. “The majority is very welcoming of the immigrant community.”

Because of the university campus, Whitewater is a diverse city, with residents from all over the world, Arrandas pointed out.

Arrandas was annoyed that neither he nor any other local Latino official was invited to the November press conference on immigration with Johnson and Steil. And he was taken aback when, during that event, Johnson pressed for the number of Spanish-speaking students in Whitewater schools, suggesting that it shows the scale of the problem with immigrants coming to the city. “He’s counting my three kids!” Arrandas exclaimed. “We are U.S. citizens. That made it really personal to me — targeting the Latino population that’s been here for years.”

Police chief’s message doesn’t line up with Republicans’

Unlike the Republican politicians who have been making political hay out of his letter to Biden, Whitewater’s police chief took pains to state in the letter that “none of this information is shared as a means of denigrating or vilifying this group of people. … In fact, we see a great value in the increasing diversity that this group brings to our community.”

“Our officers have also seen first-hand the terrible living conditions that many migrants are living in,” Meyer stated in the letter, which asks for money to beef up the police force, hire an immigrant liaison, and to pay for a  ride-share program, affordable housing and language instruction. “We simply need to ensure that we can properly serve this group and the entirety of the community,” he wrote.

Nor does he claim that there is an immigration-related crime wave in Whitewater. “We are a safe community,” he told the editor of the community news outlet WhitewaterWise.

The handful of scary incidents mentioned in the Republican legislators’ letter, which included a domestic violence case involving rape and the case of a pregnant woman who abandoned her newborn baby in a field, have more to do with inadequate services than an influx of violent criminals, city council member Brown said, adding, “It’s not like people are wandering around town raping people.”

The majority of the uptick in crime is associated with a massive number of unlicensed drivers the police have been pulling over.

“We have found approximately three times the number of unlicensed drivers on our roadways compared to previous years,” Meyer wrote in his letter.

One thing that would help, Meyer has said in several interviews, would be for Wisconsin to allow undocumented immigrants to get driver’s licenses. That would significantly reduce the burden on local cops who are overstretched with all this license enforcement and help them to know whether drivers are likely to be dangerous criminals or just farm workers trying to get home.

Republicans in the Legislature have resisted restoring driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants — which the Legislature took away under a 2007 law — despite studies showing that doing so would save Wisconsinites millions in insurance payments and make the roads safer for everyone. Wisconsin is one of 31 states that denies driver’s licenses to undocumented drivers.

“My preference would be to have an avenue so that they can study for, successfully pass a written test and show that they can pass a driving test,” Meyer said in a live interview with WhitewaterWise on Monday. “And if they can do that, I would much prefer to have them have the ability to legally drive rather than not having that.”

In fact, most of the problems the city faces, which prompted Whitewater’s request for emergency federal aid, has a lot more to do with Wisconsin’s Republican-led Legislature than either a “flood” of migrants or Joe Biden.

Republican-caused problems

Whitewater is a poor town with a median income of $46,000 and a 32% poverty rate, and a UW college campus that doesn’t pay property taxes.

As Meyer and City Manager John Weidl explained in their live interview Monday, the city of 15,000 was one of the big losers in the state’s recent shared revenue deal. Unlike Milwaukee, Madison, and tiny communities throughout the state, Whitewater did not get a big shared revenue bump from the state. Adding insult to injury, the state’s reimbursement for municipal services was reduced by $185,451 in 2022 because of a shared services agreement the city has since canceled with UW-Whitewater. The total increase for police this year, Weidl said in the interview Monday, was zero.

“I don’t think the state is doing everything it can to assist us,” Weidl said.

Despite their pro-police rhetoric, Wisconsin Republicans have been defunding the police in communities across the state for decades, the Wisconsin Policy Forum reports, through a combination of property tax limits and low state reimbursements to municipalities that have forced cuts to law enforcement.

On the broader issue of immigration, Republicans in Congress, instead of running to the border for photo ops and spreading hysteria about a wave of violent immigrants, should sit down and start fixing the problems with our immigration system.

Hiring immigration judges and speeding up processing of asylum applications, which can take as long as seven years is one needed reform. An even simpler matter is getting rid of the nonsensical rule that bars asylum seekers from legally working for 100 days after they arrive in this country.

Despite all the letters going to Biden, “What the President can do is limited,” U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Town of Vermont) told reporters gathered in his office last week for a general briefing. “Congress has to act on immigration. And that’s why I think there’s a reason why they didn’t act in the two years that they had a House Republican majority, a Senate Republican majority and a Republican president — because this is a political issue that’s good for them.”

Whitewater a welcoming place

On the local level, Whitewater’s problem, say Meyer, Weidl and Brown, comes down a lack of money.

But people in Whitewater are “incredibly generous and welcoming,” said Brown, who moved here from Texas 11 years ago and found herself warmly embraced by a community that prides itself on community service and volunteerism.

“They want these people to live here and want to be a diverse community,” she said. “In general we have a community that’s very supportive.”

In his letter, the police chief also alludes to that community support, crediting nonprofit groups in town that have “taken great strides in providing [migrants] with basic essentials like clothing and medical care.”

That spirit was on display Saturday at The Community Space, a large building donated by a local resident where volunteers offer food, clothing, furniture and English classes, all for free. “No appointment is necessary. No documentation/proof of anything is needed,” the center’s Facebook page states in English and Spanish.

Kay Robers, a white-haired woman with a brilliant smile, greeted a steady stream of Spanish-speaking families as they arrived, sitting behind a desk surrounded by Christmas decorations and bowls of candy, with two large cats sleeping in baskets beside her.

José Valentín, a 31-year-old immigrant from Mexico, first came to the Community Space for English classes. Now he volunteers on Wednesdays and Saturdays. “The people here, they need translation,” he said.

Valentin came to the United States 12 years ago to work on a dairy farm. Now he works at a local spice factory and has saved enough money to purchase his own home through a first-time home buyers program.

“I like life here,” he said. “I have a good life, thanks to God. I’m paying for my house. I’m paying less than I was when I was renting.”

His sister and brother and their children also live in Whitewater. Valentín goes to church with them on weekends. “I’ve seen a lot of people arriving from Nicaragua,” he said. “It’s hard for them because Whitewater doesn’t have enough living space. They share rooms with a lot of people. Two bedrooms cost $900 a month.”

In addition to housing, low wages and the long wait for work permits is the biggest immigration “crisis,” in Valentín’s view.

‘There are a lot of people who have good hearts. They want to help.’

“It’s a contradiction that the government is against the use of fake documents but won’t give us documents to work legally,” he said. “On the farms, the workforce is about 90% Hispanic. A lot of people in this country didn’t want to work during COVID. But the Hispanic community had to work. We didn’t have any check coming in.”

Nicaraguans now comprise about half the congregation at the Centro de Fe Cristiana, he said, where Valentin and his family go to services. Some of the new arrivals have told him how they came to the U.S. fleeing repression and violence. “They can’t walk freely in the street at home,” he said. “There’s a lot of repression by the police.”

“New people who arrive need the basics,” he said. “I like seeing how the community helps. You can get clothes, furniture, TVs, sofas, beds — a lot of things that are simple necessities.”

It’s been satisfying, he said, to be able to help.

“There are a lot of people who have good hearts. They want to help. And the people who come here are also grateful.”

There’s no question that 800-1,000 migrants moving into a relatively poor Wisconsin town of 15,000 has put a strain on city services. But despite the sensationalism about violence and chaos spilling over the border, the community’s reaction to the new arrivals seems positive.

“There are things we can do,” says Brown. “We just need a little bit more manpower and a little bit more money.”

This article was originally published the Wisconsin Examiner.

The post Political spin distorts immigration ‘crisis’ appeared first on Nevada Current.

A child waves an American flag during a Fourth of July celebration with frontline workers and military families, Sunday, July 4, 2021, on the South Lawn of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Chandler West)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

In his book “Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America,” best-selling author Kurt Andersen connects the marketing of nostalgia for an idealized American past to the organized campaign led by big business over the last four decades to destroy unions, public schools, progressive taxation and the middle class.

Andersen’s highly readable history provides some bracing context for our current political moment, including the raft of recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions rolling back affirmative action and debt relief for college students and snatching away rights from women and LGBTQ people. Those decisions are the culmination of a decades-long campaign to crush opportunity, undermine democracy and buttress the wealth and power of elites.

The original cheerful frontman for the “greed is good” philosophy that put us on the path to exploding inequality by harnessing cultural backlash was Ronald Reagan. But the effort to remake society to favor the rich by rolling back the gains of the Civil Rights movement, the New Deal and even the Progressive Era got going long before “morning in America” in the 1980s.

