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Stephanie Rapkin, Who Spat on a Leftist Protester, Is Herself a Leftist

Shorewood lawyer Stephanie Rapkin spat on a black leftist protester while she was being verbally assaulted by other protesters. The person she spat on was rushing at her, with his hands cupped at his mouth, presumably to shout at her.

This, of course, because yet another racial grievance, leading officials in Shorewood to huff and puff about how there is festering racism in their own, absurdly liberal, suburb.

And also to demand that Rapkin, a lawyer, be disbarred.

Rapkin is a Leftist

How Rapkin votes is, of course, secret. Being Jewish, the odds are strongly in favor of her voting for Democrats.

And in Shorewood which in 2016 voted 77% for Hillary Clinton, and 17% for Donald Trump, a Republican voting Jewish lawyer would be odd.

But it turns out that contributions to ideological political action committees are public, available on the Federal Election Commission website.

She hasn’t contributed much. In fact only one $5 contribution in the last 12 years (although there may have been more not reported to the Federal Elections Commission). But it was to the leftist group ActBlue, which advertises itself as “Powering Democratic candidates, committees, parties, organizations, and c4s around the country.”

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One might be inclined to ask “is this really the same Stephanie Rapkin?” Clicking through on the FEC web page, we can see that the person who made the contribution is a lawyer from Shorewood, Wisconsin, and that the contribution was earmarked for “Warren for President.”

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Searching the state database for contributions shows only three relatively small ones: $10 to liberal Marquette Law School professor Ed Fallone, running for state Supreme Court in 2013, $25 to Lindsay Grady running for Milwaukee Circuit Court Judge in 2012, and $10 to Sandy Pasch, running for State Assembly in 2011.

While she has made only these political contribution (that we can find), she also signed the Scott Walker Recall Petition.

It would be tempting for conservatives to gloat, saying this is an example of the revolution eating its own. But what we really have is an elderly woman who tried to go shopping one day, found herself in the middle of a mob at the Shorewood Metro-Mart, and when she was verbally assaulted struck out at one person who was charging at her.

This was, like the much more significant cases of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, the media and elites imposing their favored racial narrative on an incident that didn’t really fit.

But then, you can make it fit if you ignore the evidence. And you can then engage in an orgy of virtue signalling.

[Hat Tip:] Louis Mankiewicz and Cameron Ausen on Facebook, who knew about the Walker Recall.

[Update]

Mark Belling posted the following:

Stephanie Rapkin, the Shorewood attorney arrested twice over the weekend after confrontations with protesters, is an activist liberal in the community who signed the Scott Walker recall petition and donated to liberal Supreme Court candidate JoAnn Kloppenburg and Shorewood Village President Allison Rozek.

Rapkin, when applying for a vacant seat on the Shorewood Village Board two years ago, bragged that she co-hosted a fundraiser for Kloppenburg, the twice unsuccessful candidate for the Supreme Court and a Madison liberal. Rapkin, at the same meeting, bragged to Village President Rozek “I got you elected,” pointing out the fundraiser was jointly held for Kloppenburg and Rozek.

Rapkin is also a signer of the 2012 recall petition aimed at ousting former Governor Scott Walker.

[Note]

Updated 6/10 to reflect state campaign contributions, and information from Belling.

Tucker Carlson: Lock Down for Thee, but Not For Me

Liberal “Diversity” at the Huffington Post

Notice anything about this @HuffingtonPost editors meeting? 💃💃💪🏼💪🏼 pic.twitter.com/7sg4SyraPa

— Liz Heron (@lheron) May 20, 2016

Left Wing “Netroots” Really Hate Walker

From Politico:

PHOENIX, Ariz. — There’s no love lost for any of the 2016 Republican presidential contenders at the 2015 Netroots Nation confab, but attendees reserve a special kind of loathing for one candidate in particular: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

It’s an understandable sentiment given the setting. This year’s edition of the annual convention of liberal activists is heavily focused on bread-and-butter economic issues, with a strong union presence. The AFL-CIO, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Education Association have booths set up near the center of the convention hall, and many of the other booths are focused on one economic topic or another. Two large American flags with rainbow stripes instead of alternating red and white hang from the LGBT Netroots Connect booth, an indication of how forcefully gay rights are defended here.

All of which makes this a very hostile crowd for Walker, who regularly trumpets his victories over public-sector unions in his home state, and now weaves his opposition to the Supreme Court’s recent same-sex marriage decision into his stump speech as well.

“Scott Walker is probably the most dangerous of the Republicans in my opinion. And that’s just my opinion,” Dan O’Neal, the Arizona state coordinator for the Progressive Democrats of America, said. “He and Bush are probably the two most dangerous in terms of competing with Bernie or Hillary.”

It’s not that there are any warm and fuzzy feelings toward the rest of the GOP field, but it’s Walker who stirs the most negative passions among liberal activists.

“I mean, if you look at the records, Scott Walker has destroyed the economy and it’s been devastating for workers there,” Stephanie Taylor, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said on Thursday as she sat in a conference room alongside Adam Green, the other founder of the liberal political action committee. “I would hate to see that happen to America.”

Green quickly interjected, saying Walker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie are the least appealing of the bunch. “But that’s not to say we could live with the other ones,” he added.

This year, Netroots attendees sporting pro-Bernie Sanders buttons are everywhere (on Thursday, it was hard to find a Hillary Clinton logo), and none of them had positive things to say about Walker.

And just as Sanders, with his unabashedly pro-labor views, fires up his left-leaning supporters, Walker’s union-busting boasts send them into paroxysms of rage.

“To me he looks like a little twerp,” said Fred Koegel, a retired member of the Iron Workers of Chicago Local 11 union. “He looks like the kid that hired the bullies in the schoolyard to protect him. That’s him, OK?”

This kind of raw hatred on the part of the left has, in fact, proven to be a huge political asset for Walker.

It is a truism among political scientists that people with intense preferences matter more in politics than people with bland opinions. But it doesn’t work that way when extremists are conspicuously deranged. The leftists’ tantrums in Wisconsin didn’t seem to hurt Walker. Ordinary voters are likely to sympathize with the targets of the extremists. This is especially true when the target of the extremists is rather mild-mannered and earnest. (Between left extremists and Donald Trump, the issue is more complex.)

Most certainly, nobody in the Walker campaign is crying in their beer over news like this.

Palermo’s Confronts Student Activists in Campus Forum

Something unusual happened on campus last night. Leftist student activists got to confront representatives of a business they have been demonizing, and the business got to respond.

It happens very infrequently on this campus that people on two sides of any debate face off before an audience that gets to hear both sides.

The carnage, in fact, was considerable.

The representatives from Palermo’s Pizza were Chris Dresselhuys, Vice President of Marketing and Tom Branigan, who teaches part time in the College of Communication. They faced a student audience, a substantial portion of which consisted of activists from Youth Empowered in the Struggle, a branch of the leftist, pro-illegal immigration group Voces de la Frontera, which has been trying to force Palermo’s employees into a union.

Also present were two members of the Marquette administration, Vice President for Administration Arthur Scheuber and Vice President for Student Affairs L. Christopher Miller.

Given that the discussion was dominated by questions from student activists, the intellectual level was . . . well, not the most erudite.

Student activists asked the same questions over and over, appearing not to have noticed that they had been answered two or three or four times already. They often rambled incoherently during their stint at the microphone. And they made some absurdly bogus arguments.

One young woman, for example, stated that, since the Palermo’s representative was constantly denying wrongdoing, that indicated that Palermo’s was indeed guilty of wrongdoing!

Franz Kafka, call Palermo’s and place your take-out order.

Scheuber and Miller explained that they had examined all the charges against Palermo’s and found them to be without foundation. Palermo’s had been forced to fire workers who were in the country illegally (or at least, could not prove their right to be in the country to the satisfaction of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which had audited Palermo’s).

Voces de la Frontera lied to the fired workers, claiming that if they joined a union, their immigration problems would go away.

Chris Piszczek, a member of Voces de la Frontera who approached the microphone in attire reminiscent of Berkeley, Class of 1968, insisted that the mere fact that allegations were made should cause Marquette to want to distance itself from the company.

Piszczek claimed to have been thoroughly immersed  in Catholic Social Thought, with its concern for the poor and the marginalized.  After the event, we asked him whether he thought abortion ought to be illegal, and he responded that “that’s not part of Catholic social thought.”

Miller and Scheuber gave coherent answers to student questions – and indeed repeated them multiple times as questions were repeated multiple times. Miller, unfortunately, pandered a bit to the activist students. Actually, he pretty much kissed ass. He commended the students for their “passion,” when they should have been scolded for their callow, uninformed moral preening.

It’s not clear any minds were changed. The Youth Empowered in the Struggle contingent, easily identified by the applause they gave the standard activist talking points, numbered perhaps 15 students. The rest of the audience was hard to read, but at least one member said it was embarrassing how poorly the student activists fared.

