As a former panelist on “Sunday Insight with Charlie Sykes,” now that the New York Times has written about Sykes I guess I can say I knew him when, or more accurately before:

Charlie Sykes, a popular talk radio host here and leader of the “Stop Trump” movement, had spent months hammering Donald J. Trump on his show, calling him a “whiny, thin-skinned bully” and dismissing his supporters as “Trumpkins.”

So Mr. Sykes was surprised when the Trump campaign reached out on Easter Sunday to ask if the billionaire-reality-star-turned-presidential front-runner could come on his show.

The 17-minute interview last week was contentious and combative, with Mr. Sykes pressing Mr. Trump to apologize for comments he has made denigrating women, calling him a 12-year-old playground tormentor, and lamenting that he had failed to introduce the bombastic New Yorker to Wisconsin’s “tradition of civility and decency.”

Later in the week, as Mr. Trump crossed the state, he seemed to acknowledge the power of Wisconsin’s talk radio culture, which has been an anti-Trump force in the state, by railing aloud against it for deceiving voters.

“In certain areas — the city areas — I’m not doing well,” Mr. Trump told voters in Racine, Wis., bemoaning his lack of support on talk radio. “I’m not doing well because nobody knows my message. They were given misinformation.”

Mr. Sykes, along with a handful of other local talk radio hosts, has spent his mornings criticizing and castigating Mr. Trump over the airwaves. And if Mr. Trump loses the Wisconsin primary on Tuesday, he will have Mr. Sykes and his merry band of talkers partly to blame.

In a nominating contest that has exposed fissures in the Republican Party, Wisconsin’s conservative talk radio apparatus remains remarkably united in at least one belief — their deep and utter dislike for Mr. Trump, who for months has been the focus of their fiery attacks.

“Can someone win without talk radio?” asked Mr. Sykes, during a commercial break from his show. “Yes, theoretically. Except no one has.”

Wisconsin’s conservative talk radio has long played an outsize role in a state whose position in the Republican primary calendar has now given it heightened status in the nominating process.

When Mr. Walker, who ended his own presidential bid earlier this year by offering a pointed rebuke of Mr. Trump, endorsed Senator Ted Cruz on Tuesday, he did so by calling into Mr. Sykes’s show. And the week before, Mr. Cruz kicked off his Wisconsin primary bid in a friendly interview with Mr. Sykes.

Mr. Trump, by contrast, has found himself under near constant fire from the conservative talk radio hosts that dominate the southern part of the state, including the three counties that include parts of Milwaukee — Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington — that are among the most conservative in Wisconsin, and where Mr. Trump is struggling the most.

The most popular conservative talk show hosts here — Mr. Sykes, Jeff Wagner of WTMJ, and Mark Belling, Vicki McKenna and Jay Weber of WISN — are united in their disdain for Mr. Trump, with Jerry Bader, a radio personality at WTAQ in Green Bay, rounding out the group.

“The thing that’s been unique in this presidential race is, for some reason, the three who work here — Jay, Vicki and myself — and our competitors, Charlie and Jeff Wagner, all seem to despise Trump,” Mr. Belling said in an interview. “We all just kind of came to this conclusion independently. I think it’s just that we’re not as stupid as some of the people that are falling for Trump’s crap.”

In Mr. Belling, Mr. Trump has found an antagonist who is just as bellicose as the real estate billionaire himself. In his broadcast on Monday, Mr. Belling called Mr. Trump “the biggest wussy of all time,” “a big crybaby,” and a “sissy,” before turning his attention to the campaign team and declaring: “His staff are probably just a bunch of butt kissers.”

And that was just in the first hour.

“It seems to me that if you are an intelligent, thinking conservative who cares about issues, you’d be mortified that this moderate loudmouth boor would be hijacking a movement that you cared about,” Mr. Belling said, later, in an interview.

Nonetheless, on Monday, Mr. Trump made a round of calls to the state’s local radio hosts. The series of interviews, contentious and combative, did not go particularly well.

Ms. McKenna challenged his promise to build at wall at the nation’s southern border — “What does it look like? Where does it go?” she pressed him — and urged him to declare “wives and kids off-limits,” after Mr. Trump’s public spatinvolving pictures of his wife, Melania, and of Heidi Cruz, Ted Cruz’s wife.

Yet despite Ms. McKenna’s pleas that Mr. Trump “unify” the party, the interview ended on a rough note, with Mr. Trump hanging up on her.

Mr. Bader, the host in Green Bay, began his interview with Mr. Trump bluntly as well. “I have some concerns about both your behavior and what I consider to be vague policy positions,” he said.

In an interview, Mr. Bader described his conversation with Mr. Trump as “feeling like a ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit.” “Like this isn’t real,” he said. “And to me that’s what his entire campaign feels like.”

