Two coffee companies are currently competing for a pool of politically motivated customers, with each company trying to prove that they provide the Trumpiest, most aggressively MAGA coffee experience in the entire United States.
No, it’s not Starbucks and Caribou. It’s Black Rifle Coffee and Stocking Mill Coffee.
And one of them has already gotten in trouble with some of its fan base for crossing a group of Trump-worshipping, far-right extremists.
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“The difficulty [Black Rifle Coffee is] in right now is they’ve spent several years kind of appealing to the worst attitudes, particularly in the American man… One of their initial things was they sold… range targets with hipsters on them,” Will Sommer, co-host of The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams podcast, says on this week’s episode. “Kyle Rittenhouse wore one of their shirts and they had to distance themselves, and then of course that angered their fan base. And then most notably, one of the premier Capitol rioters was wearing a Black Rifle Coffee hat.”
Things only got worse for Black Rifle Coffee when its founders denounced the Proud Boys in a New York Times profile published earlier this month, leaving an opening for Stocking Mill—which has a slogan of “Arrive Violently”—to outflank them from the right. This led to former Black Rifle drinkers announcing that they’d punish the company, for instance, by setting their Black Rifle clothing on fire.
“I love how Black Rifle Coffee is this perfect little metaphor for what has happened to the Republican Party over the past four years,” fellow Fever Dreams host Asawin Suebsaeng says. “It’s like, ‘Oh, we spent all this time cuddling up to the worst elements in the conservative base and the Republican Party, and now we’re stunned to see that we’ve gotten some blowback.’”
Elsewhere on the episode, Suebsaeng and Sommer welcome the actor and comedian Andy Richter, who for years has served as late-night host Conan O’Brien’s announcer and on-air sidekick. Richter dishes on his philosophy on late-night comedy and politics, why conservatives generally don’t make good comics, and how eye-rollingly lame it was that one time Donald Trump actually dropped a condom right in front of him and Conan.
“It was kind of gross. But, you know, he’s kind of gross,” Richter recounted. “I had him autograph the condom. I still have it to this day,” he joked.
Sommer and Suebsaeng also get into why you absolutely should not fall for the latest “Freedom Phone” craze being pushed by MAGA influencers, and how one self-described “conservative porn actress” and “Kid Rock conservative” brought a hail of controversy to the latest Turning Point USA bonanza.
Listen, and subscribe, to Fever Dreams on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.