Andersen digs out a 1964 campaign ad for Barry Goldwater that never aired but that, in retrospect, seems ahead of its time, so perfectly does it capture the toxic culture war narrative of Trump-era Republicans. Scenes of Black protest marchers and ominous messages about crime are cut together with footage of wildly dancing hippies and then clean-cut white people going to church. The ad, Anderson writes, “tries to exploit popular unease with the culturally new as a way to get a green light for the rollback that Goldwater and the serious right really cared about — a restoration of old-style economic and tax and regulatory policies tilted toward business and the well-to-do.”

Sound familiar?

Republicans are following the same playbook today — talking about trans kids in locker rooms and rioters in the streets while they work behind the scenes to rewrite policies like the progressive tax code in Wisconsin to transfer enormous wealth to the already rich.

It’s worth remembering that it wasn’t until recently that the bitter politicized nostalgia associated with white Southern politicians after Reconstruction became a national Republican brand.

Andersen has a lot to say about the way newness and progress are deeply ingrained in American history, culture and politics. From this viewpoint, the Republicans’ current retrenchment and backlash are fundamentally anti-American.

In the 1970s, when economic equality was at its zenith in the U.S., white racist politicians who stirred up hatred of Black Americans and immigrants and who openly pushed for destroying unions, reversing environmental regulations and handing huge tax giveaways to the very rich were considered fringe characters.

“For most of the 20th century most Americans seemed to have permanently learned lessons about the mortal dangers of pathological nostalgia and resistance to change,” Andersen writes.

It’s actually incredible to look back at the 1970s, when the CEO of the Ford Motor Company was calling on the federal government to regulate automakers and declared that the industry must develop an emission-free car.

“Restraining excessive business power was a bipartisan consensus,” Andersen writes, quoting Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower on the subject. Unions were viewed as an important check on an economy dominated by big business. Progressive Era victories ending round-the-clock factory work and child labor and improving workers’ wages were generally celebrated. Now child labor is back. Trust-busting is out. The progressive income tax is under attack in Wisconsin, birthplace of those progressive reforms.

Andersen traces how, just when the liberal consensus seemed strongest, in the early 1970s, the late Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote his secret strategy memo for U.S. corporations – right before he took his seat on the Court.

The now-famous Powell memo, embraced by the Chamber of Commerce and business leaders across the country, laid out the plan they diligently followed, creating the network of think tanks and media outlets that reversed decades of progress on economic opportunity, civil rights and the environment. Powell’s vision of an activist judiciary has finally come to full fruition on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Here in Wisconsin, we witnessed the culmination of the right-wing anti-labor push Powell helped orchestrate when Scott Walker gutted labor unions in our state with Act 10.

Unfettered campaign contributions — another Powell triumph – and the rise of massive corporate lobbying have completely overrun democratic guardrails in elections.

What are citizens to do?

For one thing we need to call out the phony patriotism of the right. The people seeking to destroy democracy and civil rights are not the “real Americans.” They are the enemies of the fundamental American ideals of opportunity and progress.

If civic complacency that took shared prosperity and enlightened social policy for granted created an opening for the rapacious greedheads who are undermining the best aspects of our country, we are now in a very different time. Young people confronting staggering college debt and a perilous gig economy are not buying the fuzzy nostalgia or the trickle down economics the right is selling. The recent budget debate in Wisconsin exposed the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of politicians who want to impose austerity on our state in the midst of a historic surplus while giving away millions of dollars to their rich friends.

The wheels are off the right-wing bandwagon. It’s time to shove it out of our way.

The post How the right’s phony patriotism is destroying America appeared first on Nevada Current.

As citizens of the U.S., we are complicit in a system of institutionalized child abuse. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

News stories about the exploitation of children are particularly upsetting. They violate our most basic protective instincts. How could our society tolerate the systematic abuse of the very young? Yet recent reports on the  trafficking of minors in the United States force us to confront our complicity in a grotesque injustice.

The blockbuster New York Times investigation of the trafficking of migrant youth, whose forced labor is padding the profits of our country’s biggest corporations, has prompted Congressional hearings and a reexamination of the Biden administration’s handling of unaccompanied migrant children.

Another, unrelated report, “Criminalized Survivors: Today’s Abuse to Prison Pipeline” by Yasmin Vafa and Rebecca Epstein, released last week by the Georgetown Center on Gender Justice & Opportunity, focuses on how girls who survive abuse are blamed and criminalized for being sex trafficked and arrested and imprisoned for acting in self-defense and even for reporting their abuse.

To think of children confronting such horrific circumstances at the very beginning of their lives is sickening. And then to think that our society compounds the injury by, in the case of migrants, turning a blind eye to our economic dependence on child labor and, in the case of sex-trafficked girls, by arresting and incarcerating victims, is truly awful.

