Over the weekend there was quite a ruckus about Black Rifle Coffee based on an article in the New York Times, which interviewed the CEO, Evan Hafer, and Executive VP of the company, Mat Best. Here’s part of what I read over at the American Thinker last night:
The article takes a boring walk through the way leftist companies have politicized everything and then gets back to BRC: “In retrospect, the market opportunity that Black Rifle sought to exploit when it started in 2014 seems blindingly obvious.” BRC wasn’t just selling coffee and logo wear, it was selling raw American conservativism, and Trump’s pro-America stance fit right in with that.
The only problem for the coffee guys is that, as the culture wars have divided America, they seem to have decided they don’t like many of the people on their side – and they want New York Times readers to know it:
“You can’t let sections of your customers hijack your brand and say, ‘This is who you are,’” [Mat] Best [Executive V.P.] told me. “It’s like, no, no, we define that.” The Rittenhouse episode may have cost the company thousands of customers, but, Hafer believed, it also allowed Black Rifle to draw a line in the sand. “It’s such a repugnant group of people,” Hafer said. “It’s like the worst of American society, and I got to flush the toilet of some of those people that kind of hijacked portions of the brand.” Then again, what Hafer insisted was a “superclear delineation” was not too clear to everyone, as Munchel’s choice of headgear vividly demonstrated.
“The racism [expletive] really pisses me off,” Hafer said. “I hate racist, Proud Boy-ish people. Like, I’ll pay them to leave my customer base. I would gladly chop all of those people out of my [expletive] customer database and pay them to get the [expletive] out.”
Apparently a lot of conservatives were upset at these two quotes. But Dana Loesch and the BRC guys say this is a misrepresentation of what they truly meant by these comments. Below is the full 15-minute interview with an additional 10 or so minutes where they continue after the show is over:
I’ll just make a couple of points from the interview. The first quote by Best, where he said “You can’t let sections of your customers hijack your brand…”, wasn’t aimed at anyone on the right, but rather the left. Best said for the last 10 years he’s been attacked by the left because he’s the anti-woke guy, sending he and his family death threats, and they’ve also claimed that BRC is the white supremacists coffee of choice. He was just making a general statement that he will not let these people hijack the brand and make it something it is not, that their owners and partners are the ones who decide what their brand is about, based on their values.
The second racism quote by Hafer again wasn’t about the right. He said the context of that conversation was the attacks on his company last year from racists and, in particularly, anti-semites. When he was talking about the worst of the society, he was referring to the doxing, death threats, and their inboxes being flooded after a very organized anti-semitic group targeted the company because of his last name.
Dana Loesch makes the point a couple of times as to why conservatives would believe anything the New York Times writes about a conservative company at face value, and she’s not wrong. It should be a no-brainer to assume this is fake news and dig deeper, and I’m very glad she did.
There’s a lot more in the interview, so make sure you watch it.