With 9 days to go until the election, America’s oligarchs have shown their true colors.
Bezos, Buffet, Zuckerberg, Musk, and a guy you probably haven’t heard of but is nearly as rich, Patrick Soon-Shiong, all recently decided that their wealth was more important than their country.
The cases of Bezos and Soon-Shiong, who own the Washington Post and LA Times, respectively, are the saddest. Both billionaires prohibited their editorial boards from endorsing Kamala Harris for President, setting off a spate of high-profile editorial resignations.
My reaction to Bezos' refusal to let the Washington Post endorse Harris/Walz
Musk, as everyone knows, has turned X (Twitter) into a propaganda machine for Trump, probably hoping he can further enrich himself with future government contracts and potentially even land a role in a future Trump administration.
Zuckerberg has not only refused to endorse a presidential candidate, but recently hired Dustin Carmack, a staffer on Project 2025 and Ron DeSantis’ former chief of staff, as Meta’s public policy director for the South. LGBTQ+ groups have reported that Facebook’s content moderation policies are now seemingly encouraging more anti-trans hate, and I have to admit, my own page with 90K followers, on which we’ve been promoting GOTV volunteerism to keep Wisconsin blue, has been throttled as of late.
Lastly, after previously endorsing Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama, Warren Buffet announced a few days ago that he wouldn’t be endorsing either candidate for President in this election.
What the heck is going on? Why are so many of America’s richest men, whose wealth enable them to stick their necks out more than most, turning cowardly at the worst possible time?
I can only guess it's because they’ve never faced a future where a potential United States dictator might actively try to destroy their businesses if they endorse the opposing candidate, and their love of multi-national power and wealth is more important than fighting for Democracy at home.
Their multinational companies, because of our weak anti-trust laws, have essentially become untethered to the United States, and they don’t have to care if Democracy dies in America so long as their global monopolies aren’t broken up by do-good muckrakers.
Sounds a lot like America in the early 1900s.
As Heather Cox Richardson pointed out yesterday when referring to the writings of scholar Timothy Snyder, these billionaires are hedging their bets on a neck-and-neck presidential race and starting to “obey in advance,” just in case Trump wins.
What this tells me is that when American oligarchs become too powerful to feel the need to defend American democracy when we need them most, their power needs to be diminished through stronger anti-trust laws.
This also tells me that in 2024, we can’t count on anyone to save America from a dictatorship other than ourselves.
Not our corporate media, not the scions of technology, not the leaders of the once-“Grand” Republican Party.
No, saving Democracy and saving America from the politics of retribution will come down to a few hundred thousand middle class folks from Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia.
Video of my speech before we filed ~30 criminal defamation complaints with the Oneida County Sheriff on Friday.
This is why I’ve been raising holy hell about my brief imprisonment two weeks ago in an obvious case of political retribution in rural Northern Wisconsin.
Just like these decisions by Bezos and Soon-Shiong foreshadow the end of America’s independent media in the event of a Trump dictatorship, my imprisonment for criminal defamation foreshadows what will happen to anyone who voices their opposition to Trump or his acolytes if he is elected.
I’ve written extensively about my situation to this mailing list over the last two weeks because I hope my story will inspire Wisconsinites to vote like their own freedom from political imprisonment depends on it.
Here is an update on what we did last Friday.
Because there is virtually no credible media left in Wisconsin, the story of my criminal defamation imprisonment would have gone largely unnoticed had I not had a large social media presence and corporate mailing list.
Because I can’t count on the media to get this story out, I decided to publicly clear my name by using Saul Alinky’s 4th “Rule for Radicals,” which is to “make the enemy live by its own book of rules.”
Oneida County DA Jillian Pfeifer inexplicably decided to press charges against me last Monday for criminal defamation, an archaic and likely unconstitutional Wisconsin statue, even though I explicitly put a disclaimer on a satirical post I made about right-wing newspaper publisher Gregg Walker.
The post I made was clearly NOT defamation, but posts that have been made about me and the Minocqua Brewing Company over the last 4 years by many local ne’r-do-wells, including Gregg Walker, clearly are.
Many of these local "ne'r-do-wells" have stated as fact that I am a drug addict, a pedophile, a criminal, a liar, a cheater, a stealer of PPP funds, etc.
All of these statements were patently untrue, they harmed my reputation, and they were written with “actual malice,” which achieves the high bar necessary to defame a “public figure” such as myself. But in this age of social media, where mud is constantly being slung by cowardly, deplorable keyboard warriors, I ignored all of it.
But last week, given that DA Pfeiffer chose to press charges against me for criminal defamation, I decided to file complaints against ~30 people for the same “crime.”
The 14th Amendment of the US Constitution guarantees equal protection under the law, so if she’s going to prosecute my case after the sheriff bound me in handcuffs and booked me in the Oneida County jail for two hours, I expect to see the same treatment given to these 30 individuals.
If DA Pfeifer and Sheriff Hartmann don’t want to do this, which I expect they don’t, then I expect to see my case dismissed early next week.
“Force the enemy to play by the same rules.”
If Sheriff Hartmann doesn’t refer these “crimes” to DA Pfefer next week, or DA Pfeiffer doesn’t dismiss my case next week, then I will file hundreds more criminal defamation complaints in each subsequent week that my case is still pending with the Oneida County Sheriff’s department against anyone who has given me a bad review about our food quality over the last 4 years—because we haven’t served food over that time period!
I closed the brew “pub” version of the Minocqua Brewing Company that served food in September of 2020—smack dab in the middle of the pandemic. We re-opened in a beautiful, rehabbed old Texaco Gas Station in the spring of 2022, and have only served beer, soda (Rainbow Land), wine (Choice), and coffee (Woke) out of that location—not food.
These obviously “fake” food reviews, which I’ve published in good humor over the years to show how ridiculously political online reviews have become, have actually lowered my “ratings” on Facebook, Google, Yelp, and Trip Advisor.
They fit the laws of defamation perfectly, because one can measure the actual reputational harm these lies have caused in how low my online ratings have become as a result.
Do I want to ACTUALLY see these online trolls imprisoned for writing fake reviews? No.
Do I think that the law should be applied equally regardless of political affiliation, and if progressive political speech is subject to criminal prosecution, must identical right-wing political expression be too? Yes.
Do I want to deluge the Sheriff and the DA with real criminal defamation cases until they realize that the politics of political retribution will cause them an immense amount of work and heap huge amounts of public scorn upon them? Yes.
President Theodore Roosevelt helped break up the monopolies (“trusts”) lead by Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan with the help of “muckrakers"-- a group of writers that exposed the corruption and harm being caused by these beyond-wealthy oligarchs to average Americans.
I never thought I’d become a new-age “muckraker,” but by writing about the corruption in rural Oneida County, which only becomes an important place every four years when Wisconsin inevitably decides an existential presidential race, I guess I might fit the description.
Fighting back against these criminal defamation charges is going to take a lot of work and cost a lot of money. If you’d like to see me win this case and protect progressive political speech in northern Wisconsin by forcing the Oneida County Sheriff and the DA to end their campaign of political retribution against me, then please consider chipping in to my legal defense fund here.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for sticking with the Minocqua Brewing Company.
Together, we can demolish the contemporary American oligarchy that let us down in our greatest time of need through collective muckraking, one beer at a time.
Kirk Bangstad
Owner, Minocqua Brewing Company
Founder, Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC
Please Donate to Minocqua Brewing Company's Legal Defense Fund Here