And So the Police State Starts - WI Republicans Show Their Fear of Smart People

Just a few hours ago, a good friend of mine posted this quote on Facebook:

"Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation’s troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen."
~Ayn Rand

Thanks, HM.

I responded that maybe in the case of the state of Wisconsin it was the public sector workers who were the scapegoat to the Tea Party and the far right of Republican party.

Dr. William Cronon

Then I found the following articles:

Did Wisconsin GOP target Scott Walker critic with “McCarthyite” tactics? By Greg Sargent (A Washington Post article from today)

Wisconsin’s Radical Break By William Cronon (The original New York Times Article)

I won't bore you by making you re-read these articles. Let me sum up. William Cronon is a professor at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. He wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times, Wisconsin's Radical Break. Later the same week, the Republican Party of Wisconsin, under the open records laws of Wisconsin sent an email requesting that Dr. Cronon's employer go thorough his emails looking for certain names and information.

This is the list of words they want information on:

"Republican, Scott Walker, recall, collective bargaining, AFSCME, WEAC, rally, union, Alberta Darling, Randy Hopper, Dan Kapanke, Rob Cowles, Scott Fitzgerald, Sheila Harsdorf, Luther Olsen, Glenn Grothman, Mary Lazich, Jeff Fitzgerald, Marty Beil, or Mary Bell." (1)

Dr. Cronon wrote in detail about and very openly about these events in

A Tactic I Hope Republicans Will Rethink:Using the Open Records Law to Intimidate Critics 

This is Dr.Cronon's first ever blog posting.

What happens now?

The first thing that will happen is that the Governor's office and the Republicans in the Legislature will deny any knowledge of this tactic. Not true. Not any more true than if the National Democratic Party did something similar to an enemy of Barack Obama and he said that he knew nothing.

 The next thing will be for the Republicans to defend their actions. Those actions are indefensible. There should be emails that contain all of this information: Dr. Cronon is a Professor of History and these are historical times.

What should happen? The Governor and the Legislature should renounce this act. Using these laws to violate the privacy of  a private citizen and an intellectual is disgusting. This law was designed to create transparency in the Government, not attack an individual citizen for his personal views.

Above I stated that I believe that the Republican Party is scapegoating public employees. They are also anti-intelligentsia. Conservative movements in the past and now tend to attack intellectuals first. De-fund schools, de-fund universities, and vilify educators in an effort to staunch knowledge based debate. 

For the record, not all Republicans or Conservatives or Tea Party members are not interested in intellectual debate.  However, when mob rules take over, all groups go to the lowest common denominator.