In his upcoming autobiography, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker reveals the lengths to which big labor will go to protect their power. THe Scott Walker death threats are chronicled multiple times, including threats on the governor himself, as well as his children.
Protesters are angry with Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s effort to break Big Labor’s financial hold on the state in 2011. At one point, they blocked his exit from a manufacturing plant, then surrounded his police cruiser while “beating on the windows and rocking the vehicle.”
This episode is one of several violent threats that the Republican governor and his family have faced, and which are detailed in his upcoming book “Unintimidated: A Governor’s Story and a Nation’s Challenge.”
The book, excerpts of which were obtained on Tuesday by FoxNews.com, describes a behind the scenes account during his campaign to end unsustainable collective bargaining agreements for most of Wisconsin’s unionized public employees.
The 2011 episode at the manufacturing plant happened roughly one month into his first term, after his government required unionized workers to contribute more toward their health-care and retirement benefits.
The reforms to collective bargaining were part of his Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill that passed later that year to help reduce a projected $3.6 billion budget deficit.
“As we prepared to leave, the state troopers saw that the protesters had physically blocked the entrance we had used to come onto the property. So they turned the squad car around and headed toward the other exit. We watched in disbelief as the throng of people rushed toward the second exit to block our path,” writes Walker, a potential 2016 presidential candidate.
“As we tried to pull out, they surrounded the car and began beating on the windows and rocking the vehicle. Just as we extricated ourselves from their grip, a truck pulled up and blocked our path, playing a game of chicken with the troopers. They turned the lights and sirens on warning them to get out of the way. Eventually he backed up, and we sped off,” he continued.
Reflecting on the incident, Walker writes, “It was a lesson in how much our circumstance had changed in a matter of a few days. We were dealing with people who were so blinded by their anger that they were not in the least bit afraid to storm and shake a police car.”
However, the most unnerving for Walker appeared to be the death threats on his children, specifically one in which the sender wrote about how they had been following his children to school, the street on which the Walker family lived, and claimed that family members were targets.
“According to my staff, the only time they ever saw me angry during the entire fight … was after I read that letter. They were right. I didn’t mind threats against me, but I was infuriated that these thugs would try to draw my family into it,” Walker writes, according to Wisconsin Interest Magazine.
At least one threatening letter was meant for Walker’s wife Tonette, and threatened to “gut her like a deer,” which combined with the other incidents warranted heavy police security.
In addition to providing a behind the scenes look at the governor’s successful reforms, passing Act 10 and his big survival of a 2012 recall attempt, Walker tries to explain his unique brand of fiscal conservatism.
As he did during the 2012 presidential campaign, Walker argues that other Republicans get trapped in the “false choice” between spending cuts and tax increases, and that fiscal conservatives too often “present themselves as the bearers of sour medicine, when we should be offering a positive, optimistic agenda instead.”
Walkers argues that it is possible, as he has shown, to cut government spending without mass layoffs and cutting Medicaid while still improving education and public services, and providing a plan he that is a “hopeful, optimistic alternative to austerity.”
The state’s Supreme Court heard oral arguments Monday on Act 10, after a lower court last year ruled parts of the law that apply to school and municipal employees are unconstitutional.
