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The following program is a PBS Wisconsin original production.

Donald Trump:
We are just getting started.

Frederica Freyberg:
While President Trump doubles down on his divisive agenda, emphatic opposition to Republican plans make their voices heard at the State Capitol, while new polling shows Wisconsin’s sharp edged political divide.
I’m Frederica Freyberg. Tonight on “Here & Now,” medical research funding in the balance, a misogynistic online subculture leeches into the mainstream and a tuition promise atones for centuries old injustices. But first, how attack ads in judicial races impact sentencing decisions. It’s “Here & Now” for March 7.

Announcer:
Funding for “Here & Now” is provided by the Focus Fund for Journalism and Friends of PBS Wisconsin.

Frederica Freyberg:
If you’re only getting your information about the Supreme Court candidates through attack ads, you would think both judges are happy to give light sentences to pedophiles and domestic abusers. Here & Now senior political reporter Zac Schultz tells us why so many ads focus on sentencing decisions and how that can impact how all judges in Wisconsin rule from the bench.

TV announcer # 1:
Susan Crawford, the radical liberal judge who let the predator out in just four years.

TV announcer # 2:
Guys like Brad Schimel, who gave big plea deals to rapists, domestic abusers, and even a man caught with child pornography.

Zac Schultz:
Dane County Judge Susan Crawford and Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel have each been a circuit court judge since 2018. They’ve presided over thousands of cases and handed out sentences for every type of offense, allowing their opponents to cherry pick their record and find cases that make them look soft on crime.

TV announcer # 3:
Her criminal coddling record is an injustice to us all.

TV announcer # 4:
Schimel let domestic abusers walk with no jail time.

Zac Schultz:
They’ve also been running for a spot on the Wisconsin Supreme Court for more than a year and actively considering it for much longer than that. But Crawford and Schimel deny that their candidacy ever had an impact on the severity of sentence they imposed.

Brad Schimel:
Well, from the time I decided to run for Supreme Court, I’ve been in the civil division, so I haven’t handled any criminal cases. But no, you can’t do this. You can’t put your — your own personal political views or interests in, in place of doing justice.

Susan Crawford:
Well, you know, I don’t make decisions as a judge based on what I think some future attack ad might look at. I make decisions, particularly in that example of criminal sentencing, based on what I believe is necessary to protect the safety of the community, what’s necessary to protect the crime victims in a case.

Zoe Engberg:
There’s a lot of evidence that when judges are approaching an election, they sentence people more harshly than they do at other points in their term.

Zac Schultz:
Zoe Engberg is an assistant clinical professor at the UW Law School.

Zoe Engberg:
There’s also a lot of evidence that shows that negative campaign ads, in particular, have a large impact on how judges make decisions in cases.

Zac Schultz:
She points to a study out of Pennsylvania that examined a decade’s worth of sentences from every judge in the state to show the fear of attack ads and reelection didn’t just impact high profile judges who were running for higher office. It affected every judge.

Zoe Engberg:
They were able to really see how these trends developed and point to, I think, it was about 2000 years of incarceration over the space of a decade that was directly attributable to reelection, and not just typical sentencing.

Zac Schultz:
What’s most concerning is typically the cases in the attack ads aren’t even egregious decisions by the judges.

Zoe Engberg:
A lot of attack ads of this nature about individual cases, about individual decisions made for judge — by judges, often are attacking judges for fairly typical decisions that almost any judge would have actually made, given a similar case and similar circumstances.

Zac Schultz:
Brad Schimel makes the same point, saying one of the domestic abuse cases he’s being attacked over involved a veteran with PTSD, where the victim pleaded with Schimel to give the man probation to get help.

Brad Schimel:
Any judge in their right mind would have done the same thing I did that day and give him a chance, on probation, to show that he is truly redeemed and he did it. He hasn’t been in any trouble ever since, and he never was in trouble before.

Zac Schultz:
But that didn’t stop Schimel from attacking Crawford over her sentencing decisions.

Susan Crawford:
The law instructs judges in those kinds of cases to look at all the relevant factors: what the defendant’s rehabilitative needs might be, that person’s criminal — prior criminal record. And I make a decision that I believe is in the interest of justice and will protect community safety and protect the crime victim.

Zac Schultz:
Every one of those campaign ads lack context. And while they’ll likely help one of these candidates win a seat on the Supreme Court, Engberg says the impact of the ads will be felt in every courtroom in the state.

Zoe Engberg:
The impact of this is that I think it, it motivates judges to always err on the side of being more punitive and make decisions, kind of, because in the back of their mind, they’re thinking, “What will this case look like in an election ad in my next reelection?”

Zac Schultz:
Reporting from Madison, I’m Zac Schultz for “Here & Now.”

Frederica Freyberg:
Anticipated fallout from any lapse in federal health research funding prompted full-on response this week from UW leaders and scientists. UW-Madison alone stands to lose $65 million in funding due to a Trump administration reduction for indirect costs. While a federal judge has temporarily blocked the NIH cuts, Wisconsin’s biohealth industry and its health systems are sounding the alarm about any permanent loss of research funding.

Jay Rothman:
Universities across Wisconsin receive research funding from the federal government to work to the betterment of our people and our communities. Taking a meat cleaver to this funding is simply wrong, shortsighted, and will cause harm to people across the state of Wisconsin and the country. Our university research lab should be a hub of activity, humming to provide life-saving research that families can count upon. This impacts all of us.

Karyn Frick:
My own NIH funded research has led to the development of new therapies for reducing memory loss, alleviating hot flashes, and reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, which we hope will reach the clinic in the next 5 to 10 years. If you remember one thing from my remarks today, it’s that federal funding for basic and clinical research is critical for training the next generation of scientists and health professionals while developing new treatments for Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, addiction, as well as conditions such as cancer, heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, which are among the leading causes of death in the United States. Simply put, these desperately needed treatments would not be possible without NIH funding.

Nicolas Paris:
Biohealth industry in Wisconsin, it’s a national leader driving innovation and economic growth, but also contributing, of course, to health outcomes. We had plenty of examples today. It’s a very wide ecosystem with notably biomedical research and testing, digital health, drug and pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and a lot of manufacturing that goes with that distribution so it’s a whole big ecosystem. At BioForward, when we talk about growing Wisconsin’s biohealth industry, we are talking about a collaborative effort between industry leaders, research institutions, of course, and policymakers. Our state’s institutions, like UW-Madison, UW-Milwaukee, Medical College of Wisconsin, and all the others play a critical role in advancing groundbreaking medical research. … NIH investment brought $654 million to Wisconsin in 2023, and thousands of direct jobs and generate billions in economic activity for the state. These funds from NIH don’t just drive research. They attract biotech companies, venture capital. They attract top scientists and talents to the state. They drive manufacturing. They drive services, and even more. So if there’s no research, there are no discoveries, no treatments, no new fast-growing companies, and no ecosystem to support them. So there’s no doubt that reducing NIH funding would be a direct threat for us in Wisconsin.

Frederica Freyberg:
Scientists echoed this sentiment within the walls of the state Capitol today during the Stand Up for Science rally. The national event held rallies across 50 states and in Wisconsin, where hundreds turned out to voice their support for government sponsored research.

Rick Eisenstein:
If we lay off senior researchers who know how to do the research, then we have reduced numbers of grad students that are being trained or postdocs. That’s going to mean that the senior people are not there to give their experience to the younger people, and there’s fewer younger people. And the long-term implications of that is extremely negative.

John Denu:
We’ve dealt with cuts previously in other administrations. They didn’t seem so arbitrary. Simply reducing the number of dollars, right, that show up at universities, that show up at research institutes, that has an immediate impact. And so we need to have that conversation and engage our elected officials and engage the public. This is what we’re trying to do today.

Frederica Freyberg:
An undercurrent in American society went mainstream as President Donald Trump won back the White House. An online movement of men who hold misogynistic views burst onto the scene during the campaign in social media and podcasts. It’s called the “manosphere,” and a UW-Madison assistant professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs conducted a research study of how and why this ideology took political hold. We sat down with Mariel Barnes to talk about it. What is the “manosphere”?

Mariel Barnes:
In our paper, we talk about the manosphere as a collection of, kind of, websites, blogs that look or put forward a particular perspective that advocate hatred for women and advocate anti-feminist ideologies and advocate against gender equality and view, kind of, men as victims in modern day society. So we started with the Southern Poverty Law Center. They have a list of websites that they classified as anti-feminist, manosphere websites. And so we went through and we read all of these websites, and then each of these websites often has like recommendations for other people that, you know, their readers should read. And so we went through those websites as well and kind of read all of those websites and collected over a hundred different websites that could be classified as being in the manosphere. And so we have data for all of those websites for every year that they were in existence.

Frederica Freyberg:
Looking at it over time, how has the manosphere changed?

Mariel Barnes:
We see the manosphere really not being a thing until about 2008, 2009. So before then, you really had a couple of websites, a couple of people who were involved in it. A lot of time they were really involved in like fathers’ rights and custody issues. There was some allegations about, like, reverse discrimination and court cases around reverse discrimination, but there wasn’t a lot. And then you get to 2008 and all of a sudden you see this, like, uptick in like the number of websites and the number of blogs growing. The other way I think it’s changed over time is just the sheer number of people who are reading these blogs. So the growth of the internet and the growth of high-speed internet, the growth of personal blogging allowed these people to reach a wider audience. And it allowed people to find or it allowed men to find other men who shared their perspectives and so they could all talk together and network together, which before kind of the internet, you really didn’t have. They’ve joined kind of the alt right. They’ve joined white supremacist groups. They’ve joined anti-LGBT groups. They’ve joined more populist politics. So what we see under Trump and so the need for a specific blog that looks at, you know, men’s rights is less necessary because it’s now been incorporated into this bigger phenomenon and this bigger movement.

Frederica Freyberg:
How does the manosphere intersect with violence?

Mariel Barnes:
What we see is that the more isolated these groups are, the more likely they are to — we hypothesize, the more likely they are to engage in very public acts of violence against people. And so one of the most isolated groups, both from women and from other men themselves, are incel groups. And that’s why we see a lot of mass shootings and massacres emerging from those groups. But then there’s other kinds of violence that emerge. So that’s the very public version. Then you have groups like pickup artists, which want to sleep with as many women as possible, and they have a whole range of techniques for doing that and picking up women. But we hypothesize that because they need to interact with women in that way, they’re actually more inclined to commit kind of private violence and sexual assault and rape against women.

Frederica Freyberg:
Having done this research, what would you like to see come of it?

Mariel Barnes:
I think I would like more people to know about the manosphere, and that this is a insidious movement that has suddenly, like, taken on kind of a life of its own and has become mainstream. I think for a long time it was ignored by a lot of parts of society, and that was — has not helped us. I don’t think we can ignore extreme views. I think we need to confront them. And I think when they move into the mainstream, we need to acknowledge, like, where they have come from. So a lot of the thing — I have a lot of — I struggle a lot with people like Joe Rogan, right, because I think that he has and other people like him have sanewashed these more extreme views so they become more palatable to a wider audience and a wider audience thinks, “Oh, that’s not unreasonable,” and yet, at its heart, like the very heart of the issue is it is unreasonable and it is anti-women and it is anti-gender equality, and it’s just not recognized as such. So paying attention, I think, to the movements like the manosphere that are extreme is important. And I hope that’s kind of what my work draws attention to.

Frederica Freyberg:
You can watch our extended interview with Professor Barnes on our website.
UW-Madison sits on ancestral Ho-Chunk land. In recognition of that and to give back, the Wisconsin Tribal Education Promise offers full tuition, including housing costs and fees, to Native undergraduate students in Wisconsin. The promise also extends tuition waivers to Native law and medical students. “Here & Now” reporter Erica Ayisi looks at the program and the history behind it. This report is in collaboration with our partners at ICT, formerly Indian Country Today.

Riley Aguirre:
It means a lot to me and my people, my community, the Native community. We are still here. We’re still fighting for our rights to be here.

Erica Ayisi:
Riley Aguirre is a freshman at the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus.

Riley Aguirre:
Education was used as assimilation to get rid of our culture, our language, our traditions but now it’s used as a way of teaching.

Erica Ayisi:
She’s an enrolled member of the Oneida Nation and attending the university at no cost to her or her family using the Wisconsin Tribal Education Promise program. How would your family have paid for college otherwise?

Riley Aguirre:
Other scholarships, definitely, applying for scholarships outside of the school to help me as well. And probably funding through the tribe as well.

Erica Ayisi:
The Wisconsin Tribal Education Promise program provides financial support for students who are enrolled in one of the state’s 11 federally recognized tribes. Carla Vigue, tribal relations director of UW-Madison, says the university wants to make the Madison campus more accessible to Native students.

Carla Vigue:
We worked with tribal leaders from across the state to create the program, and now we’re seeing the fruits of those labors. You know, we’re seeing our first class. We’ve got nearly 80 students in this first class. And we’re hoping it will grow from here.

Erica Ayisi:
Tuition, housing, books and all other school-related fees totaling about $30,000 are covered for undergraduate Native students through the promise program.

Carla Vigue:
It’s not a taxpayer-funded program, and, you know, we’re pretty proud that people want to support this program.

Erica Ayisi:
The program is funded through private donations. Vigue says the legal precedent surrounding federally recognized tribes is a specific eligibility requirement for the students applying to the program.

Carla Vigue:
Federally recognized tribes are sovereign nations who determine citizenship. And so that’s a political classification. It’s not a race or ethnicity.

Erica Ayisi:
Schools in nearly all 50 states offer some type of financial assistance for Native students. The program’s unique. It includes medical students and law students. Tell me more about that.

Carla Vigue:
We are hearing from people across the country, even in particular, about that law aspect. There’s a lot of excitement around the law school.

Erica Ayisi:
Josef Cornelius is Oneida. His father is a UW-Madison Law School graduate who was worried about school loans for his son.

Josef Cornelius:
Initially, we were thinking that some of it would probably have to come out of my pockets or his pockets, and the fact that it was like, no worries, you know? Now we’re just — now I just have to worry about school, get good grades, and then it’s all smooth sailing.