That Mr. Trump, who has singled out reporters he does not like and banned certain media outlets he deems critical from attending his events, has pandered to the talk radio crowd here not only highlights the group’s clout, but also may reveal a general election calculation.

“The last thing you want to do as a Republican is irritate your base as you go into a general election in a swing state like Wisconsin,” said Mark Graul, a Republican strategist who ran George W. Bush’s campaign in Wisconsin in 2004 and has run other statewide races since. “And in many ways, talk radio is the voice of base Republicans in Wisconsin.”

The Wisconsin electorate, which gave rise to Speaker Paul D. Ryan — a hometown congressman whose attraction is predicated on civil discourse and serious policy proposals — is particularly well primed for the talk radio pitch here, which appeals to both their sense of conservative principles, as well as their Wisconsin-nice demeanor.

“For whatever reason, there is a pragmatism to Wisconsin hosts that you don’t see en masse in a lot of other hosts,” Mr. Bader said. “I believe I have a moral responsibility to do whatever small part I can in stopping Donald Trump. It’s beyond politics for me. I think he’s dangerous.”

And from Mr. Sykes: “I think talk radio has been more substantive, more intellectually serious here and therefore less prone to embrace an entertainer.”

“I feel very strongly that Donald Trump poses a fundamental challenge to the conservative movement, an existential challenge, so yes, I have made it my mission to stop him,” Mr. Sykes added.

Sykes’ next to last quote is a bit ironic given that the godfather of conservative talk, Rush Limbaugh, makes no bones about being an entertainer. People tend to forget that radio is a business, and if your ratings aren’t good enough, you are a poor advertiser draw, and then out the door you will go. But given how long these six have been on the air, clearly their shows work. (As opposed to liberal talk radio, which keeps getting tried and keeps failing, with few exceptions like Sly and 92.1 in Madison.)

I don’t listen to any of the six regularly anymore since their signals don’t get as far southwest as I am, and I don’t listen to them online because I work when they’re on the air. My past impression is that at least some of them, including Sykes, are avid boosters of Gov. Scott Walker specifically (in Sykes’ case going back to Walker’s Assembly days), and when I was a more regular listener I didn’t hear a lot of criticism of Walker. That could be part of their motivation for their Trump distaste, although all six were here during the heyday (if you want to call it that) of Act 10 and Recallorama, and Trump wasn’t.

Sykes, on the other hand, is the inspiration of what has been called the “Sykes effect,” over positions favored by Sykes that might be at odds with GOP leadership. (The “Sykes effect” isn’t found where I live, where neither Sykes nor any other Wisconsin-based conservative talk radio exists.)

The thing about what Sykes, Wagner, Belling, McKenna, Weber and Bader do, however, is that listeners are free to listen, or not.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found a way to criticize Hillary Clinton:

Nothing matters more to leadership in a democracy than support for an open, honest government in which citizens are informed and in charge. It is the foundational building block of the republic upon which all else rests. And any candidate vying for the votes of the American people needs to have demonstrated a firm commitment not only to the ideal but to the reality of open government.

As we noted Tuesday, Republican front-runner Donald Trump is not one of those candidates. But neither is Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton. Her horrible track record on transparency raises serious concerns for open government under a Clinton administration — so serious we believe they may disqualify her from public office. We hope Wisconsin voters give this issue the consideration it deserves when they go to the polls on Tuesday.

The issue immediately at hand — and under investigation by the FBI — is Clinton’s use of a private email server for State Department communications. Clinton may have violated national security laws by making top secret documents vulnerable to hackers and available to people without proper security clearance. Violating those laws rightly ended the public service career of Gen. David Petraeus when he was President Barack Obama’s CIA director. The FBI and Justice Department must be free to fully investigate and, if warranted, prosecute Clinton in this matter without any political interference from the Obama administration.

In addition, regardless of Clinton’s excuses, the only believable reason for the private server in her basement was to keep her emails out of the public eye by willfully avoiding freedom of information laws. No president, no secretary of state, no public official at any level is above the law. She chose to ignore it, and must face the consequences.

In a lengthy Washington Post article on Sunday, Robert O’Harrow Jr. notes that from the earliest days of her service as secretary of state, “Clinton aides and senior officials focused intently on accommodating the secretary’s desire to use her private email account, documents and interviews show.

“Throughout, they paid insufficient attention to laws and regulations governing the handling of classified material and the preservation of government records, interviews and documents show. They also neglected repeated warnings about the security of the BlackBerry while Clinton and her closest aides took obvious security risks in using the basement server.”

