by Isaac Schorr
Francesca Hong hits the campaign trail like any other candidate — shaking hands, kissing babies, petting dogs and smiling through selfies.
Watching her conduct the mundane business of politicking, it’s easy to forget the absurdity of her worldview and the chaos that making her Wisconsin’s next governor would invite.
Hong has called for the abolition of police, prisons and Thanksgiving; she’s argued the first exists to “uphold white supremacy”; she called the last a “colonizer holiday” that killed “Indegenous folx”; she’s even pointed to her white ex-husband and half-white son as examples of her lamentable “proximity to whiteness.”
On Monday, at a get out the vote event in Sun Prairie, a blue-leaning suburb of Madison, Hong was confronted over her past views.
“You know, I was actually trying to become a sports journalist when I first went to college. So I learned then you have some hot takes, sometimes bad takes on Twitter, and I let my feelings out into the world,” she explained before changing the subject to her favorite refrains: “permanent affordability,” tax the ultra rich” and a whole host of other “universal” goodies.
Hot takes, huh?
Like Stephen A. Smith spouting off about the Cowboys?
Or your friend who likes Nickelback?
The hot takes fired off by Hong earlier in her thirties — the ones she’s halfheartedly walked back to the benefit of her statewide campaign in purple Wisconsin — proved far from harmless.
In June 2020, Hong demanded that the city government defund the police.
In November of that same year, she renewed that call for them to be “re-imagined and re-structured at every level.”
In between, riots in cities across the country, egged on by the Democratic Party and facilitated by its progressive wing, claimed the lives of more than two dozen Americans and resulted in billions of dollars in property damage.
Among the dead: 77-year-old David Dorn, a retired black police captain who was murdered for trying to stop a burglary in St. Louis.
Among the other victims: hundreds of small businesses — many of them minority-owned — that never recovered.
According to the Council on Criminal Justice, the homicide rate in a sample of 30 American cities increased by 68% between April and July 2020.
According to the FBI, the national homicide rate spiked from 5 per 100,000 people in 2019 to 6.5 in 2020 and 6.8 in 2021.
And all that’s to say nothing of the countless robberies, carjackings, muggings and other indignities law-abiding citizens suffered through during those lawless years.
The anti-American iconoclasm championed by Hong, too, had consequences.
New York removed a statue of Thomas Jefferson from City Hall.
In Portland, rioters set fire to and toppled a monument of George Washington.
Boston took down a sculpture of none other than the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln.
And the unpatriotic, ahistorical narrative of the 1619 Project took deep root in our nation’s educational system and collective consciousness.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the socialist sensation mulling whether to mound a bid for the Senate or White House next year, test drove a similar dismissal of Hong’s old tweets on Sunday.
“My understanding that Francesca Hong has made clear her present stances to her electorate… she’s moved away from it,” she explained before quipping that “Woke 1 was crazy” with a laugh.
“Woke 1 was crazy,” “hot takes,” nervous chuckles, shifting feet; did they really think we’d forget what their reckless rhetoric cost?
Lies were told — and believed.
Lives were ruined — and ended.
The takes were so hot that cities burned.
Yet it wasn’t until the Left was faced with the electoral consequences of their radicalism that they professed to have had a change of heart.
They’ll never own up to what they did because they still believe in the ideas responsible.
And given the chance they would — and will — do it all again.
