Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District Democrat frontrunner Rebecca Cooke is hoping the third time’s the charm after she lost by 2-plus percentage points to incumbent Republican Derrick Van Orden in 2024. Cooke is again positioning herself as a “Blue Dog” Democrat. She claims to be a moderate farm girl. She is neither. But it’s fun to watch her try.
During a candidate’s forum last month in La Crosse, Cooke offered what she thought was a middle-ground answer about the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on Colorado’s unconstitutional ban on therapy aimed at helping gender-confused clients escape trans insanity. The ruling was 8-1, with two of the court’s three liberals finding the law encroached on therapists’ First Amendment rights. Cooke, knowing her district, like the rest of the country, isn’t chomping at the bit to back the extreme trans agenda, said she supports the “LGBT community,” but that she’s in favor of “local control in making policy.”
The answer didn’t sit well with some extreme left-wingers despite Cooke telling forum-goers that she has lots of LGBTQ friends. Her opponent in the August primary that Cooke is expected to easily win sounded much more extreme in her support for crushing the speech of people who believe gender confusion is a mental illness.
But fear not 3rd District gender-fluid cult radicals. Cooke’s real sentiments on the subject may well be more in line with the company that she keeps. None more than one of her biggest champions, the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC).
‘They Betrayed Their Oath’
The state’s teachers union has heartily endorsed Cooke’s third campaign for Congress. She is publicly proud of WEAC’s endorsement, one of several far-left labor organizations to back the congressional candidate — vocally and financially.
And WEAC is proud of its support for the radical Pride movement, from lobbying for biological males competing in women’s sports to gender mutilation for trans-confused children and more.
In March, WEAC celebrated Democrat Gov. Tony Evers’ veto of what the union described as “GOP Anti-Trans Bills.”
“I’d love to write ‘Hell no,’” Evers said as he killed bills that would have barred males pretending to be females from competing in girls and women sports, banned the dangerous practice of so-called “gender-affirming care” on children, and blocked schools from changing the pronouns of students without parents’ consent.
State Rep. Amanda Nedweski, a Republican from Pleasant Prairie, said the leftist governor again had sided with a “multi-billion-dollar industry profiting off irreversible procedures on minors.”
Of course, Evers vetoed the bills on International Transgender Day of Visibility “in a room full of transgender and LGBTQ+ students and their families and longtime supporters” like WEAC President Peggy Wirtz-Olsen.
Two years earlier, WEAC lambasted Wisconsin Republican lawmakers for passing a bill barring male athletes from participating in girls’ sports. A Marquette University Law School poll found more than 70 percent of respondents were “in favor of requiring that transgender athletes compete on teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with.” Certainly some of those supporters are WEAC dues-paying educators.
Wirtz-Olsen urged legislators to “stop targeting vulnerable groups of students for political points.” Trans activists have cited a phony study claiming laws challenging the trans movement increased suicide attempts by young people by 72 percent. As the Manhattan Institute reported last week:
The media touted the findings as evidence that Republican-led laws are creating an epidemic of self-harm among youth, while the study authors promoted the research as a cause-and-effect narrative.
Now, the study is crumbling under reexamination. A criticism published in the NHB last month shows that the research was pulled from a small sample in Idaho, and at a time when the state’s “anti-transgender” laws weren’t even in effect.
In October 2023, as Evers’ and then-President Joe Biden’s administrations were staining their government bureaucracies with identity politics, WEAC posted that the union stood “united against the proposed ban on gender affirming care for Wisconsin minors.”
A British government review has shown there is little evidence to support sex changes for minors. A U.S. Department of Health and Human Services study released late last year found the same.
“The American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics peddled the lie that chemical and surgical sex-rejecting procedures could be good for children,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in a press release. “They betrayed their oath to first do no harm, and their so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ has inflicted lasting physical and psychological damage on vulnerable young people. That is not medicine — it’s malpractice.”
Evading Questions
Cooke did not return two messages from The Federalist seeking comment about her views on biological males competing in girls’ sports and transing procedures on children. Her silence isn’t surprising. Cooke has repeatedly dodged such questions. She has to. The Democrat establishment has spent a lot of time and money manufacturing Cooke’s moderate image for a purple district campaign that is a must-win if the party hopes to take back the House in November.
Wisconsin’s 3rd District may be a toss-up according to the Cook Political Report, but President Donald Trump won the largely rural western Wisconsin district bordering the Mississippi River by 7 percentage points in 2024.
Cooke, however, seems to confirm her support for sex changes for children in a “Get the Facts” page on her campaign website. In a section on abortion, Cooke quotes Dr. Kavita Arora who said in May 2022 that overturning Roe v. Wade “could have far-reaching implications for other types of care including birth control, emergency contraception known as Plan B, trans-affirming healthcare, and fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization, which can produce leftover embryos.”
How anyone endorsed by socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Transportation Department nightmare Pete Buttigieg, and Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin (the slimmed-down member of “the Seditious Six”) can pretend to be a moderate is some pretty audacious political theater. All three have defended sex changes for kids and boys and men in girls’ and women’s sports.
Cooke also has the backing of abortion-on-demand advocate Emily’s List, a loud proponent of “gender-affirming care” like WEAC.
The teachers union campaigned against parental rights bills, which Evers vetoed. The transparency legislation would have required schools to timely release information about curriculum without burdensome costs. Evers wiped out Another parental Bill of Rights bill that would have given parents the ability to review their children’s instructional material and “decide what name and pronouns they’re allowed to use at school,” Wisconsin Public Radio reported in 2022.
WEAC, too, has pushed a “Black Lives Matter at School” initiative that provided “great ideas or recognizing Black Lives Matter at School Week.” Said ideas included demands that schools mandate “Black History & Ethnic Studies” and get rid of police officers in schools.
‘She Shares the Values’
WEAC, which has fought to end public-sector union reforms that have saved Wisconsin taxpayers billions of dollars, also has supported the radical Voces dela Frontera’s push for “Drivers Licenses for All” lobbying effort. Voces advocates against “requiring all states to check immigration status before issuing a driver’s licenses or state ID, and to only issue driver’s licenses to persons who are US citizens or have legal status.”
That’s akin to the stance of another union backing Cooke. The Democrat has touted an endorsement by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) union, a big labor player that has sued the Trump administration for the Department of Transportation’s rule requiring states to demand proof of lawful immigration status.
“I’m honored to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the hard-working men and women of AFSCME,” Cooke wrote on her campaign page.
As Fox News reported, AFSCME, “published a toolkit instructing businesses how to circumvent restrictions on CDLs for illegal aliens.”
The American Federation of Teachers, another leftist union that has backed Cooke, joined the lawsuit in February. Last month, the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. District denied a request to stay the rule pending the outcome of the lawsuit.
In endorsing Cooke, WEAC’s president lauded the candidate’s credentials for Congress.
“She shares the values of every educator I know,” Wirtz-Olsen wrote. It seems the union chief only knows leftist educators.
