It’s time for Wisconsin Right Now’s annual wall of shame for 2024. We took a look back at the news stories and people who hit the news, and we asked our readers for their feedback.
Some of the candidates facing electoral losses are obvious candidates for this list, from Kamala Harris to Rebecca Cooke. Joe Biden was a spectacular loser in 2024, of course. Pushed aside by his own party, Biden then issued a sweeping pardon to his son and commuted the sentences of heinous killers. Or did he? According to the Wall Street Journal, he’s been completely out of it for some time.
But we’re getting a little more creative than that…
We hereby present WRN’s wall of shame for 2024.
1. The ‘Old Media’
Whatever you want to call the “old media,” things didn’t go very well for them this year. In fact, it feels like a seismic shift has occurred, and it’s their own fault because they have broken their sacred trust with the American people.
Most notably, the corporate media decided to cover up (or just not probe) the dangerous reality of Joe Biden’s cognitive challenges. In other words, the media that stirred up 25th Amendment nonsense talk about the quite-with-it Donald Trump was not interested at all in the fact the American president is often completely out of it.
They’ve continued on, snarking about Elon Musk supposedly being a “shadow president” yet showing zero curiosity ABOUT WHO THE SHADOW PRESIDENT IS RIGHT NOW because we’re increasingly being told that Biden is totally out of it.
They carried water for Harris, delivering overwhelming positive coverage for her in contrast to even Hillary Clinton a few years back, who received mostly negative coverage, just less so than Trump.
But that’s not all. While the corporate media was destroying its credibility, a new media ecosphere was exploding elsewhere outside its grasp.
It’s the age of the podcast. It turns out that when people hear a person like Donald Trump unfiltered for three hours, they realize how unfair the packaged, edited, sliced-and-diced version in legacy media can be (as well as rigged debates.)
And then there’s the X explosion. Having a free speech space is changing the world (thank you Elon), providing a check-and-balance, and is rapidly gaining audience share. The legacy media picked a side, and it was the wrong one.
Their controlled, packaged, edited fun house mirror version of reality seems very 2023.
2. The Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse on the Wisconsin Supreme Court
The raging partisans on the state Supreme Court (Ann Walsh Bradley, Jill Karofsky, Rebecca Dallet, and Janet Protasiewicz) have abandoned any sense of judicial independence. We all know how they’re going to rule on pretty much everything (from the left!), and they just don’t seem to care.
They engaged in petty nonsense, like stripping the esteemed David Prosser’s name from the state law library not long before he died. They acted like a super Legislature, ordering legislative maps redrawn by destroying precedent. Three – Walsh Bradley, Dallet, and Karofsky – even flip-flopped on the definition of “contiguous.” Their decision on maps technically came at the end of 2023, but the nightmare perpetrated by the Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse – including Janet “they’re rigged, but that’s not a conflict” Protasiewicz – continued into 2024. They even hired some pricey supposedly neutral consultants and, of course, one of them had trashed Donald Trump.
Of course, the maps ended up favoring Democrats, although the strategic genius of Assembly Speaker Robin Vos narrowly prevented a takeover in November. The leftist justices weren’t done yet; they tossed settled law out the window and ignored state law to allow dropboxes, just before the election of course.
Meanwhile, Act 10 is coming down the pike at warp speed. Any guesses how they will rule on that? Only former AG Brad Schimel can stop this trainwreck because his liberal opponent, Susan “I give slaps on the wrist to sex offenders” Crawford is arguably even further left than the majority already there. On top of it, they’re (thankfully) lazy. They were even named a loser of the year by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s hack gossip columnist Dan Bice, who revealed they issued the fewest opinions in 27 years.
3. The Vos Recall Clowns
The hapless effort (make that EFFORTS) to recall or defeat Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, despite his 92 percent lifetime conservative voting record from CPAC, failed miserably. And then failed a second time. Another candidate Andrew Cegielski tried to take Vos out in the primary but dropped out for mysterious reasons. Then, “independent” candidate Kelly Clark tried to take Vos out in the general election and lost.
