Hi friends,
For those of you just joining this email list, my name is Kirk Bangstad and I own the Minocqua Brewing Company.
We’re basically a company that sells beer and increasingly other types of beverages to fund our progressive activism in Wisconsin.
Many of you may be reading this weekly essay for the first time because last week, I posted on all of our social media channels that the Minocqua Brewing Company would be using social media less and moving more towards email communication going forward.
While I’m not giving up social media entirely, I hoping to wean my company off of it as soon as possible. I’ll get back to why in a minute, but I first want to tell you what I’m thinking about last Tuesday’s election.
These were the stages of grief that I went through, and I’m guessing many of you did as well:
- Disbelief
- Physical pain (stomach/nausea)
- Fear (what country can I flee to…)
- Sadness/giving up (how can my neighbors be so debased)
- Anger (I hope my neighbors feel the pain that Trump’s going to bring them)
After going through those stages of grief, I finally found some balance and a modicum of mental health this weekend. My brain, and this is both good and bad, doesn’t allow me to wallow in pity for too long. While this gets me into trouble because I too-often short-circuit grief, I can’t help but try to fix problems as soon as I see them.
There’s no doubt that we’ve got a bunch of huge problems coming our way. Most of them will stem from electing a government that will go behind closed doors to slowly take OUR rights away and pass laws to make them harder to get back. And by OUR, I mean:
- Women
- Minorities
- LGBTQ+ community, especially trans folks
- Immigrants (both documented and not)
- Progressive political activists
- Anyone who’s not Christian
- The middle and working classes (even though many of them provided the votes Trump needed to win)
What finally gave me a sense of balance was the realization that Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and Michigan all have Democratic governors who should act as a bulwark against any extreme Christian Nationalist or Fascist policies that spring from Trump’s administration.
Our governors can sue Trump and slow-walk his executive orders for a while--hopefully long enough to get us to the 2026 elections where we can win back power in the U.S. Senate.
But because we’re all in for a world of hurt, I think it’s absolutely pointless for progressives to start pointing fingers at “who” did “what” wrong in this election.
The three most important articles I read on this subject last week were from the New York Times' David Brooks, the Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, and our national treasure, Heather Cox Richardson. I’d suggest you read them all as well.
Brooks suggests that income inequality has made America’s non-college educated so destitute that they’ve lost all respect for the college educated, and are now voting purely out of spite to “own the libs.” Nichols includes the upper-middle class in this mix who subscribe to right-wing media, and although they’ve been living in a period of relative economic well-being, they’ve been convinced that their world is a "woke" hellscape. Heather Cox Richardson dovetails on that theory and explains that right-wing media has overtaken mainstream media in its ability to reach many of us, and that the misinformation they spew is being augmented by bad foreign actors and social media algorithms that use division to promote website “stickiness.”
This sounds about right to me, and I’ll go one step further. Mainstream media has become so focused on stemming their financial losses and staying relevant that they "sane-wash" MAGA craziness so as not to alienate those who believe the insanity (Haitians eating pets, etc.) that they’ve been marinating in on social media for the last several years.
As far a social media is concerned, my own company’s Facebook page is an example of why I no longer trust these platforms. Over the course of the last several months, when I needed to reach my company’s 90K Facebook followers to spread our progressive message in an important swing state, the platform was practically useless.
Facebook warned us repeatedly over the last several months that we were in “violation” of their community standards, and that our punishment was “reduced distribution” to our own audience. Not only that, but our page was hacked last month, and over $30K was spent on bogus dental care ads over the course of a week. While we contested the charges and our bank ultimately got our money back, we couldn’t even PAY TO PLAY during the election because Facebook didn’t trust that our page wasn’t still under attack. Lastly, over the last few weeks, I saw a huge spike in AI-generated, Trump-supporting filth on our company’ Facebook feed. This suggested to me that the progressive bubble that Facebook’s algorithm generally put us in was somehow pierced with an overwhelming amount of misinformation.
To me, this influx of social media misinformation and the degradation of American journalism harkens back to the era of yellow journalism that we experienced in the late 1800s. During that time, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst took journalistic ethics to new lows by fabricating stories and playing on society’s fears in order to sell more papers. As a result, America was pushed into a war with Spain and the real news, which was that much of America worked under terribly unhealthy conditions, was under-reported.
To fill that void, ethical journalists like Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair came along. Tarbell wrote a series of columns in McClure’s Magazine over the course of two years that exposed the horrible working conditions at Standard Oil Company. Upton Sinclair, while writing in a socialist newspaper called “Appeal to Reason,” reported on similarly horrible conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking plants. He later wrote a groundbreaking novel called “The Jungle,” which lead to the Meat Inspection Act 1906. These “muckrakers” were telling the truth about the subjugation of the working class while the “mainstream media” embellished stories to sell more papers.
Fast forward to today. I’ve started reading Heather Cox Richardson, Propublica, and the Guardian to get my news because I’m wary about how I’ve felt manipulated by the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The similarities are overwhelming.
That’s why I am trying to lead my company into a world without social media and why I want to figure out a way to support media that tells us what’s really going on.
I don’t want to feel manipulated anymore, and I want to do something to help real investigative reporting flourish. As far as Wisconsin is concerned, there are a number of wonderful journalists whose work often gets lost in the shuffle. Among them are Ruth Coniff at the Wisconsin Examiner, my friend Pat Kreitlow at Up North News, and Dan Shafer at Civic Media. These progressive writers dig into Wisconsin’s right-wing corruption every day, and to me, they are Wisconsin’s new-age “muckrakers.”
I’ve decided that it’s time to explore how to turn the Minocqua Brewing Company’s current mailing list, which is about 100K people strong, into a place where Midwest muckrakers can expand their reach and educate more of us.
I’m not sure how I’m going to do that quite yet, but I want this email to serve as a call-to-action for hard-hitting, ethical journalists to contact me and explore ways that we can work together to keep us all informed about the inevitable onslaught of Christian Nationalism and Fascism we’re about to experience in the coming years.
To those who just like reading my weekly email, I’d like to ask you to encourage others to sign up for this mailing list by going to our website as well as find progressive news sources you trust and spend less time on social media.
We must find a way to spread the truth and to find the money to support those journalists with the courage to tell it.
That is what I’ll be thinking about while going into the holidays.
I’ll also be releasing a new line of beer, a coffee table book, and a BUNCH of new merchandise focused on the theme of “resistance” --but all of that is for a future email.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for sticking with the Minocqua Brewing Company.
Together, let’s enter this new scary phase in America focused on promoting the truth, sticking together, and helping support those most vulnerable to Trump’s designs on our nation--one beer at a time.
Kirk Bangstad
Owner, Minocqua Brewing Company
Founder, Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC