New York Post

Liberal media’s Waukesha woe

- Miranda Devine mdevine@nypost.com

THERE’S a reason that the Waukesha massacre has faded from the national media. There’s a reason that MSNBC and CNN and CBS refer to it as merely a “parade crash” and quickly move on to other news.

There’s a reason that President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have not prejudged the violent, racist, BLM-supporting career criminal charged with murder for driving his SUV deliberate­ly into a Christmas parade in the mostly white Wisconsin town of Waukesha on Sunday, killing six innocents, including an 8-year-old boy, and injuring 62 others.

There’s a reason the media are incurious about the hate-filled, anti-white social-media posts of suspect Darrell Brooks (right).

Waukesha is of no interest to these people, not just because the story does not serve their political purposes, as the Kyle Rittenhous­e case did when they wanted to paint Donald Trump as a white supremacis­t.

No, they are burying the Waukesha story because it threatens the very core of the progressiv­e revolution convulsing the country: criminal-justice “reform.”

Six people would still be alive if Milwaukee had not been hijacked by progressiv­e prosecutor­s.

“The Milwaukee experiment,” it was called in a gushing Jeffrey Toobin article in the New Yorker in 2015, praising Milwaukee’s Democratic DA John Chisholm.

Elected in 2006, Chisholm is a leading light of the progressiv­e prosecutor movement.

His office let out Brooks on $1,000 bail Nov. 16, after he allegedly punched his girlfriend in the face and deliberate­ly ran over her with the SUV he allegedly used in Sunday’s attack. Brooks’ criminal record is over 50 pages long.

Chisholm feigns dismay at the low bail now, but it was part of his plan.

He knows what happens when you let violent, recidivist criminals out of jail, if you handicap police and strip them of their powers, if you break the adversaria­l system, turn prosecutor­s into social workers, and close prisons.

Everyone knows. Crime and violence skyrocket, along with mental illness and homelessne­ss. There is nothing compassion­ate or equitable about progressiv­e criminal-justice reforms. They tyrannize the weakest and most vulnerable, the elderly, the infirm, and women and children.

Yes, Chisholm knew and he didn’t care.

“Is there going to be an individwou­ld ual I divert, or I put into [a] treatment program, who’s going to go out and kill somebody?” he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2007. “You bet. Guaranteed. It’s guaranteed to happen.” Guaranteed.

Chisholm wasn’t elected as a progressiv­e, but his priority immediatel­y became eliminatin­g “racial disparity.”

He didn’t care if more black people were committing crimes. It was all about the outcome.

Today, he boasts he has almost achieved his goal of eliminatin­g racial disparity in jails: “In some areas there is almost no disparity,” he told a panel March 11, when he appeared with notorious San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin talking about the “Progressiv­e Prosecutor movement.”

Chisholm boasted that he had revolution­ized the role of prosecutor “from being a line prosecutor who takes and reviews frozen moments in time . . . and actually get the prosecutor out of the courthouse and right into the community and give them a broad mandate to help solve problems.”

He calls these quasi-social workers “community prosecutor­s . . . Allowing prosecutor­s to do things beside just prosecutin­g cases is actually very empowering . . . We have to move away from what we all [have] been indoctrina­ted in, the adversaria­l system.”

The only obstacle he says he faces now is “fear” of crime in the community, which drives state legislator­s to make “bad law.” With 191 homicides last year in Milwaukee alone, “it’s really hard to make an argument.”

“We’re at a time in our nation when violence is simply overwhelmi­ng the sense of our perspectiv­e of safety . . . People do not feel that they are safe.”

I wonder why that is. Boudin told the panel that just being a “progressiv­e prosecutor wasn’t enough anymore.”

He said “my friend,” former Queens DA candidate Tiffany Caban, “said it best . . . It’s not about being progressiv­e or conservati­ve. It’s about being ‘decarceral.’ ” This means abolishing prisons. This is not what Americans want. But it’s an article of faith for progressiv­es.

You just had to watch Rep. Rashida Tlaib trying to justify her prison-abolition bill in an interview this week with Axios’ Jonathan Swan to see that the policy is so absurd she has no way of justifying it. Although her bill explicitly release everyone from jail, she simply denied that that means child molesters and violent rapists will roam the streets.

Progressiv­es pretend that everyone in jail is just there for smoking weed, while showing callous disregard for the victims of crime.

In case you were under any illusion that this all is not an ideologica­l strategy to destroy law and order, take a look at Boudin’s revolution­ary pedigree.

He is the son of Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, Marxist terrorist members of the Weather Undergroun­d, who were jailed for the murders of two police officers and a security guard during the Brink’s robbery of 1981 in Rockland County. Boudin was 14 months old at the time and was brought up by Barack Obama’s radical mentor and Weather Undergroun­d luminary Bill Ayers.

Last year, Boudin successful­ly lobbied then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo to commute his father’s 75-years-to life sentence and Gilbert was released this month. His mother was released in 2003 and immediatel­y given an honored position as an adjunct professor at Columbia University where she works on — you guessed it — dismantlin­g “mass incarcerat­ion,” and transformi­ng the criminal-justice system. These people are embedded in the establishm­ent.

Guess what else domestic terrorists affiliated with the Weather Undergroun­d did on Nov. 7, 1983? They bombed the Capitol in Washington, DC, blowing a hole in a wall and pulverizin­g, windows, chandelier­s and furniture. Yet President Biden tells us that the worst attack on democracy was the Capitol riot on Jan. 6 this year.

One of the convicted conspirato­rs for the 1983 Capitol bombing, Susan Rosenberg, had her 58-year sentence commuted by President Bill Clinton in 2001.

What did she do then? She was instrument­al in founding and fundraisin­g for Black Lives Matter, a self-declared Marxist organizati­on that advocates for the abolition of the nuclear family.

So we come full circle. Progressiv­e criminal-justice reforms are not about equal justice. When it comes to Trump supporters, such as Kyle Rittenhous­e or the Jan. 6 defendants still in pretrial detention in a DC jail, progressiv­es are viciously punitive.

They are weaponizin­g the criminal-justice system to terrorize their ideologica­l opponents and create mayhem.

This is a revolution, and we will all be its victims unless we wake up.

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