Last month, in a hearing about a Judicial Watch lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan said legitimate questions have been raised about whether Clinton’s staff was trying to help her to sidestep the Freedom of Information Act.

“We’re talking about a Cabinet-level official who was accommodated by the government for reasons unknown to the public,” Sullivan said. “And I think that’s a fair statement: For reasons heretofore unknown to the public. And all the public can do is speculate.”

“This is all about the public’s right to know,” Sullivan added.

This is hardly the first time Clinton has tried to sidestep the public eye. Last year, Pro Publica noted five such episodes:

In 1992, during Bill Clinton’s first run for office, the Clintons declined to release all of their tax returns because, it turned out, a few of the returns showed Hillary Clinton’s incredible success in commodities trading when Bill Clinton was attorney general and then governor of Arkansas. She made almost $100,000 from an initial investment of $1,000 in a matter of months — a return of 10,000% — under the guidance of a lawyer who was also outside counsel to Tyson Foods Inc., Arkansas’ largest employer. The returns weren’t made public until 1994.

In 1993, Hillary Clinton led a presidential task force to overhaul the U.S. health care system. The effort ultimately failed but the group came under intense criticism from lawmakers and interest groups for meeting behind closed doors. Several court challenges were brought in an attempt to open the process.

In 1994, U.S. investigators subpoenaed Clinton’s billing records from her years at the Rose Firm in Little Rock, Ark. — documents that also had been sought by reporters. Of key interest was Clinton’s legal work for a failing savings and loan, but records of those billings weren’t found. Pro Publica: “Much later, Clinton’s longtime assistant, Carolyn Huber, said she found in the White House residence an additional box of records that contained the billing memos. They were turned over to the independent counsel in 1996. Clinton testified she had no knowledge of how the records wound up where they did.”

As a senator in 2006, Clinton set up an energy task force that produced a 40-page report. That by itself is not unusual, but this was: The existence of the group, its members and its work product were all kept secret. Turned out the leader of the task force headed an investment firm with major holdings in the energy sector.

Public officials keep secrets because they have something to hide — something they don’t want the people they are supposed to be serving to know anything about.

Last year, the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation became an issue. Donors are identified but not the exact amount of each donation or the date of those contributions. And donations to the foundation from foreign governments have raised conflict of interest questions for Clinton as secretary of state, an office with power over foreign affairs and favors second only to the president’s.

Then there are the closed-door speeches to Wall Street financial investment firms, for which she received hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece.

These off-the-record speeches were delivered after Clinton left the State Department and was preparing for her second bid for the White House. Clinton has refused to release transcripts of the speeches, saying she would do so only if other politicians released transcripts of their speeches. But that, as The New York Times noted in a February editorial, is a child’s excuse.

“Voters have every right to know what Mrs. Clinton told these groups…. By refusing to release them all, especially the bank speeches, Mrs. Clinton fuels speculation about why she’s stonewalling,” the Times editorial said.

Sen. Bernie Sanders has used the fees she was paid for the speeches by the most powerful firms on Wall Street against Clinton in their race for the nomination. Of equal concern is the secrecy involved and Clinton’s continuing refusal to release the transcripts of what she told the investment bankers.

Clinton has a long track record of public service but an equally long record of obfuscation, secrecy and working in the shadows to boost her power and further her ambition. We encourage voters to think long and hard about that record when choosing the next president.

Readers will have to keep this in mind when the Journal Sentinel endorses Hillary! before Nov. 8. But, you know, stopped clocks, etc.

Meanwhile, James Wigderson explains why Donald Trump is likely to lose in Wisconsin Tuesday:

Given that no Wisconsin Republican not named Dale Schultz opposes Act 10, what is the possible logical explanation for Trump’s attack? Understanding that the term “logic” doesn’t really apply to Trump, it is that Trump has been getting support from Democrats who have been crossing over into open GOP primaries, or even changing their party registration, to vote for Trump believing that Trump will be the easiest candidate for Hillary! to beat. Given that suddenly the Democratic presidential primary is more of a race, this strategy appears to be backfiring on Trump.

Trump’s campaign started unraveling one week ago about now when he made what Nichols called the “bold and smart” move of appearing on talk radio programs whose hosts oppose Trump. Nichols was right, up until Trump opened his mouth.

The yellow and red areas are where Charlie Sykes, Mark Belling and (in the morning) Vicki McKenna are on the air. McKenna is also on the air in the afternoon in the dark blue area. Jerry Bader is on in the light blue, goldenrod (?) and green area. Everyone is available online, of course. (It is interesting to note how many Republicans complained about the so-called “Sykes effect” when he was pushing conservative legislation GOP leadership opposed or vice versa, and now Sykes and his talk show brethren are too establishment in pushing Cruz over Trump.)