Hi folks,
I’m writing today from my apartment in Madison, Wisconsin, and assume my feelings are quite similar to many of yours.
I have a very reserved confidence that Kamala will win, but that confidence is mixed with a healthy dose of skepticism that something could still go horribly wrong.
Since I can’t imagine an America with Trump as our President again, I’ve been unable to develop a short-term plan for my business if the unthinkable happens, which I know isn’t very smart.
Instead, I’ve doubled down on optimism to quiet those terrible “what-ifs” in my mind.
When we all hear the announcement that Kamala will be our next President, probably on Nov. 6th or a few days later, I’m fairly certain that the MAGA era, as we know it, will end.
Trump’s many criminal lawsuits will run their course. He probably won’t be punished nearly as much as anyone else who has committed similar crimes, but he will vanish from public life--which is ultimately what we all want and need to happen.
Once Trump is gone, his movement must change, and it will be hard for anyone else in that chaotic cult to keep the MAGA house of cards from falling.
The end of the Trump era will mark the end of my 4-year sprint to help save Wisconsin’s and America’s Democracy through the Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC. We aren’t very big, but thanks to so many of you, we’ve made a difference in Wisconsin since our inception on January 4th, 2021--two days before the insurrection that “woke” us all up.
We did what we could in this election by putting up billboards all over the state and recruiting volunteers to “Get Out The Vote” in 12 Wisconsin cities throughout September.
This sprint to save Democracy has at times been all-consuming for me, and not terribly healthy--both from a mental, physical, and social perspective. It’s not good for anyone's soul to fight all the time, and once that fight muscle gets strong, it’s sometimes hard to turn off in less adversarial relationships.
I’m hoping that the future of the Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC involves issue advocacy, but not the existential brawls that keeps life-shortening adrenaline pumping through my veins.
Once we beat Trump, I’m going to turn back to fixing Wisconsin’s public schools by suing to eliminate public tax dollar funding for the parasitic private school voucher system. This is a passion of mine and important for Wisconsin, but the issue thankfully isn’t existential for America.
I plan to sing more regularly at the Madison taproom, which has always been my passion and mental health balancer. I’ll start with some German lieder on Nov 17th and an Italian Christmas show on December 22nd during what we call “Beer Church” on Sunday afternoons.
I also hope to make more time for the people I love, which is really what life is all about.
One fight I will never abandon, however, is the fight against Oneida County to end their harassment of my business once and for all.
Last Friday, I filed our 73rd criminal defamation complaint over the course of two weeks against folks who have “defamed” the Minocqua Brewing Company in a way that actually fits the definition of “defamation.”
This of course is a response to the bogus criminal defamation charges leveled at me by right-wing newspaper publisher Gregg Walker, Oneida County Sheriff Grady Hartmann, and Oneida County DA Jillian Pfeiffer over a satirical post I made that included a disclaimer explaining that the post was satire and should never have been taken as fact.
I decided two weeks ago that if the Sheriff and the DA were going walk arm-in-arm with a thin-skinned bully to use the legal system to drudge up an archaic, rarely used, and likely-unconstitutional state statue to harass me, then I’m going to use the legal system to harass them right back.
The 14th amendment to the US constitution gives everyone "equal protection under the law," meaning that I expect DA Pfeiffer and Sheriff Hartmann to press charges against 73 different people (and counting) for doing something equal or more unlawful than what I did.
So far, I've not been contacted by anyone in the Sheriff's department about the complaints we filed last week, which we expected. Their non-contact helps us build our federal lawsuit against the sheriff, the DA, Gregg Walker, the Oneida County Zoning committee, and the Town of Minocqua for “political retaliation.”
The complaints we filed this week range from someone posting a photo of me wearing a Hitler mustache to fake bad reviews about our food. (we haven't served food since 2020)
One thing that the end of the MAGA movement won’t bring is the end of the Old Boys Network of Oneida County that closed ranks against an outspoken liberal who shined a light their corrupt backscratching and made them look foolish on a regular basis.
I will keep fighting against these emotionally and intellectually-stunted men to keep my business open and I’ll continue to be the loud voice that ridicules Gregg Walker when he attacks women in his partisan newspapers. That being said, I’ll do my best to compartmentalize this provincial ugliness and attempt to find balance in the glorious beauty of the Northwoods, the beauty of art made in Madison, and the beauty of intelligent conversations with like-minded friends from around the country.
Northern Wisconsin, as most of us know, has a healthy dose of problems, but none of them are existential to our Republic.
And of course, the mundane world of politics, red tape, and the daily grind would be intolerable without humor.
Laughing at myself, my adversaries, and the chaos I see all around me but don’t have the power to change is my greatest form of therapy.
Luckily, I get to use that humor on beer can labels from time to time and actually make a little money from it.
This brings me to “Snowflake Holiday Ale,” the beer we created to laugh off the $50K that my insurance company forced me to pay Gregg Walker to settle his civil defamation lawsuit out of court.
This will probably be your last shot to reserve a 4-pack for online delivery before Thanksgiving because we’ve almost sold out of the allotted cases for our online distributor and what has been earmarked for our monthly beer subscribers.
Click Here to Reserve Snowflake Holiday Ale for Online Delivery to 44 States Before Thanksgiving
Thats all I have for you today folks. There’s a poem “brewing” that I’m going to send you all on the morning of November 5th that will probably be entitled “Good Morning America.”
Knowing my luck, it will probably also get me sued by the ABC television network for trademark violations.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for sticking with the Minocqua Brewing Company.
Together, after we wake up to a new morning in America, we can take a much-needed break from politics and celebrate with a few beers, songs, and laughs--knowing that we left it all out on the field to save American Democracy.
Kirk Bangstad
Owner, Minocqua Brewing Company
Founder, Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC.