Wisconsin families didn’t line up for cream puffs at the State Fair this weekend expecting a taste of Milwaukee’s crime epidemic—or a rerun of Kenosha’s 2020 riots. But thanks to pro-crime politicians like David Crowley, that’s what they got.
Hordes of teenaged thugs descended on the Wisconsin State Fair in Milwaukee Sunday, publicly brawling, terrorizing peaceful fair-going guests, and injuring an officer. Right at the center of the statewide public discourse sits Wisconsin Democrat gubernatorial candidate and Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley.
Crowley has been billed as a “moderate” Democrat after he beat Thanksgiving and Culvers-hating Democratic Socialist (a.k.a communist) Francesca Hong by razor-thin margins in last week’s Democrat primary. Aside from publicly declaring that he does not, in fact, want to abolish Thanksgiving Crowley is not much different from Hong.
Not only is he responsible for Milwaukee County having the highest county sales-tax rate and the highest property-tax rates in the state—he’s also responsible for Milwaukee County posting the highest violent-crime rate in Wisconsin. Crowley has spent his political career running Milwaukee County like a third-world country and now wants Wisconsinites everywhere to hand him the keys to the entire state.
Most of us—especially those of us in the northern 7th Congressional District, where I’m running for Congress—don’t want our hometowns to look anything like Milwaukee, or like Kenosha during the 2020 summer of rage.
Before running for Congress, my wife and I did on-the-ground reporting from Kenosha in 2020 after the shooting of Jacob Blake. Blake was armed with a knife, struggled with officers, thwarted two tasers, disregarded police commands, and was climbing into a vehicle with three children when he was shot.
At the time, multipleWisconsin law-enforcement organizations sent a letter to Democrat Gov. Tony Evers begging him to “refrain from making statements specific to the Kenosha Police-involved shooting until the facts of the investigation are known,” because such statements put officers’ and the public’s lives at risk. Evers didn’t care. Neither did Crowley, who declared Blake’s “wounds are the result of systemic racism.”
Evers watched Kenosha burn at the hands of out-of-state thugs for three nights and stubbornly refused to send adequate aid. Within 24 hours of receiving requests for help, he had dispatched fewer troops to Kenosha than he sent to Milwaukee during the NBA Finals. By the second night, left-wing professional rioters from groups like Antifa were pouring into the city, reaping terror and destruction.
I was there that second night, when officers were still grossly unprepared for the flood of outside agitators. The city looked like something I’d only seen in photos of war-torn countries.
With law enforcement stretched thin protecting public buildings, ordinary men and women were forced to stand guard in front of their homes and businesses with baseball bats, handguns, and shotguns. Instead of calling for peace, Crowley fueled the violence by tweeting “#nojusticenopeace”—a direct threat that the riots and disorder would continue until his subjective grievances were fully appeased.
To most normal people it seems perplexing that leftists appear to hate public safety: they encourage terrorism in places like Kenosha, call to abolish the police, and refuse to prosecute the thugs who turned the State Fair into a brawl on Sunday. The answer is actually that they don’t believe in the idea of criminals at all. To a dangerous leftist, crime is always a symptom of systemic oppression rather than personal evil.
In classical Marxism the system is capitalism and class; in today’s identity-driven leftism the system is “whiteness,” systemic racism, or other identity hierarchies. In both cases the criminal is recast as a victim or revolutionary actor, while police, prisons, and clear standards of right and wrong are painted as tools of the oppressor. That’s why, instead of punishing criminals, they attack law enforcement, eliminate consequences, and obsess over “root causes” while ordinary people are left unprotected and less safe.
Christianity, of course, rejects the idea that a human person is nothing more than the sum of economic or racial forces. We believe in free will—the free will to choose good or evil. We also believe it is the responsibility of leaders to uphold the social contract and protect the innocent.
Families who just want one ordinary afternoon at the State Fair with their kids shouldn’t find themselves in the center of a public brawl. That is why I join my fellow Wisconsinites in rejecting David Crowley and refusing to let him Milwaukee our Wisconsin. We can’t allow him to turn America’s Dairyland into Milwaukee County’s open-air crime lab—complete with higher taxes, higher crime, and zero consequences. We will not trade cream puffs and cheese curds for communist crime and chaos.
Michael Alfonso is an America First conservative running for Congress in Wisconsin’s 7th District. Follow him on X and visit alfonsoforwisconsin.com for more information.