Four strikes, and you’re out. Six if you count the past Adam Steen primary and write-in attempts.
The obsessive quest to take out the speaker RIGHT WHEN HIS TALENTS were needed to preserve the conservative majority (so we didn’t end up like Minnesota) thankfully hit a brick wall with the voters. Still, they distracted him and drained resources at a critical time. Like Ahab, they ended up tangled on their own harpoon.
Pest exterminator Matt Snorek deserves a special mention here, but he’s not the only member of the bumbling recall cabal. Vos shouldn’t be immune from criticism; no leader should be. But the efforts to defeat him so missed the mark on timing alone that it amounted to arguably the dumbest recall in U.S. history. After all, they were trying to recall him from a district that wasn’t going to exist in a couple of months anyway.
How bad was this clown show? The top recaller said he wasn’t a Republican. One woman affiliated with the recallers wrote that she would prefer extreme liberal Chris Larson over Vos. The recallers openly welcomed Democratic Party help, sought Democratic signatures, and made pitches to Democrats about why they should sign. Snorek, who filed the recall petition, is a failed Burlington candidate and pest exterminator who wrote, “We have Dems and Republicans very excited and helping in this effort!!!”
Two-thirds of signature gatherers in the second recall effort were from out of state.
The circulators involved some prominent names, including former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, ex-state Rep. Janel Brandtjen, and Harry Wait, who faces felony election fraud charges. The first recall efforts failed because of multiple problems with signatures turned in by out-of-state circulators, including accusations of forgery.
This ended up being the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.
As an aside, we considered making Brandtjen a loser of the year for her big primary loss to Dan Knodl, but she’s resurfaced with a legislative job thanks to state Rep. Chuck Wichgers.
4. UW-Milwaukee Chancellor Mark Mone
2024 was not UW-Milwaukee Chancellor Mark Mone’s finest hour. Mone ended up apologizing for the public university’s outrageous decision to weigh in on geopolitical issues.
That came after the university entered into a controversial agreement with pro-Palestinian activists, which called for a ceasefire, used Hamas propaganda to accuse Israel of plausible genocide, and labeled Israeli detainees (who include militants and terrorists) “hostages” while demanding their release.
And that came after UWM slow-walked action to dismantle a pro-Palestinian encampment on campus. The encampment, encircled by a makeshift fence, contained examples of pro-Oct. 7 and anti-Israel propaganda. It’s not legal to camp on university property. Three major Jewish organizations called on the Board of Regents to negate the agreement and raised serious concerns about Jewish students’ treatment on campus. Mone and other campus leaders tried to thread a needle, but they didn’t get this one right.
The embattled Mone finally announced he’s stepping away from the chancellor’s job.
5. Thomas Leager
Warning: Wisconsin 'America First' Senate Candidate Was Recruited by Dems https://t.co/ptFBAuzdF3 @wisgop @megellefsonshow @WICRs @DanODonnellShow @yount1130 @VickiMcKenna @MarkBellingShow #breakingnews #wisconsin https://t.co/ptFBAuzdF3
— Wisconsin Right Now (@wisconsin_now) October 13, 2024
By remaining on the ballot, Thomas Leager helped leftist U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin win another term over businessman Eric Hovde (along with the independent on the ballot), and he’s still at it, trashing conservatives on X.
The Associated Press exposed the fact that Leager was recruited by Democrats who were hoping to siphon votes from Hovde to help Baldwin, which is exactly what ended up happening. Leager said he was recruited by operatives calling themselves the “Patriots Run Project.” They said they were a “pro-Trump grassroots movement that attacked both parties and urged conservatives to run for office as independents,” the AP reported.
The AP found that the group “was supported by Democratic firms and donors who worked to install several pro-Trump independent candidates in key House races.” So, basically, Leager was tricked. But unlike candidates in other states, when he learned he was tricked, he remained on the ballot and doubled down.
Thanks a lot.
