The Socialist Surge Reaches Wisconsin: Governor Candidate Tests the Left’s Limits

The socialist wave has already crashed well beyond New York City. Now the Democratic Socialists of America are even taking swings at swing states.

The latest far-Left darling is Francesca Hong, a leading candidate to win the Democrat primary in the Wisconsin governor’s race.

One might call her the Zohran Mamdani of the Midwest, but there are a few contenders now vying for that title.

Hong has unsurprisingly grabbed hold of the issues that have become hallmarks of the insurgency taking place within the Democratic Party.

She has stood proudly by her “democratic socialist” label, made wealthy people the bogeymen of her campaign (despite a seemingly upper-middle-class constituency), unrepentantly backed the obliteration of U.S. immigration law enforcement, and—most importantly to Democrat primary voters it seems—she’s virulently anti-Israel.

Hong has frequently appeared on the podcast of leftwing anti-Israel influencer Hasan Piker, one of the folks on the ship of fools that recently visited Cuba to declare their sympathy with communist tyrants.

She’s said on his show that she agreed with his positions—like creating government-run grocery stores and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement—and further noted that she hoped that “what happens here is a potential foreshadowing of what’s to happen in the future.”

No surprise, Hong has a long record of endorsing the most bonkers ideas of the Great Awokening.

In 2020, she posted on X that she backed “defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police” while voicing support for the Black Lives Matter movement.

She later said according to CNN that “police exist to uphold white supremacy. Defund then abolish. Reform can’t be an option.”

Since 2021 she’s gone a little more squirrely in her stated desire for total police abolition.

It’s a somewhat less popular position these days after a historic national crime wave.

But she didn’t exactly recant either.

According to a statement she gave CNN in May her past support for abolishing the police was about having a “wider conversation around police abolition” grounded in a belief that “the current system is not working.”

She continued: “While I envision a world where public safety is not synonymous with law enforcement, I recognize that this paradigm shift is a very long term vision and my focus is building systems of care for now and for our future.”

Let me translate the politico-speak. She’s still for abolishing the police, but since voters hate the idea, she’s going to hem a haw a bit more around the edges to sound more reasonable.

It’s not just police she’s called to eliminate.

Hong apparently envisions a world without prisons too.

At a recent political rally she told the audience that “my perfect world would be a world without prisons.” When she was later questioned about her views on prison abolition a spokeswoman for her campaign told the Milwaukie Journal Sentinel that, “a world where needs are met and there’s no need for prisons sounds like a goal worth working towards.”

That condescending statement is so perfectly in tune with generations of other smug, and utterly wrong socialists and communists who’ve plagued our world for more than a century.

We are all just so small-minded and mean for not pursuing the perfect world that exists in their heads.

We once had a world with virtually no police and prisons. Justice was meted out harshly, and often by vigilantes. When you abolish the police and do away with prisons, justice is handled more often than not by lynch mobs.

So, this “progressive” idea of prison abolition is quite regressive.

Furthermore, she’s staked out the position that crime is a result of material deprivation and not other cultural or personal factors. They really do believe that if people’s “needs are met” crime would go away. But there’s no evidence of that at all. In the worst years of the Great Depression, for instance, crime declined.

Unfortunately, the never-ending road to Hong’s fantasy world without police and prisons runs straight through hell. You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but she keeps on coming back to the chagrin of leftists everywhere, and to the misery of all who fall under their rule.

Once upon a time. Hong’s views would have been common only on the fringe of college campuses. Now they are effectively “mainstream” among Democrats, which is one of the many reasons the party has few antibodies against this movement.

The new socialists are just willing to say publicly what their base wants.

The result is that they are fully transforming the Democratic Party in their image, reshaping the party infrastructure to serve their goals. So far, this process has mostly been taking place in deep, blue bastions. But their aspirations are national and international.

This rising band of socialists and communists isn’t happy with a few House seats, the mayorship of America’s biggest cities, or the governorship of a single purple state. They want it all. And they are testing the outer boundaries of where their ideology can succeed in the hopes that one day soon they’ll have it all.