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Daily Bread for 4.17.25: The Extremism of, and Within, the WISGOP

by  • 

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 67. Sunrise is 6:09 and sunset is 7:39, for 13 hours, 30 minutes of daytime. The moon a waning gibbous with 81.5 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.


On this day in 1970, the damaged Apollo 13 spacecraft returns to Earth safely.

The WISGOP has long tolerated, and encouraged, crackpot theories and extremism (e.g., COVID denialism, lies about national elections, lies about state elections, nativism, and junk health & nutritional claims). Now, however, the party’s leaders find the miasma too much to tolerate as it wafts toward their leadership:

The Republican Party of Wisconsin has created a new process to oust county party officials and members of a state executive committee if they harass or publicly defame state party officials or Republican lawmakers.

The changes are being attacked by local GOP chairs who’ve been at odds with state party leadership, but a top Republican says the party is “trying to take the temperature down” when it comes to contentious votes on party business.

The changes were approved by the GOP’s state executive committee Sunday. They state that while volunteers and “grassroots members” have the right to elect leaders at the county and congressional district level, those individuals “should be working in coordination to achieve the Republican Party of Wisconsin’s goals and mission.”

A code of conduct requires local, regional and state GOP leaders to treat GOP officials with respect, support candidates endorsed by the Republican Party and not engage in “sexual, verbal, or physical harassment” of fellow Republican Party members.

(Emphasis added.)

See Rich Kremer, Wisconsin GOP creates process to remove local party officials for harassment, defaming Republican leaders (‘Changes come after some GOP county chairs have criticized state party and called for Chair Brian Schimming to resign’), Wisconsin Public Radio, April 17, 2025.

The party is so morally degenerated that it now needs a rule (ostensibly) to protect its leaders from the very conduct that rank-and-file party members have inflicted on others for years. From Republican to Populist to Authoritarian, the WISGOP has been a descent into lumpen members’ threats against supposed ideological enemies for years.

For those types, there’s no greater shudder of excitement than that…

Microplastic pollution found in insect casing from 1971:

Tiny particles of plastic are everywhere today, but a discovery in a museum collection proves that this isn’t a new phenomenon. While combing through drawers of caddisfly specimens, researchers found evidence of microplastic particles being used as a building material by caddisfly larvae as far back as the 1970s and 1980s. This shows that microplastics were present in rural freshwater streams long before scientists started studying them in earnest.