A special mention here goes as well to Mark Zuckerberg and his censors, who systematically removed our story from multiple pages reporting the AP’s findings about Leager as well as censoring other news stories that weren’t favorable to Baldwin. They even removed a reader’s post that said, “Vote Hovde!”
6. Dane County’s Sheriff Kalvin Barrett
First, Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett went on an unhinged politicized rant timed with a Kamala Harris visit. In it, he falsely claimed that his office cooperates with ICE.
Reminder: This is the guy who calls jail inmates “residents” as if they’re staying at a Days Inn.
In fact, Barrett’s office refused 90% of ICE requests to keep accused deportable criminals in the Dane County Jail so far this year, according to dozens of records obtained by Wisconsin Right Now through an open records request.
In 44 of 49 ICE detainer hold requests, Barrett’s department “declined to hold” the accused illegal criminals for ICE. Most of the few accepted holds involved federal judge’s orders for illegal entry charges. Many of the rejected holds involve extremely serious felonies, including an attempted homicide; a child rape case; a carjacking; violence against women, including strangulation; stalking; and repeat drunk drivers, including one facing a 6th offense.
What did Barrett say in his unhinged rant? “Additionally, statement about being ‘non-cooperative’ is false,” Barrett wrote. “To the authors of this inquiry, please aim your political theatrics in a different direction as you try to recover from the thorough, factual and strategic dismantling of your presidential candidate by VP Kamala Harris on Tuesday. The voters of Wisconsin will not be swayed by such remedial tactics.”
Wrong again, Sheriff.
7. The Milwaukee Reckless Driving ‘Art Car’
What is this monstrosity, you ask? Well, it is the Milwaukee reckless driving “art car.” You know, Milwaukee has a reckless driving epidemic, and rather than getting rid of the Collins Agreement or restoring the Milwaukee police force’s diminished strength, the city decided to tackle the problem by gluing some orange traffic cones on the back of a truck.
Technically called the Moving City, the art car was created by Public Artist in Residence (PAIR) Sarah Davitt. It cost $88,000. Of course, it did.
One month later, the truck broke down as the suspension failed due to the weight of the art. No word if and when the truck will ever be put back into service.
8. Charlie Sykes, Liz Cheney & Never Trumpers
Monday pre-NYE newsletter:https://t.co/Nn9rNDBHyx pic.twitter.com/qjhxriiwE1
— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) December 30, 2024
Charlie who? Charlie Sykes came to Waukesha County toting Liz Cheney and Kamala Harris along with him, and no one gave a sh*t.
The man who was once revered in that county is now despised. Worse, he’s irrelevant. Never Trumpers are fast going the way of the Dodo. As far as we can tell, they pretty much amount to Sykes, Cheney, George Conway, and Bill Kristol. No wonder he’s spending time in France. We’ve lost count of all the people Charlie once supported/built before turning on them. Is there a profit margin in that?
At least Charlie didn’t run down to Mar-a-Lago with Joe and Mika. As we speak, he’s relentlessly trolling on X, moving on to Musk. For morphing from purely contemptible to completely irrelevant, Charlie Sykes makes our loser of the year list.
9. The Wauwatosa School District
🚨 The Wauwatosa School District plans to shut down one of Wisconsin’s top-ranked STEM schools, because apparently too many white kids use the program. WILL is taking a stand in defense of the law and common sense, filing a federal complaint to protect ALL students' access to… pic.twitter.com/WgCuvFgRr7
— WILL (@WILawLiberty) December 16, 2024
Woke-tosa delivers again. When it’s not getting rid of fireworks in favor of drone shows or discouraging red and green at City Hall for Christmas (yeah, the latter was last year), it’s trying to close down the third-best elementary school.
Enter the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), thank God, which is threatening legal action against the Wauwatosa School District (WSD) and its Superintendent “after they announced plans to shut down the Wauwatosa STEM School, currently ranked the third-best elementary school in Wisconsin by U.S News and World Report. ”
Additionally, according to WILL, “WSD plans to close other STEM-specific programs and opportunities district-wide because the programs are too white . . . WILL is prepared to bring a civil action against the district to protect the constitutional rights of parents and students.”
Great plan, Wauwatosa, close a school that works.
10. Jill Underly & Her Consigliere Sachin Chheda
Jill Underly and her consigliere Sachin Chheda didn’t have a good year. Underly has drawn an opponent from the far left (Jeff Wright) and the center (Brittany Kinser, a pro-school choice candidate) in the state Department of Public Instruction race. She even lost the endorsement of WEAC’s PAC to Wright, and we’ve heard several times that Gov. Tony Evers is unhappy with her. He’s split with her publicly on several key issues and has yet to endorse her.
No wonder. Her year was marked by incompetence, deception, wokeism, and alleged cover-up.
Underly’s executive director, the powerful leftist ex-campaign operative Sachin Chheda, even donated to the committee working to push through a $252 million Milwaukee Public Schools referendum at the same time DPI was failing to tell the public that the district had not turned in key financial data as far back as September (which means that MPS also has earned a mention on our Wall of Shame.)
DPI finally came clean with the public in a May 24 scathing letter to Milwaukee Public Schools that outlined a series of missing financial documents, including its annual report and certified budget data, a problem dating back months. But, of course, that was AFTER the referendum, which strikes us as something voters had a right to know about.
Underly also lowered school testing scores. The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) is urging the Legislature to “rein in DPI’s ability to change accountability standards in education” after the state Department of Public Instruction (DPI) released new report card data on November 19 in which “the only expectation is mediocrity.”
WILL Research Director Will Flanders stated, “DPI has rewritten academic standards so that the only expectation is mediocrity, and Wisconsinites must not stand for it. Continual changes to both the Forward Exam and state report cards have created a ‘Frankenstein’s’ monster of an accountability system that outright hides declining academic achievement. The legislature must act in 2025.”
Underly even missed a key vote when the Board of Regents was weighing in on DEI in the university system. It later turned out she was on a European vacation. The Regents’ meetings were by Zoom. She couldn’t find a hotel lobby in Europe to dial in. Then, bizarrely, she arrogantly asked the entire state to wait for an answer until she could come back to vote. Again, she couldn’t find a hotel lobby in Europe with the internet.
And, of course, Underly remains on the wrong side of hot-button issues with growing public support, such as not allowing biological boys to compete in girls’ sports.
11. Wisconsin Children’s Hospital
It’s bad enough that Wisconsin’s Children’s Hospital cuts the breasts off of minors and pumps them with hormones. We documented that outrage in 2023.
This month, Children’s Hospital struck again, rejecting a toy donation for sick kids because the group’s name had the word “Blessings” in it. The hospital apologized, but it never should have happened.
The non-profit revealed the rejection on its Facebook page, saying the hospital claimed Brecken’s ‘blessings’ “can be perceived as a religious affiliation which goes against their policies.” Brecken’s Blessings is an organization “committed to making a difference in the lives of those affected by congenital heart disease (CHD).” The inspirational group is named after a beautiful little boy who died of the disease.
Since 2016, Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, located in Milwaukee, has given puberty blockers or hormone therapy to about 141 minors. Since 2021, the hospital has conducted 11 breast surgeries on minors, both augmentation and mastectomies.
There are many good people working at Children’s Hospital, to be sure. And the hospital does a lot of good work. But it needs to get off the woke train before it damages its reputation further. Reminder: In 2023, Children’s Wisconsin Foundation canceled the iconic Briggs & Al’s Run Walk because it wanted a more “inclusive” event.
12. Josh Kaul
Partisan hack and Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul had JUST ONE JOB. To fix the state crime lab, since that’s basically the issue he ran on. Yet, year after year, he has failed to do so, delivering worse numbers than his predecessor, Republican Brad Schimel.
Overall, cases handled by the Kaul-run crime lab have dropped 28 percent since 2016. That’s according to Kaul’s report. Kaul is also doing much worse processing controlled substances, trace evidence, and toxicology cases than Schimel did. Kaul’s office takes much longer to process DNA than Schimel’s, even though Schimel handled almost twice as many cases. The turnaround time increased under Kaul by 35 percent.
