Louisiana Voice

So, LSU is establishing a lecture series honoring Charlie Kirk as a way to promote free speech?

Is that what it’s come to? It took the murder of a demagogue for an institution like the Ole War Skule to wake up and say, “Hey, we need to promote free speech in honor of Charlie”?

I was somehow under the impression that institutions of higher learning already supported free expression and the exchange of ideas. But LSU wants to set up a free speech program to honor a man who has said the following:

• If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.
  • The Charlie Kirk Show, 23 January 2024
• If you’re a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States marine?
  • The Charlie Kirk Show, 8 December 2022
• Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.
  • The Charlie Kirk Show, 19 May 2023
• If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?
  • The Charlie Kirk Show, 3 January 2024
• If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us … You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.
  • The Charlie Kirk Show, 13 July 2023

At one time or another, Kirk also said:

• Gay people should be stoned to death
• Most people are scared when they see a black pilot flying a plane
• Taylor Swift should reject feminism and submit to her husband
• No one should be allowed to retire
• Leftists should not be allowed to move to red states
• British Colonialism was what “made the world decent”
• -The guy who assaulted the Pelosi’s should be bailed out
• Religious freedom should be terminated
• Multiple black politicians
• “stole white people’s spots”
• MLK Jr was “an awful person”
• The Great Replacement Theory is reality
• Hydroxychloroquine cures COVID
• Vaccine requirements are “medical apartheid”
• Guns deaths are acceptable in order to have a 2nd amendment
• Women’s natural place is under their husband’s control
• Parents should prevent their daughters from taking birth control
• George Floyd had it coming, the Jan 6th protestors didn’t
• The 1964 Civil Rights Act was a “huge mistake”
• Encouraged parents to protest mask mandates
• Mamdani winning in NY is a travesty because Muslims did 9/11
• Muslims only come to America to destabilize Western Civilization
• Palestine “doesn’t exist” and those who support it are like the KKK

And then, there’s this little gem straight out of Kirk’s The MAGA Doctrine: The Only Ideas that Will Win the Future:

“Donald Trump has always been a builder, from hotels to casinos to golf courses—Barack Obama was a community organizer who gave impressive speeches. However, one of the least eloquent points that President Obama made during a speech was his infamous line ‘You didn’t build that.’ It’s no surprise that President Trump understands that businesses and growth are good for the economy and create jobs, while President Obama focused on the government as the solution.”

Left unsaid was that Trump bankrupted each and every casino he “built,” along with several other businesses – or that he’s now using government (read: tariffs) to destroy businesses.

But here’s a thought: While LSU was deifying and beatifying Kirk, it was also delivering a slap in the face to its African American students, including a significant number of outstanding athletes.

What if those athletes responded to those insults by deciding they were no longer going to play? What if they decided they were going to boycott the South Carolina game on Oct. 11? Or the Texas A&M game two weeks after that as a protest of LSU’s worship of a white supremacist?

Football is a huge moneymaker for LSU and such a move would certainly have an impact on the Athletic Department’s bottom line. Would scholarships be pulled? I’m pretty sure Gov. Jeff Landry would at least threaten players with that. But that would literally gut the football season and kill LSU’s cash cow. Can’t let that happen. Such a protest, after all, would merely be an example of freedom of expression, right?

The field is filling up with announced and unannounced candidates to the U.S. Senate seat now held by politically-damaged incumbent Bill Cassidy in next year’s congressional elections.

To date, all the declared candidates are Republicans and each is doing his or her best to out-Trump the others. The only potential Democratic candidate is former Gov. John Bel Edwards who has yet to only rumored to be a possible candidate.

Of the six announced and two unannounced Republicans whose names have cropped up, State Rep. Julie Emerson, born in Homer in Claiborne Parish but reared in Carencro in Lafayette Parish, is hands-down, the most qualified.

First elected to represent House District 39 (Lafayette and St. Landry parishes) in 2015, she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry from the University of Louisiana Lafayette. In her 10 years in the House, she has seen some 30 of her more than 40 bills introduced become law, a high rate of success for any legislator.

But her bills weren’t kneejerk bills; they were proposals of substance and even some of the ones that failed did so because similar bills were introduced and passed by other legislators.

She has scored high marks from right to life and the NRA, two areas in which we differ politically, but some of her bills went against the plaintiffs’ bar by limiting judgments to actual medical damages paid in injury cases. Overall, she has given serious thought to her legislative duties and that’s a big plus.

Her legislative record is rather long to list, but you can see for yourself by going HERE.

Presumed frontrunner State Sen. Blake Miguez of New Iberia, on the other hand, appears to be a one-trick pony. During the same timeframe as Emerson, he has introduced more bills (77) but 20 of those pertained to firearms. He almost appears to be a shill for the industry. Some of those were repeats from unsuccessful efforts in previous years but it reveals his near-obsession with guns.

Granted, several of those dealt with gun safety, which is never a bad thing but there are other issues besides guns facing Louisiana citizens.

Miguez began shooting with his father at a local firing range at an early age and by the time he was 12, he had started competing in the International Practical Shooting Confederation and by age 17, he had become a Grand Master with the Beretta 92F.

State Treasurer and former U.S. Rep. JOHN FLEMING of Minden, also like Cassiday, a doctor, is personally wealthy (somewhere north of $6.3 million), thanks to a string of 30 Subway sandwich shops, UPS franchises and other real estate investments. Yet, back in 2012, he opposed increasing the tax rate for those earning $1 million or more per year because, he said, he could barely scrape by on his net income which he gave at the time as about $600,000 per year. “By the time I feed my family, I have maybe $400,000 left over,” he lamented.

Using his own numbers, it appeared that the majority of his uninsured 500 employees were among America’s working poor.

But no worries. Fleming had that covered with his ownership of FLEMING PAYDAY LOANS, LLC which provides loans at exorbitant interest rates to his employees unable to make it on their salaries. At the time I first wrote about that, he was still in congress and his mouthpiece demanded a retraction but we refused because the records were there in the SECRETARY OF STATE’S RECORDS.

Of course, being a shrewd businessman, Fleming was pretty-well acquainted with tas laws under which the income of corporations is taxed twice—once at the corporate level through the payment of the corporate income tax and again at the individual rate when corporate profits are distributed. Sole proprietorships, partnerships, S corporations and limited liability companies (LLC) are taxed only at the much lower individual owner level.

According to his congressional financial statement, his companies are all set up as LLCs and partnerships which would explain his statement that the $6.3 million flowed through his personal income taxes.

That brings us to Louisiana Public Service Commission member Eric Skrmetta, quite possibly the baddest of the Peck Bad Boys in the race to dislodge Cassidy.

There is so much to report on Skrmetta, it’s difficult to know where to begin, but here goes.

Only months after Texas experienced that horrendous power failure in the middle of winter (the one where Ted Cruz left for vacation in Cancun), we learned that in November 2021, Skrmetta made a motion at a PSC meeting for Louisiana to WITHDRAW from the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, a nonprofit association that manages the power grid for 15 states and Manitoba Province in Canada, overseeing uninterrupted availability to electric power for 42 million people. Texas had opted out of MISO, which led to its massive outage. Why? Because he objected to the reliance on wind turbines.

Three years later, it was Skrmetta who pushed through a motion to hire his BUSINESS PARTNER and suspended attorney as a consultant to advise the PSC on matters since he couldn’t do so as an attorney. In fact, Scott McQuaig was not only hired at a salary of $128,500, but was scheduled to consider a separate $49,550 per year contract for him to monitor the area of cybersecurity.

Commissioner Craig Greene said (with a straight face), “I do not know the extent of Mr. McQuaig’s relationship with Commissioner Skrmetta,” Greene said, apparently with a straight face, “but it is never surprising for commissioners to know all the consultants who place bids to the commission.” They were business partners, for cryin’ out loud! That’s a breach of ethics if there ever was one.

Skrmetta’s 2019 FINANCIAL DISCLOSURE STATEMENT neglected to mention his income from his involvement with Boomtown Casino in Biloxi, Mississippi, or his agreement with Boomtown in Jefferson Parish. Probably an oversight.

In 2014, we learned that Skrmetta OPPOSED a rate reduction for exorbitant telephone rates for prison inmates – even to the point of openly challenging a spokesman for the Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops, who advocated a reduction. Perhaps the $29,500 in political contributions from companies that provided inmate telephone services fueled Skrmetta’s passion.

Skrmetta was one of the three-member Republican majority who in April 2024, APPROVED  a rate hike by Entergy to finance a $1.9 billion project to improve its grid. That approval, voted on four months ahead of schedule, did not come during a meeting in Baton Rouge, but at a remote lakefront resort on Toledo Bend Lake in Many, where most people would be unable to attend. Want to see who has the stroke at these meetings? CHEVRON AND EXXONMOBIL, a couple of major industrial power users, agreed not to oppose Entergy’s plan after all parties reached a deal to shift millions of dollars of construction costs onto residential and commercial ratepayers (that’s you, folks).

In 2020, we ran a story that a Skrmetta business associate was awarded $17 million in PSC energy efficiency contracts. The company, Brilliant Efficiencies, was founded by Jason Hewitt in 2013. Hewitt had no discernable experience in energy efficiency but he did have the all-important connections via his business RELATIONSHIP WITH SKRMETTA.

It was Skrmetta who in 2013, decided that a RE-VOTE was necessary on a previously-approved energy-efficiency program and new member Scott Angelle obediently case the deciding no-vote, killing the program designed to help electricity customers purchase efficient appliances.

And, of course, it was Skrmetta’s re-election in 2014 that spelled the death knell for SOLAR ENERGY in Louisiana.

“I do give perspective to the precedent. But it should — the precedent should be respectful of our legal tradition, and our country, and our laws, and be based on something, not just something somebody dreamt up and others went along with.”

–Clarence Thomas, questioning legal precedents at an appearance Thursday at the Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law (A precursor to more fealty to Trump by the court?)

“I have seen my entire career destroyed by Trump in six months. I always felt the placement of the immigration court in the Department of Justice was wrong. The boss of the prosecutor should not be the boss of the judge. I feel like the immigration courts are the canaries in the coal mine, and what’s happening to them is an illustration of what might happen to other court systems if we don’t stop it.”

– Immigration Jude Dana Leigh Marks (ret.)

(Editor’s note: I am taking the liberty of re-posting Kirk Bangstad’s essay from his own newsletter in hopes of helping him in recruiting more members of the resistance. I hope you will read this in its entirety and get a paid subscription to his newsletter. What he is attempting to do is vital to our continued freedom from this monster Trump and his followers – and trust me, if something happens to Trump, there are plenty more to follow in his authoritarian footsteps.)

First, They Hunted Immigrants; Now They’re Hunting Teachers.

The history of the Chinese Cultural Revolution tells us that we must stand up for our truth-tellers now–or risk persecution, violence, and even death–later.

Minocqua Brewing Company

When I was at Harvard from 1995-1999 majoring in Government, it was a foregone conclusion that I would take Professor Roderick McFahrquhar’s class on China’s Cultural Revolution. He was one of the world’s top scholars on Maoist China and his reputation as a master lecturer was renowned. His course shed a light on all the horrible things that happened after China rejected science, education, history, and their own culture at the behest of their cult leader, Mao Zedong.

In short, China’s 10 year Cultural Revolution from 1966-76 resulted in the death and persecution of millions of Chinese, left an entire generation of China’s population undereducated, and in the Communist Party’s own words (written later in 1981) was responsible for “the most severe setback” since the People’s Republic’s founding.

Mao Zedung’s failed agriculture policies that caused mass starvation, as well as his persecution of China’s intelligentsia that led to mass violence, torture, and displacement, should be a warning to us all.

Why?

Because the political and cultural underpinnings of China’s barbaric Cultural Revolution exist today in Trump’s America.

1. The capitulation of mainstream media to Trump means at worst, we’re not getting real news—or at best, we’re only getting pieces of real news.
2. America’s dependence on social media platforms inundated by bots and AI means that much of what we see online is propaganda meant to keep us in fear.
3. The cult of personality among the undereducated and easily-manipulated surrounding Trump is as strong today as it was under Mao in the 1960’s.
4. Anti-education, anti-science, and anti-expert/elite propaganda in America is stronger than it’s ever been in my lifetime. Just look at the current war on Tylenol.
5. Our federal government is outwardly lying to us (‘there’s nothing in the Epstein Files.’)
6. Trump is occupying progressive cities under the guise of immigration control and crime prevention, but the goal is to keep us in fear and control us/our ballot boxes before the 2026 election. (much like the “Red Guard” and “People’s Liberation Army” was sent to control the Chinese people during the Cultural Revolution.)
7. Trump’s regime is starting to persecute anyone who dares tell the truth—like comedians, journalists, and teachers (similar to what happened in China)—so that society will be too afraid to hold a mirror up to his corrupt regime and capitulate to dictatorial rule.

Des Moines Superintendent and Olympian Ian Roberts, , Iowa Teacher Matt Kargol, and Wisconsin Teacher Krista Lesiecki have all been persecuted in the last week by ICE and online cult mobs

Just a few days ago, we learned that ICE detained Des Moines’ popular School Superintendent, Ian Roberts. While Robert’s immigration status is still under investigation—even though he’s lived most of his life in the U.S. and was a celebrated olympic athlete—ICE said he was a “danger to society.”

That statement about Roberts is an absurd lie meant to push the false narrative that our public schools are filled with left-wing extremists, but that lie was still published by mainstream media because it came from our federal government.

Matt Kargol is a teacher in Oskaloosa, Iowa, and Krista Lesiecki is a teacher in Ellsworth, Wisconsin. Both were fired from their jobs after posting negative comments about Charlie Kirk’s legacy. These two teachers were among many others also targeted by online mobs of Trump/Kirk followers or bots posing as Trump/Kirk followers.

Teachers don’t make enough money to defend themselves from online mobs and sue their school districts to protect their jobs. Their unions are supposed to do that for them, but teachers unions—especially in Wisconsin—have been decimated by Republicans.

So what does that mean?

Our teachers are VERY VULNERABLE right now across America, and we as a society must protect them at all costs. Our kids’ future freedom depends on them being able to learn media literacy in school, which teaches them how to understand the difference between truth and lies.

So what do we do when migrants, minorities, government bureaucrats, law firms, universities, comedians, and now TEACHERS are getting attacked by Trump?

We strike, of course. That’s the only way.

And we can look to Italy for guidance, because they just pulled off a massive General Strike in protest against Israel’s Palestinian genocide.

This show of force, organized by Italy’s trade unions, is gaining momentum. Strike organizers met this weekend to bring in unions from other European countries to block shipments to Israel. People across the world are realizing that the only way for their voices to be heard in an era of authoritarianism is through strikes that hurt national economies and the oligarchs behind those economies.

Last June, I laid out a scenario that outlined how resistance groups across America could start engaging in monthly organizational stress tests to gather momentum for a real General Strike in the fall of 2026—when it seems like Trump will probably attempt to cancel our elections and further consolidate power.

I had a meeting scheduled with organizers at the nationwide level of Indivisible, which I believe is currently the largest organized resistance group in America. Unfortunately, right around the time i was supposed to meet with Indivisible, I was arrested at my own taproom, along with 6 of my customers, for simply giving a political speech against the right-wing ringleader of corruption in Oneida County, Gregg Walker.

After spending a harrowing 24 hours in a tiny cell with hardly any human contact (much like solitary confinement), I decided to pull back from activism at the statewide level and focus on protecting my company from the local goons in Oneida County while continuing to build what I believe will be a major tool for the Resistance.

This tool is an e-commerce site called the Minocqua Marketplace, which I hope will become an “Amazon for Progressives,” and allow the left to boycott any company that bends the knee to Trump and easily purchase substitute goods from companies that are part of the resistance movement. Go to this link https://minocquamarketplace.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email and scroll all the way to the bottom to get a free subscription to his newsletter.

I hope that, once large enough, we can divert a portion of the proceeds from the sale of goods on this site to a “General Strike Fund” that helps ensure that those striking have food/shelter/health care, etc.

My mental health after being jailed demanded that I consolidate my efforts and not spread myself too thin, but the summer is now over, the Minocqua Marketplace has been built, and my taproom has made it successfully through yet another summer tourism season.

It’s now time that the Minocqua Brewing Company rejoin the conversation about how to bring Trump, Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Thiel, Ellison (father and son) to their knees through a General Strike, which will hopefully pit Oligarch against Dictator, and will hopefully allow America to come out on the other side with a winning Democratic coalition.

Folks, this is the way.

We must take to the streets and take to our social media platforms to stop ICE from disappearing school superintendents and stop propaganda bots from cancelling teachers. But we can’t stop there.

We must organize with a purpose to strike and crush the U.S. economy until we get our rights back, and we must demand that all 3 branches of our Federal Government start listening to us again.

In my mind, the upcoming “No Kings Rally on October 18th” is yet another crucial organizing stress test that will lead to the ultimate goal of striking, which is the obvious and most effective tactic to fight against tyranny. I hope to see many of you after the protest at our taproom in Madison.

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

Together, while fighting ICE and the bots, and by staying clear-eyed about what has to be done to save Democracy, we will get our country back—One Beer At A Time.

Kirk Bangstad

Owner, Minocqua Brewing Company/Minocqua Marketplace

Publisher, Minocqua Brewing Company Times

Founder, Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC