Barnes leads group behind AOC, defund the police movement
OSHKOSH – In case you missed it, 1130 WISN’s Dan O’Donnell connected the dots on the extreme-left wing group behind Mandela Barnes’ candidacy for US Senate. Barnes is a leader of the “Working Families Party” – a group that has prioritized defunding the police and electing extreme socialist squad members like AOC.
Read the full story from Dan O’Donnell here, or find excerpts below.
The Radical Left-Wing Political Machine Behind Mandela Barnes
Dan O’Donnell
News/Talk 1130 WISN
August 22, 2022
To fully understand who Wisconsin Democratic Senate candidate Mandela Barnes is, one must first understand that he is, at heart, not really a Democrat.
He is running as a Democrat and serves as the Democratic Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin, but he is a founding member and self-described “long-time leader” of the state’s chapter of the Working Families Party, a national left-wing organization responsible for supporting and mainstreaming the most radical ideas and politicians in America.
It was the primary force behind Socialist Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Corttez’s shocking rise to power in 2018, a major driver of the “Defund the Police” movement in 2020, and for years has promoted the the abolition of both the Electoral College and Senate filibuster and packing of the Supreme Court for partisan advantage..
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“I was a member of the Working Families Party before I ran for lieutenant governor, because the Working Families Party is committed to building the America that we all want to see,” Barnes said while delivering the official Working Families Party response to President Trump’s State of the Union Address in 2019.
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Defunding the police was a major component of the Working Families Party’s platform even before the death of George Floyd brought the issue to national prominence, and Barnes has been in lockstep with his party for years.
“Do you agree that police budgets should be maybe completely done away with or defunded?” he was asked in a PBS Wisconsin interview shortly after Floyd’s death.
“Not completely done away with,” Barnes answered, [but] we need to invest more in neighborhood services and programming for our residents, for our communities on the front end. Where will that money come from? Well, it can come from over-bloated police departments.”
Less than a month later, he tweeted “Defund the police only dreams of being as radical as a Donald Trump pardon,” and in September 2020 called for the dismantling of the entire system of law enforcement following the decision by a grand jury in Kentucky not to charge officers in the death of Breonna Taylor.
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Once again, Barnes has been in lockstep with the Working Families Party’s position on bail reform. As a state representative in 2016, he sponsored a bill that would end cash bail in Wisconsin. That died in committee, but Barnes was undeterred. If elected to the Senate, one of his top aides says, he will push to end cash bail nationally.
“The lieutenant governor believes we should decide who is imprisoned before their trial begins based on how much of a risk they pose to the community, not on how much money they have,” Barnes aide Maddy McDaniel told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “The bottom line is money shouldn’t have anything to do with public safety.”
Rather amazingly, those comments came just three months after a man free on bail rammed his car into the Waukesha Christmas Parade, killing six people and injuring more than 50 others.
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That change, based on the Working Families Party’s longtime embrace of left-wing radicalism, will largely be an even further push into socialism, as Barnes would be the first founding member of a state Working Families Party chapter to be elected to the United States Senate. The Party is clearly excited about his chances, as well as the possibility of him being the Senate’s first Squad member.
As the Party put it in a message endorsing the current Squad members earlier this year: “Our progressive coalition in Congress is growing, and so is our power. When we re-elect the Squad and elect more progressives to join them, we’ll achieve the real working families majority we know is possible.”
Read the full report from Dan O’Donnell here.
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