The authors of the Georgetown report coined the term “abuse to prison pipeline” in 2015 to describe the cycle in which girls, especially girls of color, in the United States are punished for the gender-based violence they endure and sent into the prison system without access to support to help them recover from their trauma.

Thanks to that 2015 report, which gained champions including President Barack Obama, public awareness of the injustice of the criminalization of child victims. The rise of the #MeToo movement and #BlackLivesMatter brought further attention to the injustice.

As a result, the report’s authors say, there has been a decline in arrests of children for prostitution and even in the use of the term “child prostitute” — which, they point out, wrongly implies that children who are trafficked are the agents of their own exploitation.

But other problems persist. Girls who are victims of abuse are still frequently arrested for running away and truancy — acts that are often committed in response to abuse or trauma. Black children are more than five times more likely to be picked up for prostitution or “criminalized vice” than white children. Overall, the criminal justice system still fails to recognize the violence, coercion, threats and manipulation of children who are frequently held accountable for criminal acts that are really perpetrated against them by their abusers. High-profile stories of young women who have been sentenced to long prison terms for killing their rapists have shed some light on the terrible double bind for these victims.

The Georgetown report makes a series of policy recommendations. It celebrates state laws limiting the transfer of youth into the adult legal system and ending the incarceration of children for status offenses including running away or truancy. It holds up models of alternative sentencing for survivors of domestic violence and new efforts to take into account trauma and adverse childhood experiences.

In addition, the report calls for new investments in preventing gender-based violence in the U.S., a movement to acknowledge and change the unwarranted suspicion with which girls who report abuse are treated, protecting victims from harsh sentences for acts related to their victimization, and recognition of the disproportionately high rates of abuse of girls of color, LGBTQ youth, immigrants and children who experience other types of adversity.

There is also a larger societal issues we all must address.

Political rhetoric that dehumanizes people — whether immigrant children who are forced to labor for U.S. corporations or incarcerated girls who have been sex trafficked  — is driving terrible public policy.

In this week’s House hearing on child labor trafficking, Ariana Figueroa of States Newsroom’s DC Bureau reports that Republican Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana “questioned whether unaccompanied migrant children are really children, since some are teenagers.”

“As compassionate children of God, every American wants to just hug that child and care for that child, but that’s not the reality, America,” Higgins said. “What they’re talking about here is not a lost and abandoned and frightened small child. The vast majority of the so-called children, unaccompanied children, are actually undocumented, illegal young adults.”

Higgins is trying to paint a scary picture, using language to try to cancel out compassion and cover up the reality that exploited teens and pre-teens like those described by The New York Times do, indeed, deserve our compassion and protection.

Wisconsin Republican Rep. Glenn Grothman, who chairs the House Oversight & Accountability Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs, spoke at the same hearing, alternating between using the word “children” and the dehumanizing term “aliens” as he excoriated the Biden administration’s immigration policies at the U.S.-Mexico border which, he said, “have led to historic encounters of unaccompanied alien children that have overwhelmed [the Office of Refugee Resettlement] and endanger migrant children.”

Tough talk from politicians about “aliens” and criminals seeks to dehumanize people so we don’t have to empathize with them or take in the reality of their abuse. They aren’t really children. They aren’t even really human (they’re “aliens”).

All of that is a smokescreen to try to cover up the shock of realizing that, as citizens of the U.S., we are complicit in a system of institutionalized child abuse.

There is no more egregious injustice than the “abuse-to-prison pipeline.” That phrase captures the terrible truth, that people who are already suffering unimaginable hardship are those most likely to be targeted for further mistreatment.

Instead of heaping punishment on the already oppressed and trying to convince ourselves that we are somehow different and more deserving, we need to recognize that we are all human beings who deserve to be treated with equal justice, compassion, and dignity as part of the same human family.

For the sake of our own humanity, we need to protect the children.

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KENOSHA, WISCONSIN - NOVEMBER 10: Kyle Rittenhouse becomes emotional describing events leading up to the shooting of Joseph Rosenbaum as he testifies during his trial at the Kenosha County Courthouse on November 10, 2021 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Rittenhouse shot three demonstrators, killing two of them, during a night of unrest that erupted in Kenosha after a police officer shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back while police attempted to arrest him in August 2020. (Photo by Mark Hertzberg-Pool/Getty Images)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

Kyle Rittenhouse, the white teenager who shot three people, killing two of them, during Black Lives Matter protests in downtown Kenosha, was found not guilty of all the charges against him on Friday.

The Kenosha County jury in the Rittenhouse murder trial found that Rittenhouse acted in self-defense when he fatally shot Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber and injured Gaige Grosskreutz after travelling to Kenosha from Illinois and posting himself at a used car lot, which he said he was defending from vandalism, with an AR-15-style rifle on Aug. 25, 2020.

Rosenbaum, Huber and Grosskreutz were in Kenosha along with hundreds of demonstrators during days of protest against the shooting of Jacob Blake by a Kenosha police officer.

The jury deliberated for four days, after hearing eight days of testimony, before reaching its decision Friday morning. Jurors were instructed by the judge to set aside the social and political upheaval surrounding the case and consider only whether Rittenhouse believed his life was in danger when he shot the three men.

In a statement Friday, Laura Martin, the executive director of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, called the verdict indefensible and warned it could embolden other vigilantes.

“Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines, as a minor, to incite violence and cause chaos in the midst of public outcry to stop police brutality and systemic racism,” she said. “And we’re seeing these same violent outbursts locally at commission hearings, and school board meetings across Nevada. And now these people are being empowered to arm themselves. Rittenhouse’s victims should be alive and he should be held accountable. And our local authorities must insure all Nevadans they will not side with armed vigilantes during peaceful protests.”

Martin also called presiding Judge Bruce Schroeder’s action during the trial “gross displays of partisan and biased behavior.”

The judge prohibited “the prosecution from using the word ‘victims’ to describe the people Rittenhouse shot,” but indicated the defense could say “rioters,” “looters” and “arsonists” to describe those same people.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers activated the National Guard to be ready to help Kenosha city in the event of unrest after the jury announced its verdict.

Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, a Democrat who is running for U.S. Senate in Wisconsin, issued a statement from his campaign account immediately after the verdict, saying, “Over the last few weeks, many dreaded the outcome we just witnessed. The presumption of innocence until proven guilty is what we should expect from our judicial system, but that standard is not always applied equally. We have seen so many black and brown youth killed, only to be put on trial posthumously, while the innocence of Kyle Rittenhouse was virtually demanded by the judge.”

“Despite Kyle Rittenhouse’s conscious decision to take the lives of two people protesting the shooting of Jacob Blake by police, he was not held responsible for his actions, something that is not surprising,” Shaadie Ali, interim executive director of the ACLU of Wisconsin, said in a statement. “But Kyle Rittenhouse isn’t the only one responsible for the deaths that night. The events in Kenosha stem from the deep roots of white supremacy in our society’s institutions. They underscore that the police do not protect communities of color in the same way they do white people.”

Citizen Action of Wisconsin’s Movement Politics Director JoAnna Bautch called the verdict a “travesty.”

“Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines to come to Wisconsin with the intent to infiltrate a peaceful protest organized by leaders and residents in Kenosha calling for racial justice. He did not come to help the community,” Bautch said in a statement released by Citizen Action. “He waved a gun in the face of people exercising their First Amendment rights. He came with support from white nationalist groups to incite violence and intimidate Wisconsinites — Black, white, and Brown — to keep us from speaking out. In his attempts to stop people from exercising their rights, he shot and killed two innocent men, and harmed another.”

Rittenhouse, now 18, was charged with five felonies:

• First-degree intentional homicide
• First-degree reckless homicide
• Attempted first-degree intentional homicide
• Two counts of first-degree recklessly endangering safety

A misdemeanor weapons possession charge was dismissed by  Schroeder before the jury began its deliberations, after the defense successfully argued that Wisconsin law allowed Rittenhouse to possess the AR-15 he carried in Kenosha since it was not short-barreled.

In a statement Evers issued Friday afternoon, he said “No verdict will be able to bring back the lives of Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum, or heal Gaige Grosskreutz’s injuries, just as no verdict can heal the wounds or trauma experienced by Jacob Blake and his family. No ruling today changes our reality in Wisconsin that we have work to do toward equity, accountability, and justice that communities across our state are demanding and deserve.”

Evers also called for calm: “I echo the calls of local Kenosha community leaders and join them in asking everyone who might choose to assemble and exercise their First Amendment rights in any community to please only do so safely and peacefully. We must have peace in Kenosha and our communities, and any efforts or actions aimed at sowing division are unwelcome in our state as they will only hinder that healing.”

This story was originally published in the Wisconsin Examiner, an affiliate of the States Newsroom nonprofit network of news outlets which includes the Nevada Current. The Current’s Michael Lyle contributed to this report.

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