Fox's Dana Perino grills Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong over democratic socialism

Give Dana Perino credit for doing the one thing that's gone missing from most political interviews: asking the candidate to explain her own words back to her. Francesca Hong didn't get caught in a gotcha. She got asked about tweets she actually wrote, in 2020, calling to defund the police. That's not ancient history and it's not a hostile misreading. It's the record.

What's telling is watching the scramble that follows whenever a Democratic socialist has to answer for that phrase now that "defund the police" has become politically radioactive even in blue states. The instinct is always to reframe, soften, claim it meant something more nuanced than what the words plainly said. Maybe Hong has genuinely rethought her position. Fine, people do that. But voters in Wisconsin deserve to hear her say so directly, not watch her tap-dance around a question a network anchor was willing to ask that plenty of others wouldn't have bothered with.

This is also a preview of the general election, whether Hong's primary rivals like it or not. If she wins the nomination carrying a DSA label and a defund-the-police paper trail into a swing state governor's race, Republicans aren't going to need to manufacture an attack line. She already wrote it herself, in public, for anyone to find. Perino just did the finding first.