Kirk Bangstad, the owner of Minocqua Brewing Company, announced Sunday that he is running for governor of Wisconsin, barely a week after his brewery posted Facebook comments offering free beer in the event of President Donald Trump's death and mocking what appeared to be an assassination attempt.
Bangstad made the announcement in a Substack post, framing himself as a populist fighter the state's Democratic field lacks. He needs 2,000 signatures by June 1 to qualify for the November ballot. The timing alone tells you something about the man's political instincts, or his lack of them.
The brewery's Facebook page had posted comments after reports of shots fired at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, where Trump and several Cabinet members were in attendance. Fox News Digital reported that the brewery's account wrote: "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." The post continued: "We'll never know. Regardless, we stand at the ready to pour free beer the day it happens."
Read that again. A man who runs a business, employs people, and now wants to lead a state government publicly joked about a sitting president being shot, and then announced a gubernatorial campaign days later.
Bangstad claims the posts drew the attention of federal law enforcement. He wrote that both the FBI and the Secret Service investigated him and his company. In his Substack announcement, he described the encounter in characteristically dramatic fashion, saying he was "interrogated and intimidated" by agents who visited his taproom on a Thursday night.
Rather than prompting any reflection, the federal visit apparently accelerated his political ambitions. Bangstad wrote that after the agents left, he told his lawyer Fred he was going to run for governor.
"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."
So the FBI and Secret Service show up at your door over posts that joke about presidential assassination, and your response is not to reconsider your conduct but to launch a statewide campaign. That is the kind of judgment Bangstad wants Wisconsin voters to trust.
Members of the Wisconsin Democratic Party disavowed Bangstad and his company after the posts drew national attention. That is, at minimum, the correct instinct. Joking about a president's violent death is not political speech anyone should defend, regardless of party. The broader pattern of Democrats dodging accountability for incendiary rhetoric makes the disavowal noteworthy, though whether it holds remains to be seen.
Bangstad, for his part, did not accept the criticism. He turned on his own party. In his Substack post, he blamed State Rep. Francesca Hong and gubernatorial candidate Mandela Barnes, calling them "Corporate Democrats" whose "messaging mistake" had made things worse.
"The messaging mistake [State Rep. Francesca] Hong made, as well as [gubernatorial candidate Mandela] 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."
Note the logic. Bangstad posted comments joking about a president's assassination. Law enforcement investigated. Fellow Democrats distanced themselves. And in Bangstad's telling, every one of those consequences is someone else's fault, the media's, the Republicans', the FBI's, his own party's. The only person who bears no responsibility, apparently, is the man who wrote the posts.
This is not Bangstad's first foray into politics or provocation. He ran for Congress in 2015 and for the Wisconsin state assembly in 2020. His brewery has a long history of mixing progressive politics with its product line, selling specialty-branded beers tied to political figures and trends. One offering, "Tammy Shandy," is named after Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin.
Bangstad also formed the Minocqua Brewing Company SuperPAC, which his company's website describes as aiming "to remove Republican federal and state elected officials who perpetuated the election lies that caused the Insurrection of January 6, 2021, and whose downplaying of the seriousness of COVID-19 caused so many unnecessary deaths in our country." That language tells you where Bangstad sits on the political spectrum, well to the left of even many mainstream Democrats, and unapologetically so.
The pattern is familiar. Figures on the progressive left build personal brands on outrage, monetize political anger, and then leverage the attention into political campaigns. The recent fraud indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center shows how organizations on the left can drift from stated missions into something far less defensible. Bangstad's trajectory is smaller in scale but similar in spirit: political grievance as a business model, now repackaged as a gubernatorial bid.
When Fox News Digital reached Bangstad for comment on his campaign, he did not walk back the brewery's posts or express regret. Instead, he offered this:
"I'd tell you that the world is almost as excited about me running for governor as they are about #freebeerday."
That is not a man who has reconsidered anything. That is a man doubling down.
Wisconsin is a closely divided state. Its gubernatorial races carry real consequences for policy on taxes, education, public safety, and the state's relationship with federal authorities. Voters deserve candidates who can be trusted with the sober responsibilities of executive power, not someone whose entry into the race was triggered by a federal law enforcement visit over posts celebrating the prospect of a president's death.
The broader Democratic field in Wisconsin now faces an uncomfortable question: how do you share a primary ballot with a candidate whose national profile rests almost entirely on this kind of conduct? Democrats who disavowed Bangstad over the posts will have to decide whether that disavowal extends to his candidacy. The episode echoes other recent cases of Democrats elevating figures with deeply controversial records into positions of public trust.
Meanwhile, the question of whether the FBI or Secret Service investigation produced any formal findings remains unanswered. Bangstad himself is the only source for the claim that agents visited his taproom. No public confirmation from either agency appears in the reporting. Whether the investigation is ongoing, closed, or led to any referral is unknown.
There is also the matter of the posts themselves. Joking about presidential assassination, or even appearing to encourage it, is not ordinary political speech. It is the kind of conduct that, in a healthier political culture, would disqualify a person from serious consideration for public office. The fact that Bangstad treats the episode as a credential rather than a liability says less about him than it does about the audience he is courting.
The backlash against Rep. Krishnamoorthi for tying Trump's approval ratings to the WHCA Dinner shooting showed that even within Democratic circles, there are lines. Whether Bangstad's candidacy crosses one remains to be seen. His own party's initial reaction suggests it does. His fundraising and signature totals in the coming weeks will tell the rest.
Bangstad needs 2,000 signatures by June 1. That is not a high bar. Whether Wisconsin Democrats let him clear it without a fight will reveal whether the party's disavowal was a matter of principle or just a press release.
Every political movement is judged, eventually, by what it tolerates. The progressive left has spent years arguing that rhetoric has consequences, that words matter, that language shapes culture, that public figures bear responsibility for the climate they create. Those arguments were deployed relentlessly after January 6, 2021. They were used to justify social media bans, congressional hearings, and federal investigations.
Now a man who joked about a president's assassination, blamed everyone but himself for the fallout, and launched a gubernatorial campaign in the same breath wants to lead a state of nearly six million people. If rhetoric truly has consequences, this is where the left gets to prove it. The record so far, from David Axelrod calling out Jimmy Kimmel's tasteless joke to the Wisconsin Democratic Party's initial disavowal, suggests that at least some on the left recognize the problem.
But recognition is not the same as accountability. Bangstad is betting that outrage is a viable campaign platform and that the rules progressives wrote for everyone else do not apply to them.
Wisconsin voters will get to decide whether he is right. The rest of the country will be watching to see if Democrats hold their own standard, or quietly look the other way.