While his mismanagement continues to imperil public safety, Kaul has found time instead to launch partisan cases against lawyers who worked for President Donald Trump.
13. DNC
The Democratic National Committee hoisted itself on its own petard this year. The party and its Democratic cohorts in the White House covered up President Joe Biden’s cognitive problems until it was too late to hold a competitive primary. They should, minimally, have urged Biden to step aside when Robert Hur’s report came out, basically saying he wasn’t charging the president with a crime because he was an old man with a bad memory.
One bad debate later, and the DNC was anointing an awful candidate who had never won a primary after controversy about rigging the game for Hillary over other candidates and screwing legally with RFK Jr. until he got frustrated enough to jump ship and join forces with Trump. The DNC has also failed to articulate a coherent economic agenda, and the BLM-fueled defund the police movement has been an albatross.
Republicans even took back Congress.
14. State Rep. Lee Snodgrass
In a despicable, classless move, Democratic state Rep. Lee Snodgrass trashed former state Supreme Court Justice David Prosser just hours after his death from cancer. She took down her comment after criticism but couldn’t resist including another slam at him in her follow-up. Grow up.
15. U.S. Congressman Mark Pocan
He seems to spend most of his time obsessively trolling Derrick Van Orden on X. But he did take time to vote against a bill that calls for the deportation of illegal immigrants who are convicted of sex crimes and to commend Joe Biden for commuting the death sentences of horrific rapists and murderers. See the pattern.
For being an intemperate clown with dangerous anti-Israel positions to boot, Pocan makes our loser of the year list.
16. Hartland Arrowhead School Referendum
Turns out voters don’t think Hartland Arrowhead’s twin Taj Mahal high schools need to be torn down to make way for a new $400 million campus, counting interest. Arrowhead’s referendum wasn’t the only school referendum to bite the dust, but it stood out for its lofty price tag.
Special mention goes to any and all Wisconsin school districts that approved Biden’s Title IX nonsense, and there were some supposedly conservative ones.
17. Badger Institute
The supposedly conservative Badger Institute didn’t have a good year. The think tank did some good work (and employs some good people, like Pat McIlheran), but it also made an absolutely outrageous decision to “uninvite” conservative Rich Lowry from an event. Lowry caused a firestorm over a slip of the tongue on the Megyn Kelly podcast; he said he misspoke.
Lowry wrote a column for National Review headlined, “Next Time Cancel Me for Something I Actually Said.” In it, he wrote that he had been canceled by Badger Institute and Indiana State University. Many conservatives roasted Badger Institute on social media, arguing that a conservative organization should not help further what they see as a cancel culture hoax being perpetrated by the left against Lowry.
That comes on the heels of Badger’s big series that included positives about marijuana legalization. Badger appeared to some to be building the case for marijuana legalization here. This comes after the group launched a past series of stories pushing “criminal justice reform” in Wisconsin.
Badger’s President Mike Nichols touted the marijuana series as “real facts about pot in Wisconsin” and insisted the group doesn’t have a legalization agenda. However, it turned out that Jeremiah Mosteller, the author of some of the stories and a visiting fellow at Badger, is a vocal proponent of… marijuana legalization and prison reform who works for groups funded by major national figures who are aggressively pushing for legalization,
18. The Milwaukee Public Museum Officials
The Milwaukee Public Museum honchos insisted on breaking ground even though they haven’t raised the amount needed for a new museum, then stopped giving fundraising totals, and are still plowing ahead with their decision to essentially destroy the national treasure, including artwork and historic murals that can’t all be moved.
An organic protest movement of outraged citizenry even popped up, but it didn’t deter them, and construction whirred on. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “At a Dec. 3 meeting of the County Board’s Committee on Parks and Culture, (Museum CEO Ellen) Censky declined to give a specific number regarding where the museum is in achieving its $108 million goal in private fundraising toward the new museum’s $240 million price tag.”
Unacceptable. It’s like building a new house before you have enough cash to buy it.
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