According to the Marquette Tribune:

Marisa Galvez, a senior in the College of Arts & Sciences and one of those who called for the panel, said the administration still needs to take more notice to the issues students have with Palermo’s as a company.

That’s the standard activist way of thinking: “our position is so obviously right, and our arguments so obviously good, that if somebody doesn’t agree with us, it must be because they are not listening.”

Typically, people are listening, and think you are wrong.

The activists claimed to represent “the students,” but there is no evidence that any majority of Marquette students even know or care about the issue. And if they did, it’s not at all clear they would agree with the activists.

Marquette in 2013

Marquette in 2013 is not Berkeley in 1968, but there are ghettos of leftist activism on campus, particularly around the Center for Peacemaking, the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center, the Women’s and Gender Studies program, Residence Life, the humanities departments, as well as Sociology and Psychology.

Within these cocoons, critical thinking is not encouraged, and students can luxuriate in a smug sense of righteousness, without worrying too much about complex issues in the real world. Do unions really help workers? Is racism the main problem blacks face? Is anybody who doesn’t think that abortion should be legal sexist? Is anybody who opposes gay marriage a homophobe?

Asking these questions is not encouraged, and indeed not even really allowed. The answers are assumed to be obvious.

Moral Seriousness

By coincidence, yesterday afternoon just a couple of hours before the forum, we talked to a student who is going to serve with Teach for America this summer, working in a poor school in the Mississippi Delta. He won’t bring World Peace, but he is devoting a few months of his life to something that may make things just a bit better for some children.

That’s a morally serious choice. Whining about the evils of Palermo’s Pizza isn’t a morally serious choice. It’s a cheap way to feel self-righteous.

Politically Correct Marquette Faculty Rally Behind FemSex

From the Marquette Tribune, an open letter from faculty who support the FemSex workshop, from which Marquette recently pulled support.

The letter engages in the standard blather about how great the workshop was. It further makes a few absurd claims, such as:

By affirming the worth and importance of female desire and fostering people’s understanding and appreciation of their bodies and sexuality, the curriculum also cultivates a campus climate in which the sexual assaults that brought Marquette under public scrutiny two years ago can become less likely.

How this would supposedly happen is a mystery. How writing pornographic stories, or coloring pictures of female genitalia (both part of FemSex at Marquette) might prevent rape is something only a feminist could imagine.

But what is interesting is the list of faculty who signed the letter:

Eugenia Afinoguenova, Lauren Applegate, Tara Baillargeon, Danielle Beverly, Amy Blair, Omega Burckhardt, Gerry Canavan, Roberta Coles, Ed de St. Aubin, Eric Dunnum, Ellen Eckman, Jenn Fishman, Leah Flack, Kristen Foster, Stephen Franzoi, Melissa Ganz, Barbara Glore, Beth Godbee, John Grych, Angelique Harris, Steven Hartman-Keiser, Heather Hathaway, Heather Hlavka, Jim Holstein, CJ Hribal, Andrew Kahrl, Astrida Kaugars, Laurieann Klockow, Lezlie Knox, Christine Krueger, Robert Lowe, Timothy McMahon, Jodi Melamed, Dawne Moon, Sameena Mulla, Kristy Nielson, Rebecca Nowacek, Debra Oswald, Tony Peressini, Anthony Porcelli, Sareene Proodian, Krista Ratcliffe, Heidi Schweizer, Mary Anne Siderits, Angela Sorby, James South, Peter Staudenmaier, Meghan Stroshine, Theresa Tobin, Robert Topp, Sarah Wadsworth, Elizabeth Wawrzyniak, Amelia Zurcher

This is pretty much a Who’s Who of the politically correct secular caucus on campus, full of the names of the people who wanted to hire aggressively lesbian dean candidate Jodi O’Brien. Among the signers is a psychology professor who demeaned the Bible as “sexist” by ripping a passage out of context.

Then there is a philosophy professor whose class was approvingly described by a student acolyte:

I just finished up an entire class on how patriarchy controls every structure in our society and how women are systematically prevented from being equal to men (Capitalism and Catholicism are among the most guilty parties).

Then there is James South who, as chair of the Philosophy Department tore down from the door of a graduate student a quote from humorist Dave Barry of which he disapproved!

This, in other words, is part of the “we don’t really like Catholicism, and want to undermine it when we can” lobby at Marquette.