A Minneapolis City Council candidate’s quest to take down a satirical website criticizing her has unveiled the domain holder, but it isn’t who she thought it was.
Wedge Live, a hyperlocal news outlet that covers and excoriates Minneapolis politics in equal strides, has been dismissed from 12th Ward candidate Becka Thompson’s accusation that it was responsible.
In May, Thompson made a campaign finance complaint about an anonymously run website claiming she was running in Ward 14, which does not exist. The reference was apparently a joke about the fact that she currently resides in north Minneapolis, the district she represents on the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, while running for a south Minneapolis office. (Thompson said she plans to move.)
Thompson acknowledged that she didn’t know for sure who was behind the fake campaign website, but suspected that Wedge Live creator John Edwards produced the content and told contributor Taylor Dahlin, an X user with a large following, to promote it. She said images on the website — including pictures of a Make America Great Again hat and a Batman mask superimposed on her portrait — echoed Edwards’ signature graphics style, and reasoned that Dahlin’s quick posting of the website after its creation meant that the two were part of a conspiracy to deceive voters.
Both Edwards and Dahlin denied involvement.
On Monday, the state Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board dismissed the complaint for lack of probable cause. Edwards didn’t think highly of Thompson, board chair Faris Rashid wrote — he had once called her “a maniac,” “a performer,” and the “weirdest, worst member of the Park Board” — but there wasn’t any evidence that he or Dahlin created or paid for the website.
Thompson also discovered the real identity of the website’s domain holder as the result of a subpoena authorized by the Office of Administrative Hearings: Naomi Wilson, a volunteer working with the homeless population. Wilson declined to comment.
“My goal is to get it taken down, and I would like it to be acknowledged as what it is, which is election interference, which is illegal,” Thompson said. “Obviously, it’s impeding my campaign. … I went through the posture of trying to ignore it, but that’s not really an option for me anymore.”
