Last Friday, Eau Claire’s District 3 Appellate Court Presiding Judge Lisa Stark denied our motion to “stay” the collection of the $750K defamation judgement against the Minocqua Brewing Company until our appeal is decided.
This means that Gregg Walker, publisher of the Lakeland Times, a tiny alt-right propaganda rag in the tiny hamlet of Minocqua, Wisconsin, is once again free to start garnishing my bank accounts and seizing assets from the Minocqua Brewing Company, even though there is a HIGH LIKELIHOOD that this state-record-setting defamation loss will be overturned on appeal.
If you’ve just tuned in today, Gregg Walker originally filed this defamation lawsuit against me in 2021 after I called him a crook and a misogynist for spewing misinformation about the pandemic in his newspaper and railing against Oneida County’s health official for doing her job and trying to protect us from Covid.
For the last three years, we’ve received one backwards decision after the next from tiny Forest County’s literal backwoods Judge Leon Stenz, which on numerous occasions almost brought me and my company to its knees.
We only got a hint of relief from Stenz’s attacks last June when Appellate Court Presiding Judge Stark (appointed to court by Scott Walker in 2013) granted a temporary stay of collections until she could review the full motion to stay in its entirety.
While we celebrated that “stay” two months ago, we never fully believed that the 3rd District Court of Appeals would give us a fair shake.
You see, Wisconsin’s Third District, the one in rural Northern Wisconsin, is comprised of three ex-Governor-Scott-Walker-appointed judges--meaning that they were appointed because of their ties, either tacitly or explicitly, to Wisconsin’s Republican Party, by a governor that arguably damaged our state more than any other in Wisconsin's history.
To make this insinuation crystal clear, Scott Walker’s record of gutting our state in order to enhance his own power means that there is no way that his same Mitch-McConnell-like anti-democratic psychosis didn’t ALSO permeate the judicial appointment process.
I was told that these judges, by the mere fact they’ve made it to the esteemed appellate court level, SHOULD focus more on the law than on their own political allegiances. I've also lived through Wisconsin’s last decade, which has seen our state and country’s judicial system, time and time again, twist the law in knots to advance the agendas of both Scott Walker and Donald Trump.
To say this all in a shorter way, I never expected to get justice from the Wisconsin’s 3rd District Court of Appeals, and we certainly didn’t get it last Friday. Furthermore, I don’t expect to get it a year from now when they actually decide on our appeal—after Walker’s vultures have presumably pecked away at all the meat left from my company’s carcass.
Because I now believe that Northern Wisconsin's partisan judicial system is largely bereft of honor and courage, my company must now throw itself at the mercy of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, which after the judicial election in April 2023, is no longer in thrall to Wisconsin’s Republican Party.
And to make this crystal clear, I don't expect to get ANY special treatment from a progressive-leaning Wisconsin Supreme Court, but I do expect to FINALLY get an IMPARTIAL JUDGEMENT on this wickedly-political lawsuit that has been warped by partisanship from day 1.
Now this is the really crazy part about this whole ordeal, which I’ve alluded to in past missives.
I HAVE INSURANCE from West Bend and Society Insurance to COVER ANY LOSSES MY COMPANY MIGHT SUSTAIN FROM DEFAMATION LAWSUITS! We fought with them years ago so that they’d pay for my legal defense, and they grudgingly started doing so about a year into this ordeal.
This means that when the judge decided to deny my insurance-company-hired-lawyers’ motion to grant me a stay from collection efforts, my INSURANCE COMPANIES, NOT ME, were on the hook to pay this judgement to Gregg Walker and the Lakeland Times until the appeal is finalized.
When I lost this case last October, however, Society and West Bend decided they didn’t want to pay this huge judgement and filed a motion with Judge Stenz to abandon me—even though I’ve never missed an insurance payment and have fulfilled my part of the contract to a “T.”
And now that we’ve lost this stay and I may have to potentially file for bankruptcy if the Supreme Court denies our next motion, these same insurance companies are refusing to cover the cost of filing for bankruptcy, approximately $50K, because its “not part of my defense.”
This is a classic story of why the entire insurance industry is such a scam. They only help you until the cost to them is too high, and then they drop you when you become a burden to them--expecting that you won’t have enough money to fight back.
Well, we are fighting back, and we’ve filed a “bad faith” claim against both Society and West Bend Insurance amounting to now over $3 million dollars. Unfortunately, that lawsuit will take another year to adjudicate and we’ll probably have to once again take it to Wisconsin’s Supreme Court after getting partisan judgements by “Backwoods Leon” and the Walker-appointed 3rd District Court of Appeals.
As an aside, for all those that read the word "bankruptcy" as meaning "the end of the Minocqua Brewing Company," please know that under no circumstances do I intend to go belly up. Filing for bankruptcy will be our way to legally protect my company from Gregg Walker's vultures while our appeal and bad faith claim against our insurers make their way to Wisconsin's Supreme Court.
Prior to last Friday’s legal punch to the gut, I was planning to once again promote our 12-city “Get Out The Vote” tour in today’s post, which officially commences this coming Tuesday at 5:30 pm at our flagship taproom in Minocqua.
It is not lost on me that the amount I will have pay attorneys to help me file for bankruptcy (again to restructure debt, not to go belly up) in the event that Wisconsin's Supreme Court passes on our emergency appeal, is similar to the amount we’ve been trying to raise to both put on this tour and erect our HOPE billboards in those 12 cities--about $50K.
I’m not a paranoid guy by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s hard for me not to believe that there is some connection between the timing of this decision and the timing of our tour starting in 3 days. It’s pretty convenient for those who want to destroy a massive effort by our Super PAC; in partnership with Planned Parenthood Advocates of Wisconsin, Citizens Action of Wisconsin, Our Wisconsin Revolution, and Progress North; to recruit volunteers and knock on doors to get progressives out to vote in Rural Wisconsin.
As an aspiring opera singer renting an apartment in highly-unaffordable New York City back in the early 2000’s, I often lived paycheck to paycheck—even while working part time as a management consultant for blue-chip tech companies. Although I was often stressed about money, my passion for singing gave me the optimism I needed to “have faith” that money issues would somehow work themselves out as long as I worked hard and was true to myself, my art, and others.
Although I’ve wizened up a bit about money and have become more cynical after trying to run a brewpub in the reddest part of Wisconsin during Covid while my president lied to me, I’ve never lost my deep-seeded belief in the vague idea of the “Divine,” rooted in a similarly vague idea of “Fate.”
Some would call that “having religion.” I call it having an eternal hope based on a strong moral code learned in the Christian tradition.
This eternal HOPE, coupled with my absolute belief that what my Super PAC is doing is essential to saving Democracy in America, AND my absolute belief that the war of words I’ve had with an intellectually and emotionally stunted newspaper publisher should never have resulted in an $750K judgement against me, means that I WILL NEVER GIVE UP.
COME HELL OR HIGH WATER, we’re going to help get out the vote in Wisconsin to make sure that Trump never gets close to the White House again.
That being said, I could use some financial help to finish that fight while keeping Walker’s vultures at bay. If you can chip in to help me keep fighting, I would appreciate it.
That's all I have for you today, folks.
The world we live in today is a chaotic place where misinformation abounds and bots pose as people in a digital world where we arguably spend too much time. That misinformation creates a fever of hateful partisanship, especially in our small swing state that plays an outsized role in saving America's democracy.
That being said, the joy and honesty we're seeing from the Harris/Walz campaign, following the honesty and diligence we saw throughout Biden's presidency, fills me with an abundance of HOPE that we can soon put this era of political hatred and divisiveness behind us.
Once we do that, we can begin to repair our institutions at both the state and federal level, including our justice system, which has been so severely warped and weakened over the last few decades.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for sticking with the Minocqua Brewing Company.
Together, one beer at a time, we'll soon finish this long race that will hopefully restore a semblance of civility, honor, and backbone to our state and national government.
Kirk Bangstad
Owner, Minocqua Brewing Company
Founder, Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC