Hi Folks,

Kirk Bangstad here from the Minocqua Brewing Company, and I’m writing today to tell you the rumors are true.

5 minutes before I started writing this essay, I filed papers to become the next Governor of Wisconsin.

Donate to My Campaign Here

I’m running for Governor because I believe Wisconsin needs a battle-hardened fighter to join the rest of America to save our Democracy from Trump’s regime, and that person doesn’t exist in the crowded field of Democrats currently running in Wisconsin’s Gubernatorial primary.

Believe me when I tell you that I spent a year reaching out to people in Wisconsin that I think would make great candidates—folks who are electable in a our divided state, who understand how high the stakes are to protect our Democracy, and whose convictions are as strong as their spines.

This group included State Senator Chris Larsen, attorney/former Eau Claire Assemblyman Dana Wachs, Milwaukee attorney and current Wisconsin Elections Commissioner Mark Thompson, journalist Pat Kreitlow, American Federation of Teachers Wisconsin President Jon Shelton, and Fighting Oligarchy/ Bernie Sanders Organizer Simon Rosenblum-Larsen.

I believe they’d all make better candidates than me, because:

1. I generally despise politicians and really don’t want to become one.

2. None of them are quite as pugilistic as I am, which can be a turn-off to many voters.

3. All are way more adept at coalition-building than me.

I was repeatedly disappointed when each one told me they weren’t going to run, so I kept searching. I reached out to progressive candidates Francesca Hong and Kelda Roys. While I think the former is too politically naive and unelectable in a general election, and the latter has been in office so long that she thinks more about which coalition of voters she’ll piss off before checking in with her heart to saying what she believes—I knew both were true progressives.

I reached out to Hong’s campaign first, because I admire her courage to bear the Democratic Socialist flag against the feckless Corporate Democratic wing of our party. I told one of her advisors that I’d endorse her if she came out with an election protection plan, because I believed deep in my heart that Trump’s regime would unleash an “October surprise” that would try to steal elections across the country and keep his goons in control of Congress. He said he’d bring my proposal back to his team and get back to me. Two weeks later, he informed me that he’d been let go by the campaign, and gave me the number for her campaign manager. I called it and never heard back from the Hong campaign.

So I called Senator Roys a few weeks ago and told her I’d endorse her if she came out with an election protection plan. She told me that she believed Wisconsin’s elections would be safe, and thought that if she scared voters with these alarming worries about an “October surprise,” then they might not come out to vote at all.

After hearing Kelda’s excuses for not talking about the literal “elephant in the room” that scared so many progressives like me, I got quiet on the phone with her and knew in my heart that she didn’t have the guts to fight an existential battle to save our Democracy when that battle inevitably comes to Wisconsin.

Donate to My Campaign Here

Then last week happened.

After posting last Saturday that “Either a brother or sister in the Resistance needs to work on their marksmanship or he faked another assassination to get a positive news cycle,” I was disavowed by the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, Mandela Barnes, and Francesca Hong. The first two didn’t bother me because:

1. I’ve been skewering Governor Evers, Attorney General Josh Kaul, and the Corporate wing of the Democratic Party for years; because so many of them are incapable of meeting the moment, standing up to Trump, disavowing AIPAC/JStreet for supporting Israel’s genocide against Palestine, and fighting for the working class instead of for their campaign donors.

2. Mandela Barnes is career politician who puts his finger up to see which way the wind blows before deciding what to say. When his campaign released light-weight commercials that showed him making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while Ron Johnson was airing racist ads against him in the U.S. Senate race a few years ago, I new he didn’t have the stuff it takes to fight and win.

Unfortunately, when Hong disavowed my post, my fear that she was too politically naive for this moment in American history proved to be correct. I’ve had beers with Francesca and think she’s got a great political career in front of her, but it’s obvious to me that she’s still learning how to find her own, original political voice.

She took the bait from Republican propagandists by disavowing my post, along with the rest of the Corporate Democratic Party, because she probably listens more to her high-paid political consultants than to her own gut—a mistake typically made by naive politicians.

What Hong should have said, and what she probably would have said if she wasn’t in thrall to her handlers, was…

“Of course political violence is bad, but given that Trump’s regime lies to us daily, and given that he and his party’s rhetoric are the real reason America has seen a rise in political violence, I’m going to suggest you ask them about why the Secret Service has mysteriously gone to the dogs and about their hypocritical fake outrage over Bangstad’s post, instead of trying to get a quote out of me.”

Will I forgive Hong for her naivety? Of course—I think she’s great. BUT…that doesn’t mean I believe she can hold her own against Trump at this stage in her career.

The messaging mistake Hong made, as well as Barnes and the rest of the Corporate Democrats, spilled progressive blood into the water that created a feeding frenzy against me, my fiancé, and my company. Trump’s propaganda machine and the corporate media that continuously fails America with its cancerous “bothside-ism,” came after me with full force; and that led to me being interrogated and intimidated by the FBI and the Secret Service.

After those two agents left my taproom on Thursday night, I told my lawyer Fred that I was going to run for Governor. Since I couldn’t trust the Democratic Party to have my back nor the current slate of gubernatorial candidates—and because I have a social media reach that dwarfs them all—I might as well stand up for myself and the rest of the working class, who I’ve been standing up for with my loud voice for the last 6 years.

Now, the first thing I gotta do in this campaign is raise some money so I can hire a campaign staff. Believe it or not, Actblue, the fundraising platform for the Democratic Party, wouldn’t allow me to join their platform. I’m CERTAIN this is because someone in the Corporate Democratic Party told them to box me out because they’re completely scared that that I’ll win and put them out of business. Not to worry, however, we've bypassed Actblue and are now working with a completely trustworthy donation platform called Stripe. All of your donations will be tracked and reported appropriately to Wisconsin’s campaign finance folks, but you won’t see the typical donation layout that you’re used to. Here’s a link to donate. Remember, you can’t give me more than $10K. that’s a joke!

Donate to My Campaign Here

Next, because I jumped in this race so late, I only have until June 1 to collect 2000 signatures and get on the ballot. Since I don’t have any campaign staff hired yet, I gotta collect all these signatures through social media outreach. Here’s the link to download the signature form.

I’m hoping my supporters living in Wisconsin can download this form, sign it, get a few others to sign it as well, and then return it by mailing it to our Madison Taproom at:

Minocqua Brewing Company 2927 East Washington Avenue Madison, WI 53703

If you want to have more fun returning these sheets to us, then come on by and have a beer. We can’t get mail at our Minocqua location, but you can always drop them off in person at 329 Front Street in Minocqua.

Download Nomination Forms Here

Thanks for reading, and thanks for sticking with the Minocqua Brewing Company and me.

Together, we’ll “Make Wisconsin Great Again, One Beer at A Time.'“

Although I’ve been called the “Trump of the left,” I’m absolutely sure that I’m the the smartest candidate in the field, and will be the best executive to lead Wisconsin out of these tumultuous times.

Kirk Bangstad, aka the closest candidate Wisconsin has had to "Fighting Bob La Follete” in 100 years

Ok Folks,

Kirk Bangstad here, owner of the Minocqua Brewing Company.

The dust has settled from last night's mayhem, where I spent an hour before being intentionally intimidated by the Secret Service and FBI posting warnings on our two largest social channels--Facebook and Substack--that I might be detained and that people shouldn't believe a word of what might be reported about me unless it came from my own representatives.

Here’s the background on why they visited me in the first place.

The two agents who questioned me at our Minocqua location, after two other agents came by our Madison location and scared the crap out of my employees there, were very young. They seemingly didn't want to be there anymore than I did, but under this administration, I wasn't going to take any chances.

When they first showed up, I told them I refused to talk to them without my lawyer present, so they left and agreed to meet me later. I knew I had about an hour before they came back, so not only did I shoot off a post asking supporters to come by the taproom, I also posted the text of the voicemail I received from one of the agents, and asked people to call his number and remind him of the oath he had taken to the Constitution--not the mobster cosplaying as our current President. The guy's eyes seemed kind enough that I actually thought he might have taken those phone calls to heart.

I then live-streamed the interview with these agents to get it all on record, and they left after about 5 minutes. Here’s the video:

The questions they asked about me being associated with any groups intending to assassinate the president were absolutely ridiculous, but the entire event was pretty innocuous--probably because I had a lawyer present and they knew they weren't going to get me to slip up and say something that would give them a legal opportunity to haul me away.

Regardless of whether or not this interrogation was innocuous, what happened last night should have never happened at all.

Under no circumstances was the post I made last Saturday, which had me trending nationally on X by Monday, threatening to Trump (notice I didn't say President Trump).

Under no circumstances should a business owner from Northern Wisconsin, which is about as remote from Washington DC as possible, be visited by the Secret Service and FBI and asked questions about his intentions to assassinate the President.

There are two reasons why I was harassed by these junior agents last night:

First
The right-wing social media bot propaganda machine was turned onto my company because someone in Trump's regime thought it could capitalize on my satirical post to convince Americans that progressives are violent and dangerous.

It then went after me, my fiancé, and everyone who had posted on our page for the last week, looking to utterly destroy us.

I've gotten continuous death threats for 5 straight days, which has happened to me before and doesn't really faze me anymore, but unfortunately, they were able to make one "killing"--a healthcare executive with 30 years experience was fired from Aspirus Health for simply sending us a pic of himself wearing one of our t-shirts.

Second
Someone at a much higher level in the Secret Service and the FBI than the two junior agents who interrogated me decided to make an example out of me in order to scare the BEJEESUS out of all of you. This is what they want you all to think:

"If this brewery owner can be questioned and possibly detained simply by wondering publicly whether Trump's assassination attempt was staged, so can I. And since I've heard about people dying from the brutal conditions in those detention centers, I think I'm just never going to say anything publicly ever again."

Well folks, if you're anything like me, and I know many of you Scandinavian Midwesterners are, you're stubborn as hell. When I get bullied, I dig my heels in even harder--and I hope you do too. Here’s a video I posted last night full of rage.

What happened last night has convinced me to fight even harder, and I've got a plan on how to do that that I'll announce live tomorrow--while being protested by a bunch of MAGA deplorables at our Minocqua Taproom.

Yes, although our Madison location is closed today to respect the nationwide #MayDayStrong General Strike, our Minocqua location is not. We open for the summer season today from 11am to 7 pm.

And like clockwork, the uneducated local yokel MAGA contingent has decided to protest our taproom tomorrow at noon, and I've decided to turn the tables on them.

I'm going to give a free beer tasting to every progressive that shows up tomorrow at noon, and in that beer tasting, I plan to make a big announcement about my political future, as well as educate these smooth-brained cultists about the history of fascism and oligarchy in Germany and America.

Joining me will be retired Army Colonel George Mason and a number of other retired military veterans to ensure my safety--because I don't trust the corrupt Minocqua Police Department nor the Oneida County Sheriff's Department to protect me or my customers.

I'm organizing to get some large speakers to drown out MAGA and ensure that our words are heard by the whole town, as well as our customers who will also get to enjoy some tasty beer as they watch the events unfold.

I've also been in contact with a nearby Indivisible group, who are going to bring a giant FIST--because of course we need a giant fist!

Folks, if you’re as pissed off as I am about what happened yesterday, come over tomorrow and join me at my taproom at noon. We’re going to raise the roof and make the MAGAs in Minocqua rue the day they ever decided to pick a fight with the Minocqua Brewing Company.

Hope to see many of you tomorrow,

Kirk

“Uh, hi, Mr. Bankstand. My name is Special Agent Wimmer. with the U.S. Secret Service. Uh, we have some information, come to our attention, honestly, just had a couple questions that we wanted to run by you. If you could give me a call back at 608-496-9715 that’s 608-496-9715. Just have a couple questions if we get able to talk this through. Really appreciate it. Have a good rest of the day. Take care.”

Call this number and ask this secret service agent to stand down and honor his oath to his country.

Owner Kirk here.

the Secret Service and FBI have contacted me. I’m speaking with them with my lawyer Fred in less than an hour.

If you don’t hear from our socials tonight, something is wrong.

I am of sound mind and body, and am in no way thinking of harming myself.

If you don’t hear back from me tonight, don’t believe a thing you hear from the federal government about what happened to me.

I’ve directed my team to start communicating through these or other channels if I’m imprisoned.

Listen to my team, who will identify themselves as such, instead of the federal government, if you want to be updated honestly about my status.

Hopefully these agents are just as “over” this insanity as the rest of the country, but it’s worth taking precautions because they are still part of the Trump regime.

Hoping to chat with you on the other side of this soon to tell you what happened.

Kirk

Kirk Bangstad here from the Minocqua Brewing Company.

Patti Vasquez joined me last night for the Up North Podcast, where we discussed the uproar surrounding my post about the alleged assassination attempt against Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents dinner last Saturday.

I went through the timeline of events over the last four days that led to my trending nationally on X and making national news, then went into further detail on why people might question whether this assassination attempt was real, the statistics that show political violence is six times more likey to come from right wing domestic terrorist than progressives, and the breaking story of a hospital executive fired from his job in Wausau, Wisconsin for wearing one of my company’s t-shirts to a football game in Indiana.

I’d encourage you to watch the entire episode above, but if you don’t have the time, here are the most important clips from the show:

In the first segment, I first reiterated my Facebook post that went viral and caused the entire MAGA universe to clutch their pearls and “act” horrified:

“Well, we almost got #freebeerday. Either a brother or sister in the Resistance needs to work on their marksmanship or he faked another assassination to get a positive news cycle. We’ll never know. Regardless, we stand at the ready to pour free beer the day it happens.”

I admit that my line about improving marksmanship, intended specifically to be hyperbolic in order to set off the next line that suggested this assassination attempt may have been staged, was probably not as funny as I intended it to be. That being said, I won’t apologize for it because not an once of that line called for violence or called for people to assassinate Donald Trump (I’m not calling him the President on purpose).

Here’s what happened in the next few days.

In the next segment, we went through a series of events that happened before and after the alleged assassination attempt that simply don’t add up logically, which means that its very “OK” for people to question whether this alleged assassination attempt was staged. Here’s the clip:

In the next segment, we listed a ton of statistics that show that regardless of the deluge of misinformation coming from Trump’s regime, MAGA influencers, and even corporate media, the ratio of political violence coming from the right verses the left is about 6.7 to 1.

This means that it’s absolutely absurd to pin political violence in America on the left. On the contrary, America’s fascist hard right movement is mostly responsible for our surge in political violence over the last few years…full stop.

Unfortunately, because so many Americans are deluged with state propaganda and our corporate media keeps failing to push back, the PERCEPTION among everyday people is that the left is just as violent as the right. Here’s the clip:

And lastly, I wanted to bring you this story of a healthcare executive who was fired for sharing a picture in our comments section on Facebook for wearing one of our shirts.

Let’s be honest, he wasn’t fired for wearing that t-shirt, he was fired because a hate group called Libs of Tik Tock posted his picture on their site, and then a wild world of Russian bots and MAGA mouth-breathers descended on Aspirus’ social media accounts and demanded that he be fired.

From the story released Tuesday by WSAW, the ABC affiliate in Central Wisconsin, Aspirus’ CEO couldn’t take the heat and instead of waiting 24 hours for the Russian bots to go to sleep, he decided to throw a committed longtime nonprofit healthcare leader under the bus.

Here’s what I had to say about it:

Folks, let me reiterate. The day we’re not allowed to legally express our thoughts about what our government is doing to us is the day we no longer live in a free society.

You may not like or agree with a single thing I say, but BY GOD, IF YOU’RE AN AMERICAN, YOU MUST STAND BY MY FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHT TO SAY IT!

This is was my parting message last night:

Thanks for reading and watching, and thanks for sticking with the Minocqua Brewing Company—which may have been a little harder this week than in the past:)

I am who I am, and I may be too dramatic, passionate, and emotional for some. That being said, I will always call a spade a spade, and I will always fight for justice, equality, and democracy for everyone in America—especially the folks who aren’t rich enough, Christian enough, male enough, or white enough for their voices to be heard.

Kirk Bangstad

Owner, Minocqua Brewing Company/ Minocqua Marketplace Publisher, Minocqua Brewing Company Times Founder, Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC

Buy Your Free Beer Day T-shirt

Hey friends, it’s Kirk.

You may have heard our name this week. Welcome to the new subscribers — glad you found us.

For those of you who’ve been here a while, you already know what Free Beer Day is. For everyone else: it’s exactly what it sounds like. And we’ve been saying it out loud, proudly, since day one.

We just expanded the collection. There’s something for everyone now — t-shirts, tanks, hoodies, a long sleeve, a v-neck, a water bottle, a koozie, a tote, a mug (two actually), buttons, a yard sign, and yes, a garden flag. Because resistance doesn’t have to be grim. Sometimes it’s a cold beer and merch that says exactly what you mean without a single apology.

Every vendor in the Minocqua Marketplace has pledged not to fund MAGA candidates or causes. When you buy here, your money stays on the right side of history.

Browse the full Free Beer Day collection and pick your statement.

Ladies v-neck, hoodie, long-sleeve t-shirt

unisex v-neck, tank top, sleeveless t-shirt

And for those of you that don’t quite agree that James Comey was just indicted for posting about some seashells that spelled out 8647, which means “get rid of 47,” we have some merch for you as well.

8647 NA Beer, 8647 Dish Towel, 8647 T-shirt

You know what Free Beer Day is. You know what 8647 is. You know what this week meant. Now pick your statement.

— Kirk & The Minocqua Marketplace Team

Good morning,

Kirk here. It’s Tuesday, which means Ben Cominos is back — and this week he’s writing from the field.

Ben spent Saturday speaking at a Democratic event in Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District — Tom Tiffany country — to a room that wasn’t quite ready for his message. What he experienced over the next few minutes is the whole ballgame: skeptical faces softening, then nodding, the moment he stopped talking about Trump and started talking about the economy.

That’s the lesson, and it’s one a lot of Democrats still haven’t learned. You don’t beat MAGA by promising a return to normal. You beat it by giving working people a reason to show up — something concrete, something that lands in their kitchen, not just their news feed.

Independent voices like Ben’s are the ones doing that translation work right now, in rooms most national Democrats wouldn’t bother walking into. Our seasonal School House Bock celebrates the public education our next generation needs to see through the noise, and your online purchase of our beer supports the independent voices and the values for which we’re fighting.

Thanks for reading and thanks for supporting the work. Here’s Ben…

Kirk Bangstad
Minocqua Brewing Company / Minocqua Marketplace
Publisher, MBC Times
Founder, Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC

Buy School House Bock

Well, this sure was an interesting weekend, was it not?

Look, this would be the third time that I would be writing an article about political violence, the way it’s discussed in the media, both social and legacy, and a call for a return to sanity.

I feel like I may be in the minority considering who might be reading this, but I don’t want to see political violence. EVER. I don’t care who it’s enacted against.

All I can think about right now is that there will be another effort to pass FISA in the middle of the night, and this time it will pass with flying colors in order to prevent events like Saturday night from happening again.

The name of the game is stripping away our freedoms in the name of “security,” and this moment seems tailor-made for that.

Always remember, Trump sucks, but if we’re being realistic with one another, he isn’t legislating that much differently than most other Republicans have, or would. He’s just the next logical step in the process.

This is why it’s all that much more important to see a true opposition party offer a clear alternative and highlight the ways in which it would be better.

Now, if it’s alright with you, I’d like to talk about something going on in my personal life for the purposes of this article. I mean, in reality, who’s going to stop me? Nobody, that’s who.

On Saturday, I was asked to speak at a Democratic event for the 7th Congressional District in Wisconsin. For those of you not in the know, that’s the district that is currently represented by Tom Tiffany. Seeing as I had an opportunity to speak to an audience that doesn’t always get the chance to hear my “Outside the Box” perspective, I figured I would make the most of it.

Needless to say, I was one of the younger people in the room. I often highlight that I bring a unique perspective to the left flank of politics because — and stop me when you’ve heard this before — I represent the generations that have been left behind by a failing status quo. The part of the electorate that understands what Donald Trump represents, but also knows the majority of the people in my life would still support him if he were coming across on the economy in any way. Literally in ANY WAY.

I understand that lionizing Nikki Haley during the 2024 primary would have led to (almost) this exact situation in a world where she got the presidential nomination.

It may not feel like it, but we’re headed to a post-Donald Trump world a lot faster than I think any of us realize. As somebody who has the prime of his working years ahead of him, I’m looking for a Democratic Party that understands how to push back against a broken system, not against one broken man.

I could tell, at least initially, that not everybody in the room was in favor of the message.

What was cool about it, though, was that I could watch opinions change in real time.

When I do my radio program, all I can do is assume that everybody agrees with me 100% of the time and is bent over at the waist laughing at all of my awesome jokes.

Speaking in front of a live audience let me know that is only sometimes accurate.

It was awesome.

The coolest part about it, though, was watching minds change in real time the longer I spoke.

For instance, I believe basing an entire campaign/agenda on impeaching Trump, holding ICE agents accountable, and a “return to normalcy” is a failing proposition.

Not to say those things wouldn’t be appreciated, but that it’s not going to bring people from their living room to polling places. Most people need to feel like they personally will be impacted positively by a platform. You may call that selfish; I call it human nature.

To be clear, this is an excerpt from my speech. When I said it, I could physically see some faces react in frustration to that message. Not all faces, not even most faces, but enough for me to notice while doing the speech.

Forty seconds later, after highlighting the economic agenda I think would be the most beneficial, I watched those same reserved faces nodding along in agreement with my main points.

This is how we change the party, and this is how we move forward to put MAGA to bed.

Not Donald Trump to bed — the whole movement.

I will not call it a victory if a Mitt Romney-style Republican is in the White House. It will be the same shit, but 14% friendlier, and allow me to speak for the people being left behind… that just ain’t gonna cut it.

This was an awesome experience for me. I met the candidates for governor, I got to share my personal beliefs about what the future holds for Democratic politics, and I was even asked to speak again at the 6th Congressional District, so it seems like people are at least somewhat buying into the points I’m making.

If a progressive like me can be accepted in northeast/northern Wisconsin, it can work anywhere. We just need the people that mean business to step up and do something about it.

For those of you interested in listening to the entire speech, I am currently having the video edited and will hopefully have it on my Ben Cominos YouTube page.

I’ll be sure to let Kirk know when it’s available.

About the Author: Ben Cominos is a Wisconsin-based political commentator, writer, and host of Outside the Box on WHBY Radio in Appleton. Known for his sharp analysis, humor, and no-nonsense approach, Ben challenges complacency in both parties and pushes for solutions that put working people first. His work blends political insight with an everyday perspective—because for Ben, progress starts with honest conversations and holding everyone accountable.

You can follow Ben on YouTube and TikTok at

Check out all our different beers and cider — Gulf of Mexico Lager, Muckraker Stout, Freedom Trail, or the Department of Public Education Cider

Buy Progressive Beer

Good morning, folks.

It’s Mocha Monday and today’s piece is from Patti Vasquez. It’s about a Chicago cop who didn’t come home Saturday. It’s about a White House ballroom that the administration is now using a hotel “shooting” to justify. And it’s about what it actually feels like to be an American living in a country where the wait by the phone has become the whole experience.

Patti grew up in a neighborhood full of cop families. She almost became a Chicago police officer herself. So when she writes about Officer John Bartholomew and about gun violence in this country, she’s not writing from a think tank. She’s writing from the block.

Before you dive in, a quick reminder: we don’t have corporate sponsors underwriting this work. A portion of everything we sell today, WOKE Coffee bags and WOKE Oat Milk Sweet Cream Cans, goes directly toward paying the writers who bring you pieces like Patti’s. If you want independent voices telling stories the mainstream would rather soften or ignore, fuel up with something that actually supports them.

Now here’s Patti….

Kirk Bangstad Minocqua Brewing Company / Minocqua Marketplace Publisher, MBC Times Founder, Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC

Consider purchasing a bag of WOKE Coffee Beans, a 4 pack of WOKE Oat Milk Sweet Cream canned coffee, or sign up for a WOKE Coffee subscription here.

The House Gets Quiet. No Ballrooms for Us. A Chicago officer is dead. The White House wants a ballroom. We’re all still waiting by the phone.

Saturday morning, two Chicago police officers brought a robbery suspect to Endeavor Health Swedish Hospital in Lincoln Square. They were making sure someone in their custody got medical care. The man they were escorting shot them both. Officer John Bartholomew, 38 years old, ten years on the force, did not come home. His partner, a 21-year veteran, is fighting for his life.

Swedish Hospital is a few miles from where I live. I know that neighborhood. I know the streets around it. Many of my neighbors and friends live with the constant dread of receiving the news delivered to the family of John Bartholomew.

I grew up in Norwood Park, on Chicago’s northwest side. The 16th District covers Jefferson Park, Edison Park, Forest Glen, Portage Park, Dunning, and Norwood Park. It’s one of those corners of the city where cops and firefighters have built communities together. They raise their kids in bungalows near the Metra line and the CTA Blue Line, coach Little League, go to the same churches their parents did. Some of my closest friends growing up were cops’ kids. I knew what it looked like when a parent left for a shift and the house got a little quieter until they came back. When the news broke Saturday, I know exactly which families in my old neighborhood held their breath. Which ones reached for their phones. Which ones wondered if this was the day.

After 9/11, I applied to the Chicago Police Department. I wanted to help people in my beloved city feel safe. I went through the entire hiring process. I passed the exams, the psych evals, and the physical tests. The only reason I am not a Chicago police officer today is that life had other plans. I was eight and a half months pregnant with my son Griffin, and my comedy career was starting to take off when CPD invited me to join the force. But I was already becoming someone else. I will never forget what it felt like to want that job. I wanted to run toward the problem instead of away from it.

I still do. Just differently.

That’s the thing that gets lost in the culture war version of this conversation. The version that says if you believe in police accountability, you can’t also grieve Officer Bartholomew. That you have to pick a side and stay there. I don’t accept that. I grew up with these families. I know what they carry. And none of that contradicts also knowing that policing in this country has caused real harm to real people, disproportionately in Black and Brown communities, and that we have to be honest about both things at the same time.

Holding both isn’t weakness. It’s the only honest position possible for me.

Meanwhile, in Washington Saturday night, they turned a security incident at a hotel ballroom into a zoning permit. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner was disrupted by a gunman at the Washington Hilton. A Secret Service agent was shot. By Sunday, the Justice Department had sent a letter to the National Trust for Historic Preservation giving them until 9 a.m. Monday to drop their lawsuit blocking Trump’s $400 million ballroom on the site of the demolished East Wing. Their argument? When the ballroom is finished, future presidents won’t have to “venture beyond the safety of the White House perimeter” to attend big events at the Hilton.

The Correspondents’ Dinner has never been held at the White House. It is hosted by the White House Correspondents’ Association, a nonprofit of journalists. It has always been at the Hilton.

Their argument is laughable bullshit.

A police officer was dead in Chicago.

Every day in this country, people die from gun violence. In schools, places of worship, movie theaters, grocery stores, playgrounds, hospitals.

In 1988, I sat in my friend’s bedroom while Laurie Dann went on a shooting spree through our suburbs. Her dad was a cop. We waited together for news that the coast was clear. That he was safe. I was a kid and I already understood that the threat was never abstract. It was always one phone call away.

It's the access to guns that puts people in danger in this country. Cops, presidents, farmers, families, nurses, eight-year-olds in second grade classrooms. All of us living with the wait. None of us getting a ballroom with a bunker.

Patti Vasquez hosts “Driving It Home with Patti Vasquez” weekdays 5-7 PM CST on WCPT 820 AM. She’s a mom, wife, daughter, caregiver, radio host, writer, comedian, and professional feeler of feelings.

Consider purchasing a bag of WOKE Coffee Beans, a 4 pack of WOKE Oat Milk Sweet Cream canned coffee, or sign up for a WOKE Coffee subscription here.

Hi Friends!

What a weekend it’s been!

Tracy and I spent the weekend in Sonoma, California with my partner in making Choice Wine, Matt Grove of Equality Vines.

This trip was planned for months under the guise of promoting our new batch of Choice Sauvignon and Rosé made from grapes in Sonoma County’s highest point, Pine Mountain. However , the secret that most everyone in my inner circle knew EXCEPT Tracy was that this trip was really all about finding a romantic spot to propose to her.

We’ve been dating for almost 2 years, and in that time, Tracy’s been my absolute rock through some truly harrowing periods. She was there when I lost the largest defamation lawsuit in Wisconsin’s history, when I was thrown in jail for criminal defmation by a crooked sheriff, and when our tap room in Minocqua was shut down by the local MAGA zoning board. I’ve fallen in love with her while dating long distance. She lives in Eau Claire, and I split time between Madison and Minocqua. Driving that triangle for the last two years has aged my jeep dramatically, but as you can see from these pictures, it was all worth it. I somehow managed to convince a woman way out of my league to love me back.

And with that, I’m off to get on a plane back to Wisconsin and nurse a wicked but happy hangover.

I’ll leave you with the actual video of me proposing to Tracy, overlooking a field of cabernet sauvignon vines.

Thanks for indulging a non-political, non-essay from me this week, and thanks for sticking with the Minocqua Brewing Company through the bad times and in this case, the very good times.

Back in action next week,

Kirk

Good morning folks,

Kirk here, and today we’re turning things over to Wisconsin State Senator Chris Larson for a no-spin breakdown of the 2025-26 legislative session — the wins, the near misses, and the bills the Republican majority let die on the vine. If you’ve ever wondered what your legislators actually do (or don’t do) with their time in Madison, this is the column to read. Senator Larson lays out the receipts: 1.1% of Democratic bills got so much as a public hearing this session. None became law. That’s not gridlock — that’s a choice.

But it wasn’t all bad news. Postpartum Medicaid extension finally passed after years of being blocked. Gail’s Law will save lives by covering supplemental breast cancer screenings. DACA recipients can now pursue licensed professions in Wisconsin. And returning citizens will have Medicaid coverage before they walk out of prison — a change that will reduce recidivism and save taxpayers money. Real wins, hard-fought, worth celebrating.

Today, we’re featuring our Department of Public Education Cider— a crisp reminder of what we’re fighting to protect: truth, transparency, and the right to learn freely in a democracy worth saving. With property taxes spiking across Wisconsin to backfill a budget that gave $0 in new general school aid, the fight for our kids’ classrooms has never been more urgent. Every purchase helps us pay and platform our writers, who keep cutting through the noise to call out corruption where it lives.

Thanks, as always, for reading, sharing, and keeping this movement alive.

Kirk Bangstad Owner, Minocqua Brewing Company / Minocqua Marketplace Publisher, Minocqua Brewing Company Times Founder, Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC

Buy Dept. of Ed Cider Here

On their way to getting kicked out of power, what did Republicans do with their majorities before the session ended?

By, Wisconsin State Senator Chris Larson

Subject: On their way to getting kicked out of power, what did Republicans do with their majorities before the session ended?

Wisconsin has - at least in theory - a full-time legislature. That means that should the majority decide to allow it, members can introduce, debate, and pass legislation at any time during each 2-year session, which runs from the first week of January in every odd-numbered year to the first week of January two years later.

In practice, the legislative calendar under the current Republican majority has shrunk to about 14 and a half months. The 2025-26 Legislative Session effectively ended on March 19, after which no new bills could be introduced. This might not be such a big deal if we had accomplished everything we set out to do for our neighbors. Sadly, as has been the case for far too long, we left a great deal of unfinished business on the table, and it’s hard for me not to think that we left our state worse off than when we started the session in January 2025.

Were your largest problems solved in the 11 days the Wisconsin Senate was in session over the past year and a half?

Before campaign season begins in earnest, let’s review the 2025-26 Legislative Session. We’ll begin with a brief discussion of partisanship in the legislature, which unfortunately provides a necessary backdrop for just about everything that happened (and didn’t) in the Capitol this session. From there we’ll highlight a few of the near misses, biggest wins, and most frustrating steps backward of the session at large. In a future column, we’ll move on to the unfinished business of the past two years. Spoiler alert - there’s a whole slew of topics we’ll need to revisit in 2027 and beyond if we’re going to move Wisconsin forward and improve the lives of our neighbors.

NOTE: A huge part of what shaped this session was the disastrous biennial budget, which offered $0 in new general aid from the state for schools, causing property taxes in communities across the state to spike to make up the gap. I already covered the budget in detail last summer HERE.

Partisanship in the Legislature

To understand why this session was so disappointing, it is necessary to point out just how cravenly partisan the current Republican majority continues to be. Since the infamous lame-duck session of December 2018, where they moved to strip incoming Governor Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul of some of their authority before they even took office, the Republican-controlled legislature has largely refused to work with Democrats on anything of substance. Public education funding has remained stagnant, local government revenues have fallen further behind inflation, housing and energy bills have skyrocketed, healthcare costs are out of control, and we have failed to legalize cannabis or put into action our 2050 climate goals.

How bad has it been? Well, out of 1,185 bills introduced in the State Senate since January 2025, 446 of them had a Democrat as a first author, but only 9 of those received a public hearing, 3 passed out of committee, and zero received a floor vote. On the Assembly side, 1,238 bills were introduced, 500 had a Democrat as first author, 19 of those received a public hearing, 5 passed out of committee, and just one received a floor vote - passing 96-0 but dying in the State Senate. That’s right - just 1.1% of Democratic bills got so much as a public hearing this session, and none became law.

“Just 1.1% of Democratic bills got a public hearing this session and none became law.”

Because we have a Democratic Governor, every bill that does become law is by definition bipartisan. That has happened 247 times in the 2025 session. Democrats in the State Senate have been more willing to work across the aisle than the Republican majority, and our voting records prove this pretty convincingly.

According to the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau (LRB), out of 145 roll call votes in the Senate this session, the median Senate Democrat voted with the Republican majority nearly half the time (45.5%). The other half of the time, Democrats rejected the highly partisan, politically-motivated, and often entirely unserious proposals that were ultimately vetoed by Governor Evers.

Perhaps a better measure of bipartisanship isn’t the quantity, but the quality of bipartisan legislation. Did enacted legislation meet the needs of the moment we are in? When common ground was available, did majority leadership rise to the occasion and claim it? Ultimately, this is what our neighbors will judge us on, and in my view this is precisely where the Republican majority has fallen short.

Near misses

I introduced 153 pieces of legislation this session as the lead author, and another 112 as second author. I co-sponsored hundreds more, some of which became law. The topics were quite varied, including healthcare, the environment, consumer protection, campaign finance, criminal justice reform, gun safety, worker rights, and - perhaps most important - public education. You can see the full list of bills I’ve introduced or co-sponsored HERE.

Unfortunately, just 9 of the bills I was 1st or 2nd author of received public hearings in committee this session. Four received committee votes, and one - the broadly bipartisan AB 17 - passed the State Assembly.

AB 17 was designed to improve worker power, reduce layoffs, and reduce the likelihood of business relocations by creating tax incentives for businesses to convert from other ownership models to become employee-owned. For whatever reason, Republicans in the State Senate declined to bring the bill up for a vote.

Another bill of mine that miraculously received a hearing and committee vote in both houses was SB 577. This bill was another bipartisan collaboration - this time with Rep. Jessie Rodriguez - that would have directly helped a shared constituent of ours (Gabriel Lugo) as well as any other person who was wrongfully convicted of a crime and imprisoned in Wisconsin. Under current law, the most anyone who is wrongfully convicted of a crime can be compensated upon release from prison - no matter how long the sentence - is $5,000 per year up to a total of $25,000 plus attorney fees. That is hardly sufficient to make up for taking away an innocent person’s freedom.

Mr. Lugo spent nearly a decade and a half in prison for a murder he did not commit. When he was finally released in 2023, he was awarded the maximum amount of just $25,000 plus attorney fees. The state claims board recommended a much higher award - $750,000 - to help him begin to rebuild his life. However, because of our state’s outdated and wholly insufficient statutes in this area, that money could not be awarded without the passage of a bill. Rather than pass an entire bill to benefit just one person, we decided to revive efforts from prior sessions to change the law altogether. I was extremely disappointed when our legislative session ended without SB 577 becoming law.

The other bills I led on that had at least a public hearing would have, among other things, prevented artificial intelligence from being used to deny medical claims for a patient, banned the release of mylar balloons that cause costly and dangerous power outages, and prohibited foreign nationals from influencing our political process by contributing to referendum committees.

These are all good bills, and I’m proud to have worked on them with colleagues on both sides of the aisle. However, at a time when prices for just about everything are out of control, our democracy at the federal level is in danger of collapse, and our schools are so chronically underfunded that some districts are at risk of insolvency, you’d be justified in being frustrated that even these relatively small measures could not become law, despite most of them having bipartisan support.

To say I’m disappointed too is a severe understatement. As neighbors and as taxpayers, we all deserve better than what we’ve been getting from the legislature for the better part of two decades.

Biggest Wins

Thankfully, it wasn’t all bad news this session. There were actually some long-overdue breakthroughs that are worth celebrating. We’ll briefly discuss four of them. The first involves a guarantee of health coverage for new moms.

Postpartum Medicaid Extension

The postpartum period is a critical time for mothers and babies alike. Unfortunately, for women whose household income rises above the threshold for Medicaid after giving birth, they stand the risk of losing their health coverage. That’s why Congress granted states the ability to amend their Medicaid State Plans to allow continuous coverage for new moms in the program for up to one year after giving birth. After years of failed attempts, owing mostly to Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’ opposition, Wisconsin was one of just two states in the country that did not take advantage of the 12-month postpartum extension.

This year, things finally changed. On the final day of the regular session for the State Assembly, Speaker Vos surprised everyone when he announced that a vote would be held on SB 23, which had already passed the State Senate in April of 2025 with just a single “no” vote. That same day, Vos announced he would be retiring from the Assembly at the end of 2026. These two events are not a coincidence.

Now that the public has a deeper understanding of the need to cover health care for new moms and their babies, we must do the same for all Wisconsinites.

Gail’s Law

The health insurance industry is the source of many problems. They consistently look for new ways to deny payment for critical health services, and have become experts at blocking progress on healthcare costs by convincing legislators to kill most attempts at serious reform. That’s part of what makes the passage of SB 264, also known as “Gail’s Law,” so special.

In short, women with denser tissue in their breasts can often develop breast cancer before it can be detected by traditional screenings. As with most types of cancer, early detection is key, and without more rigorous screening, women with dense breasts risk not knowing they have cancer until it is too late. Those who pursue the more thorough screening recommended by their doctor are left with huge bills that some families simply can’t afford.

That ends now. Thanks to Gail’s law, Wisconsin insurance plans must cover supplemental breast cancer screenings for all those who have increased risk without cost-sharing - similar to how traditional mammograms are covered currently. This bill will save lives!

DACA Occupational Licensing

Another big win late this session was for dreamers - lawful immigrants who were brought to the United States as children by parents who were undocumented. Until now, those who participate in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program could have driver licenses, own property, pay taxes, and work in a variety of fields, but were locked out of any occupation that requires a license issued by the Department of Safety and Professional Services (DSPS).

Thanks to AB 759, that glass ceiling - the inability to become a teacher, nurse, doctor, or other licensed profession - no longer exists. Finally, DACA participants can pursue the American Dream to the fullest extent of their education and ability, helping to fill vacancies in some of our most critically understaffed fields in the process. While the federal government continues to keep our broken immigration system in place, Wisconsin is doing what it can to make things better here at home.

Medicaid Reimbursement for Returning Citizens

Wisconsin’s corrections system needs serious work. The final bill we’re highlighting here, AB 604, may not be as widely known as the prior three, but could end up being one of the most impactful once fully implemented.

Under federal law, incarcerated individuals lose access to Medicaid coverage. While they are incarcerated at county jails and state prisons, those levels of government are required to provide healthcare for people in their care. However, once individuals complete their sentence and are released into the community, they often lack health coverage for a period of time. This critical post-release period is when returning citizens are most likely to re-offend, and for those with substance use issues in particular, this can prove deadly.

What AB 604 does is allow Wisconsin to adjust its Medicaid program so that individuals who would normally qualify for the program can receive Medicaid services for up to 90 days before being released from custody, including medication-assisted treatment for substance use. This will save lives, and almost certainly lead to a reduction in our recidivism rate. Wisconsin had one of the higher rates of reincarceration in the nation at 35% in 2021, while neighbor Minnesota saw a 20% rate. Minnesota is one of several states that have already taken advantage of the expanded eligibility for Medicaid prior to re-entry. Every person we can keep from returning to prison is a net positive for state spending and for society.

Another benefit of this law is that county jails will see lower medical services costs, freeing up more resources for things like transit, parks, and public health.

Steps Backward

Consistent with recent history, there were a host of bad bills introduced by the Republican majority in our legislature over the past two years. Several centered on expanding private school vouchers, increasing mass incarceration, and attacking LGBTQ+ rights - particularly Trans youth. Fortunately, Governor Evers has largely acted as a goalie with a veto pen and stopped the vast majority of these bills in their tracks.

Sadly, a few bills did become law this session that I voted “no” on and have serious concerns with. The budget is the most egregious example of this, but it’s worth highlighting the standalone bills as well - all of which passed the State Senate on the final day of regular business on March 17th.

IHRA Definition of Antisemitism

Antisemitism is abhorrent and should be rejected in no uncertain terms. I am proud to have worked on initiatives to expand Holocaust education in Wisconsin, so that future generations may remember the extreme inhumanity that is possible when we allow hatred and dehumanization to take root. AB 446 is a bill designed to codify one particular definition of Antisemitism - the one used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) - into Wisconsin law.

This is problematic for a few reasons. First, the IHRA working definition of Antisemitism was never intended to be codified into state or federal law. We know this because Ken Stern, one of the primary authors of the definition, has consistently warned against this. Second, we already have strong hate crime laws on the books in Wisconsin, and Antisemitic views expressed through vandalism, threats, and intimidation are already illegal. What we don’t, and shouldn’t do in the United States, a nation which guarantees freedom of speech in our Bill of Rights, is engage in viewpoint discrimination. We don’t have working definitions of racism, anti-muslim hate, or other forms of bigotry in Wisconsin law. To do so specifically for Antisemitism makes little sense.

Watch former Rep. Sandy Pasch’s testimony against AB 446 from October 2025.

Most of all, I worry that codifying the IHRA definition of Antisemitism will continue to mistakenly conflate criticism of Israeli government leaders with hatred toward Jewish people. As Israel’s government under Netanyahu has become increasingly aggressive in waging war and attempting genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza, criticism of the regime has become more widespread. Under President Trump, we have seen people on college campuses in particular be targeted for legal action, including deportation, for their vocal support for a free Palestine and against genocide. There is real concern that as states like Wisconsin begin codifying Antisemitism in the way that AB 446 does, it will open the door to more attacks on speech and the targeting of Muslim-Americans and Arab immigrants by our oppressive federal government.

This is a complex issue and my good friend and former legislative colleague Sandy Pasch co-wrote a brilliant Op-Ed in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel which explains the downfalls of this legislation better than I ever could. I encourage you to read it if you’re interested in the topic.

Name, Image, Likeness

College sports at the highest level have long moved away from being a mere extracurricular activity and have become a multi-billion dollar business. For decades, the profits flowed everywhere except to the players themselves, who were not allowed to make money off of their talents while maintaining their eligibility for NCAA athletics.

Those days are long gone. Players are now able to receive what are called “Name, Image, and Likeness” payments, or “NIL.” Some of that money comes directly from university budgets. With the University of Wisconsin at Madison being a member of the Big 10 - perhaps the largest and most powerful of all college sports conferences, there is increasing pressure to increase the pot of money available for NIL. AB 1034 used various accounting maneuvers to free up about $15 million in NIL money for athletes at 3 campuses, but the bulk of that money goes to UW-Madison, which has struggled to attract top talent to its football program in recent years.

In addition, the bill includes a troubling exemption from Wisconsin’s open records law for the “generation, deployment, or allocation of revenue generated by an intercollegiate athletic program.” How do we justify this kind of state investment if we as taxpayers don’t even have the ability to access relevant information about it?

I have no issue with athletes getting paid or with UW schools going to alumni and other donors or increasing ticket, concession, or merchandise prices to pay for NIL payments. What I do take issue with is using scarce taxpayer dollars on NIL when tuition is unaffordable for too many students, and state support for academic programs has lagged behind for decades. If we are going to invest more tax dollars in our UW System, it should be to benefit students through tuition relief or improved academic programming, not paying a few elite athletes to come through our doors for a year or two on their way to going pro.

Mobile Sports Betting

Sports gambling is everywhere. As an avid fan of the Brewers and Packers, I can’t watch a game without being bombarded with ads from sportsbooks. Until this year, the Brewers’ TV broadcasts were on a network owned by a sports betting company - FanDuel. You might even have family or friends who bet on sports. You may be surprised to learn, then, that outside of the confines of tribal casinos, mobile sports betting is mostly illegal in Wisconsin. AB 601 will change that.

Currently, if you want to legally bet on sports in Wisconsin, you need to be physically present at a tribal casino. Once AB 601 becomes law and updated gaming compacts are ratified with Wisconsin’s tribal nations, you will be able to bet on sports from your mobile device from anywhere in the state, so long as the servers that process these bets exist on tribal property.

What this means is that soon you will be able to legally take part in sports betting any time of day or night, from wherever you are. I don’t have to tell you how damaging gambling addiction can be. Countless lives have been put in financial ruin by gambling. Thanks to advancements in mobile technology and the sheer volume of things you can bet on, from the outcome of a game down to whether the next pitch will be a ball or a strike, there is virtually no limit to how much money you can lose once you start betting.

I would have loved to see safeguards for overbetting and gambling addiction recovery efforts put into place before approving this legislation, rather than having these items pushed down the road for future negotiations. These will be critical to reducing the negative impacts of a casino in every pocket in Wisconsin.

Unfinished Business

If you’ve made it this far into this session wrap-up and you find yourself filled with an overwhelming sense of “that’s it?” you are not alone. There is so much more we need to do to move our state forward and improve the lives of our neighbors. Almost none of the big issues affecting our state were addressed by enacted legislation this session, and it’s pretty clear why - the status quo is working just fine for the super-rich, and the current majority that has been in power for 15 years is perfectly OK with that.

However, with fairer maps fully in place for the first time, a slew of legislative retirements already announced, and a new Governor set to be chosen this fall, the new year and corresponding legislative session present a tremendous opportunity to finally begin addressing our shared challenges at the scope that is necessary to succeed.

Stay tuned.

Chris Larson, Wisconsin State Senator https://bsky.app/profile/chrisjlarson.bsky.social

Buy Dept. of Ed Cider Here

If today’s piece moved you, here are a few ways to wear it on your sleeve — literally. All four shirts are available now in the Minocqua Marketplace, made on demand to reduce waste, and printed with the kind of messaging that turns heads and starts conversations.

No Kings T-Shirt (Small Print), Educators Against Fascism T-Shirt, Abolish ICE Unisex T-Shirt

This is Kirk Bangstad, owner of the Minocqua Brewing Company.

We’ve added about 10K new subscribers to our independent political news and analysis channel called the Minocqua Brewing Company Times over the last few months, and starting in early May, we’ll be adding a lot more news segments to our platform.

That being said, I wanted to re-introduce who we are and what we’re ultimately trying to do among the many different divisions of our company.

Who We Are: We’re not your average media outlet — or your average brewery.

We’re a beer company, a media company, and a marketplace rolled into one unapologetically progressive machine.

• The Beer: We brew craft beer that tastes good and does good — each sale helps fund our fight against right-wing extremism. Our for-profit status helps us stay independent and act more quickly than non-profits who are governed by boards and often rely on grants from the government for funding.

• The Media: Through the “Up North Podcast” and “Minocqua Brewing Company Times” Substack, we cover the stories that corporate media ignores — corruption, local elections, and the everyday people making Wisconsin and the Midwest better.

• The Marketplace: Minocqua Marketplace features small, progressive makers from across the country, and aims to become a tool to boycott companies who have bent the knee to Trump. When you shop there, you’re voting with your dollars for the world you actually want to live in.

Our Mission: To build a progressive Wisconsin (and beyond) where truth still matters, workers have power, and democracy isn’t for sale.

Since Trump was elected in 2024, our team; which consists of Midwestern radio talk show hosts, union leaders, political organizers, and politicians; has published essays every day of the week and released a weekly podcast to our audience of over 170K subscribers.

We’re also proud of the fact that we’ve consistently landed among the top 50 U.S. political pages on Substack.

Since December of 2025, we offered “Office Hours” once a week to paying subscribers, along with special events like virtual beer tastings, parties in our taproom, and discounts to our marketplace.

To date, 1K out of 170K of you have helped sustain us by becoming paid subscribers. This subscription revenue, along with the ads that we place within our articles to sell our products, enables us keep this platform going.

Starting in May, we’ve decided to offer more to our paying subscribers with the hope that we can convince many of you take the leap and subscribe for $8 a month.

In addition to our free daily essays and weekly podcast, we’re going to be offering live political news and analysis for our paid subscribers two more days a week, as well as a “Weekly Wrap Up,” which will be a “reader’s digest” email that links to all the rest of our content from the previous week. This will allow our paying subscribers to “turn off” our daily emails and give their inboxes a rest without missing anything.

Here’s the schedule:

• Mondays:

  • Free Monday essay by Patti Vasquez

  • Paid Office Hours with Patti Vasquez, 1 pm

• Tuesdays:

  • Free Tuesday essay from Ben Cominos

  • Paid Office Hours with Kirk Bangstad, 1 pm

• Wednesdays:

  • Free Wednesday essay from our team

  • Free Up North Podcast with most of our team, 6 pm

• Thursdays:

  • Free Thursday Essay from Kirk Bangstad

  • Paid Office Hours with Ben Cominos, 1 pm

• Fridays:

  • Free Friday essay from our team

  • Paid Weekly Wrap Up email

• Saturdays: Free guest essay (usually Wisconsin Senator Chris Larson, Wisconsin AFT President Jon Shelton, or Fighting Oligarchy Organizer Simon Rosenblum-Larsen

• Sunday: Free essay from Kirk Bangstad

Subscribe now

Now for the great part. Regardless of whether you’re a free or paying subscriber, you can now “turn off” emails from us that you don’t have time to read, or that give you anxiety because your inbox is constantly being flooded.

For example, if you’re a free subscriber and really only love to read Patti’s essay on Mondays, you can turn off everything else and only get one essay from us a week. We’d rather keep you on our team than have you unsubscribe from us completely because you can’t take the inbox fatigue.

For paid subscribers, you have the option of turning EVERYTHING off except our weekly round-up emails that are sent on Friday that include links to ALL free and paid content that was published the week before.

Subscribe now

Our Ask: If you believe independent journalism and progressive organizing are worth fighting for, please consider becoming a paying member today.

We can’t grow without your support, and we need to grow in order to fill the void being left in the Midwest and Wisconsin by a dying legacy media landscape.

Your subscription keeps our writers paid, our podcast live, and continues to grow our movement.

And because we actually give a damn, you’ll also get some great added benefits -discounts, live events, exclusive access, and a front-row seat to this wild ride we call democracy.

MBC Times Membership Benefits

Exclusive behind-the-scenes access to our writers

• Monthly Virtual Happy Hour with Kirk — Once a month, grab a beer (or a kombucha, we don’t judge) and join Kirk live for an unfiltered hour of updates, stories, rants, and your questions. It’s part behind-the-scenes, part therapy, and totally unscripted - just the way we like it.

• Get featured in the MBC Times — Every month we shine a spotlight on one of our members — and the progressive local organization they believe in. It’s our way of sharing the good work happening in your communities and building a stronger statewide movement together.

• Attend the Members-Only Holiday Party — If you’re anywhere near Madison, you’re invited to the Members-Only Holiday Party at our Madison Taproom. Hang out with Kirk, Patti, and Ben — and yes, your first drink’s on us.

Discounts on our progressive Marketplace and Taprooms

• 10% off all purchases of our products on the Minocqua Marketplace

• 10% off all purchases in our Taprooms in Minocqua and Madison. Just show your active subscription at checkout. (We know not everyone’s local, but hey — road trip?)

Participate in live discussions and help shape the future of our newsroom

• Be part of the conversation. Paid members can comment and ask questions live during our podcasts and events. We’ll see them in real time — and if you’ve got something smart (or funny) to say, we might just read it on air.

• Quarterly Membership Survey. Every few months, we’ll ask what’s working, what’s missing, and what we should cover next — from local races to national stories. You’ll have a direct say in what we report and where we show up.

🌟 Plus…

You’ll get full access to the Member Hub, where all your perks live — event links, discount codes, and member-only updates.

And, you’ll get our monthly members-only newsletter, a candid roundup of what’s happening behind the scenes and what’s coming next.

You can even buy a group or gift membership to share this movement with others.

Hit subscribe, join the movement, and help us keep fighting for truth, progress, and democracy in Wisconsin and beyond.

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading, and thanks for sticking with the Minocqua Brewing Company.

Together, we’ll keep fighting right-wing misinformation and propaganda, one beer and Substack subscription at a time.

Kirk Bangstad

Owner, Minocqua Brewing Company/ Minocqua Marketplace Publisher, Minocqua Brewing Company Times Founder, Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC

Kirk Bangstad here, owner of the Minocqua Brewing Company.

Ben, Patti, and I had a fact-filled podcast last night about:

1. Blatant insider trading and war profiteering occurring within the Trump regime regarding the Iran War.

2. Blue states like Wisconsin being denied FEMA assistance simply because they don’t bend the knee to Trump.

3. The rotating cast of Democrats that always seem to side with Republicans to block legislation that huge majorities of Democrats want.

4. The AFL-CIO creating a massive strike fund to build towards a future general strike against the Trump regime.

Last night’s episode was chock full us useful facts and information, so I suggest you watch the whole thing. If you don’t have the time, however, here’s a few of the most important clips:

In this first clip, I gave 4 examples of obvious insider trading within the Trump regime in both the prediction and oil markets. In each case, large trades were made directly before Trump announced major news to the public. In each case, those trades made millions of dollars.

With regard to those trades, Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) said "There are two answers: God, or an insider trader. And something tells me that God is not placing bets around Donald Trump's posts on Truth Social." [AP/NPR]

With both the DOJ and FBI in Trump’s pocket, we’ll simply have to keep watching this blatant war profiteering until we regain power, but it’s imperative that we keep talking about it and hold his regime accountable in the court of public opinion

In the next segment, we talked about how Governor Evers was begging Trump to release disaster relief funds for the massive flooding that occurred in Wisconsin last week, and how he’s already been rejected by Trump requesting relief from the huge floods that happened in Milwaukee last August. We created a graph that showed that Trump has withheld disaster funds from blue states at an alarming rate compared to red states—a phenomena that has never occurred before Trump took office.

We then talked about how Wisconsin will now have to fend for itself , and how we can no longer rely on our federal tax dollars coming back to us in the form of disaster relief due to Trump’s politics of retribution. We then discussed model legislation passed by Massachusetts and Minnesota to created statewide disaster funds after predicting that they, too, would be hung out to dry by Trump’s FEMA. Lastly, I urged Democratic Governor Tony Evers to use some of Wisconsin’s huge budget surplus to create a LITERAL RAINY DAY FUND for disaster relief so that Wisconsinites won’t have to rely solely on the charity of their communities and ever-more-stingy insurance companies to get them back on their feet after a weather disaster.

Next, we discussed a theory called the “rotating villain,” which suggests that there’s JUST ENOUGH Corporate Democrats beholden to the rich that continually stop the passage of most every major piece of legislation is popular among Democrats and the working class.

This theory reared its head as 7 Democratic senators sided with Republicans to send $300M worth of bulldozers to Israel so they could further wreak havoc in Middle Eastern wars that a vast majority of Americans are not interested in fighting.

These senators, all funded heavily by AIPAC, include: Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Chris Coons of Delaware, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Jacky Rosen of Nevada, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York.

The reason they’re called “rotating villains” is that is seems like the horrible votes made by Corporate Democrats get spread around to different people on purpose, so that no single politician has to take all the blowback from the votes they take to screw the working class.

Ben ultimately said that with so much at stake, we must root these “rotating villains” out of the Democratic Party once and for all, and elect true progressives that won’t sell their votes to the highest bidder.

Finally, we ended the show by passing on the news that the AFL-CIO created a created a general strike fund called Union Now. This is a huge step towards actually being able to pull of a general strike if and when Trump attempts to steal our elections this coming November. Here’s Ben talking about why have a strike fund is so important.

And last but not least, Wisconsinites, here’s map of where there’s planned May Day Strong events happening in Wisconsin on May 1 “No work, no school, no shopping.”

To learn more about how to get involved on that day, go to www.mobilize.us and search on “May Day Strong” events in your area.

Thanks for reading and watching, and thanks for spreading the facts you’ve learned along the way so that we can cut through the endless propaganda we’re being fed on a daily basis.

Kirk Bangstad

Owner, Minocqua Brewing Company/Minocqua Marketplace Publisher, Minocqua Brewing Company Times Founder, Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC

Get more from Minocqua Brewing Company in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Hey friends, it’s Kirk.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported this morning that more than a third of Wisconsin’s 72 counties are actively cooperating with ICE. A third. After everything we’ve watched unfold in Minnesota and Illinois — masked agents terrorizing communities, warrantless snatch-and-grabs, thousands of people thrown into detention centers because of how they look, Alex Pretti and Renée Good murdered before our eyes — Wisconsin sheriffs looked at that and said, sign us up.

If you live in one of these counties, your sheriff has signed on:

Brown. Columbia. Crawford. Door. Dunn. Fond du Lac. Forest. Green. Juneau. Kewaunee. Langlade. Manitowoc. Marinette. Marquette. Oconto. Price. Rock. Sawyer. Sheboygan. Trempealeau. Walworth. Washington. Waukesha. Waushara. Winnebago.

That’s your sheriff agreeing, in writing, to help federal agents violate due process in your county. That’s your sheriff green-lighting racial profiling as a law enforcement strategy. That’s your tax dollars funding the infrastructure of domestic terrorism against your neighbors.

You don’t have to be complicit just because your sheriff is.

The single easiest way to tell your neighbors — and your local law enforcement — exactly where you stand is to put a sign in your yard. Not a bumper sticker nobody sees. Not a social media post that disappears in an hour. A sign. In your yard. Every day. For everyone on your block to see.

When enough yards on a street say not in my name, it changes the temperature of a town. That’s how your neighbors know they have allies. That’s how communities have always pushed back against authoritarian creep — visibly, stubbornly, locally.

We sell yard signs and lawn ornaments in the Minocqua Marketplace. Every partner we carry has pledged not to fund MAGA candidates or causes, so when you buy one, your money does double duty. It puts a message on your lawn and it stays the hell out of the pockets of the people building this.

Abolish Ice flag, Keep the Immigrants flag, Chinga La Migra flag

Ice Out yard sign, Terrible Things yard sign, Blue Dot flag

And because we can't let a week go by without a little joy in the fight: we just added our own Free Beer Day garden flag to the mix. Because resistance doesn't have to be grim. It can also be a cold beer and a garden flag that speaks for itself.

I Wish It Was Free Beer Day Garden Flag

Pick one out. Stake it in the ground. Let your block know where you stand.

The sheriffs in these 25 counties made their choice. Now you make yours.

— Kirk & The Minocqua Marketplace Team

Good morning,

Kirk here. It’s Tuesday, which means Ben Cominos is back — and this week he’s naming names on the quiet little game both parties play to make sure popular things never quite make it across the finish line.

You’ve seen it before. A bill everyone claims to support somehow fails by one vote. A handful of Democrats “break with their party” just in time to hand Republicans the outcome corporate donors wanted all along. Rinse, repeat, blame the other side.

Ben calls it the rotating villain. Glenn Greenwald called it the same thing back in 2010. The tactic hasn’t changed — only the names on the villain rotation have.

Defeating this kind of cynical politics starts with naming it out loud, which is exactly what independent voices like Ben’s are here to do. Our new seasonal School House Bock celebrates the public education our next generation needs to see through the con, and your online purchase of our beer supports the independent voices and the values for which we’re fighting.

Thanks for reading and thanks for supporting the work. Here’s Ben…

Kirk Bangstad
Minocqua Brewing Company / Minocqua Marketplace
Publisher, MBC Times
Founder, Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC

Buy School House Bock

Hello, my name is Ben Cominos, and I’m a professional hater. (Audience in unison: “Hi, Ben.”)

All jokes aside, if you didn’t listen to my show on Friday morning, I went on a bit of a tear.

The uniparty was in full force on Thursday with three bills coming across their desks. Not only were there three bills up for a vote, but one of those votes happened after midnight… you know, when all the really popular stuff happens that you have to rush through the dark of night.

A bill regarding $300 million worth of bulldozers being sent to Israel in the name of knocking over homes in Palestine and Lebanon passed by one vote. The Iran War Powers Act, which would have reined in any president’s ability to launch a war without Congressional approval, failed by one vote. A five-year extension of FISA, a bill that allows our government to spy on us without a cause or warrant, failed by one vote… at 2:09 in the morning.

Fret not, though. That last one — you know, the objectively good thing that Congress did — will be back up for a vote again on April 30th, and call me crazy, but I bet you it will get the required votes.

This is a concept that I talk about a lot on my show. A term known as the rotating villain will always appear to make sure that the most popular outcome is not the outcome we receive.

The best part is, that villain is always different, so all parties can claim ignorance.

Now… (earmuffs, Republicans) almost every single Republican in the House and Senate has the ability to vote for the objectively unpopular thing and not worry about repercussions.

“What’s that? All but three Republicans voted for my government to spy on me? Whatever — did you guys hear that public schools are teaching our children that slavery was bad?”

Republican voters have to hold their own to account, but unfortunately, I’m not holding my breath right now.

Liberals, on the other hand, have a much taller order.

They need to hold the one to three members of their party accountable as they take turns siding with the overwhelming majority of Republicans to take away our freedoms or prevent the kind of transformative change we need.

Glenn Greenwald actually wrote an opinion article about this back in 2010 that you can read here. He goes on to list several different occurrences where just enough Democrats broke ranks with the entire Republican Party to block popular progress. Here’s an excerpt from the article that just covers 2009 and ‘10:

“The primary tactic in this game is Villain Rotation. They always have a handful of Democratic Senators announce that they will be the ones to deviate this time from the ostensible party position and impede success, but the designated Villain constantly shifts, so the Party itself can claim it supports these measures while an always-changing handful of their members invariably prevent it. One minute, it’s Jay Rockefeller as the Prime Villain leading the way in protecting Bush surveillance programs and demanding telecom immunity; the next minute, it’s Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer joining hands and ‘breaking with their party’ to ensure Michael Mukasey’s confirmation as Attorney General; then it’s Big Bad Joe Lieberman single-handedly blocking Medicare expansion; then it’s Blanche Lincoln and Jim Webb joining with Lindsey Graham to support the de-funding of civilian trials for Terrorists; and now that they can’t blame Lieberman or Ben Nelson any longer on health care (since they don’t need 60 votes), Jay Rockefeller voluntarily returns to the Villain Role, stepping up to put an end to the pretend-movement among Senate Democrats to enact the public option via reconciliation.”

And here’s the kicker: this doesn’t get into codifying Roe v. Wade. This doesn’t count minimum wage stagnation. It doesn’t count the efforts to improve upon Medicare for All.

I realize that in this tale of two parties, Republicans obviously leave a hell of a lot more to be desired than Democrats, but in case you’re wondering where my attitude — and the attitude of so many people wired like me — comes from, it comes from these kinds of moments.

(And we haven’t even scratched the surface of what Manchin and Sinema blocked in 2021 and ‘22.)

That’s what we watched happen twice on Thursday. Seven Senate Dems (all of whom have received seven-figure donations from AIPAC) voted to send $300 million of bulldozers overseas. Remember that the next time we need to do layoffs in the special needs department at your local public school.

And one House Democrat (Golden) voted to give our presidents universal authority to enact war. Thankfully for him, he already announced his retirement.

What a lucky coincidence!

If you’re ever asking yourself how Republicans can ever win, this is how. I’m not implying that people vote for Republicans to enact change — I’m implying that they stay home and don’t vote at all because they know the only thing the Democratic Party has to offer them is excuses.

As someone who champions taking part in the voting process — as someone whose career literally hinges on political engagement — I don’t want this to be the case.

Some Dems actually do mean business, and they need to be championed when they do.

Then, slowly but surely, we need to get rid of these clowns that gum up the works in the name of preserving status quo politics, for all of our sakes.

About the Author: Ben Cominos is a Wisconsin-based political commentator, writer, and host of Outside the Box on WHBY Radio in Appleton. Known for his sharp analysis, humor, and no-nonsense approach, Ben challenges complacency in both parties and pushes for solutions that put working people first. His work blends political insight with an everyday perspective—because for Ben, progress starts with honest conversations and holding everyone accountable.

You can follow Ben on YouTube and TikTok at

Check out all our different beers and cider — Gulf of Mexico Lager, Muckraker Stout, Freedom Trail, or the Department of Public Education Cider

Buy Progressive Beer

Good morning, folks.

It’s Mocha Monday and today’s piece is from Patti Vasquez. It’s about love. It’s about cruelty. And it’s about the machinery being built in plain sight while most of Washington pretends everything is fine because the Dow ticked up a few points.

Before you dive in, a quick reminder: we don’t have corporate sponsors underwriting this work. A portion of everything we sell today — WOKE Coffee bags, and WOKE Oat Milk Sweet Cream Cans — goes directly toward paying the writers who bring you pieces like Patti’s. If you want independent voices telling stories the mainstream would rather soften or ignore, fuel up with something that actually supports them.

Now here’s Patti….

Kirk Bangstad
Minocqua Brewing Company / Minocqua Marketplace
Publisher, MBC Times
Founder, Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC

Consider purchasing a bag of WOKE Coffee Beans, a 4 pack of WOKE Oat Milk Sweet Cream canned coffee, or sign up for a WOKE Coffee subscription here.

The House Always Wins

Lawrence Raymond Bonnin was born in 1933 and everyone called him Larry. He was probably the most Larry person who ever lived — and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. He was big laughs, big stories, a room that got louder when he walked in. He was 5’4” on a generous day and carried himself like he was six feet tall. He was, without question, the best man I ever watched lose.

I still call him daddy. I always will.

When I was little, going wherever daddy went was the whole point. He played poker with the kind of men who stayed up past midnight in rooms that smelled like cigarettes, cologne, and bourbon, and I was right there with him, sitting on his lap learning gin rummy before I could read a chapter book. There was nothing glamorous about any of it — sticky tables, bad lighting, men who laughed too loud. I loved every second. I still have a soft spot for dive bars that probably traces directly back to those nights. It just felt like his world, and his world was where I wanted to be.

He took me to all the racetracks around Chicago — Hawthorne, Maywood, Arlington — we hit them all. He’d hand me two dollars before each race and send me down to the paddock to look the horses over before post time. I was absolutely convinced I could read them. I’d study which ones were calm, which ones were electric, which ones had something to prove that afternoon. I was right often enough to feel like maybe I had a gift. By the time I was ten I knew how to bet to win, place, show, and box a trifecta like it was arithmetic. I loved explaining what a quinella was to novices trying to figure out their racing forms.

For anyone who saw Paper Moon, I was Tatum O’Neal without the grifting. Deep cut, but a movie I identified with deeply.

I wanted to be a jockey. Partly because I loved horses — I drew saddle diagrams obsessively, rode at Girl Scout camp for six summers, and still get on a horse whenever I get the chance. The joke I tell in clubs is that I figured if I became a jockey, my dad would keep coming to the track, and that way he’d have to keep hanging out with me even after I grew up.

He loved bringing me to the paddock. He loved teasing the jockeys too. I’ll never forget the day he teased Pat Day and said, “Well, you’re just a little fella, aren’t you?”

On a beautiful sunny day at Arlington in the 90s I picked a 99-to-1 longshot. Don’t ask me why. Something about the way that horse was moving. The look in his eye. Daddy and I watched that race and somewhere around the final turn, that horse started coming. I mean really coming. By the time he crossed the finish line ahead of the pack, my father grabbed my hand and we were both standing up bouncing like kids on a sugar high. The whole world for about thirty seconds was just the two of us and this impossible horse.

Then the inquiry sign went up on the board.

The horse had elbowed its way through the entire field, hitting every single horse along the way. Disqualified. The bet was gone. My father shook his head and laughed, because what else are you going to do? You win some, you lose some. It was just two bucks.

What I didn’t understand yet, and what I wouldn’t understand for years, was that the inquiry sign was always going up somewhere in his life. The house was always taking it back.

Larry grew up on the South Side of Chicago, and his family eventually moved to what we now know as the wildly affluent Lincoln Park. He was selling newspapers as a little boy during the Depression, when papers cost two or three cents and sometimes people gave him a dollar. That was real money then, the equivalent of nearly twenty dollars today. People loved him even then. He was charming and funny and tiny, and some of them handed him a little extra just because of the way he smiled. He’d bring it home.

At his funeral in 2001, a woman in her eighties came up to me, held my hands in hers, and told me she used to babysit daddy. She talked about how hard he worked as a child, and choked back tears telling me how my grandmother would often spend what he brought home on drinking and gambling.

It was baked into him before he had a chance to choose differently. And something tells me it had been baked into her long before that too.

He stopped drinking in 1989. It was not his choice really. A DUI cost him his livelihood. He was a limo driver at the time, after decades behind the wheel of a cab going back to 1950. His license, his profession, a piece of his identity — all of it suspended in one courthouse morning. He might have gotten off easier, but when the officer pulled him over, my father looked at him and said, “Come on. Even God takes money.” The judge gave him significant community service for the attempted bribe. That was extremely Larry.

When the drinking stopped, the gambling filled the space with a ferociousness that devastated my family for years. The riverboats arrived in Illinois, pushing just far enough offshore to stay legal, and my father found them like water finding a drain. By 1992 or ‘93 he was in serious debt. I was in graduate school in the fall of 1993 when he came to me and asked to borrow $2,000. He’d lost $10,000, he told me. He was sure he could win it back.

It was my first credit card. I took out a cash advance and gave it to him.

A few years later, my mother and I found out how bad it had really gotten. He’d been taking out credit cards in both of our names. The debt was over $60,000. He had to declare bankruptcy. My mother’s credit was destroyed for years. So was mine.

My mother has never fully forgiven him for that, and I understand why. What I also understood, even then, was that it wasn’t malice. He was a man who couldn’t feel pleasure in ordinary life without the hit, who had traded one source of dopamine for another and couldn’t find his way back. The grief of losing his son in 1976 made him drink harder. The debt made him smoke harder. The shame of not having enough made him lose more. Each thing feeding the next. A man buried alive who kept digging his own grave deeper.

His funeral was packed. Larry filled rooms to the end. People loved him, people laughed with him, people drove from far away to say goodbye. His daughters from his first marriage weren’t there. A packed room and two empty seats that said everything about what it means to love someone and not be able to survive what they leave behind.

One sister visited when he was dying for reasons I’m still not ready to discuss. The other told me she didn’t think it was necessary. A week before he died he said “I guess she’s not coming, huh?” I shrugged and in the most Larry moment I ever experienced, he said “I guess I can’t blame her.”

My mother was with him in those final six months anyway. Despite everything he put her through. They went on dates every Monday. She was furious at him and she showed up. That’s also a kind of love, the kind that doesn’t have a proper name.

He died in June 2001. Lung cancer that was surpassed by an aortic aneurysm. He was smoking four packs a day by the end. Before he went, he told me he wished he’d had a million dollars. That he wished he could have taken care of me, that he wished we’d been rich. His last words, in my mother’s arms, were “I’m sorry.”

And then, finally: “It’s not fair.”

He was right on both counts.

I think about him all the time. I think about him when I pass a dive bar with neon in the window. I think about him at the Kentucky Derby every year, even though Arlington Park itself is gone now — demolished and sold, the paddock where we stood together buried under somebody’s future stadium. I think about what it would mean for him to know Griffin and Declan. He would have loved those boys so much. Griffin would have driven him absolutely crazy. He’s a hardcore liberal who would have argued him into the ground on politics, just like I always did with daddy. He would have loved every minute of it. And Declan. He would have been by that boy’s side every single day, doting on him constantly. I like to think he still is.

I thought about daddy this week because the news is full of gambling. But the men gambling with our lives and our future are nothing like him. Not even close.

Larry was sick. He was consumed by something he didn’t choose and couldn’t control, something his mother handed him before he was old enough to know what it was. And something someone had likely handed her long before that. He lost his own money, and then in his desperation, ours. He was sorry for it every day. The last thing he ever wanted was to hurt the people he loved. He just didn’t know how to stop.

What is happening in Washington right now is not addiction. It is not compulsion. It is not a man who can’t stop himself. It is calculation. It is construction. These people didn’t stumble into a casino. They built one. Out of a war. And they’re making the rest of us buy the chips.

Here is what we know. In the minutes before Trump posted on Truth Social signaling a pause in strikes on Iran, roughly $580 million in oil futures flooded the market. No public news explained it. Sixteen minutes later, Trump posted, oil dropped, stocks surged, and somebody made a fortune. This happened not once but repeatedly — the same pattern appearing before the two-week ceasefire announcement, before multiple major market-moving moments. Two Democratic senators wrote to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission demanding answers. An anonymous trader racked up nearly a million dollars on Polymarket betting on Iran war outcomes. More than 150 Polymarket accounts surged with bets predicting a U.S. strike on Iran the day before it happened. The Financial Times reported that Pete Hegseth’s stockbroker was seeking to make large investments in major defense companies in the days before the U.S. and Israel struck Iran. The Pentagon denied it. The White House sent staff an email warning them not to place prediction market bets on the Iran war.

You don’t send that email unless you know what your people are doing.

On Friday the Dow rose 800 points when the Strait of Hormuz was declared open. On Saturday, Iran closed it again and the Revolutionary Guard fired on tankers. And on Sunday — today — the United States Navy fired on an Iranian cargo ship called the Touska, blew a hole in its engine room, and U.S. Marines boarded and seized it. Trump announced this on Truth Social like he’d won a hand. “We have full custody of the ship,” he wrote, “and are seeing what’s on board.” More than 20,000 sailors and merchant seafarers have been stranded on ships in the Gulf since this war began in late February. The ceasefire expires Wednesday. Watch the market Monday morning. I promise you someone already has.

But the war casino is only part of the story. Because while the insiders are trading on ceasefire announcements, something else is happening to the rest of us. SNAP benefits have been slashed. Medicaid and Medicare are being gutted. Healthcare subsidies are disappearing and people are dropping their insurance because they can no longer afford it. Hospitals in vulnerable communities — rural hospitals, hospitals in medical deserts across this country, many of them in red states whose residents voted for this — are closing their doors. Seniors are being squeezed. People with disabilities are losing support. The programs that let people stay in their homes, stay in their communities, live longer and healthier are being hollowed out in real time, and the money is flooding upward at a historic rate.

That is not a casino where everyone plays. That is a casino where certain people always win, and everyone else pays for the losses.

My father lost money he didn’t have and took some of ours trying to find his way back. He died sorry for it. Before he went, all he wanted was to have been able to take care of us.

These men are not sorry. They are not lying awake wishing they could have done better by the people who trusted them. They know exactly what they’re doing. They built the house. They set the odds. And they made sure they’d never be the ones to lose.

That’s the difference. That’s the whole difference.

I miss my daddy. I wish he was here to see how beautiful his grandsons turned out.

The house always wins. Until we decide it doesn’t.

See you on Mayday.

If gambling has become a problem for you or someone you love, help is available. Are You Really Winning? is a nationwide campaign offering support and resources for problem gambling. Visit areyoureallywinning.com or call 1-800-GAMBLER.

Patti Vasquez hosts “Driving It Home with Patti Vasquez” weekdays 5-7 PM CST on WCPT 820 AM. She’s a mom, wife, daughter, caregiver, radio host, writer, comedian, and professional feeler of feelings.

Consider purchasing a bag of WOKE Coffee Beans, a 4 pack of WOKE Oat Milk Sweet Cream canned coffee, or sign up for a WOKE Coffee subscription here.

Kirk Bangstad here with the Minocqua Brewing Company.

My essay today was going to be about our ongoing federal lawsuit against Oneida County for political harassment and how we can’t catch a break from the ever-obstinate Judge James Peterson—who has somehow managed to preside over multiple lawsuits to defend our taproom from being shut down by …

Read more

Buy our Trump Voodoo Doll Here

Hey friends,

Kirk here, owner of the Minocqua Brewing Company that’s slowly but surely building an e-commerce site that will be ready to help boycott companies that fund Trump’s regime when and if he tries to steal our elections in November.

If you’re new here, welcome. The Minocqua Marketplace exists on one core idea: where you spend your money matters. …

Read more

Kirk Bangstad here from the Minocqua Brewing Company.

In last night’s Up North Podcast—Patti, Ben, and I talk about the Wisconsin’s Supreme Court Race, Eric Swalwell’s fall from grace, Victor Orban’s defeat in Hungary, and the upcoming May Day Strong event.

If you have an hour to spare, I recommend listening to the entire podcast. If you only have a few minutes, here are a few snippets from the show:

First off, this chart above shows a massive progressive shift in last week’s Supreme Court election from Trump’s victory in 2024. In fact, if you measure the votes by Wisconsin’s congressional Districts, progressive Judge Chris Taylor’s victory looks even more lopsided:

WI-01: 🔵+15 (Trump + 4.5)

WI-02: 🔵+59 (Harris +40.0)

WI-03: 🔵+21 (Trump +7.4)

WI-04: 🔵+62 (Harris +51.4)

WI-05: 🔴+9 (Trump +22.1)

WI-06:🔵+4 (Trump +16.4)

WI-07: 🔵+3 (Trump +22.5)

WI-08: 🔵+7 (Trump +16.2)

Here’s a clip from the show where we talk about Ozaukee County, a suburban area near Milwaukee that has traditionally voted red for decades. They went blue last week

While all of this is outstanding news, we must take it all with a grain of salt. Studies have shown that people who vote in the Spring elections tend to be more educated, which demographically means that the spring electorate is naturally more progressive. To maintain these massive progressive gains throughout Wisconsin next November will take a lot of effort.

The good news got better last week with Victor Orban’s defeat in Hungary. Orban rigged Hungary’s entire government and constitution to ensure electoral victories for himself and his party, and somehow he was still defeated. This gave me a strong shot of hope that we can do the same thing to Trump this coming November, even though we know he’ll try to steal our elections.

In the days since the election in Hungary, we’ve discovered that Orban was funneling money to CPAC, the largest annual conference for the Republican Party. Orban has pledged fealty to Vladimir Putin, and the the fact he funneled money to CPAC confirms many of our fears that Russian propaganda permeates throughout the MAGA movement. Here’s a clip about that:

Luckily, it appears that the wool is starting to fall from the eyes of the MAGA voter, and they’re realizing that voting for racism and bigotry won’t make their lives any better. What MUST happen to win these people over is for progressive leaders, once elected, to do big things—not just half measures—to prove we can move just as quickly in the right direction as Trump moved us backwards.

Left wing populism means focusing on education, universal healthcare, and good paying jobs. That combination, if executed boldly, will win over more Americans than bigotry and racism any day of the week.

Thanks for reading and watching, and thanks for sticking with the Minocqua Brewing Company.

For the first time in a long time, I’m hopeful again. I hope you are too.

Kirk Bangstad

Owner, Minocqua Brewing Company/ Minocqua Marketplace Publisher, Minocqua Brewing Company Times Founder, Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC

Get more from Minocqua Brewing Company in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Kirk Bangstad here, owner of the Minocqua Brewing Company, and I jumped on a live broadcast with Pattie Vasquez right after I had a hearing in Oneida County in which I plead guilty to a disorderly conduct charge in order to avoid a lengthy jury trial on a separate charge that could have landed me in jail—bail jumping.

I’d encourage everyone to listen to the half hour conversation, in which I tell the entire story of why I was charged with disorderly conduct in the first place—but if you don’t have the time, I’ve included the most important clips.

The focus of today’s “Office Hours” was to talk about the stress of filing taxes, and that any sort of relief that some families got from Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”—like $1000 funds for young children or tax breaks on tips for folks in the service industry—were quickly erased due to rampant inflation caused by Trump’s tariffs and the insane Iran war that’s driving gas prices up. Here’s Patti explaining why all these “tax savings” touted by Trump were a scam:

We pivoted from taxes to another practice that is uniquely used in Wisconsin that really hurts the working class—the egregious use of bail jumping charges to pressure defendants to plead guilty in order to move them more quickly through the criminal justice system and avoid lengthy jury trials.

Wisconsin is one of only seven states that allow prosecutors to file additional charges if people violate a wide range of pretrial release conditions while a case is pending in court.

From this article in Wisconsin Watch:

“Defense attorneys say bail jumping charges give prosecutors more leverage to pressure a defendant to plead guilty since the new charges can come with more jail or prison time than the original charges. Under state law, each felony bail jumping conviction may result in up to six years in prison.”

And bail jumping charges have gone through the roof in Wisconsin. From the same article:

“From 2020 to 2024, Wisconsin prosecutors filed nearly 250,000 bail jumping charges, according to state court system figures. During the same period, Minnesota’s court system reported prosecutors filing 336 charges for failure to appear and 636 charges for willfully disobeying a court mandate, the only potential charges for violating bail conditions in that state.”

I bring this up because I’ve just lived it. Here’s a clip of me telling my story of why I chose to plead guilty to a disorderly conduct charge stemming from a political speech I gave at my beer garden last summer.

While I’m lucky enough to be able to afford a lawyer that helped me navigate away from a bail jumping conviction, too many folks in the working class can’t afford lawyers and as a result, rack up bail jumping convictions that lead to jail time while waiting years for their actual cases to get heard. This results in being perpetually stuck in the criminal justice system, unable to get a good job as a result, and being driven into poverty or committing more crimes to survive.

Wisconsin is unique in its ability to screw up people’s lives with this insidious bail jumping statute, and the only way we can fix this problem is for Democrats to take back the majority in Wisconsin’s state legislature next November.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for sticking with the Minocqua Brewing Company.

Together, we must take bold steps to stop punishing the working class in Wisconsin, including fixing this crazy bail-jumping problem—one beer at a time.

Kirk Bangstad

Owner, Minocqua Brewing Company/ Minocqua Marketplace Publisher, Minocqua Brewing Company Times Founder, Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC

Get more from Minocqua Brewing Company in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app