This was a wild week in Northern Wisconsin, and although many on this list aren’t from here, I think the politics in Northern Wisconsin matter to us all.
Why? Because if we can make Northern Wisconsin more progressive, we can turn Wisconsin blue and stop being a presidential swing state.
Unfortunately, last week our area looked a lot more like an intolerant backwoods than an area slowly moving along the arc of progress.
First, Marathon County—home of Wausau, the largest city in our Congressional District—was hammered by the New York times for voting against a simple resolution affirming the phrase “A Community for All.”
A few days later, an anti-Black Lives Matter organization was invited by the same county board to speak for an hour and went off the rails, professing that progressive Wausau mayor “wanted to exterminate black people.”
Furthermore, Wausau’s alt-right school board allowed the same hate group to give a day-long conference at the local high school, an affront to decency at a public school.
The Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC urged our FB community to email the school board and rebuke their decision to host this group, and we interviewed Ka Lo, a progressive Marathon County Board Supervisor quoted in the NYT article on our Up North Podcast.
Now we know this crazy news is coming from one city in a sparsely populated area of a sparsely populated state, but what is happening here is a harsh example of a different United States than what many living on the coasts experience, and this area hasn’t always acted this backwards--thus we’re getting the attention of the New York Times.
And that’s why we’re talking about these issues in our email to you today. We think this ugliness in Wausau is directly linked to the ugliness that Trump brought in his presidency and the ugliness that is perpetuated through the lies of Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson and our Congressman Tom Tiffany.
These two Trump cultists regurgitate the misinformation that turns white communities against people of color and foment distrust of progressive policies designed to lift of the poor and middle class.
And that’s why we exist—to tell Northern Wisconsin the guys are lying through billboard ads, tv commercials, and radio.
This billboard has been up in River Falls for a month, and we’re going to put up another on highway 51 north repeating our message—"These Guys are Lying to Us.”
If you’d like to help us pay for these billboard and ads, the easiest way to do that is to buy our beer, or buy our merchandise, because 5% of all of our profits go to the Super PAC.
Of course, if you want to donate directly to the cause, here’s the link.
Thanks for reading and thanks for helping Make Wisconsin Great Again, one beer at a time.
Kirk Bangstad, owner of the Minocqua Brewing Company and Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC.