The following are Letters to the Editor, published in the Star-Observer last week.
Readers wrote of the political landscape in Wisconsin and nationwide. Another person wrote in to discuss the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Read the letters below:
What’s right for Wisconsin?
I may just be a student at Hudson High School, but I feel it necessary as the leader of a youth political party to write to the editor when I feel encouraged to do so.
I write here today to talk about Francesca Hong, the DSA gubernatorial candidate who lost narrowly to David Crowley. On paper it seems she is working for Wisconsin families, however I believe there is a bad side to her that we should all know about. First: the old social media post she made about how she wants to cancel Thanksgiving, which is outrageous! To cancel Thanksgiving is to cancel a longstanding American tradition, which would anger many American families. Now I must admit, she did backtrack on this, but it was still a giant stain on her reputation.
Then there is wanting to completely abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement. You can have any opinion on ICE that you want, but I want to make it clear that I believe ICE can be reformed into something much better than it is now. Without ICE, who will enforce immigration and customs? The system we had before ICE wasn’t very good, so what else can we do?
Now to speak to local politics. I am appreciative of how our mayor, Rich O’Connor, has done, but I feel he could do a lot better. I am not saying past mayoral candidate Liz Malanaphy would have been better. I know her, quite well, actually. Very kind lady and I have nothing but respect for her time knowing me way back at E.P. Rock Elementary, but our views are very different so I do not feel she has the proper ideas to be mayor, in my honest opinion. I respect her very dearly and I do hope she is reading this. I may be a conservative but I can respect progressives, too. The last thing I would like to talk about is state Assembly candidate Kevin Knoke: I know a couple people who knew him very well during his time working at Willow River Elementary and they all had good things to say. However, I just feel he is not the right candidate for Wisconsin families.
Jacob Gustafson
Hudson
Tiffany agrees with Trump on everything
Tom Tiffany wants you to believe he’s the perfect candidate to be Wisconsin’s governor. Turns out, we have very different ideas of what “perfect” means.
In a perfect world, our tax money would support affordable healthcare, affordable housing, healthy and free school lunches, equitable educational opportunities and overall support for children, the elderly and veterans.
Instead of taking care of Wisconsin, however, Tiffany’s idea of a perfect world includes spending a trillion dollars to fund a forever war with no objective, no foreseeable ending and zero regard for human life. His idea of making Wisconsin and America great includes approving billions of dollars to fund enforcers that roam our streets, tear apart families, lock children in cages and terrorize our communities.
Tiffany doesn’t care about the people in his own 7th Congressional District, let alone in Wisconsin. His voting record speaks for itself; 100% of the time he voted to take away vital programs for Wisconsinites, many of which will go into effect after the midterm elections.
In Wisconsin alone, Tiffany’s “YES! Mr. Trump” votes: cut SNAP benefits, hurting about 1 in 10 households; cut Medicaid, hurting more than 1 in 5 people; cut veterans services, hurting more than 7 in 100 people; cut Medicare, hurting more than 1 in 4 people; cut Social Security (OASDI benefits), hurting more than 1 in 4 people; and the list continues. A report from the Center for American Progress Action Fund found that Tiffany has voted in line with Trump’s priorities on every piece of legislation.
Spending trillions of dollars on weapons while Wisconsin residents, including those in his own district, go hungry, can’t afford healthcare, can’t find affordable housing and don’t have fully funded schools is a sure path to failure and a poor investment in Wisconsin’s future. Perfection is a high bar, but our state can certainly do better than this.
Yes, Tiffany’s idea of perfection and mine are vastly different. While his focuses on pain, death and destruction, mine is all about making Wisconsin and America great by making sure we all do better.
This November, I won’t give Tiffany any more chances. David Crowley knows Wisconsin. He knows what we need and he and his team will build up, not tear down what Wisconsin has built. This November, I will vote for lunches, not landmines; healthcare, not concentration camps; education, not electric gloves.
Laurie Harmon
Hudson
The ungrounding of Palestine
The United Nations Genocide Convention includes “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” among the acts that can constitute genocide.
South Africa made this specific prohibition central to its case against Israel before the International Court of Justice. While a final ruling on the merits may take years, the ICJ has already ordered Israel to “take all measures within its power” to prevent acts forbidden under the Convention.
Physicians for Human Rights Israel issued a July 2025 report titled Destruction of Conditions of Life: A Health Analysis of the Gaza Genocide. It concludes:
“Though Israel has cited military necessity…the scale, pattern and nature of the operations, as well as accompanying statements, indicate a broader policy aimed at destroying Palestinian society in Gaza and making the enclave uninhabitable.”
The report argues that the targeted destruction of hospitals, obstruction of medical aid and the killing and detention of over 1,800 health care workers reveal a “deliberate and systematic dismantling of Gaza’s health and life-sustaining systems.”
Israeli architect Eyal Weizman makes a related argument in his 2026 book, Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide. Weizman documents how Israel’s demolition of Gaza has made the territory unrecognizable and unlivable.
Weizman describes Gaza’s systematic destruction: “[M]ost of the Gaza Strip — cities, refugee camps, schools, universities, mosques, the health infrastructure, agriculture, wells and the soil itself — has been destroyed and made toxic by bombs, artillery, tank shells and sappers [combat engineers].”
He adds that “the most systematic destruction was caused by D9 bulldozers made by the U.S. company Caterpillar.” An Israeli bulldozer operator in Gaza says that if Palestinians return to where their homes stood, “All they will find is sand.”
As Weizman puts it, “Ungrounding…aims to remove a society from its place and erase all traces to its previous existence.”
When hospitals, homes, water systems, farmland and even the soil are systematically destroyed, this is not collateral damage. It is the deliberate creation of conditions for the impossibility of life and must be confronted for what it is: genocide.
Terry Hansen
Grafton, Wis.
How Trump’s lawyer became A.G.
Last week the Senate confirmed Todd Blanche as Attorney General by the narrowest of margins — 50-49.
Here’s what we know about Blanche:
He’s slow-walked the Epstein files, brushed off survivors and eased Ghislaine Maxwell’s confinement.
He created a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” for Trump and allies to draw from as they pleased, only rescinding it in writing at the last minute as the price two GOP senators demanded for their votes. Nothing stops him from reviving it.
He shut down crypto crime investigations and dismantled the DOJ’s crypto enforcement unit — while personally holding up to $485,000 in crypto assets he hadn’t yet divested.
He locked in an immunity deal shielding Trump, his sons and the Trump Organization from audits on every return filed before May 2026. Ask yourself why someone with nothing to hide would need that.
He’s pushed out investigators tied to cases touching Trump’s orbit.
He’s brought retaliatory bogus charges against Trump’s political opponents.
The DOJ is supposed to be the people’s lawyer, not the president’s personal law firm.
So why does the “law and order” GOP let this slide? Because any senator or congressman who crosses Trump gets primaried and keeping their seat matters more than doing their job for us, the people.
Come November, we decide whether Derrick Van Orden and Tom Tiffany keep enabling this.
Markus Fasel
Chippewa Falls
How Tiffany killed job growth
Since the Trump administration took office, more than a million jobs have vanished nationwide. In Wisconsin, the damage shows up in our neighbors’ paychecks and in small towns’ tax bases.
Federal cuts alone have eliminated roughly 2,400 jobs across our state, with federal employment falling from about 31,300 to 28,900. These were not faceless government jobs they were people providing veterans’ care, staffing regional offices and keeping public services running.
Manufacturing, the backbone of Wisconsin’s economy, has also taken a hit. A study by the Midwest Economic Policy Institute and the University of Illinois found federal tariff policies cost Wisconsin thousands of manufacturing jobs.
The wider picture is worse. Federal data shows manufacturing lost about 9,500 jobs between January 2025 and January 2026, as employers grew wary of unpredictable trade policies and stopped hiring or replacing retiring workers.
Job totals don’t show the full harm. Every lost paycheck hurts more than one family. When people earn money locally, they spend it locally, at grocery stores, gas stations, diners, repair shops and other small businesses.
Research shows that money spent in a community creates more local business activity as it moves from person to person and business to business. When Wisconsin loses thousands of paychecks, we lose more than those jobs, we lose the spending those workers would have brought to Main Street, from Superior to Kenosha.
Thousands of Wisconsin jobs and the local spending tied to them have disappeared under this administration’s watch. Congressman Tom Tiffany has voted for policies that helped bring us here, supporting an agenda that cuts the federal workforce and uses tariffs that put manufacturing workers at risk.
Wisconsin cannot afford a shrinking workforce. Our small businesses cannot afford the missing paychecks that come with lost jobs. We cannot afford a governor who puts loyalty to Trump ahead of our livelihoods.
It is time to hold Tom Tiffany accountable for the jobs and local dollars lost on his watch, before more Wisconsin families and businesses that depend on them pay the price.
David Crowley, the Democratic nominee for governor, will fight for Wisconsin workers.
John Krizek
Hudson
Fake red scare
Since July 4, President Trump has repeatedly labeled some politicians and policies “communist.”
Communism is historically defined as centralized government ownership, control of production, with goods and money distributed according to need. Looking closely at the politicians and policies who have been labeled “communist”, they don’t fit that definition.
We need policies that aim to level the playing field — so the average American can earn a living wage, mothers can hold steady jobs because daycare is affordable, people can get medical care without fearing bankruptcy and every child gets a good education.
Could our social programs benefit from a thoughtful overhaul? Certainly — tax dollars only stretch so far. It’s time we sit down across partisan lines to talk about spending. Do we prefer funding unauthorized wars or childcare? Do tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy benefit communities more than funding health inspectors whose work guarantees the quality of our food?
When words like “communist” get thrown around by people who should know better, it’s meant to scare people. If the current administration had real policies to improve Americans’ lives, they wouldn’t need the same scare tactics Senator McCarthy used in the 1950s.
As a voter, I won’t cast my ballot based on labels — I’ll vote for policies that show a politician has thought beyond election season and has a real plan to improve everyday lives.
Labels are superficial and often misleading; it’s the substance that matters. Educate yourself, ask questions, have conversations — understand the policy and the person behind the label.
Mary Landwehr
Chippewa Falls