Hi Folks,
With your help over the last few weeks, we’ve been able to purchase HOPE billboards in nine of the 12 cities where we plan to take our musical “Get Out The Vote” tour in late September/early October.
I’m going to eventually ask you to chip in to fund the last few expensive ones in Green Bay, Appleton, and Oshkosh, because those cost a lot more than the others, but since they’re digital signs and don’t need to be built, we don’t have to pull the trigger on them quite yet.
Apart from buying billboard space, the Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC is in a bit of a lull as our paid organizer is reaching out to progressive organizations to partner with us to recruit volunteers to help get out the vote in late September. We’re also finalizing the musical acts that will be playing in each city to help attract and energize those would-be volunteers.
So instead of raising money from you this week, I figured I’d give you an update about the Minocqua Brewing Company’s ongoing defamation lawsuit against Wisconsin’s most conservative propaganda rag, the Lakeland Times.
Four years ago, I attempted to defend Oneida County’s public health official, Linda Conlon, when Gregg Walker, Publisher of at the Lakeland Times, attacked her for protecting the public from Covid. In my article, I called him a misogynist because he had already publicly attacked our Chamber of Commerce Director, Krystal Westphal, by calling her “idiotic” in a hit piece years earlier, and I was sensing a trend.
He sued me for defamation, and what should have ended in an immediate dismissal 4 years ago from any reasonable judge turned into a legal butchering that was carried out in one of Wisconsin’s smallest counties (Forest), and ended in the largest defamation loss ($750K) in Wisconsin’s history last October.
We appealed the decision, but before we were able to file that appeal, Walker’s lawyer for the case, Matt Fernholz, who also happens to also be the Republican Party of Wisconsin’s legal attack dog, attempted to garnish my personal and company’s bank accounts.
Fernholz’s attack resulted in a few crazy weeks of financial chaos for the Minocqua Brewing Company, but it was ultimately thwarted by Wisconsin’s Third District Court of Appeals when they “stayed” his garnishment attempts while considering our appeal.
Over this four-year period of time, Walker published approximately 80 negative articles against me and my company—12 of which have been written in the last 6 months alone.
When we attempted to countersue Walker for defamation, Forest County Judge Stenz dismissed our lawsuit. His reasoning was that Gregg Walker, who publishes the papers of record in both Minocqua and Rhinelander, was not a public figure, but I somehow was because of my large social media reach.
Throughout those four years of being sued for defamation, I witnessed Gregg Walker and the Lakeland Times continue to viciously attack Oneida County women in leadership positions, especially Judge Mary Roth Burns when she ran for re-election in 2023, and most recently, a third grade elementary school teacher and her principal (for supporting her against his attack.)
This latest attack came after the teacher read her students a book that included same-sex relationships. Walker’s hit piece, entitled “Stop the Indoctrination of our Children,” was not only wildly misogynistic, but terribly hateful and patently misleading in its rhetoric against public schools.
When someone sent me this repulsive article a few weeks ago, I decided it couldn’t go unanswered and wrote a parody that humiliates Gregg Walker as much as he humiliated and maligned those two women who can’t easily defend themselves against a guy who buys ink by the barrel.
I've learned, by reading the works of American activist Saul Alinksy, that ridicule is often the best way to stop a bully. Am I proud that I sometimes stoop to a similar level of bullying while beating them back? No.
Do I have a particular knack for hitting them hard after they've attacked those who can't defend themselves? Yes.
Should I use this unique, but someone dark skill, for good? Why the hell not!
Will Walker sue me again for this little cartoon we made? I'll let you be the judge.
But I digress...
I've written today about my experience getting sued these last four years because I thoroughly believe that, after this crazy period in American history that gave rise to the MAGA movement is over, and when laws are passed to prohibit news organization like Fox and the Lakeland Times from spewing lies and misleading voters, the positions I have taken against this hateful rhetoric that have continuously put me in hot water will be vindicated.
Now let’s talk about what’s happening now.
This defamation case is far from over, but I do deeply believe that I will prevail upon appeal. What I also believe is that Matt Fernholz and Wisconsin’s Republican Party will never stop trying to hurt me and my company.
I say that because Fernholz wrote to my attorneys just last week and claimed he would be filing a motion to open “discovery” into the financial records of the Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC, even though my Super PAC has nothing to do with this defamation lawsuit and all “discovery” has been stopped because the case is now in the hands of the Appellate Court, not the in the hands of their "useful" Judge Stenz--who ultimately caused this entire fiasco.
I unfortunately sound very “Trumpy” when I say this, but I believe Fernholz and his legal team will continue to use every legal maneuver possible to continue their prolonged fishing expedition into my private affairs, hoping to eventually find something that they can take out of context to embarrass or hurt me.
What they’re trying to do is completely transparent to my lawyers and me, but like the rest of the Republican Party, they have no shame and will continue to attempt to bend the gears of justice to their will by finding corrupt judges willing to help them achieve their ends.
But how can we stop these jerks from using the justice system as a weapon against people they don’t like?
By passing Anti-SLAPP laws, which are laws that penalize rich vindictive jerks from filing “Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation.” Had Walker been forced to pay a large penalty if a judge ruled that his lawsuit was intended to unjustly use the legal system to bully me, he probably would have never filed it in the first place.
Wisconsin is one of only 17 states that offers ZERO protection against these sort of lawsuits, and it’s high time we change that.
But we won’t be able to make any progress until we have a state legislature that isn’t controlled by rich vindictive jerks, but instead by honest politicians willing to bring Wisconsin out of the stone ages on this issue and a raft of others—like abortion, Medicaid expansion, marijuana legalization, PFAS contamination, public school funding, etc.
Next week, I’ll be starting a weekly section of this essay that highlights progressive State Senate and Assembly candidates that have a chance at winning their races, which in turn will give us a chance at making our state government functional again. We need to start moving Wisconsin FORWARD, like it says in our state motto, and we have to have the capacity to think beyond merely beating Trump in this next election.
That's all I have for you today.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for sticking with the Minocqua Brewing Company.
Together, we can defeat the bullies of the MAGA movement by ridiculing the propaganda they use to scare people.
And together we can move this state, and with it our country, FORWARD...one beer at a time.
Kirk Bangstad
Owner, Minocqua Brewing Company
Founder, Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC
