Politics
In this historic Black neighborhood in Milwaukee, the Biden question is met with indifference
Lisa Collins sat in the shade of a green ash tree Wednesday in the Milwaukee neighborhood of Lindsay Heights handing out free hot dogs and hamburgers as part of a “joyful rebellion” against the nearby Republican National Convention.
Though she plans on voting for President Biden in the upcoming election, it is not without trepidation.
“That made me so mad at that debate, I said I’m not voting, I’m just not,” she said of Biden’s awful performance. “But you know I am.”
Hers is a kind of ambivalence common in this part of town, where the dreams of Black Americans have flourished, withered and risen again, in a city and state that will play a critical role in deciding which candidate wins the Oval Office.
Lisa Collins works the food station at the Milwaukee Childcare Collective event during the Republican convention.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Much of the world is obsessing over big questions: Would a second term for Donald Trump be a step toward authoritarianism? Is Biden mentally competent? Should Biden step aside, and if he did, could Kamala Harris successfully carry a campaign? Should it be left to an open field of Democratic contenders?
But in Lindsay Heights, like many places, a lot of folks have yet to think about the election. Those who have are often uninterested in those soul-searching questions that dominate headlines.
At this event arranged by the Milwaukee Childcare Collective, most people didn’t know they were gathered in response to the convention. They came for the face painting and food, and their concerns are more mundane: teaching kids to read, paying the bills, finding a napkin to clean Popsicle juice off chubby toddler legs.
Deshay Majors, sitting with his son and young daughter, she of the sticky knees, said he has not yet decided whom he will vote for.
“It all depends what they are talking about,” he said of how he will make his decision, though he isn’t sure which issues will sway him, or what he wants to hear.
Community members get free clothes at the Milwaukee Childcare Collective event.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
It’s a reminder that it ain’t over until it’s over, but time is running out.
On the national front, there is an air of despondency. Many are convinced that as long as Biden remains atop the ticket, the party is destined to lose the White House. Possibly in a Trump landslide. Very likely in addition to losing control of the Senate.
Even before his debate debacle, Biden was struggling to match his performance four years ago with Black voters, a vital Democratic constituency, especially in swing states.
Paul Maslin, who has been polling and strategizing in political contests since the days of Jimmy Carter, put Biden’s chances of reelection “somewhere between slim and none.”
“And slim,” he said, “is making reservations to leave town.”
Kids play basketball at the Milwaukee Childcare Collective event.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
A recent poll by the Associated Press and University of Chicago found nearly two-thirds of Democrats surveyed said Biden should withdraw from the presidential race and let his party nominate someone else.
Biden’s standing with independent and undecided voters is even worse, said Maslin, who has decades of experience in Wisconsin politics.
“His campaign has to have told him, or should be telling him, ‘Mr. President, one thing the voters you need to win this election have in common is they don’t like you,’ ” Maslin said. “They owe it to themselves, to him, to the party, to the country.”
The upper echelon of Democrats (those “elites” Biden has taken to railing against) are voting with their wallets.
“I can tell you, having talked to a lot of donors, their depression and despair has curdled into anger,” said Paul Begala, a strategist who twice helped put Bill Clinton in the White House. “They’re very angry. And angry people don’t donate.”
But that outrage hasn’t reached this parklet, where the basketball hoops lack nets and the closest bathroom is in a nearby church.
The area is named for Bernice Lindsay, the first Black woman to obtain a journalism degree from Ohio State University. She moved to these narrow streets north of downtown in the 1920s, intent on helping to create a place where Black professionals could own homes and raise families. For awhile, the community thrived — until freeways, violence and neglect tumbled it into decline, like so many other minority enclaves in America.
Kids gather for free ice cream at the Milwaukee Childcare Collective event.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Now, it’s a community working to raise itself back up. Vacant-lot gardens grow strawberries, and residents organize to help themselves and win what they need from a government that has too often passed them by — Democrat or Republican.
Some of the Victorian and Queen Anne homes are fixed up, some are boarded up, and most have front porches where people gather.
Sheyenne Wilson, 25, has been visiting those porches to talk about Biden, though the organizer says she likes to mostly listen.
What she hears isn’t pro-Biden or pro-Trump, but more pro-Lindsay Heights.
Sheyenne Wilson, with her son, Khalif El, is an organizer for the Biden campaign.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
“Basically people want someone who will support the community,” she said, her 10-month-old son, Khalif, on her lap.
That, said her fellow organizer Trasus Wright, is the opening he uses. He sees abortion as the kind of personal issue that can move voters — even his wife, Dea Wright, is undecided.
Dea Wright likes Trump’s stance on school choice — their six children benefited from such a program, she said.
“Where Trump gets me is where they start saying Christianity in schools,” she said.
Trasus Wright said he isn’t bothered by his wife’s uncertainty because he believes that “Joe is going to bring her around. His policies around advocating for women are going to be what matters.”
And what of Biden being too old?
“They’re both old,” said Eric Donelson, unbothered by reports of Biden’s mental decline as he ate a hamburger.
And what about Vice President Kamala Harris? Would she be a better candidate?
Robert Jackson and his daughter, Blessing, at the Milwaukee Childcare Collective event.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
“Do we vote for somebody just because they look like us, or for what they represent?” said Wilson, who has concerns about Harris’ prosecutor past.
“I still don’t think there will ever be a lady president,” said Collins, the woman handing out food.
“We forget she’s vice president. She don’t talk,” Donelson said. “Speak up, woman.”
And as for anyone else? There aren’t any names familiar enough to warrant an opinion.
But Trump is no shoo-in here, either — despite his push for Black voters in recent weeks, including a convention airing of an Amber Rose/Forgiato Blow rap video meant to show the party’s inclusiveness.
“I am not voting for Trump, I’m letting you know. I don’t like nothing about Trump, I am going to keep it real,” Donelson said.
“Trump’s got a little more energy in his body than Biden,” Collins argued.
“Biden is getting old, but I’d rather work with old, senile than a crazy man,” Donelson shot back.
“I’m going to tell you something. I said, this is all a mess to me,” Collins said.
What Linsday Heights shows is the disconnect between the political elite and the voters, for either party.
“Justice For Jah” is a reference to Samuel Sharpe Jr., who was killed by members of the Columbus, Ohio, Police Department who were in Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Biden will have to decide in a matter of days if he is staying or leaving — and the pressure has grown intense.
Democrats are set to have a virtual roll call for delegates in early August to formally pledge their allegiance. Once that is done, it becomes increasingly hard for another candidate to step in.
But for the voters in Lindsay Heights, mistrustful of politics and concerned about daily life, time is running out for either party to reach them with a message that carries enough meaning to carry them to the polls.
If that neglect continues, it probably won’t make much of a difference what Biden decides.
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is leveling a stunning accusation at Vice President JD Vance amid the national furor over this week’s fatal shooting in Minnesota involving an ICE agent.
“I understand that Vice President Vance believes that shooting a young mother of three in the face three times is an acceptable America that he wants to live in, and I do not,” the four-term federal lawmaker from New York and progressive champion argued as she answered questions on Friday on Capitol Hill from Fox News and other news organizations.
Ocasio-Cortez spoke in the wake of Wednesday’s shooting death of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good after she confronted ICE agents from inside her car in Minneapolis.
RENEE NICOLE GOOD PART OF ‘ICE WATCH’ GROUP, DHS SOURCES SAY
Members of law enforcement work the scene following a suspected shooting by an ICE agent during federal operations on January 7, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
Video of the incident instantly went viral, and while Democrats have heavily criticized the shooting, the Trump administration is vocally defending the actions of the ICE agent.
HEAD HERE FOR LIVE FOX NEWS UPDATES ON THE ICE SHOOTING IN MINNESOTA
Vance, at a White House briefing on Thursday, charged that “this was an attack on federal law enforcement. This was an attack on law and order.”
“That woman was there to interfere with a legitimate law enforcement operation,” the vice president added. “The president stands with ICE, I stand with ICE, we stand with all of our law enforcement officers.”
And Vance claimed Good was “brainwashed” and suggested she was connected to a “broader, left-wing network.”
Federal sources told Fox News on Friday that Good, who was a mother of three, worked as a Minneapolis-based immigration activist serving as a member of “ICE Watch.”
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
Ocasio-Cortez, in responding to Vance’s comments, said, “That is a fundamental difference between Vice President Vance and I. I do not believe that the American people should be assassinated in the street.”
But a spokesperson for the vice president, responding to Ocasio-Cortez’s accusation, told Fox News Digital, “On National Law Enforcement Appreciation Day, AOC made it clear she thinks that radical leftists should be able to mow down ICE officials in broad daylight. She should be ashamed of herself. The Vice President stands with ICE and the brave men and women of law enforcement, and so do the American people.”
In Springfield, Ill., in 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln delivered a powerful speech decrying the “ravages of mob law” throughout the land. Lincoln warned, in eerily prescient fashion, that the spread of a then-ascendant “mobocratic spirit” threatened to sever the “attachment of the People” to their fellow countrymen and their nation. Lincoln’s opposition to anarchy of any kind was absolute and clarion: “There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.”
Unfortunately, it seems that every few years, Americans must be reminded anew of Lincoln’s wisdom. This week’s lethal Immigration and Customs Enforcement standoff in the Twin Cities is but the latest instance of a years-long baleful trend.
On Wednesday, a 37-year-old stay-at-home mom, Renee Nicole Good, was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. Her ex-husband said she and her partner encountered ICE agents after dropping off Good’s 6-year-old at school. The federal government has called Good’s encounter “an act of domestic terrorism” and said the agent shot in self-defense.
Suffice it to say Minnesota’s Democratic establishment does not see it this way.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey responded to the deployment of 2,000 immigration agents in the area and the deadly encounter by telling ICE to “get the f— out” of Minnesota, while Gov. Tim Walz called the shooting “totally predictable” and “totally avoidable.” Frey, who was also mayor during the mayhem after George Floyd’s murder by city police in 2020, has lent succor to the anti-ICE provocateurs, seemingly encouraging them to make Good a Floyd-like martyr. As for Walz, he’s right that this tragedy was eminently “avoidable” — but not only for the reasons he thinks. If the Biden-Harris administration hadn’t allowed unvetted immigrants to remain in the country without legal status and if Walz’s administration hadn’t moved too slowly in its investigations of hundreds of Minnesotans — of mixed immigration status — defrauding taxpayers to the tune of billions of dollars, ICE never would have embarked on this particular operation.
National Democrats took the rage even further. Following the fateful shooting, the Democratic Party’s official X feed promptly tweeted, without any morsel of nuance, that “ICE shot and killed a woman on camera.” This sort of irresponsible fear-mongering already may have prompted a crazed activist to shoot three detainees at an ICE facility in Dallas last September while targeting officers; similar dehumanizing rhetoric about the National Guard perhaps also played a role in November’s lethal shooting of a soldier in Washington, D.C.
Liberals and open-border activists play with fire when they so casually compare ICE, as Walz previously has, to a “modern-day Gestapo.” The fact is, ICE is not the Gestapo, Donald Trump is not Hitler, and Charlie Kirk was not a goose-stepping brownshirt. To pretend otherwise is to deprive words of meaning and to live in the theater of the absurd.
But as dangerous as this rhetoric is for officers and agents, it is the moral blackmail and “mobocratic spirit” of it all that is even more harmful to the rule of law.
The implicit threat of all “sanctuary” jurisdictions, whose resistance to aiding federal law enforcement smacks of John C. Calhoun-style antebellum “nullification,” is to tell the feds not to operate and enforce federal law in a certain area — or else. The result is crass lawlessness, Mafia-esque shakedown artistry and a fetid neo-confederate stench combined in one dystopian package.
The truth is that swaths of the activist left now engage in these sorts of threats as a matter of course. In 2020, the left’s months-long rioting following the death of Floyd led to upward of $2 billion in insurance claims. In 2021, they threatened the same rioting unless Derek Chauvin, the officer who infamously kneeled on Floyd’s neck, was found guilty of murder (which he was, twice). In 2022, following the unprecedented (and still unsolved) leak of the draft majority opinion in the Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court case, abortion-rights activists protested outside many of the right-leaning justices’ homes, perhaps hoping to induce them to change their minds and flip their votes. And now, ICE agents throughout the country face threats of violence — egged on by local Democratic leaders — simply for enforcing federal law.
In “The Godfather,” Luca Brasi referred to this sort of thuggery as making someone an offer that he can’t refuse. We might also think of it as Lincoln’s dreaded “ravages of mob law.”
Regardless, a free republic cannot long endure like this. The rule of law cannot be held hostage to the histrionic temper tantrums of a radical ideological flank. The law must be enforced solemnly, without fear or favor. There can be no overarching blackmail lurking in the background — no Sword of Damocles hovering over the heads of a free people, ready to crash down on us all if a certain select few do not get their way.
The proper recourse for changing immigration law — or any federal law — is to lobby Congress to do so, or to make a case in federal court. The ginned-up martyrdom complex that leads some to take matters into their own hands is a recipe for personal and national ruination. There is nothing good down that road — only death, despair and mobocracy.
Josh Hammer’s latest book is “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.” This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. X: @josh_hammer
Insights
L.A. Times Insights delivers AI-generated analysis on Voices content to offer all points of view. Insights does not appear on any news articles.
Viewpoint
Perspectives
The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content.
Ideas expressed in the piece
- Democrats and activist left are perpetuating a dangerous “mobocratic spirit” similar to the mob law that Lincoln warned against in 1838, which threatens the rule of law and national unity[1]
- The federal government’s characterization of the incident as self-defense by an ICE agent is appropriate, while local Democratic leaders are irresponsibly encouraging anti-ICE protesters to view Good as a martyr figure like George Floyd[1]
- Dehumanizing rhetoric comparing ICE to the Gestapo is reckless fear-mongering that has inspired actual violence, including a shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas and the fatal shooting of a National Guard soldier[1]
- The shooting was “avoidable” not because of ICE’s presence, but because the Biden-Harris administration allowed undocumented immigrants to remain in the country without legal status and state authorities moved too slowly investigating immigrant fraud[1]
- Sanctuary jurisdictions that resist federal law enforcement represent neo-confederate “nullification” and constitute crass lawlessness and Mafia-style extortion, effectively telling federal agents they cannot enforce the law or face consequences[1]
- The activist left employs threats of violence as systematic blackmail, evidenced by 2020 riots following Floyd’s death, threats surrounding the Chauvin trial, protests at justices’ homes during the abortion debate, and now threats against ICE agents[1]
- Changing immigration policy must occur through Congress or federal courts, not through mob rule and “ginned-up martyrdom complexes” that lead to personal and national ruination[1]
Different views on the topic
- Community members who knew Good rejected characterizations of her as a domestic terrorist, with her mother describing her as “one of the kindest people I’ve ever known,” “extremely compassionate,” and someone “who has taken care of people all her life”[1]
- Vigil speakers and attendees portrayed Good as peacefully present to watch the situation and protect her neighbors, with an organizer stating “She was peaceful; she did the right thing” and “She died because she loved her neighbors”[1]
- A speaker identified only as Noah explicitly rejected the federal government’s domestic terrorism characterization, saying Good was present “to watch the terrorists,” not participate in terrorism[1]
- Neighbors described Good as a loving mother and warm family member who was an award-winning poet and positive community presence, suggesting her presence during the incident reflected civic concern rather than radicalism[1]
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
President Donald Trump said on Thursday that he plans to meet with Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado in Washington next week.
During an appearance on Fox News’ “Hannity,” Trump was asked if he intends to meet with Machado after the U.S. struck Venezuela and captured its president, Nicolás Maduro.
“Well, I understand she’s coming in next week sometime, and I look forward to saying hello to her,” Trump said.
Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado waves a national flag during a protest called by the opposition on the eve of the presidential inauguration, in Caracas on January 9, 2025. (JUAN BARRETO/AFP via Getty Images)
This will be Trump’s first meeting with Machado, who the U.S. president stated “doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country” to lead.
According to reports, Trump’s refusal to support Machado was linked to her accepting the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, which Trump believed he deserved.
But Trump later told NBC News that while he believed Machado should not have won the award, her acceptance of the prize had “nothing to do with my decision” about the prospect of her leading Venezuela.
Judge sentences rapper to time served in 2023 San Diego arrest
Chief marketing and communication officer named to Milwaukee Business Journal’s 40 Under 40 | Marquette Today
Flood watch expands into metro Atlanta ahead of severe storm threat
Prosecutors in DOJ’s Civil Rights Division will not investigate Minneapolis ICE shooting, sources say
Indianapolis Colts highest and lowest PFF grades on offense in 2025
Florida High School Football Rankings: Top 25 teams – Oct. 21
Cleary's 21 help Le Moyne down Central Connecticut State 69-64 in OT
How old is Bo Nix? What to know about Oregon quarterback ahead of 2024 NFL Draft
99th annual Pony Swim held in Virginia
Video: ‘It Didn’t Have to Happen This Way:’ U.Va. Faculty Call for Review of Police Response to Protests
AOC accuses Vance of believing ‘American people should be assassinated in the street’
Mercosur: How Macron’s domestic weakness undercut his Brussels clout
National Park Service will void passes with stickers over Trump’s face
Trump plans to meet with Venezuela opposition leader Maria Corina Machado next week
Trump says meeting Iran’s ‘Crown Prince’ Pahlavi would not be appropriate
-
Detroit, MI6 days ago2 hospitalized after shooting on Lodge Freeway in Detroit
-
Technology3 days agoPower bank feature creep is out of control
-
Dallas, TX5 days agoDefensive coordinator candidates who could improve Cowboys’ brutal secondary in 2026
-
Health5 days agoViral New Year reset routine is helping people adopt healthier habits
-
Iowa3 days agoPat McAfee praises Audi Crooks, plays hype song for Iowa State star
-
Nebraska3 days agoOregon State LB transfer Dexter Foster commits to Nebraska
-
Nebraska3 days agoNebraska-based pizza chain Godfather’s Pizza is set to open a new location in Queen Creek
-
Missouri3 days agoDamon Wilson II, Missouri DE in legal dispute with Georgia, to re-enter transfer portal: Source