Wisconsin's Supreme Court Needs A Shot of Courage
And the Minocqua Brewing Company needs some inspiration to fight for it
Hi Folks,
I’m feeling like this holiday weekend was much too short.
Merely weeks after an absurd election and after hearing this morning of yet another absurd appointment (Kash Patel to FBI), I would rather just push the reset button to last Thursday and avoid the real world for another four days.
Of course, that’s what Trump wants—to bludgeon us with such resounding absurdity that we all just turn off the news and let him quietly become a dictator.
As I’ve said in recent essays, my path forward will be to listen to mainstream media JUST ENOUGH to understand what’s going on, try to steer clear of the cesspool that is social media, and CURATE my news consumption to include journalists or news outlets that I can trust to give me an honest analysis of what Trump’s doing and ways that we can make it harder for him to succeed.
This approach will hopefully allow me to stay positive and not get overwhelmed with doom over the next several months.
I’m taking the same approach with my company’s social media and email list. We've started sending an email out every day of the week that focuses on a different topic, and will be building an opt-out feature so that you can reduce the number of emails you’re getting from us if you’re not interested in certain subjects.
While we spend much of December and January figuring out this new way of “marketing-through-news,” I hope you bear with us if you see some disjointed emails. Running the Minocqua Brewing Company and being a “newspaper editor” is currently too much to take on, so I'm trying to find folks to help me figure this out.
That being said, there is another important election coming up that will decide whether or not Wisconsin will be able to ward off what will surely be mountain of illegal actions that come from the White House or other soon-to-be-corrupted offices in the executive branch.
This of course is the upcoming Supreme Court election that will decide if we maintain Wisconsin’s progressive majority.
Don’t get me wrong, municipal and school board elections are extremely important as well—my company would have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees if the Town of Minocqua and Oneida County weren’t represented by an old boys network of MAGA reprobates.
The election for State Superintendent of Public Instruction is important as well. I wrote yesterday that had Jill Underly, the candidate we endorsed four years ago, not politically caved at the last minute, she might have been able to help us end the parasitic private school voucher program and improve public schools throughout our state. Because she caved, we endorsed her opponent yesterday, Jeff Wright.
Unfortunately, I’m having a hard time getting excited about this Supreme Court race, even though it's pivotal that the court remain progressive and not become a rubber stamp for Trump.
My issue is that our progressive court, which the Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC worked VERY HARD to elect, has let me (and the entire state) down a number of times in the last two years.
Yes, they overturned our badly gerrymandered maps that gave us much fairer elections in 2024. And yes, they are seemingly poised to strike down a barbaric 170-year old state statute that bans abortion. Fixing these two issues are why we elected Janet Protasiewicz to the bench in 2022 in order to tilt the court to the left.
However, after those two issues, they’ve surprisingly done little else. The Milwaukee journal surmised that this court issued fewer decisions in the last session (14) than in the last 27th years.
Two of those “non-decisions,” in particular, had very real effects on my company and me.
The first was our emergency plea that the Supreme Court reverse the biased decision from Wisconsin’s rural 3rd District Court of Appeals that allowed Gregg Walker and the Lakeland Times the ability to collect an absurd $750K from me. This award was the largest defamation decision ever in the state by a large margin, and resulted from a deeply-flawed trial adjudicated by a backwoods judge (Stenz) in one of Wisconsin’s least populated counties (Forest).
My legal team was certain we could overturn this decision if given enough time to let the appeals process play out, but the decision by right-wing judge Lisa Stark of Eau Claire to let Walker’s lawyer start coming after my assets before our appeal was going to bankrupt my company before we had our day in court.
We needed Wisconsin’s Supreme Court to “stay” Judge Stark’s decision until our case was heard, but they refused. This forced me to settle out of court with both my insurance company and Walker to avoid bankruptcy.
The lopsided-nature of the $750K award vs the lack of evidence of ANY damages caused by my words to Walker or the Lakeland Times made this case ripe for the Supreme Court to further define defamation law in Wisconsin, but they punted.
I assume it was because they wanted to avoid any potential criticism by Republicans or state-wide media that they were “playing favorites” by helping a progressive company with a Super PAC that worked hard to elect the judge that tilted the balance of that court.
This second example of Supreme Court “inaction” is much worse, because instead of just hurting me, they punted on a clear-cut lawsuit that would have resulted in removing a growing cancer that’s killing Wisconsin’s public schools—the private school voucher program.
If you want to read about this ills of private school vouchers, check out my “Public School Saturday” article yesterday.
Our “original action” asked the Supreme Court to rule that Wisconsin’s private school voucher program was unconstitutional.
An “original action” is a process used to bypass lower courts in order to expedite a decision by Wisconsin’s Supreme Court. It is only supposed to be used when it isn’t necessary to gather evidence in lower courts, or when the issue at hand is simply too time-sensitive to allow it to work its way through the court system.
We believed our case was a perfect candidate for an "original action" because all of our “evidence” that private voucher schools were unconstitutional had already been made public in reports from the Department of Public Instruction.
We also believed that after 20 years of Republican attacks on public school funding that cause countless annual emergency referendums around the state to fund school districts, ending the parasitic private school voucher program was the exact sort of “emergency” that needed an “original action” to rectify.
Furthermore, there were only 2 years that Wisconsin was assured of a court that wasn’t in the pockets of Republicans, so time was of the essence to fix this problem with an uncorrupted court.
The Supreme Court punted again after what was clearly a political effort to derail this case--both from the right, and surprising, from the Establishment Left. Again, read my article from yesterday for a more thorough explanation.
The “inaction” of Wisconsin’s progressive Supreme Court has lead me to believe that they care more about appearing nonpartisan than actually fixing the statewide dysfunction caused by a corrupt, conservative court that ruled for 15 years before them.
I get that the court is supposed to be nonpartisan, but after witnessing a completely partisan United States Supreme Court twist the constitution in knots to help a would-be dictator get elected, now is the NOT the time to be overly-concerned about appearances!
I believe that if there were ever a time for judicial activism, it would be when our state and country are at the edge of a precipice, and this court hasn’t yet shown yet that they are capable of rising to that challenge.
While it's hard for me to get excited about this upcoming Supreme Court race because I've been bruised by this court over the last two years, I do realized that electing Susan Crawford, the progressive candidate, is really important to our state and country.
What will inspire me to fight hard again in this next election will be if Crawford indicates broadly that she’s willing to fight for public schools.
And for Justices Dallet, Karofsky, and Protasiewicz--if someone shows you this email, I implore you to see the global role you play in being progressive Supreme Court justices in a swing state that must resist the hurricane of fascism building in Washington DC, and rise to meet the moment.
In so many ways, you're all we've got left to fight for us. Now more than ever, you must lead with courage and think less about how your decisions might hurt your chances of getting re-elected.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for sticking with the Minocqua Brewing Company.
Together, we must have the courage to meet the moment. We'll help in the "liquid courage" department.
Vive le Résistance,
Kirk Bangstad
Owner, Minocqua Brewing Company
Founder, Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC