MADISON GRINDS DOWN EXPLICITLY CONSERVATIVE ORGANIZATIONS.

Woke students, to abuse a term, have a long history of protecting their classmates from dissenting points of view by clearing out the racks offering the offending material and taking it to the recycle bin.

The College Fix reported a recent event in Madison.

A relatively new center-right student publication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is triggering some students and staff, as stacks of the magazine have been repeatedly and maliciously thrown away since last fall.

The Madison Federalist were tossed in campus trash bins, just the latest incident in a string of dumpings, said student Ben Rothove, editor-in-chief.

“We have had suspected tossings since the first print edition of The Madison Federalist in February 2025,” Rothove told The College Fix in an email Thursday.

“However, our first confirmed tossing happened in October,” he said. “A university employee saw me refilling a stack that had been tossed. The employee then pulled me aside and told me that another staff member had tossed the stack. According to this employee, a small group of university staff members looked through the edition and mocked its contents.”

Federalist founders had a familiar reason for creating their magazine.  Mr Rothove, who also writes for The College Fix, noted “As conservative, libertarian, or simply non-progressive journalists on UW-Madison’s campus, we are used to challenging the campus orthodoxy and facing backlash for doing so. Incidents like this reinforce that The Madison Federalist was a necessary addition to our student media ecosystem.”

Why does that sound familiar?  "Years ago, I wrote for The Badger Herald, conceived as an independent student newspaper in the belly of the Radical Monster, the University of Wisconsin Itself."

Students who considered themselves conservatives, but might have been understood as Militant Normals, founded a paper to report on campus news and vowed to keep the conservative perspective on the editorial page.

Consider an editorial by Nicholas Loniello, in the registration week issue of August, 1970.

The Daily Cardinal afforded the first reasons for beginning. It wasn't a paper for us and our friends -- its coverage is relevant only to the radical movement, not to the bulk of varied interests on the campus. The Cardinal prints the latest on the riot, demonstration and strike scene, but little about the Ag students and the Engineers. The GE recruiter and the Army Math Research Center hardly qualify as the biggest things that ever happened to this campus, yet they and a few other selective subjects are consistently danced around and beaten on the monotonous pages of the Daily Cardinal.

So we started the Badger Herald, determined there was a need for a student newspaper with wider-ranging news coverage. We have avoided in our news reporting the Cardinal's political myopia by refusing to become ideological nymphomaniacs, and will continue to do so next year.

That editorial went to press before the local heavies bombed Sterling Hall, and the ideological nymphomaniacs, along with their intellectual children and grandchildren, continue to run Student Affairs and the likes of MSNBC.

Recall, dear reader, that Sixties "activism" was sex, drugs, rock-'n-roll, and purity tests, plus a different sort of craziness.  On the one hand, you had the Manson family attempting to trigger a race war by murdering rich people and painting "Helter Skelter" on the dining room walls.  On the other hand, when George Wallace said, "Oh, you're a he.  I thought you was a she!" that was a comment on the guy's long hair, not his peasant dress or bottom surgery.

Madison, though, has a way of working against Robert Conquest and his alleged aphorism, "Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing."  So Mr Rothove (is he working with a smaller staff than Patrick Korten, Nick Loniello, and Tom Timberlake put together?) notes in a letter to The Daily Cardinal, which is apparently still publishing.

As the conservative student newspaper at UW-Madison, we have faced an uphill battle. While many universities similar to ours have long-established right-leaning student publications, it has been difficult to sustain one on this campus. In the late 1950s, a journal called Insight and Outlook was founded by UW students, but it ceased publication after a decade. In the 1960s, the Badger Herald was founded to oppose the Daily Cardinal’s left-wing radicalism, but it has experienced an editorial shift leftward for years. In the mid-2000s, the Mendota Beacon briefly occupied newspaper racks on the isthmus before disappearing.

In my view, ensuring the longevity of The Madison Federalist is important. Therefore, we have invested considerable time into cutting-edge investigative reporting.

That story has several dimensions.  I suggested the founders of the Herald might have been Militant Normals who wanted coverage of "the Ag students and the Engineers" and I might note, intramural sports and the resurgence of fraternities that occurred as Vietnam was winding down and ice hockey became a force.  Mr Rothove's letter echoes that.  "In addition to investigative stories, the Federalist also makes an effort to cover campus events ignored by the other student newspapers."

Over time, we've noted the editorial shift of the Herald, as well as the abortive emergence of the Mendota Beacon and the ideological nymphomania that presented during the corona tyranny.  "What could be more 2020 than the Young America's Foundation calling out one of their onetime campus media allies for censorship?"  And only last week, Herald editorialists offered an essay that would not have been out of place in the old Daily Cardinal.  "State Street Brats’ bracket leaves out half tournament."  Because the former Brathaus, with new management and a similar menu, only put together a betting pool for the men's tournament.

It’s never been about people not caring about women’s basketball, it’s that they haven’t been given the opportunity to do so. Lack of exposure simultaneously correlates with a lack of knowledge.

“I think Madison businesses should be responsible for promoting women’s sports, even if they don’t feel inclined to,” [freshman (c.q.) point guard Nikki} Kerstein said. “Women’s basketball really is just as exciting and entertaining as the men’s game.”

While it’s easy to call out an establishment for overlooking women’s sports, we all need to do better. Supporting women’s sports starts with visibility. Tell your coworkers to fill out a women’s bracket. Talk about the athletes. Watch the games and if you need a place to start, watch JuJu Watkins as she wraps up a historic season.

If March Madness is truly about the love of the game, then it’s time we start treating both tournaments like they belong in the conversation.

Well, maybe I was wrong about that "old" Daily Cardinal.  That's a Normal, if not one of Kurt Schlichter's Militant Normals, writing. There's nothing about "sexism" or "toxic masculinity" or any of the predictable Theorrhea: only coherent sentences and sentimentality.  As far as the current Cardinal?  No mention of State Street Brat's marginalizing tournament, no calls to trash the place.  We take the good news where we can find it.