Erica Ayisi:
Undergraduate recipients of the Tribal Promise are reserved one wing of dorms inside the Smith Residence Hall. There’s also an Indigenous student center close by that hosts tribal student groups like Wunk Sheek.

Josef Cornelius:
I’d say the Wunk Sheek house and the Indigenous program have done a really good job at promoting the diversity here.

Erica Ayisi:
Vigue says the university wants to do what’s right for Wisconsin’s Native people considering the university is on Native land belonging to the Ho-Chunk, also known as the people of the Big Voice.

Carla Vigue:
This is Ho-Chunk ancestral land, and I think there’s now some sense of pride in that and wanting to share and celebrate that history but there’s also, you know, with this promise, a chance to give back too.

Erica Ayisi:
The University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus extends over 900 acres of land, including a four-mile stretch of shoreline along Lake Mendota. But this land is the ancestral home to the Ho-Chunk Nation, the Native people who were living here for over 10,000 years. Through a series of treaties, the Ho-Chunk were forced to cede or give up this land to the state of Wisconsin and the federal government.

Jon Greendeer:
The 1837 treaty wasn’t a revered treaty at all. These are forced agreements to cede our land, such as that particular treaty, move west of the Mississippi, and, you know, and relinquish our ownership of our historic homes.

Erica Ayisi:
Jon Greendeer, president of Ho-Chunk Nation, says the final treaty with the government was signed under duress.

Jon Greendeer:
We had eight months to vacate, but then we didn’t. And in the coldest parts of the winter, they shipped us in rail cars across to the neutral ground. And, you know, we suffered a lot for that.

Erica Ayisi:
Ho-Chunk were given one and a half million dollars for their land, but the government put most of it into interest-bearing trusts, leaving Ho-Chunk next to nothing.

Jon Greendeer:
I don’t think any representatives of authority could walk away from one of those agreements and say they were the beneficiary of something.

Erica Ayisi:
Most of the Wisconsin Native tribes were forcibly moved to reservations, but Ho-Chunk people are spread across the state with over 7,000 currently enrolled members. Greendeer says the treaties of the past are significant to their sovereignty of the present.

Jon Greendeer:
The treaties gave way to a lot and substantiated our abilities to negotiate not only with local governments, but also later on with these other little governments that were starting up with the education campuses with the UW.

Erica Ayisi:
Ho-Chunk had already surrendered this part of their land in an 1832 treaty, paving the way for UW-Madison to be built in 1848. Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act in 1862, selling 1.3 million acres of tribal land in Wisconsin and using the proceeds to create so-called “land grant universities.” And so today, the tuition promise extends to Native students across the state. A promise Greendeer calls late but fitting.

Jon Greendeer:
I think the Wisconsin promise is a very old promise that is finally getting kept, at least at the UW level, at least at the college level.

Erica Ayisi:
One hundred and eight years after the last treaty was signed, Robert Powless, an Oneida man, became the first Native to graduate from UW-Madison. Ada Deer, a Menominee Native, was the first woman. For Aguirre, a free university education on Native soil is personal.

Riley Aguirre:
Our education is not only for me, but for our community and for the resiliency of my ancestors. We fought so long through so many generations of trauma and abuse and neglect and being here is like resiliency.

Carla Vigue:
They were forcibly removed, and this university has spent some time coming to accept and share that story and part of the reason this promise exists is because, you know, there is some recognition that that all happened, but there’s also, you know, there’s also the need and want to do what’s right and good for Native people too.

Erica Ayisi:
A heritage marker was erected on UW-Madison’s campus to recognize the ancestral home of Ho-Chunk. It’s near Bascom Hill, which sits on top an effigy or burial mound built by Native people over a thousand years ago. A series of 12 Ho-Chunk circle clan sculptures are outside the Bakke recreation and Wellbeing Center.

Carla Vigue:
The promise is intended to be forever, right? I mean, Native American students have been around, you know, since the beginning of what is now the United States, been around since the inception of what is now this country. And I think the goal is to make sure that they’re taken care of forever.

Erica Ayisi:
Both students are looking to use their education to better their communities.

Josef Cornelius:
I kind of want to go into wealth management or some — maybe sustainability.

Erica Ayisi:
And amplify Native voices.

Riley Aguirre:
I do want to go into some field where I can be an advocate for possibly my tribe or other people, but definitely Native people as a whole and getting our voices out there to be heard.

Erica Ayisi:
Reporting from Madison Ho-Chunk lands, I’m Erica Ayisi for “Here & Now” and ICT.

Frederica Freyberg:
For more on this and other issues facing Wisconsin, visit our website at PBSWisconsin.org and then click on the news tab. That’s our program for tonight. I’m Frederica Freyberg. Have a good weekend.

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Funding for “Here & Now” is provided by the Focus Fund for Journalism and Friends of PBS Wisconsin.