No longer fringe, small-town voters fear democracy's demise
HUDSON, Wis. (AP) — A word -- “Hope” -- is stitched onto a throw pillow in the little hilltop farmhouse. Photographs of children and grandchildren speckle the walls. In the kitchen, an envelope is decorated with a hand-drawn heart. “Happy Birthday, My Love,” it reads.
Out front, past a pair of century-old cottonwoods, the neighbors’ cornfields reach into the distance.
John Kraft loves this place. He loves the quiet and the space. He loves that you can drive for miles without passing another car.
But out there? Out beyond the cornfields, to the little western Wisconsin towns turning into commuter suburbs, and to the cities growing ever larger?
Out there, he says, is a country that many Americans wouldn’t recognize.
It’s a dark place, dangerous, where freedom is under attack by a tyrannical government, few officials can be trusted and clans of neighbors might someday have to band together to protect one another. It’s a country where the most basic beliefs -- in faith, family, liberty -- are threatened.
And it’s not just about politics anymore.
“It’s no longer left versus right, Democrat versus Republican,” says Kraft, a software architect and data analyst. “It’s straight up good versus evil.”
He knows how he sounds. He’s felt the contempt of people who see him as a fanatic, a conspiracy theorist.
But he’s a hero in a growing right-wing conservative movement that has rocketed to prominence here in St. Croix County.
Just a couple years ago, their talk of Marxism, government crackdowns and secret plans to destroy family values would have put them at the far fringes of the Republican party.
But not anymore. Today, despite midterm elections that failed see the sweeping Republican victories that many had predicted, they...