Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 81. Sunrise is 5:30 and sunset is 8:13 for 14 hours 43 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 0.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court hands down a unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education outlawing racial segregation in public schools.
Yesterday, the WISGOP held its state convention at the Kalahari in the Wisconsin Dells. Henry Redman reported on the convention by watching a live-stream of the gathering.1 The WISGOP professes an interest in economics, but knows well that cultural issues motivate the party’s diehards:
During a panel discussion of current and former Republican legislators, Rep. Tony Kurtz (R-Wonewoc) said that the state’s residents are “feeling the economy.”
“When you look at what’s going on right now, it is affordability, it truly is,” Kurtz said. “Let’s not sugarcoat that. Everybody, at least in my district, we’re feeling the economy. So that’s where I think we, as Republicans, we have to say what we have done and what we will continue to do.”
But from the convention stage, officials such as Tiffany, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, U.S. Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon, Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann, former Gov. Scott Walker and U.S. Reps. Bryan Steil and Derrick Van Orden, railed against alleged election fraud, undocumented immigrants, trained protesters fighting the Trump administration and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
“The left never, never talks about the victims of crime from illegal immigrants,” Johnson said. “But they take those two individuals who they trained and encouraged, put themselves into harm’s way, they died, and they turned them into martyrs and use them as an excuse to defund ICE, defund CBP, refuse to fund DHS, and put all of America, or continue to keep America at risk.”
See Henry Redman, At convention, Wisconsin Republicans say midterms could turn state into Minnesota, Wisconsin Examiner, May 17, 2026. See also 2026 WisGOP State Convention, Wis. Eye Pub. Affs. Network (May 16, 2026).
Redman’s headline derives from the WISGOP’s effort to convince Wisconsinites that their state might become…Minnesota. It takes a huge amount of moxie and mendacity to convince ordinary people that Minnesota is a hellscape.
Then, again, Redman reports that the WISGOP has an even harder task:
The warning [about becoming like Minnesota] comes after 15 years in which Republicans have controlled majorities in the state Legislature and hold six of the state’s eight congressional districts while Republicans hold both houses of Congress and the presidency. In his speech, [gubernatorial candidate Tom] Tiffany painted a Wisconsin in decline.
“This election is about more than politics. It’s about whether Wisconsin is going to continue down this path of decline,” he said.
If, by Tiffany’s account, Wisconsin is continuing on a path of decline despite significant GOP officeholding across the state and nation, one wonders how much worse off we’d be with one more WISGOP officeholder in Tom Tiffany as governor.
And yet, and yet, no matter how much WISGOP Assemblyman Tony Kurtz talks about economic issues, it’s cultural conflict that motivates the movement to which the WISGOP is beholden. One might oppose this approach (as this libertarian blogger does), but the WISGOP has a grasp of its own practicalities — the party might lose with its base, but it will certainly lose without them.
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- Redman wrote on Bluesky that he was denied press credentials to the event. The denial accomplished nothing except to show that there is no one as thin-skinned as a party operative denying a press pass to a reporter. ↩︎
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Upcoming posts (in no decided order): Claims of Legacy, a Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and Outcome-Driven Argumentation.
Shark fatally mauls spearfishing diver off Australia’s Rottnest Island: